5 Minutes

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I bundled up for a bike ride around Mercer Island today. It's been a while since I've been on my bike. It took me 38 minutes to cover the street portion of Mercer Island, a route I could cover earlier this year in 33 minutes. That's a difference of 5 minutes over just a 13, 14 mile course! That's horrible. I was quite depressed.
Part of it is that I'm out of biking shape. But the other part is that my body has changed. I've been lifting some and I'm carrying a lot more upper body muscle. I'm at least 5 pounds heavier than I was when I was training for STP earlier this year, and I felt those pounds like an anchor dragging me down the hills.
At the end of the ride, on the climb up the steep hill to my house, my left calf cramped up violently and I almost fell off my bike. During the ride, I had a huge headache because I wore an insulated bike cap under my helmet and my already snug helmet was like a vise on the sides of my head, above each year. The whole ride was an exercise in extended suffering.
I have to make some hard choices. If I'm going to ride RAMROD (Ride Around Mount Rainier in One Day) next year, if I'm going to ride the 56 mile bike leg of a triathlon, I'll need to give up the upper body weightlifting and drop that muscle mass. I'm not a huge fan of biker body, though. One's upper body becomes scrawny. I think I'll have to make that tradeoff again next year, though. For just one more time. Goal orientation can be difficult sometimes.
My only vindicating moment on this Christmas Day was chasing down another biker on the I-90 bridge on the way back home. He had about a 250 yard lead when I got on the bridge, and I finally passed him on the last fourth of the bridge, on the climb. The cold air was burning my lungs when I passed him. I looked back once or twice and saw him trying to climb out of the saddle, but he was done.
It's a Wonderful Life is on network TV again. I've never watched the whole film. It's always on in the background. One of these Christmas seasons I should watch it, but I think I've missed that window yet again. Once Christmas day has passed I'm emotionally done with the whole holiday.
My sisters get in on a really late flight tonight, so I have to finish cleaning up the house. Merry Christmas to all!

Buckaroo Tavern

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About two years ago, I lived in Fremont, a neighborhood north of Seattle. One night, my roommate and I noticed a movie being shot down the street from our house, outside the Buckaroo Tavern. We walked down to watch. Scott, his girlfriend Jane, my friend Derek (staying with me for the summer), and me. We didn't find out what was being shot that night. They were finishing the film, as the whole crew started celebrating after they shot the scene, which involved couple bikers riding off on Harleys.
I finally figured it out tonight, on Christmas Eve 2000. It was "Ten Things I Hate About You". I just saw the scene I watched them film that night. It flashed by as I was channel surfing. It was such a tiny scene. I'm amazed at how large the crew was that night. If filmmaking always involved such a large crew, I don't think I'd want to be involved.
Last night I saw Billy Elliot with Laura before she left for Chicago. I enjoyed it, in the end. It took me a while to understand the film and where its center lay, but once I did it won me over.
Now that Laura's gone, I'm the Last of the Mohicans. I remember this Far Side, the caption was Last of the Mohicans. It depicted an Indian poking his head out of a tent, saying "Hello? Anyone there? Hello?" Or something like that.

Ghost town

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Seattle is turning into a ghost town, as everyone heads off for the holidays. I'm a ghost, wandering the city. This is the type of rainy weather that makes me feel like heading to some hole in the wall and drinking and smoking myself into oblivion while trying to capture coherent thoughts on a cocktail napkin.
I've been operating the airport shuttle service this week, driving everyone to the airport. The last batch heads off today. Then it will be me myself and I for a few days. A good chance to catch up on basic life maintenance--laundry, clean the room, pay the bills, read a book or two. Plan out the year to come.
I think my years alternate in quality. Every odd year is great, and then the even years are not so good. This was an even year, so I can't say it was all that great. I'll be glad to kick it out the door of a moving car. Among other things, I didn't travel this year. That always is the sign of a bad year, when I don't travel. Next year I will have to get ahead of the work curve.
I bet I finish a few books in the next day or two. This weather is all about reading. Like plane flights. Only I'm going nowhere.

Going far by going nowhere

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I made a big decision today. But I can't write about it. I'll just say, I'm glad to have made it and my mind is much more at peace now.
Just went to see You Can Count On Me starring Laura Linney, Macauley Culkin's little brother, who looks like Macauley, and Mark Ruffalo. Matthew Broderick has a small part. I really enjoyed it. I love films that are quiet, and films that don't always answer questions for me, and this was both of them. I recently attended a screening of Traffic, the new Steven Soderbergh film, which was also very good. Benicio Del Toro is the coolest cat around. It has been a pretty slow year for movies. Most weeks nothing interesting came out. But these two, I must say, were worthwhile.
Ebert just revealed his top 10 films of 2000, and both of those films were on it.
"Almost Famous"
"Wonder Boys"
"You Can Count on Me"
"Traffic"
"George Washington"
"The Cell"
"High Fidelity"
"Pollock"
"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"
"Requiem for a Dream"
How frustrating that I haven't seen Crouching Tiger yet. I can't remember wanting to see a film more. I may just have to fly to LA this week to see it. I might go crazy. I did not think "The Cell" was that good.
I always have such a hard time remembering which films came out during the calendar year. I guess if I had to generate a top 10 list of films this year, it might include (in no particular order)
--Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (I haven't seen it yet, but I know I'll love it)
--The Contender
--Almost Famous
--Wonder Boys
--Unbreakable
--Traffic
--You Can Count On Me
--High Fidelity
--Magnolia
Man, I can't think of any more. It's too late, and my mind has turned stale.

Some things never change

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I just saw an ad for the new episode of the Simpsons tonight, and they mentioned dodge balls. Those hard, red, rubber balls with the light, scarred texture, used in elementary school for playing dodge ball. I wonder if they still use those in school.
And what was with that sport, dodge ball, anyway? What a violent sport, hucking those rubber rocks at each other as hard as possible. Boy, it was fun, though.
Another ad just showed on TV, for a new Wes Craven film, Vampire 2000. It seems like every year, John Carpenter or Wes Craven come out with some vampire movie. They are all the same. Any movie with a title that includes the year it is released will probably be lousy. It is a confession of its own mediocrity. I will only be relevant for a small audience in this, the year I am released.

Blame the chef

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I was just listening to the Evgeny Mravinsky recording of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony today, and it is so much better than the other recording I have of this work. It's funny, when most people want to buy a classical recording, they don't pay any attention to the conductor, orchestra, or the actual performance itself. They just want to own the symphony. Yet they would never think of buying a cover of their favorite artists' works instead of the original recording itself. Odd. There's such a large difference between recordings of classical pieces.
The conductor has a huge impact on the recording. The same influence a director has over a film. Many people will go see a film just to see a movie star (Julia Roberts' success is proof of that). But I go to a film primarily on the strength of a director. The correlation between a director and the quality of a film is much higher than that between the cast and the quality of the film, once you reach Hollywood production budgets (in home movies, the poor acting can be highly distracting, it's true). Same for the chef versus the wait staff at a restaurant. It isn't always the case, but in classical recordings and movies, I have absolute faith.

Smart baseball columnist

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Rob Neyer, who writes for ESPN.com, is the smartest baseball columnist out there. Mainstream sports coverage mostly stinks. It's interesting to think that I used to only watch the local news growing up. When I watch the local news now, I have to laugh it's so poor. It's easy to forget about the bell curve, but it almost always holds true. The world is dominated by the mediocre. In fact, local news may be a bell curve with its peak closer to the left than the right, in the wrong direction.
But if you're a baseball fan, you should read Rob's column. He's a step ahead of all the other baseball columnists out there, and he's not a baseball journalistic insider. He stands outside the game and looks at it outside in, which is why his column smacks of the truth. He also is a disciple of Bill James, and I love the statistical dissection of baseball. No other sport begs for more mathematical analysis. I remember keeping stat sheets of my own performance back in little league. I can't remember what I
learned about myself. Probably that I was a mediocre player, in the middle of the bell curve.

Magazine lint I receive way

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Magazine lint

I receive way too many magazines. I can't help it. I love just flipping through magazines. Everyday I come home and I have a new magazine. Next to the pile of hardcovers on my bed is a pile of magazines about 4 feet high by my bed. I can't bring myself to throw them away, but honestly I will never read half of them. Some I subscribe to, others are just sent to me because of my job. I think I would have to read one magazine a day to keep up with the current flow. If I really had to cut down, though, I think I would just keep:
The New Yorker
Sunday New York Times
Wired
Fortune
Entertainment Weekly
I am dying to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it's one of those films that's only currently open in limited release, in LA and NY. I could actually fly down to LA to watch it this weekend. As I write this, I am sorely tempted. I really need to get away from Seattle right now. This in between weather, when there's not quite enough snow on the mountains to hit the slopes, but enough precipitation to make life outdoors miserable, it's the valley of death. I wasn't planning on leaving Seattle this holiday season, but that may be a big mistake. Enough time without travel and my soul starts to dry from the inside out.
But I also think I want to run away from certain things in Seattle right now, and that can't be healthy. I need either more patience, or a calmer spirit, or some crazy athletic endeavor to sap all my energy. Maybe one of these days I'll hop in my car one day and just drive down the coast, to San Francisco, and just sleep in my car along the way.

E-mail I just realized that

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E-mail

I just realized that I now process over 230 e-mails a day at work. For much of the day, I am a router. I wonder what model number Cisco would put on me. I wonder if this is healthy.
The DC shifts are wearing me down, so I'm having very strange dreams. I had a whole year's worth of odd dreams last night. During one, I was playing someone one on one in this strange game. We were in a real-life maze, and we were trying to avoid each other and steal things from each other's home base. We had all sorts of strange powers we could call on, like temporary invisibility, and the ability to teleport to the exact opposite coordinates in the maze. The other half of the dream, I was back at Stanford in the Bay Area, driving around with Mark and Howie on campus. I was wandering all around campus, and it looked like a lot of older classes were having reunion celebrations. I can't remember the other part of my dream, but I remember I was on the run from something. Maybe the wind storm in Seattle last night disturbed my sleep.

Dream Jeopardy Categories I was

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Dream Jeopardy Categories

I was flipping through Microserfs again yesterday, because I came across it while cleaning my room. Love that book, it's quite clever. In the first few pages, Coupland talks about picking out your seven dream categories if you happened to be on Jeopardy. It's odd how much you can learn about a person if you ask them that question. I asked a few of my friends, and here's what they said (I will not name names b/c I'm not sure if I'm violating some weblog etiquette, though maybe some people will read these and know who I'm talking about, and I'll have to come back and edit these):
NFL in the 90's
NBA in the 90's
CRM Software
Movie Stars
80's sitcoms
Shawshank Redemption
Gameshow babes
fila, diadora, and all things brother-man
eighties baseball
combat sports
fine chicks (naked visual category)
post-80s female singers
southeast asian accents (audio category)
pompeii
basic ballet terms
social psychology
the ins and outs of "The Real World"
history of spanish civilization
the classic musicals
music theory
northern ontario/southwest virginia's lakes and rivers
small misc actors/actresses
swimming olympians
developmental biology
jane goodall's chimps
canadian superstars
sport injuries
When you get to truly know someone very well, I think that you can recognize them on their 7 dream categories alone. And if you don't know them very well, the results might surprise you. It might make a good party game.
I think my seven dream categories right now would be:
mediocre chicago cubs pitchers of the 80's and 90's
hong kong action films
surround sound formats
famous short stories
movie soundtracks (audio category)
road cycling
microsoft excel
Interesting how so few pick any categories related to their jobs.
I have some big decisions to make this weekend. I also have to get my Christmas shopping done (started?). Looks like another online shopping holiday season. I got my first Xmas present in the mail yesterday, from Amazon. My stepbrother and stepsister-in-law Alan and Sharon got me this book on movie special effects. Very cool. I can't wait to read it. I wish more people I knew had wish lists...it would make my job easier this holiday season.

The Fountainhead on my Back

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The Fountainhead on my Back

Back from a late night shift at the Seattle distribution center. It's my seventh or eighth day of working down there, so I am now back on my old college vampire schedule. I always make the mistake of drinking something caffeinated during my shift, so I come home wired.
I will flip through The Fountainhead and try and finish it tonight. My high school English teacher wanted me to read it and enter the Fountainhead essay contest. This was in 1989 or 1990. I started it and never made it past 30 or 40 pages. I remember I was not a big fan of Rand's writing back then. So now, some 10 or so years later, I'm almost done with it. I will be glad to get this monkey off my back. I'm still not sure I'm a big fan of her writing, but she has some interesting ideas. The characters are all puppets to me, but she gets her point across, blunt as she may be.
Working at Amazon, I always have about fifty books I want to read piled all around my bed. When I roll around in bed in the middle of the night, I hear hardcovers falling on the ground.
I dream of snowboarding.