What I learned at my 10-year HS reunion

On Saturday night I went to my 10-year high school reunion.

I think the greatest thing about my high school reunion wasn’t the top shelf open bar with my best friends or sharing a remembered laugh with an old friend or hearing about asshole ex-classmates being carried to the hospital after OD’ing on coke and half-bottles of vodka or marveling at how a lot of people I never really liked don’t have discernible necks. As a former fat, insecure kid with horrible hair, it was nice for me to see girls that I once thought were attractive and think “oh, I have ex’s many times more attractive than them” and it was especially great when I heard someone with a sprawling wet spot on his shirt say “this guy came up to me and goes ‘Hey, nice pink shirt,’ and I said ‘It’s not pink, it’s salmon, asshole’ and then he poured his drink on me so I poured mine on him!” Yeah, you really won that battle, guy who didn’t remember my name.

I don’t want to talk up the negative anecdotes and make this a clichéd “angry high school reunion” story, but there’s a good one after the jump.

What I remember from a 26.2 mile run.

Most of the below was written within two days of the event discussed.

I qualified for the 2011 Boston Marathon the other week by running 26.2 miles at a 7:13 per mile pace in Virginia Beach. I don’t want to talk about the race very much, though I will. What I find much more interesting is getting ready for it; not the training, but the myriad rituals and arbitrary requests and obsessive details and adjustments one makes in the days and hours leading up to the race. Planning every meal for the week; pinning a number on four times to ensure symmetry and level, ultimately settling for ‘good enough’ after recognizing the absurdity of the pursuit; eating a pre-determined 500+ calorie low fiber breakfast, drinking a pint of water, and swallowing Gu packets, all at the respective pre-race time intervals: 152 minutes, 107 minutes, 38 minutes, 13 minutes. Each of these things have their very specific motivations because heyheynameoftheblog everything is important.

Mentioning those minutes has me thinking about the fallibility of memory and leads into a general distrust of first-person accounts as historical reports. All I know about the race is what I felt. Looking at the race map (http://www.shamrockmarathon.com/Assets/marathon+map+2010.jpg), I realize that my memories of events are all wrong with regards to time and distance. The concept of time is a funny thing in a marathon and remembering emotion is a funny thing at any time. Every time I try to recall a particularly delicious meal, wonderful kiss, or stunning accomplishment, I’m only recalling what I choose to remember. Mayhaps that’s why that $50 steak was a little more dry the second time you went to that restaurant, or that ex-lover you haven’t seen in years is annoyingly much more attractive than you remember. So perhaps take the full report with a grain of salt.

When do you do when no one is watching?

I’m writing this starting at 11:15 PM. Soon, I’m likely going to play in the snow step outside in the freezing rain and promptly come back in. When I finish this, it’ll be after 1:00 AM or after 1:00 PM on Wednesday

I’m telling you this because I’m feeling very personally productive, efficient, and quite happy. Having multiple consecutive days of unplanned staycation (thanks, snow!) and being determined to actually do things, I’m getting them done on my own schedule that does not at all mirror the typical workday. That’s what I’d like to talk about: one’s own natural rhythms and work schedules.

Just me and my echo.

I mentioned wanting to put up a post about dead languages way back in the early days of the blog (you know, a month ago). As I was writing/thinking out the previous post, I realized that the spread of a dominant language inevitably results in the death of others (via obsolescence), so this is probably the finest time to get into dead and endangered languages.

In December I had been listening to a lot of  The Mountain Goats. I’ll ask you to listen/read along to the track below, even if contemplating the utter loneliness of being the last of one’s kind is not really the best way to start a week.

I was reminded of a story I read years ago about two women who were the last speakers of a native language in South America. They lived on opposite sides of a Spanish-speaking village and rarely spoke to one another; they were not friends. Perhaps there was narrative bias effecting a protag/antag, but one was quieter and lived modestly and avoided attention (I believe when she was interviewed she was playing with her granddaughter) while the other woman advertised herself as the “true” last speaker of this language (she claimed the other woman spoke a bastardized version while the writer seemed to feel the other woman was the authentic one) and wouldn’t say anything in this dying tongue unless she was paid first. She refused to be recorded because it would, you know, disrupt her market scarcity. Yeah, that one seems kinda horrible, huh? Summary facts and more thoughts after the jump.

Someone out there will understand me in 100 years

I had a horrible conversation the other night that made my head hurt because it made me think too much. It was great and it thankfully came late in the evening so that I could be incoherent about a number of other topics before coming around to the simple question of whether or not Mandarin will be the lingua franca of the world the way English is now. I can’t recall the timeframe Anna and I put on this, but I don’t think it was more than a century. Anyway, I say “no,” but I want someone out there to tell me how and why I’m wrong. My thoughts after the jump.

Is The Future really drunk people watching YouTube projected on an order of fries?

I was at Radegast in Williamsburg with two of my favorite people on Saturday night. As I am able to understand in my limited capacity, their current shared raison d’être is to help build the future by playing with really awesome toys all day long. Harlo makes Android apps and writes about things I wish I could. Noah filters video through steak and plays with Wiimotes and autonomous blimps. (and now they’re engaged and I introduced them, which means their kid will be named Enrico) Anyway, the toys of the night were portable micro projectors.

They are what they sound like: pocket sized projectors you can hook up to your laptop, ostensibly for PowerPoint presentations but more likely for videos of ducks getting erections (crazy). Last month, LG actually released the US’s first cell phone with a video projector (PC Mag video). So with this in mind, Noah pointed at the walls of Radegast and said, “In two years, those walls will be covered with YouTube videos, and it’s going to be beautiful.”

I don’t know if I’m able to disagree with him (he can talk circles and squares around me), but I was a bit frightened. I’m sure it’s partly because we were in that most face-to-face social environment that is the long-tabled beer hall, and I’m the third-to-last person I can think of to throw up the “oh no too much technology!” flag but where is the line here? Not in technological advancement, but in our ability to process it?

Hush

I think my first very quiet night in a very quiet place was about 3 years ago. I was 40 minutes outside of Charlottesville, VA, and even though I was sharing a small bed with my girlfriend at the time, I was scared. I was scared of The Mennonites. It was dark and quiet in her parents’ house in the woods, and when I woke up at 4:00 AM, it wasn’t from a loud noise or a knee to the groin — my body just freaked out and convinced me that it was too quiet to be right. I was convinced there were Mennonites (the nearest neighbors) at the window, staring at us in disapproval. I went back to sleep okay, but I’ll never forget those (imaginary? they felt so real…) Mennonites. I’ll also never forget the quiet.

I’m from New Jersey, and for the last week, I’ve been at my parents’ house in one of the nicer suburbs of New Jersey. Last I checked, downtown has a knitting store and a running store, which is next to a wine store. The movie theater’s marquee was built in the 1920’s and was featured as the last shot of many throughout the town in the opening credits of old NBC show Ed. I think specialty stores and old theater marquees that aren’t dilapidated tell you you’re somewhere safe, prosperous, and quiet.

But many, many times I’ve thought to myself how quiet this place is not. Most of my best friends live in New York but come back out and say how rejuvenating and quiet it is. I guess you could call it Vitamin Q. But sign me up alongside the grumpy old folks who just seem to never get enough when I want it, and I’m worried it’ll be impossible for most people to find in the future.

The indoors is not epic.

First, I’d like to say I’ll never make this blog a training journal for whatever athletic thing I’m pursuing. I never understood putting those online to share if you’re not a pro. “Here are my pedestrian numbers.” Riveting.

Anyway, I just got in from a quick run in 40 degree rain. If you’ve never run in that sort of weather, yes, it is pretty miserable. But only for a little while. As this Times article from last month (“Train the Mind to Run Right Through Winter”) points out, people that are new to regular exercise are typically the ones who give up in bad weather. Over time (for me it took years, to be honest), you really don’t mind it. In fact, the writer says, you begin to embrace it:

What I think about when I shovel the driveway.

I think of John Henry the steel-driving man about once a year. Probably more than that, but I really think about him when we’re hit by a snowstorm. Layered in my best 10 year old sweats, shoving and shoveling snow into little piles, I look over at my brother or father or neighbor pushing and being pulled by a noisy red Honda snowblower, and I want to beat that damn thing.

Racing alongside a person and a machine that doesn’t know it’s being raced, I think of doing specialized workouts with labor analogs, I think of my years of endurance athletics, and I think of poor John Henry, the best man of many, dying in his race against the steam-drill. Then I think of John Connor fighting the machines, but I will stick to John Henry for right now, after the jump.