My Crashes

My bike, it appears, is cursed.

I have been biking to work for about a year and a half now, the last half on a new (cheap) bike.  Strangely, I crashed, through none of my fault, twice in the last month.  The first time, I for whatever reason lost all brakes that were fine moments earlier.  I was on a slight decline, and I deliberately crashed myself on the sidewalk to avoid flying past a busy intersection.  (Note to self: You can probably slow yourself down using shod feet as brakes.)  The second, which happened last week, was scarier: the front tire just blew out without provocation.  A piece of metal was stripped off the rim--it's crazy.  I had no idea a bike tire had enough pressure to actually cut metal.

I skinned knees both times, but the crashes have made me wary.  Not of biking in general, but of this bike in particular.  Skinned knees aren't too bad, but I don't think I want to find out what would happen on a third crash.  I think it will be walk-and-train until I can afford to buy a new, perhaps better quality bike; long story, but I'm broke at the moment.  It's winter anyway, and the weather has been alternately cool or freezing.  I only wish the sun would come out more often.

A (Very) First-World Problem

Last night, you found it cold enough to turn off the air conditioner, but not so cold as to require heat.  Since the apartment is centrally cooled and heated, you ask yourself if it will, somehow, continue to ventilate if you shut the system off.  You go to bed wondering if you will die of CO2 poisoning in your sleep.  You survive the night.

My Grub

I eat, therefore I am, and what I am not, or refuse to be, is a chemistry experiment.

In recent weeks, food labels have become my latest source of morbid fascination; the production of the modern factory food requires, it seems, a Ph.D.  Who knew polysorbate 80 was necessary to make beef jerky?  My grandmother used to just dry beef strips out in the sun.  Also, to go from yogurt that's awfully plain to yummily vanilla-flavored is to add nine(!) different ingredients.  I suffer each and every morning I eat plain, but at least I won't have to metabolize malic acid and potassium sorbate.  Does my body even appreciate the kinds of sacrifices I'm doing for its sake?  One can only hope.

I am not anally vegetarian, although I certainly can't remember the last time I had meat.  I used to count the number of days I went off meat, but I have long since given up.  If you must insist that I belong to a category, you will find me among wholefoodores, exotic species that eat the least-processed food available.  Indeed, when presented some time ago with a stark choice between a beef-barbecue sandwich and canned vegetable soup, I picked the sandwich, despite my earnest, on-going flirtation with vegetables.

Now, if I could only break my addiction to Coke Zero, that would be great.

----tear here----

A random experiment with a new point-and-shoot:

 
This is the Menil Collection, a small museum of modern art and other artifacts collected by some very rich folks.  It is, quite literally, in my backyard.

My Reads 0.5

I'm thirty-four, you know.  I'm not going to be one of these bitches that ruins children.

--That has to be the best line ever uttered in literature, by the Lady Ashley, in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which, in this day and age, somehow still scandalized me.  And I promise to write more often.

My Reads

I regret to announce that Fyodor Dostoevksy's The Idiot will be the last Russian novel I will ever read in my life.  While it was a fun read in spots, I do not have enough brain cells left to keep track of characters' multiple, radically different names.  Also, what is up with all that passive aggression?  Russians be crazy.

Next up: Chinua Achebe's Beloved Things Fall Apart.  I look forward to reading in the late afternoon sun on this gorgeous fall day.

My Vanity

So after all those years spent in graduate school, my world view has come down to this: better poor and skinny, than rich and flabby.  In the best case, one would be rich as well as skinny, but since my choice of profession cannot now be undone with grace and dignity, I will never be rich, so I might as well stay skinny.

This post should probably begin with an incident some two years ago, when I joined a gym in my old neighborhood.  A trainer there told me I had 20% body fat; I was seriously offended.  Dude, look at me.  Where is all this fat you claim I have?  I did not believe the cad.

Until, it appears, I have lost a lot of it.

Today my laptop presented a fresh warning of an impending hard drive failure.  It's been doing this for a long time now--I've stopped caring--but this one was new and unnerving.  It also did something strange I've never seen before.  I am backing up everything even as I write.  In the process I happened upon two-year old pictures, and, oh my god, I swear I look vastly different.

I have not been paying attention, truly; I don't know what I weigh today.  The only indication I've had is that some time in the fall last year, I had to get new jeans, because the ones I had been wearing had become too big.  I could probably make money selling before-and-after photos to a shady company trying to sell some miraculous new diet pill.

There is no miracle of course; neither is there a secret.  Well, maybe there is, and, I read somewhere, the secret is French: to eat until one is no longer hungry, which, from experience, is way before one is full.  I have to admit, there is a certain dignity and pride to be had when you manage to satisfy hunger but not indulge it.  I hardly eat meat now; I am vegetarian for days, sometimes weeks on end.  I bring my own lunch, dinner is usually a salad and warm bread.  In a week, I do any three of the following: long walk, long swim, yoga, weights, body weights.  Variety in physical activity is the one, and perhaps only thing fitness fanatics are right about.

All this is sensible, but not extraordinary.  Nevertheless, my coworkers were so aghast, nigh offended, to see me eat a donut.  Of course I eat donuts, but they were like, How can you be so skinny?  I also eat bread pudding.  It is so good I even know the days of the week it is to be found in the cafeteria.

You have to understand, I work in an obesity research lab, and, I swear, everybody there is on a diet.  One technician eats, by her own admission, 2,000 calories five days a week, and subsists on 500 the other two.  You could sometimes hear her sigh, I wish I could eat today, at her desk.  My boss has been shedding noticeable pounds lately.  Another technician was called, affectionately, a horrible horrible person for bringing to work homemade cupcakes she believed were 2,000 calories each.  Indeed, I think most people bring junk food to the lab so they won't have to eat it themselves.

 I will be on the beach with friends in two weeks.  I'm just hoping I won't gain all the weight back.

Of (Drunk) Flies and (Old) Men

I will not event attempt to make coherent prose out of things.

My roommate works in a fruit fly lab, so it's not unexpected there are Drosophilae flying around in the apartment.  I presume most, if not all, are mutated or genetically modified in some way, but whatever.  It is fine.

And funny when I observed that these little buggers like wine.  That they drink it, get drunk, fall into it... ...and drown.  It was hilarious.

Last night I went with some friends to a dive bar--perhaps as local as one can find in the city--to catch some blues.  We like this place a lot, because there's no need to dress, the owner and bouncer is a character, and the music, always live, is outstanding.  Most of all, the crowd is easy going, and refuses to apologize for what it is.  What it is is mostly older, a little country, and appreciates honest music.  A friend points out that she likes to see older people still go out in this country.  In hers, which is Slovenia, they don't.  I say, only half-jokingly, Does that give you hope?  She laughs hysterically.  Yes.  That I won't be lonely in old age?  Yes, definitely.

What she doesn't know is, this is the same reason I hear Mass Sunday mornings in the chapel in my neighborhood.

I used to go to the evening Mass, which I didn't even like.  It was ritualistic and fussy; there really was only so much incense I can breathe.  One bright, gorgeous Sunday I happen to wake up early with nothing to do, so I up and go to the morning Mass.  I see many many kids gallivanting around the courtyard, speaking in tongues.  Well, actually, French, and it occurs to me maybe I would hear Mass in French, if only accidentally.  That would have been something, but, unfortunately, it would not be so.  Nevertheless, there is a lot of French people for some reason unknown to me, and I have to admit the average French is probably better dressed than the best-dressed of the rest of us.

But I digress.  I like the morning mass a lot.  It is not fussy, and attended by a much older crowd, and they give me hope.  Over time and through any and all trials it brings, their faith survives.  Also, their marriages, and, one wishes, their hopes and aspirations.  A bit scarred maybe, but still.

Age maybe inevitable, but defeat is not.

(Unless you're a fruit fly and your breeder's wicked roommate finds it amusing to tempt you with wine.)

Adventures in My Mind

Biking to work has its benefits.

Mostly, I can fit once more into 30-inch jeans :).  It got, however, too cold to bike, so it's been bus and train in recent days.  To make up for all the lost calories, I've taken to ditching the bus and walking to and from the train station.  In the right weather, it is a beautiful walk, as I have to cross a bridge over a freeway; the view is... ...not bad.  One night, I pass a man sitting all by himself on the bridge, and the first thing to cross my mind is, He's not going to jump, is he?

But I digress.  On this walk I pass by a fancy "Chinese" restaurant, in quotes, because I think a Chinese place is not really Chinese unless the Chinese eat in it.  I don't remember seeing one Chinese person in that place.  Its floor-to-ceiling windows are right next to the sidewalk, and one evening a thought occurs to me, How fun would it be to one day

flash/moon all these well dressed people?

My Life Changes 2.0

An eternity, it seems, has passed since I last sat down to write.

It has, in fact, only been half a year--not counting that tipsy blurb about some Spanish wine--but so eventful was this half year that I no longer know where and how to start.  Perhaps the end of this story begins with this Facebook post, which some people wink wink might think odd to find on my wall:

Some people do crazy things to feel alive.  I ... I tie a balloon to my back pack and let it fly behind me on the bike ride home.  Wish I could say I had a little niece to bring home the balloon to, but she's like 8,000 miles away.  But anyway, with apologies to Pearl Jam, I am a lucky man to count on both hands (and more) the ones I love.

So I have feelings, who knew? :D


That bike ride home, by the way, was fueled by a beer and a hot dog from a small get-together get-to-know-you among lab rats in the area, which became, for me, a quiet and personal celebration of a very different kind.  I didn't tell anybody at the time, not even friends who were there, but I then had just happened to open my inbox, and there was a very special email in it.

It was a job offer, and, with it, the promise of a fresh start.  In the months and weeks prior to that day, the relationship between me and my boss--who was also my PhD adviser--had become increasingly strained, and I had already known the situation to be unsustainable.  Indeed, it got so bad that to this day two months hence, I still do not talk to him, and we work only across the street from each other.

I am not exactly sure what happened when, but I refuse to believe it was all my fault.   After all, I had worked more than six years for a man with a reputation for swiftly turning staff over.  With very few exceptions, people stay about a year and not much more.  I remain the only one to finish with a PhD from his lab.  The three other students he had had over the years simply upped and left, some with more acrimony than others.  In some circles, that I stayed and finished was something of a miracle, or, less graciously, an act of folly.

You see, I can put up with a lot, but, alas, only with so much.

I now work for a big, jolly young fellow who understands that productivity--particularly in research--is less about the amount of time one spends in the lab than how one spends it.  I am happy in my new job, and it shows: colleagues think I must work holidays and weekends to generate the kind of data I get.  Happily, I don't, and, for a change, the boss does not mind.  Win win.

The concern remains that a postdoctoral research position, which is what I have, was never meant to be permanent.  But that, perhaps, is best left for a future post.