12/31/07 - 1/6/08 Year of the Retarded Gay Panda Bears With Their Heads on Fire (320 minutes)

1/5/07 (60 minutes)
Things have felt different, lately. I feel unfit, but this seems to elicit alternating resignation and anger at my plight rather than motivation to improve. The training environment is far from ideal here in Maryland, but my opinion is that as an intelligent adult I ought to be able to cope with such minor inconveniences as the sun going down and the ground being too cold to admit bare feet.

My parents gave me a breadmaking machine for Christmas (at my suggestion), and today it broke. I realized after fooling with it for a while that I was getting severely distressed by simple, unimportant machine. So after half an hour I stopped screwing with the thing, kneaded the dough by hand and baked it in the oven, instead. It was the obvious solution. I knew early on that I wouldn't be able to make the thing go. But I persisted, and as I did I wasn't thinking about making the breadmaker work, but about the incompetence of the manufacturer, the idiocy of the automated phone system (it WAS poorly-designed, even in retrospect, but still) and in general all sorts of negative things that were irrelevant to the facts of the situation. I adopted the correct solution slowly and grudgingly rather than readily and impartially, as I would normally expect from myself.

I pride myself on an equanimity which has been tenuous and fleeting since the time, two or three months ago now, when my training started to deteriorate. I think this is evidence that my physical and mental states are more closely intertwined than I like to imagine.

I hold an irrational, egotistical belief that my "mental self", the "me-ness" of who I am, is an independent, invincible entity whose main purpose is the systematic mastery of whichever tasks either present themselves or are selected. The mastery of the physical body is one example. This is how I view the source of competitive drive.

This outlook, I am beginning to realize, is sophomoric and ultimately untenable. It is philosophically questionable to suppose there exists some sort of "external Mark" existing as an ineffable emergent phenomenon, floating around in nether-space and too strong to be overcome by such trivialities as brain chemistry. Why I have been genetically programmed to believe in such ghosts (as most humans seem to do) is a mystery that I may speculate upon at another time. But for the moment, it's mostly just an illusion I wish to disavow myself of.

I don't mean that I want to stop believing in sentient existence, free will, and the human soul. I mean that I want to stop believing that mine, in particular, are so damn privileged.

1/4/07 (90 minutes)
Good true long run, the first in a while. Felt great after two easy days. Check out the YouTube of last year's conference championships.


1/2/07 (30 minutes)

Pontificating on philosophy:
part 1
part 2

My tibilias anteriors were starting to get sore from all the road running (I ran after dark again and had to use the road), so I came back in early. But honestly I was happy to do so, because it was truly cold for the first time since I came home (a few degrees below freezing, with strong winds), and California has made into a sissy in that regard. I think freezing weather is fine, but with wind it's nasty, and my hands were getting numb.

Enough bitching. I'm done writing for now.

1/1/07 (70 minutes)
Managed to get out while there's still some daylight, and ran laps around the back yard. The only problem is that these are only one minute long, which means I'm turning almost constantly, and I can feel that wearing on my ankles and knees somewhat while I run. My legs feel fine now, though.

I decided to name this the Year of the Retarded Gay Panda Bears With Their Heads on Fire because it's a new year, but calling it the year of the rooster or dog or Quetzalcoatl or whatever name they already have for it did not seem apt. The Olympics are coming to Beijing, and here are the official mascots:


Incidentally, there's a chance I will be going to Beijing this summer as well. The summer camp I've worked at the past two years is starting an overseas program with a campus in Beijing, where they'll offer cosmology. Technically, I don't know cosmology (not on a college course level), but I my boss doesn't know that I don't know it. Also, they have a picture of me on their website.

I'm allowing them to use my gorgeous visage for free advertising, so they clearly owe me one. How could they not send me wherever I want to go? And let's see - your options are to do the exact same thing you've done the past two summers, living on the Stanford campus for six weeks, or to go to freaking Beijing, travel expenses paid, right before the start of the Olympics. Not a hard choice.
Also from their site, this guy

lived in our dorm last year. He's Kenyan, but he's fat and slow and never runs except when there's peanut butter at the end of it. One night he saw some non-affiliated kids sneaking around the dorm and beat the shit out of them all, simultaneously, until the cops came and handcuffed the camp director in his pajamas. True story.

12/31/07 (70 minutes)
ran around my backyard breaking wind in two senses. when i finally ran out of gas (in one sense), i felt abandoned and started making farting noises with my mouth, but they came out all wrong and so i gave up and just listened to the empty silence of winter.
later my parents went to bed at 10:30PM so i stayed up alone and watched the ball fall in times square, at which point i spontaneously ejaculated. true story.