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Showing posts from May, 2008

troubling

A 10-minute mile is not a very good showing. Even if it is the first mile I've run in 10 months or so, I feel like I should be in better shape than the time indicates. I'm a bit embarrassed. On the bright side, at least I got some exercise--rode my bike down to the Pedal House, dropped it off for a tune-up, walked over the foot bridge to the green belt, put in my shamefully slow mile, and walked home. Hopefully there will be a decent turn-out for pick-up ball on Sunday; otherwise I'll have to go be ashamed again, trying to keep up with the pick-up soccer game. On another bright note, I think I solved the grill crisis for the weekend's bbq--on my walk to the greenbelt, I passed a bunch of stuff out on the sidewalk with a 'free' sign on it. Including a grill with a propane tank that felt at least half-full. The element looked serviceable. Is a grill the type of thing that I should think twice about before accepting a donor?

straight and narrow

I helped my friend Craig remodel his bathroom over the weekend. I went with him to Home Depot Friday morning and then didn't leave his property until this afternoon at 1. The time just blended into one long day; I can't believe that the entire weekend has already passed. It feels good to work with my hands, to create something new or better. It also makes me notice how well we've all been socialized to have certain expectations--the height of light switches, the horizontal orientation of toilet paper dispensers, the width of grout lines between tiles. We even fabricate tiles that meet our expectations about what our expectations about tiles should be. We expect straight lines, textured walls, eight-foot ceilings. Water pressure for our showers, drain pipes for our poop, wires to carry electricity to our outlets where we can plug in our devices to make us pretty. I was glad not to be camping on this rainy Memorial Day weekend, but spending the time looking at all the

Memorial Day and other wonders

Maybe it's no one else's idea of a good time, but I'm excited to spend Memorial Day up in Casper helping Craig remodel their bathroom. I also get to play their wii. I plan to practice my mad bowling skills. Why is Jon Stewart funny to me and Stephen Colbert so not funny? In other unrelated news, who has time to make Lego stop animation clips of totally weird things like the thriller video? And why I am so excited about the new Indy Jones film?

sham

Granted, lyrics like " Everything's bigger down in Texas, ' cept the minds that try to lead us" may not be especially deep. Last night, though, standing in Will and Tawnya's basement next to the washer and dryer and the workbench lined by tubes of caulk on the unfinished concrete floors, with fifteen people next to me standing or sitting on a remnant of carpet or a folding camp chair, listening to Saint Olas sing about spiders and iguanas and zombies, I got to hear one of the best live shows of my life. Maybe the thing about live music that makes me so melancholy is feeling confronted by the really beautiful expression of emotion and knowing that I'll never be able to express those parts of me (whatever parts of oneself, I mean, which can't be expressed in words) as clearly and as beautifully as a musician. It's sort of like when people say, "Man, yoga yesterday worked muscles I didn't even know I had"--for me, live music stirs parts

If those cans had been deer....

Patrick and I went out to Rogers Canyon this afternoon and killed some organic black bean cans. Killed 'em dead. Now I feel secure in my manhood. Yawp!

flashing yellow

the street lights on grand were flashing yellow and red when i came back from campus today. i thought maybe the dudes digging up the front yard at my house had cut into a power line and shorted out all of town, but apparently not. the tv still works. my roommate was watching some 'next' on mtv when i got here. for a reality tv show, it sure sounds like they're all reading from scripts that they haven't quite memorized yet. but the roommate left cuz she couldn't take the whole house shaking when the compact the dirt where they're refilling the big hole they dug so they could put in a new water line. she says the noise and vibration make it hard for her to focus on the final she's been studying for since monday. i'm inclined to agree. but the point is, when i was sitting at the light, on my bike, while all the cars kept driving by on grand and it looked like there would never be a break in the traffic, two nice drivers stopped to let us cross. i

flyball a-hole

on sundays, we've been playing pick-up basketball at noon all semester long. the flyball people have had the gym reserved at 1:30 all semester long. maybe the flyball people don't realize this, but when we play pickup basketball, we play to a certain number of points , not to a certain time. this means that we don't always know when our game will finish. sometimes a game is quick--fifteen minutes--and sometimes it's less quick--like forty minutes or so. i don't know how long it takes to set up flyball equipment. but it seems to me like they could start setting up their shit on one end of the floor while we play our half-court game at the other. instead, there's a dude who dumps his big box of stuff right in the middle of the floor while we're in the middle of a game. i understand that they have the right to the gym at exactly 1:30 every sunday. i admit it; it's indisputable. and yet, the dude is such a complete prick. maybe he lacks social ski

snake oil

"Falling in love can induce a calming effect on the body and mind and raises levels of nerve growth factor for about a year, which helps to restore the nervous system and improves the lover’s memory." That's what a story on msn says. I think I could use some of that kind of medicine.

bad dreams

I think that hot cocoa before bed has one of two effects on my sleep: either I get no sleep, or I have bad dreams. It doesn't always give me bad dreams--maybe it's a combined effect with some other aspect of my diet/actions/behaviors/whatever--but it's often enough that I'm identifying it as a contributing factor. Weird. Also weird: curling. It's on channel 27 right now, the CBS College channel, though apparently, according to the design on the ice, this is the world curling championship. Canada vs. Scotland, complete with play-by-play announcing. I wonder how these guys got into the sport--I mean, like, did they take curling lessons in third grade and discover a preternatural skill for sliding big rocks down the ice? Or maybe some curling scout saw them sweeping the grocery store steps and recruited them for the national team? Maybe this is what people mean when they say there's nothing to do in Wyoming. I bet you can't take curling lessons anywher