concocted glimpse

Before I even ran my first race ever last month, I registered for my second. I felt a little crazy. Just because I love running didn’t mean I’d love racing. A week before I knelt down to check my laces before lining up at my first start, a friend looked at my face as I talked about my upcoming race, pointed her finger at me and declared “you’re going to catch the racing bug. I can tell.”

I woke up before 7:00 AM yesterday, I did it on purpose, I totally loved it, and I’d do it again.

If you didn’t just die of shock, that’s good; you’ve probably never seen me in the morning. [Don’t feel bad; I haven’t even seen me in the morning.] If you did die of shock, check out the disclaimer page before rigor mortis sets in. It outlines how you’ve pre-absolved me of all liabilities for casualties due directly or peripherally to reading my blog. And how you’ve willed me all your chopsticks.

Once upon a time only one thing could happily rouse me from slumber at ungodly hours [godly hours start after 9:00 am]. Now there are two. The second thing’s a race. Morning at my race yesterday was more beautiful than Edvard Greig could make it seem.

Check it out: I’m acutally *grinning*!

This race was different than my first one. It was half again as long, but it was much easier for me physically, even though it was longer and harder: there were hills. [I’ve been finding the slope of hypothetical hills with a student I tutor, and oy, it’s so much easier to find a steep rise than to run one.] I think the extra month of training and race experience helped put me way ahead on this race!

There were volunteers along the course who cheered everyone on. “Keep going!” “You’re doing so great!” I loved the atmosphere of this race.

In good form on the last stretch

The starting line had posts for runners to self select a speed: 8 min/mi or faster runners first, slower runners in minute increments behind. There were no finish chutes at the end this time, but I had a time chip. That was cool. I heard the time device beep as I crossed the finish line!

I win just because I race!

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Over last quarter break I landed a job escorting visiting students from Japan. On the bus ride back to the college on the second day, one of them asked how we write dates in America. That’s an answer fraught with trouble. Americans are ununiform daters. This little date problem has caused big date problems. For example a large online retailer {ahem} botched a release date for a new game due to software glitches caused by disparate date-writing, and have you ever seen a horde of angry nerds? Provoke their wrath and even a level 20 cleric with a loaded eighteen-sided die and a +15 cloak of protection will not save a site from sharing the fate of the Mars Climate Orbiter.

Everyone that I know is in agreement that traditional American ordering

• MM/DD/YYYY

makes least sense. I prefer the Asian notation system, largest unit first

• YYYY/MM/DD

because I think it makes the most sense, and it’s best for cataloging. However, on the paperwork I do at work the year is assumed [all paperwork is logged by quarter] so I end up elliding and writing MM-DD, which happens to match most of my peers’ American notation. Most Americans I know who use alternative ordering use the British system, smallest unit first:

• DD/MM/YYYY

It’s not just ordering though. There are a dozen other possible notation alternations, which compound into exponential possibilities. Take leading zeros, for example. Include

• 05.17.2004

or scrap

• 5/17/2005

?

There’s the problem of separators, which can cause software glitches even if uniform ordering is followed. [This is a phone number issue, too.]

• 17/5/2006

vs.

• 17.05.2007

vs.

• 17-05-2008

And then there’s [YY]YY abbreviation. 05/17/04. This can make for twelve cute matches every century, but it’s not the best for serious dating. All the permutations are enough to drive a person crazy — but I’m only interested in the perfect match. And I’ve found it. Yep. I have. I only have one date in my life.

And we’re sailing right into Honeymoon Mambo No. 5, and this is the best. bliss. EVAR. This notation is easy: ∞

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Our house has been officially warmed: the ritual party, that co-hosted extravaganza where your friends try to see how many people can fit in your house, someone brings a bottle of champagne, and everyone leaves wanting to come back.

I was happy how fun it turned out to be! It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction. I played RockBand for the first time, and apparently my [unanswered] calling in life is to be a drummer/vocalist—I even acquired a little fanboy. I made some very popular stuffed cremini mushrooms. I don’t eat mushrooms, so I was teased about making something I wouldn’t eat, but the praise outshone the teasing. DDR was, comme toujour, superfun. There were fortune cookies, and by the end of the night I was very fortunate indeed.

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My Flames are 2-3 in the quarterfinals, and I just read and loved a book called Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs. What do hockey and a book of whimsically categorized English etymologies have in common, you ask? I’ll tell you. The book was written by the editor of the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary.

Canadian English is quite full of its own quirks. And hockey announcers are a surprisingly rich source for collecting linguistic phenomena. So naturally, when I watch hockey, I indulge in armchair analyses of the discourse of hockey announcers. Who’d've expected to find more metonymy in a period than in a poem? Ah, my cushy life as a chesterfield-potato!

Early in the season an announcer described the oily grin of an opponent with the phrase

he has a smile like poison come to supper

which, we found out from the internet, is uniquely Canadian. There’s a lot of lovely linguistic information one can find on the internet, if we can trust that the internet yields linguistic data reasonably similar to that of a traditional corpus [and my senior seminar paper indicates that we can], and if we know how to interpret that data [I can make no guarantees concerning such abilities in the general public].

I’ve been continually tickled with the plums pulled from the unplumbable depths of their rhetoric. Some of it’s impossible not to smile at [“this game has all the intensity of a bubble bath”]—they’re so jovial about it! They’re game for anything.

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The other night I had a fever and I was sleeping on my shoulder at a funky angle and it was aching. I dreamt that a man walked up to me, took out a knife, and with it rubbed ersatz butter all over my shoulder, and then said “everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it.” Whereby I was promptly healed.

There was a week in sixth grade where our teacher promised us a pizza party if everyone got 100% on the spelling test. To my comrades and me, a pizza party [gotta be, gotta be Domino’s] was better than finding $1,000 in the gutter: we were highly motivated to ace. We’d been rotating the week’s words for nearly a month—despite being in an accelerated program, we were decelerated spellers—and one of the words was “zestfully”. At the time an ad for a certain soap jingled “you aren’t fully clean unless you’re zestfully clean!” Being disturbed creative children, we lathered up several nefarious ‘n’ hilarious variations on this theme, including “you aren’t fully clean until you’re POSSESSEDFULLY clean!”, which we intoned in timbres suitably occult. Unfortunately, this led to the sole sabotage of our pizza party. The day of the spelling test, when Mrs. Rigby said “zestfully”, Tyler wrote down “possessedfully”, because he hadn’t understood that wasn’t what the ad had been saying the whole time. These days it would probably be illegal for the teacher to leak the weakest link, but if it’s any comfort to you, Ty’s body was returned to his parents.

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The third day after moving, I made bread and hummus. [And I saw that it was good.]

This task was, if not of Herculean proportions, at least as difficult as the fleecy quest given to Jason of HMS Argo fame. It reminded me of a day in grade three [I’m being Canadian and using cardinals instead of ordinals] where a parent came in to demonstrate his job. He took two desks and faced them opposite each other. He gave a set of tools to one student, including a spoon, a bowl, and a mini box of cereal. The other student had to give instructions, without looking, about how to eat breakfast. The kid with the tools couldn’t perform any task with them unless instructed, so if the instructor kid left out “open the cereal box” and went on to “pour the cereal”, the kid with the cereal was stuck pouring nothing out of a closed box. This exercise required a little coaching, because the kid with the cereal box automatically filled in each step in his mind and did it without being told. One kid left out “pick up the spoon” and just said “eat the cereal”. Hilarity with corn flakes ensued.

I’d planned on bread. I had thought this through and kept out a few key items. The hummus was an afterthought, but I quickly combed through the little steps and I thought I had everything I’d need for both; lemons, flour, the bread machine; the juicer, yeast, the scale . . . twenty minutes later, right before Step #04: juice lemons, to yield Ingredient #14: half a cup freshly squeezed lemon juice, I realized I had no knife to cut the lemons so I could juice them. D’oh!

The parent’s job was—if I recall correctly—computer programming. If you’re not sure why breakfast run thus amok is like writing a program, you’ve probably never had to write a line of object-oriented code. It’s very tricksy, with [in my experience] a lot of semi-colons and synthetic syntax that’s not easy to glom on to. At the end of my Java experience I was feeling a lot like Angry Girl With Blender. [That picture is me three years ago at war with a smoothie we were making to eat with our frozen wedding cake. Roscivs loves this picture for reasons I don’t understand.] I can code monkey up some pretty html, complete with cascading style sheets, but Java is not my cup of tea. But there’s this little toy language where you code in PhotoShop, with colors! And apparently Python doesn’t need semi-colons; I think I might like it.

The Æsopian upshot is, if life hands you lemons and you’re making lemonade, think like a programmer; you’re gonna be needing a knife.

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• Humpty Dumpty • spring flower • Jailbird [inspired by robosteff and her incubaby] •

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The first thing I took care of was music; the second, books! I requested 17 holds at our new city library system. We’re going to be blissfully close to the library. Seattle is the readingest city in the nation, and it shows. I’m last in queues of more than 500 for two of my holds. I’m gathering up all the books I need to take back to the county library system. Notes from two recently read:

one

To Kill A Mockingbird: While I was reading this book I got half a dozen comments—in waiting rooms, at home, the bus—“I loved that when I read it in high school! I read it x times!” I didn’t read it in high school. I think I missed the sweet spot for this book. It was good, but not super memorable to me. One page 83, someone wrote in the book, so what should have been

That Stephanie’s been after my recipe for thirty years, and if she thinks I’ll give it to her just because I’m staying with her she’s got another think coming.

turned into

That Stephanie’s been after my recipe for thirty years, and if she thinks I’ll give it to her just because I’m staying with her she’s got another thing coming.

It’s one thing to use your own eggcorns. But to mistakenly pen them in as corrections in printed text? Tut! Bad form!

two

Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation: A little book of essays. One of the last has life lessons we can learn from the seasons. Last night I was reading Barack Obama’s recent speech and this line, amidst a lot of other great ones,

opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

reminded me of a passage I’d taken from the book, the lesson learned from summer, which is that life provides abundantly:

This fact of nature is in sharp contrast to human nature, which seems to regard perpetual scarcity as the law of life. Daily I am astonished at how readily I believe that something I need is in short supply. If I hoard possessions, it is because I believe that there are not enough to go around. If I struggle with others over power, it is because I believe that power is limited. If I become jealous in relationships, it is because I believe that when you get too much love, I will be shortchanged.

Make this a lesson from summer; illustrate it with loaves and fishes; however you cut it, I believe that it opens up your world when you believe there’s enough and to spare, and your dreams don’t come at my expense.

My belief in the principle of abundance stands behind my views on world population, on immigration, on how to live life; my opportunities for happiness are limitless.

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We’re going to move—not too far from where we are, just a leap down the lake, almost into the nitty gritty of the city. It will be a lot different than our last move. That involved moving roots. This one isn’t like a transplant. I’ve already settled into the soil here. It’ll be more like a good pruning.

I’m sparkling with excitment about being closer to downtown. I’m making a list of all the marvelous things I’ll be able to do all the time now. So far it’s looking a lot like this:

1. Pike Place
2. Pike Place
3. Pike Place

Moving—even just a prune move—is a really tricky thing for me, emotionally. It seems to bring out a titanic clash of many of the most volcanic traits. I spent this morning making a mix CD [yeah, an actual disc—nostalgically retro] to transition into the new house. I found this idea on a woman’s blog when I was reading tips on relocating, back two years ago. I’ll play it while I clean [always our first nesting ritual] and settle in. I’d forgotten about it. This morning Roscivs reminded me.

Some songs remind me of other of my abodes, like a thread weaving back through the living spaces of my life. Some are ancient staples, some newer favorites, making it future-present centered. Some of the songs remind me of things I want to keep in mind while I move. Some remind me of the person I’m moving with. When I get flighty, it’s infinitely comforting to know he’s with me wherever I go. From myself I hear I’m Like a Bird 0:55; from him, Ruth 1:16; cummings.

here is the deepest secret nobody knows / (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud /and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows / higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) / and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

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Speaking about what animals can teach us about running and life, the juxtaposition of this poignant satiric Threadless against the majestic, uncompared wild running of the antelope is too adroit to pass up. Whenever I look at this I see a gym full of people perspiring to mental pin-ups of fantastically airbrushed Gods.

It’s unreal. Unreal, but oh-so-powerful.

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