I Need a Golden Helmet...

I need it because this is how I feel. I got a little teary when I looked at this guy's expression. This is how I really feel tonight.

Somewhere Inbetween...

Do you ever get the feeling that your life has paused between key frames in a film. You feel blurred, in motion from somewhere to somewhere. But for the moment you are paralyzed, and you can't see who you were a moment ago or who you're going to be when the motion ends.

I've been feeling that way yesterday and today. I numbed my mind last night with all the stuff I use to distract myself from myself, but felt horrible in the morning, like I always do when I'm like this. The morning usually brings a little clarity, but only a little.

In the night I was in the shower and decided to shave my face into a new shape. I was going for a kind of Buffalo Bill look, but I think it came out more like a prison inmate. What I was really thinking was that I wanted a real Van Dyke, like I was a character in a Rembrant painting. The goatee is too round though, and I was too chicken to trim the sideburns higher and more pointy. So it became Buffalo Bill, or more realistically, prison inmate.

So I'm I shot the photo, and it was very blurry. I didn't want to set the camera up again, so I just photoshopped it until it looked lookable. And now I have to try to figure out how on earth I can teach the kids something tomorrow.

PS - This is what I have been listening to this evening.

Playing with Bikes...

So, you might not realize it but you're looking at about two pretty solid days of work. Yesterday I spend the better part of the morning, all of the afternoon affixing the brake levers to my satisfaction on the home made bullhorn bars, then scraping all of the decals off of the bike with my thumbnails. The bullhorns and brake levers were ok, but the decal removal was awful. I tried using an exacto-knife at one point but it brought up about as much paint as decal, so I reverted back to the thumbnails. They hurt terribly.

In affixing the brake levers I realized a couple of things. When I cut the drops to make the bullhorns I should have left more of the vertical part. They're too short to be able to support the levers and allow for one course of bar wrap above. Originally I was assuming that I could get some mountain bike style brake levers, because I'd seen single speed bikes with them. Well, I don't know how they work them out, but I couldn't find them online anywhere, and the old levers were fine. In any case they work ok. The other thing I realized was that the cable housing for the brakes was so old and weathered that it had cracked at the point of insertion into the brake lever on both sides, and I'd need to replace them.

I'd bought some new cables previously, because the cables on it were scary rusty, but I hadn't put them on yet. The yellow housing was one of my favorite parts of the bike, and the housing on the new cables was the dull black you see on it. Oh well.

Before I started on the cables I decided to run to the library where I had some items on hold, and to stop at a bike shop on the way to buy some of the cushy jell inserts that you put under the bar wrap these days. But the bike shop didn't have them. I'd struck out with them before on Slime tubes to fit my 27" x 1.25" wheels. Maybe I should go back to the other shop up in the avenues. This one is just so convenient.

Anyway, after my trip, with bare bars and cracked cable housing, I came home and started working on the rest of it. The first cable I changed was for the front derailleur. Due to bad design, the cables had been totally exposed and they were really rusty. So I switched that our and bent the metal bits that routed the cable to try to fit the whole housing along the cable's route. It didn't work well, and when I was trying to fix it I got sidetracked adjusting the derailleur. I'm no good at it. I never have been.

But this time was worse than most. I was playing with the clamp position on the seat tube, and while trying to loosen the bolt that held the clamp closed I inadvertently tightened it until it sheared off at the midpoint, leaving the threaded in the clamp. So, I'm going to try and drill it out, but I might have just given myself an excuse to update the drivetrane. What a mess. I was very frustrated and angry, and watched Topgear for a couple of hours to calm myself down, then went to bed.

This morning I decided that the fact that I'd crippled it wasn't a reason to finish the cables, so I set to work on that. It took a surprisingly long time, mostly because the bolts for the brakes are located in places that are about ten millimeters too short to be able to get my little ratchet into. Then when I did get to them the fell apart unexpectedly, pieces flying over the dirty floor, and getting lost under all the mess. Eventually, however, I was able to finish it all.

Following that I was going to secure the cable housings with some zipties, but when I looked for them in the store I found only neon colored ones, and decided to pass for the time being.

The next thing upon which to work was the helmet. I purchased the retro-reflective tape some time ago, but hadn't put it on the helmet as an excuse not to ride my bike to school in the morning. I hate riding in the dark. If I'm not visible, then I don't have to. Anyway I decided it was time to begin remedying the situation, so I pulled the tape out. I was thinking of making a skull out of small square pieces at first, but moved on when I couldn't design a pleasing one on my computer. I couldn't figure out what to do instead of the skull and sat thinking for some time when it came to me all at once and I started making a pattern to cut from. It's not perfect. I made it from two strips of 1.5 inch tape, so it's 3 inches wide, and the sides turned out not to be perfectly symmetrical. But it was close enough for me.

Anywho, so much for the first two days of vacation.

The Ride I Intended to Take...

So, yesterday I took the ride I intended to take last week. It's turned stormy and cold here, and yesterday was the preview of it. It was just on the edge of cold, and they sky was that steely version of a clear sky in fall. It's like the impending cold bleeds the color out. Today it stormed, and the sidewalks were full of brightly colored leaves. Maybe it's a water color, all the paint running toward the ground as the water comes down.

Anyway, I slept late, then spent the morning working up a group of songs for a new music mix around the mood I was getting from this one song by The Mountain Goats, called So Desperate. It's this really beautiful, sad sort of song. You can hear it here. But this was before the ride.

I finished amassing the list of songs without mixing them, and it was already the mid afternoon, so I got my new bike and left the building. It was lovely out and there were lots of people walking in the park at the entrance to the canyon. Soon I reached the entrance to the upper canyon, the part to which I've never been, and I was expecting more of the same. There wasn't nearly as much foot traffic on the road, but there were several bikers that passed me. I wasn't going very fast.

About three miles up the canyon I passed what looked like a water treatment plant, and the road narrowed and became less evenly paved. There were bits where the ground got marshy on the north side and water ran across the path, turning the dead leaves into a ground up sop. There was a stream running on the south side of the path. This path made sharp turns sometimes, and curiously steep jogs. It seemed like the engineers who plotted it didn't want to mess with the nature much. It fit, because not long after that the deciduous trees gave way to tall pines and the air became cooler and far more aromatic.

Among these pines I saw the creek far below to the right, moss covered boulders that are more brightly and darkly colored than the ground around them. These were nice little vistas, opening and closing as I went along. I kept thinking that I should tell the film teachers at school about this place. They'd be great locations that might give the kids films a bit more depth.

The top of the canyon is full of picnic areas established by and dedicated to Rotarians. There are big plaques in each one, and a couple of big gear monuments, then at the very top is this great pavilion with a very sharply pitched roof, covered in pine shakes. It looks vaguely swiss, and the trusses must have been in trouble because it was warped in a very picturesque but dangerous looking way. It was really fantastic.

I've been thinking I'd get rid of the drop bars on my bike and replace them with a homemade pair of bullhorns, but I might have to reconsider after riding down the canyon. I got in the drops and kind of let it go, speeding down the narrow pavement in a way that surely would have frightened anyone going up, (as the people passing me on the way down had frightened me a couple times), but it was late in the afternoon and there wasn't anyone still on the way up. The bike was really quite stable at speed, really a joy to ride. It was exhilarating, but I was careful not to let it get away from me. I realized early on that the brakes need to be tightened up even a little more. On the other hand, they're great brakes; far smoother than on my mountain bike.

From the upper canyon I went up to the east side into the avenues, as I did last week, then on down to my building. The sun was setting, around six, as I came out of the canyon, and it was twilight as I walked my bike up the steps to the building. It was night when I stepped out soon after to go get some dinner. Writing this post I realize that it was a singular kind of evening, as today is the end of daylight savings. I guess every evening is singular. This was just one of the ones that let you know it. It was a beautiful day.

Just Another Manic UEA...

Last weekend was UEA and I think I went a little manic. I did a whole lot of stuff, and bought a whole lot of stuff, and in the end, although I did a whole lot of stuff and bought a whole lot of stuff I really didn't do or buy much of anything. I didn't spend more than about a hundred and fifty bucks, and I hardly left my apartment. In any case, it wasn't a really great weekend.

I think the one thing that I am pleased about that did come from it was that I finally bought a road bike. It's a late '70's to early '80's Bianchi Sport SS steel frame with suntour components. I've been looking for a bike since the beginning of the summer, starting with new bikes, being blown away by the prices, scanning craigslist and KSL Classifieds hourly and finding nothing, resigning myself to spending a thousand bucks on a new Surly bike, then going back to the classifieds. I figured out from calling immediately when I saw something I liked that bikes were going in the first fifteen minutes they went up all summer. But last weekend I was the first caller.

I went out and looked at the bike, and the girl seemed to have misrepresented its condition in the ad. I couldn't even take it for a test ride because tires were flat and the chain was off the rear derailleur and rusted. Also, the back tire was so out of true that I thought it might have been in an accident and bent. It looked pretty rough, and I was frankly a little miffed that the girl didn't tell me this before I spent $10 in gas to drive out to Murry for a test ride.

She advertised it at $100 dollars, but I told her that I didn't know if I could resurrect the drivetrain. She said to make an offer so I said $70, then she countered to $80. After thinking a moment and realizing that even if I did have to put a new drivetrain I probably wouldn't find a deal this good again for another year, so I took it. Then she wouldn't take a check, which pissed me off more. But I went and found a branch of my credit union and came back and bought it.

As the day went on and I made a few stops on the way back home I kept looking at it and feeling better and better about my purchase. The cloth bar tape was moth eaten, the cassette and chain were rusty, the decals were peeling, and the gum sidewalls on the tires were dried out, but the bike had been stored in a storage unit from what looked like soon after it was bought. Then, when I got it home and looked more closely I saw something that made me feel like I hadn't gotten such a deal after all.

On the top of the topbar partially obscured by the rear brake cable was a pretty significantly sized dent. That really brought me back down. I wasn't sure then if the bike was worth anything at all. The plan all along had been to salvage what I could of the components, but losses were ok because the frame looked to be in such good shape.

But researching on the web I found that dents in steel frames don't seem to be such a big deal as in aluminum frames or more significantly carbon. Actually I guess carbon just cracks, but anyway, I think it will be ok.

Anyway, I spent most of last evening and this morning working on it, then I rode up City Creek Canyon then up the east road to A St. It was really beautiful with the leaves in the elevation of the valley changing, and the bike rode fairly nicely. I got home and made some minor adjustments and it was even better. I'm planning some fairly significant changes for it, but all in all I'm pretty happy with it. I feel like I got a deal again, and I like the bike.

Self Actualization...

I was just reading a few articles on The Economist. I read the new stuff on the web version about every day, and I came across this kind of random article on Maslow and the Hierarchy of Need. In it Maslow is quoted as saying, "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualisation."

I started thinking that maybe the reason I find life so unsatisfying is a deficit of self-actualization. I guess its not a new idea. I've been a fan of the Hierarchy for a while, but this bit is new I think. I don't see myself as anything, so there can be no actualization.

I went through this weird period for a few years when I was younger where I became a few things:

• I was a writer, and I wrote. I wrote a few short stories I liked, several journals I thought were full of meaningful stuff, and finally a book. People read what I wrote and I got reactions; mostly good. I felt like my writing made me significant.
• I was a friend, and (there's no verb for this; maybe friended?)... Anyway, I was the confidant of a lot of people, and I felt like my friendship served them good stead. I felt like I made their lives better.
• I was a boyfriend, and I loved. For better or worse (probably usually worse) I loved. My relationship made me feel worthy (for a while).

Anyway, I don't really have any of these anymore and for whatever reason I haven't developed any new roles for myself. In a wierd way, most of the time I don't feel like any of these roles would mean anything anyway.

I read this short story by Jose Donoso yesterday called Paseo. It's told from the point of view of a child remembering childhood at home with a father, two uncles and a spinster aunt. They lead this painstakingly carful life together, the intent of which is never to inconvenience each other. The narrator says at one point that that was the concept of love he inherited, that it was never to incovenience another. I'd never seen that sentiment on paper, and I was struck first by how wrong it was, (although the story never gives any resolution on the subject) and second, how I feel that way myself. Probably my biggest ambition in relationships with the people I love is never to inconvenience them.

I guess this has been what I've gone with recently. Oh well, it made sense in my head for a minute.

Feces From the Heavens...

I spent a large chunk of yesterday afternoon cleaning my upstairs neighbor's feces from the many surfaces in my bathroom.

About nine months ago I came home to find a strange rusty looking stain running down my bathroom wall and into my medicine cabinet. The pipes in my building are old and rusty and I thought that it might just be a bit of a leak. I threw away everything in the cabinet, complained to my landlord, and after he'd come and looked embarrassed and assured me it wasn't waste water I ignored it.

A couple of months ago, after the upstairs neighbors left their kitchen sink on, overflowing and flooding down through my kitchen cabinets (they've done this twice more, once damaging my living room ceiling) I started looking up, and realized that there was a leak in my bathroom ceiling that was becoming occasionally bedewed. Eventually it began to drip occasionally and I complained to my landlord. He didn't do anything, but then I caught him one day showing the apartment across the way to some prospective renters, and I took him in to show him the problem. By this time it had begun to drip when the neighbors flushed their toilet. I thought it was a leaky feed pipe because the water seemed to be clear, but I didn't want to deal with it anyway. He said he'd come in and fix it.

The next day he came and ripped out my ceiling to the lathe, but didn't do anything else, and didn't leave me a note explaining what was going on. So, rather than having a drip of clear water when the neighbors flushed I had a small stream of sediment filled dirty water. Unpleasantly, once or twice over the next week I was using the bathroom when the neighbors upstairs flushed, and the water came down on me. I hate confrontation. I'm terribly passive aggressive, but this was it for me. I sent a letter along with my rent check saying that if he didn't fix all the stuff wrong with the apartment I was going to start looking for another place.

The next day he showed up with the plumber (which he'd been promising for three months to fix the bathtub). I came home from work at 5:30 to find them still working. There was a big hole over my toilet and bits of crap (literally), mortar, and drying toilet paper all over everything. They said that the waste water pipe had just rotted away, and was emptying into the ceiling when the neighbors flushed.

When they knocked off at 6:30 they had finished the pipe, but not the bathtub. I asked them about it and they said that they were going to have to come back in and tear out all the tile to fix it. They made a cursory vacuuming with a shop vac in the bathroom before they left, which got the big pieces of mortar, but left everything else.

So yesterday I stripped (I didn't want to get any on my clothes even though I know that it'd wash out) and cleaned with a big bucket of bleach and a scrub brush. There's still a big hole in the ceiling and the cold water knob on the bathtub is still a rusted broken mess, but at least there's no more feces.

Someone even came in and tried to fix the ceiling in the living room. Of course they did it by tearing chunks of the paper off and patching it (incompletely, so there are bare spots) with joint compound. It means I have big three-toned splotches that look worse than the sagging cracked paper did before, but I guess he should get partial credit for trying.

I'm still thinking about moving. I don't want to because I just moved into a new ward, and I'm settling in, and it's just a pain to pack up and deal with all the crap you accumulate. But I might just have to suck it up and do it. It might be less trouble than staying.

A Haiku to My Students...

We've been having orientation meetings for the last three days (since Wednesday). Last night was Back to School Night. I never went to a Back to School Night when I was a kid and I don't think that we did one last year. We didn't really know what to do. Mostly parents kind of milled around and whenever they showed up in our rooms we gave them a short verbal version of our syllabus. It was a little weird, but ok.

I'm in a new room on the south end of the building. I talked to the boss at the end of last year about moving into one of the big rooms with the windows, and he said ok, but then he forgot when he hired a new social studies teacher, and gave it to him. Matt moved into the other big window room, so they gave me his old room. It actually works out ok. I'm not averse to it, but it presents me with a problem. There are a couple of bulletin boards. I haven't got a clue what to put on them. I don't really know what I'm going to put on my other walls either, but I've kind of felt like I should do something. I spent almost all of last year with bare walls. Only at the end did I start putting students work up on them to cover their nakedness.

Maybe I'll take some of my supply money and buy a couple of posters. I do have the enormous poster of Shakespeare in a half-tone that Matt bequeathed me.

Anyway, we finished our meetings at noon today and went to Golden Coral. We all ate a few plates of fried foods then came back to get stuff ready for Monday. I have composed a haiku to commemorate the occasion:

Metal-studded glares
Mohawks brushing the ceiling
The children return...

The Night Before...

Orientation meetings are starting for school tomorrow. I guess monday the kids will be there. I'm trying to relax tonight. I spent the day at school moving all of my crap from my old room up in the old weather station (our school is in the old KUTV news building) and into a bigger and better one. It's nice because the ceiling is more than twelve inches above my head in the new room. I mean it was neat to feel tall for a couple of minutes, but I'm quite looking forward to my projector not burning out every day and my room not smelling like a dirty clothes hamper. That's what we used to call my old room, "The Hamper".

There have been some problems and a lot of unpleasantness at school over the summer, especially in the last week, and I fear that this year is going to be even more challenging than last year was. I was very anxious about it, but I realized that the things that have changed are entirely out of my hands and there's nothing I can do about them. I'm trying to take the advice of the Dali Lama in the movie Seven Years in Tibet. Poorly paraphrased (I haven't seen the film in years) he says that if it is something you have control over you don't need to worry, and that if it's something you don't have any control over then there's no reason to.

Anyway, I have a pretty good idea about what I'm going to lead with once I get all of the beginning of the year, beginning of the trimester crap out of the way. I've been reading about Wittgenstein (not reading Wittgenstein, although I got Philosophical Investigations at the library today), and I'm going to start out by reading one of my favorite bits from On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, which eventually ties into Wittgenstein, uses some Truman Capote, then pulls back around to Kerouac.

In the passage Kerouac has arrived in Denver where he finds all of his friends from back in New York. Alan Ginsburg and Neal Cassady tell him that they are performing an experiment, which he subsequently witnesses. Ginsburg and Cassady sit across from each other and talk, and they talk and talk and talk, and they try to describe what they are thinking in such detail that the other will truly understand what they mean. Finally Ginsburg brings up something that Cassady doesn't want to talk about, saying, "There's one last thing I want to know-". So Cassady deflects it and says, "But, dear Sal (Kerouac's character), you're listening, you're sitting there, we'll ask Sal. What would he say?"

Kerouac replies, "That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo (Ginsburg's character). Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all."

So, the question is whether true communication is possible. This ties into Wittgenstein (I think) in this way. An individual names a particular sensation, on some occasion, 'S', and intends to use that word to refer to that sensation. So, this is an example of a word in "private language". Holly Golightly in Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" uses the term "mean reds" do express a significant emotion to her. I might call it anxiety, or ocd, or add, but although my analogues may describe her "mean reds" none of them really are "the mean reds".

Wittgenstein would say that even "the mean reds" isn't really "the mean reds". The mean reds simply are, and though Holly Golightly calls them the mean reds they exist outside of her name for them. What's more, her name for them, "the mean reds" doesn't really mean anything to someone else until she further describes them in sufficient detail that the person can associate it to the sensation or emotion with which they would associate it. It's private language, so until Holly Golightly and the person with whom she's speaking agree upon the association of "the mean reds" with a specific emotion or sensation then it's not really language at all.

Meaning is a social event; meaning happens between language users. As a consequence, it makes no sense to talk about a private language, with words that mean something in the absence of other users of the language. A private mental state like "the mean reds" cannot be adequately discussed without public criteria for identifying it. Wittgenstein argues, if we can talk about something, then it is not private. And, conversely, if we consider something to be indeed private (unique to the individual), it follows that we cannot talk about it.

This illustrates that we are fantastically alone.

But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to communicate. It's my belief that all of the great literature out there is a collection of humanities best effort at communicating "that one last thing". Even if we can't communicate our private experiences, can't make someone feel exactly what we're feeling, with words, we can still inspire them to feel. We can stimulate their imaginations and emotions, and that's still pretty good, and pretty important. At that point I'll read them another passage from On the Road. Maybe the one where he says that it's always been the mad ones for him, or how his favorite word is manana. I still need to work on the dis-mount a bit. But that's the basic idea.

Just Another Brick in the Wall...

Well, it's Monday afternoon and I'm kind of going out of my head. Rough weekend. I didn't do anything at all. I may as well have been in a coma. I've been thinking more and more about the divisions of the Myers-Briggs personality test. I took an abbreviated version of the test on humanmetrics.com. I came out as a very strong introvert (79%), intuitive (38%), thinking (25%), and judging (33%). A lot of people think this test is great, and others think of it as kin to fortune cookies. At the very least I find it interesting.

I've seen a large shift in my personality since high school. I think I would have scored much stronger as an intuitive then, that I would have landed more on the feeling rather than the thinking side of the spectrum, and that I would have scored far stronger as intuitive than as judging. Maybe these are my ideals. I don't know for sure. But I believe I was far happier with who I was then than I am now.

It's frustrating, because I've spent the last ten years trying to be that guy again, but I can't. My values have changed, whether I've willed them to or not. For example, when I was a kid I was fascinated by the whole hippie ethos. I really liked the culture and the mood, (although I never did any drugs or anything), but this last Thursday I went with some friends to a free concert of The Yonder Mountain String Band and Keller Williams. I was floored by the behavior of all of the hippies there. They were utterly horrible. Granted they weren't the hippies I had in my head, but even the culture pissed me off. I felt like they were all just a little too cool to be real. It's the same vibe that makes me absolutely hate New York City. I'd as soon punch them in the nose as go to a drum circle with them (or a Starbucks, not to short change those atrocious East Villagers).

It's like this old Calvin Kline sport coat I have. Sometimes I wear it, even though it doesn't really fit, because it reminds me of who I was. It's a relic of better days. When I put it on I can still get the aftertaste of that younger me, and feel a little bit of how I felt then. But if I really looked in the mirror I would see that I've entered the beefy years, that it stretches too much, and that it's beginning to look a little shabby. I can't wear that coat much anymore, and as time continues to go by the memories will become memories of memories, and so on, until they mean nothing at all.

Maybe I'd be happy to become who I'm becoming if I felt like there was a chance that I'd feel as good about myself as I did then, but I don't see that happening unless somehow my ideals changed as much as my values have. But I still want to be that kid. He seemed like a better person.

My Weekend...

This week I was maybe a little foolish in my physical exertions. I got an email from Josh Chambers on Wednesday saying Jordan Singleton and his wife were living at his parents this summer before going to med school in Wisconsin. He was going out of town this coming week and Jordan was leaving soon after, and he wanted to get together for lunch. So, Thursday afternoon I was sitting around doing nothing and decided to look up the UTA routes to see how far north I could get on my bus pass. Turns out there was a commuter bus that runs from the train in Ogden to Brigham City. I figured I could ride my bike over Sardine Canyon, so I immediately packed my bag and dashed out the door. I only had about seven minutes to ride from my place down to the Salt Lake station on 6th west, but surprisingly the lights almost all went in my favor and I made the train.

The Frontrunner takes about an hour to go from Salt Lake to Ogden. From there the bus took like an hour to get from Ogden to the intersection of 11th South and Main in Brigham City. That's the light you never make when coming down out of the canyon on the way to I-15. I got off of the bus at about 3:Something in the afternoon. It didn't take me a really long time to figure out that I might have been a little foolish to go at this time. It was very hot, about 93 degrees, and I probably didn't have enough water in my bottle. It was a hard ride.

By the time I got to the Stake Center Hill in Millville I'd had it, and I walked up it. When I got to the top I went over to Jordan's parents house. Jordan was in and we sat around and talked all evening while he worked on a commercial appraisal for his dad. His dad is an appraiser. Anyway I spoke and spoke and spoke. It's weird for me. Jordan is actually becoming pretty good with probing questions. He was a dual major in psych and philosophy, and I think the idea is that he's going to med school to do psychiatry. It's kind of funny because he didn't believe in it at all when we were kids. I remember waking up in the night once when we were having a sleepover at his house when we were kids. I was having a small panic attack and was getting ready to go home. He was angry, (this was what happened about every time I slept over in those days), and he said, "It's all in your head!" It's interesting to see him choose this line of work.

Anyway, we ended up playing Wii (my first time) till like 1:00AM, then made plans to go to lunch with Josh the next day, and I went home. Jordan can be a little ADD, and I couldn't get a hold of him Friday and I had his cell phone number down wrong. I didn't know Josh's number, and I didn't think to simply look his law offices number in the book. So, instead I spent the day working on that old Peugeot that I'm converting to a single speed. I actually got it more or less running, but then I decided to true the back tire. A spoke broke and that ended the project till I can get some new ones. After that I spent a few hours working on cleaning out the trench in yard where I shall soon lay the foundation for the rock wall I'm going to try to finish before going back to school. So that was good, but involved more dehydration and very hot weather.

The slept poorly that night and decided in the morning that sooner was better than later for riding home. I had to pick my Mom and Dad up at the airport at about 8:30PM, and I was thinking of sticking around till the afternoon to see of Jordan and Josh would want to get together, but instead I just left. I rode out around 9:15, and found that Sardine Canyon is easier from the Cache Valley side. You can see on the elevation graph on the route map that you descend more than you climb when going from Cache to Brigham.

Anyway, I figured on catching the bus back at that intersection, but when I arrived I was feeling pretty good. I could ride on down highway 89 I thought. I would have to sit around for 45 mins if I waited for the bus there. Why not ride on to the next stop, then the next if I was ahead of the schedule. So I did, and eventually I was thinking, "I could just ride into Ogden to the station."

About the south side of Willard I lost it. I was done, and I guessed that the bus should be coming soon. The stops were a few miles apart now, and I stopped and waited at a couple before going on. It was too hot and I was too sore to stand in the open on the side of the highway. My legs started cramping when I did. In my head, also, was a voice saying, "Ride on. Ride on. Be a man. Make some progress. It's only about 10 miles to go." I was thinking about riding with my Dad when I was a kid. We'd be dying, but he rode on and on. I always thought of rides in increments, but for him it seemed to be binary. Either you were done or you weren't, and you weren't done until you reached your destination. So he'd ride on, and on, and on.

So I was riding on, and was in between two bus stops in Harrisville when the bus passed.

I stopped at a Chevron and lay on the grass under a tree until my heart stopped racing. When I got up I was sore all over, so I finished my water bottle and went in to refill it, then got back on my bike and rode. I play these tricks on my mind when I'm riding. I say, "Man, I'm tired, but I can make it to that mile marker up there. Then I'll decided whether to stop and rest." When I reach that point I convince myself that I'm fine, that in fact I'm getting a second wind. So with that renewed energy I choose the next mile marker. I tried doing that with the stop lights, which in Harrisville and North Ogden are relatively far apart, but my body kept betraying my mind. I was done, and no manner of mind trick was going to change it. But I didn't have a choice so I kept going.

I was feeling kind of foolish. Somewhere there's a picture of Peter, Dad, and I in Roy getting back on our bikes. I was probably like ten. That day we rode all the way from home to Salt Lake. I'd managed that at ten, and here I was, almost thirty and dragging myself into Ogden. It felt a little pitiful. But I got there.

I had forty-five minutes until the next train left so I went into a gas station Burger King. I figured I could buy some food and wait in the air conditioning. I should have known better than to choose Burger King. I don't know if I've ever enjoyed anything I've bought there. I bought a hamburger, a chicken sandwich, and a small chocolate shake from the value menu, and went to sit down and watch CNN on the wall TV. I got through the shake and it gave me a little stomach ache. I probably consumed it too fast. But I'd bought the sandwiches and felt obligated to eat them. I started with the hamburger. I think it was about 30% bun, 10% meat, 1% cheese, and 59% mustard (0% ketchup). It oozed out all over the place, and eating it was unpleasant. The stomach ache grew. The chicken sandwich was similarly comprised, but substitute mayo for mustard. I made it half way through and knew I couldn't take anymore. I imagined I was throwing two quarters away as I all went in the garbage. It gave me a twinge of guilt, but it was a fair price not to have to keep eating.

Anyway, I got on the train and went home after that, but I'm bored of the relation of this story. So that's all you get.

This Week's Ride...

So, durring the week I decied I was going to do at least one big ride or hike per week. So my ride for this week was going to be to go up Emigration Canyon. I went yesterday (Saturday), and all the way up to the UofU campus I was wondering if this was a good idea. I thought, maybe I'll take it in steps. Today I'll ride to the top of campus. Next time I'll ride to the mouth of the canyon. Next time I'll bla, bla, bla... You get it. Anyway, that is usual for me, to feel doubtful as I begin. Then I ignore that and say, I'll just go till I can't anymore and see where that gets me.

I continued on up the canyon at a fair clip, but there were people in spandex passing me pretty regularly. "Oh," I thought, "to be a person in spandex. To have slightly less air resistance." Ok, not really, but I was thinking how nice it would be to be on a road bike and have less resistance on the ground. But I carried on.

Eventually my lower back got so sore that I had to stop for a moment and stretch. As I was doing that one of the few people in spandex that I had passed passed me again. When I got back on the bike and started to ride again I approached him relatively quickly and overtook him. As I passed him by and looked at him as I went I began to feel a little sorry for him. He looked about 40, and was well rounded. He was riding a flatbar Trek roadbike, and looked uncomfortable in his spandex. I figured he'd been sold the whole getup and had chosen the flatbar because he wasn't quite sure he could commit himself to a full dropbar road bike self. He was buying the dream of being fit, but probably knew a comfort bike was more his speed. Its the struggle between the desire for the image of fitness and the reality of the need for better health.

I knew from how easily I'd passed him that he probably had felt bad when I had gone around him before and was pushing to get back where he thought he belonged, in front of me. After all, he'd bought spandex, and a relatively expensive bike. He wasn't that old. Being in front of me with my baggy shorts and my fat tired mtn. bike would prove it, would justify the purchase. So when I passed him again I knew I was disheartening him. But it would be just silly to fall back because of this, and I put it out of my head as I went on.

Originally I had planned to ride to the first switchback. I thought it was a reasonable distance for me. But I was running out of juice. I was most of the way through Purple, the second album by Stone Temple Pilots, and I decided I'd ride to the end of the album. So I continued on for three songs, flagging, and when the fourth began I thought, "That's it. I'm done." (I'd misremembered how many songs there were.) So I stopped, and rested for a moment while I fought myself over turning around. Eventually I decided to go on. I rode for about a hundred yards and the trees opened up and I found myself at the switchback. I'd almost turned back when I was about a block away.

I got off there and sat on a concrete guard and drank some water, and thought about my near failure. It made me a little ashamed of myself and raised my ire. At that moment the well rounded 40 year old in spandex passed with a triumphant gloat in his eyes. "Good for him," I thought. "And shame on me." I decided that I would ride on. After a couple of minutes I got back on my bike and started on my way up.

Here the shoulder widened and so did the view. More people in spandex passed me now, most of them spindly tall guys about my age on very expensive bikes. There were a few women too. One of them I thought was a guy, when I saw her arms and shoulders (they were bigger than most of the guys I'd seen riding), then I saw her breasts. She was scary.

The view was really nice at this point in the canyon. All of the sudden you are above the bottom of it and you can see back down toward the valley, and how and high you have come.

I continued on for a couple of miles, and at one point the well rounded fellow passed me coming down, wearing a satisfied smile. Eventually my second wind was running out and I saw a summit, hoping it was the top, and as I rode up and over it, it was. There was a scenic pull off and about twenty five or thirty bikers were standing around smiling and chatting with each other and the other members of their parties. I smiled and looked out at the reservoir below, and then I turned around and rode down.

I ran a couple of errands in town on the way home, and when I put my route into Bikely it came out at about 30 miles. I'd planned on doing 22. It was a very nice way to spend a Saturday morning.

A Ride Through the Mountains

I've been going home to Cache Valley to help my parents out for a few days a week. They've been watching my sister Miriam's four boys while Miriam, Nathan, and the girls move from Florida to Alabama. It's been a little rough on Mom and Dad. If they could institute a mandatory four hour nap for the boys I think they'd have done it on the second or third day. It doesn't have to be as hard as it has been, (Abe, you know who you are), but it has, and I end up running interference.

Anyway, I got this brilliant idea that I'd ride my bike there and back to keep from paying $4+ a gallon. I wasn't about to try riding all the way, at least not on my first time, so I planned rather to ride the Frontrunner to Ogden then ride up one of the canyons and go through Liberty, over the mountain and down to Avon where I'd have someone come pick me up. Well it so happened that Mike Forsberg was going up the day I intended so I hitched a ride with him and spent the 3rd (yea USU fireworks show, ((not really, (((fireworks don't appeal to me like they did when I was a kid))) )) ) and the fourth (yea getting second degree burns from a blow torch ((not really, (((burns don't appeal to me like they did when I was a kid, ((((reference posterior of right hand)))) ))) )) ) (too many parentheses?) up there.

So at 3:30 in the afternoon on the 5th, Dad dropped me off in Avon. I took my bike out of the trunk and started to ride up state road 162. I'd ridden it once when I was a little kid on a road bike, which seems insane to me now. Maybe it was graded then, but even on a mountain bike, with cantilever brakes and a front shock I was sometimes worried a little.

One of my goals this summer, since I don't have a whole lot to do for school, is to ride my bike and hike a lot, and to take a lot of pictures that I can post of Panoramio for Google Earth. Anyway, by the time I got to the top of the pass, which is by far the most senic part of the ride, I was too tired and sunburnned to really care about photos. Anyway the top is really nice, and you should give the ride a try sometime. The wild flowers were just starting to wilt, and there are these long rolling meadows full of them. It looks like Switzerland. Its really very beautiful.

The descent was kind of scary. It goes down into Liberty pretty quickly. The terrifying part was how people in ATV's race up it. That sucks too because if you didn't bring enough water, as I didn't, the inside of your throat gets coated in dust. It's two or three inches deep in a couple of places. Also there were a couple partial washouts on the switchbacks on the road. There were several 4-wheel drive vehicles on the road on both sides, and strangely enough I saw about three or four passenger cars. I pity their parts.

I rode through Liberty and Eden, around Pineview Reservoir, and down Ogden Canyon. Even though I've been riding around town a fair amount, it hasn't built up that much tolerance to the effects of spending hours straddling a bike seat. By this time my crotch hurt. Alot. Anyway, I foolishly followed the map on Google rather than the address of the train station and common sense. When I hit North Ogden I knew something fishy was happening. I stopped and asked a guy spraying weeds in his driveway. The station was something more than 24 blocks the other way. I think Google was going by county road numbers or something.

The guy was super nice. When I asked him if I could fill my water bottle from his hose he went in and got me a bottled water. Looking like one of those bums who ride around on thriftstore mt. bikes with a Colt 45 oz. I rode the last couple miles to the station. I was very tired and covered in dust and grime. I boarded the train, strapped my bike in and plugged my earphones into my head. I was pretty much done for the day.

The worst part came afterward though. We were about to pull into the Salt Lake station when this girl came down the aisle and sat across from me. She looked at me and I kind of tried to smile. She started talking to me but I was too tired to want to take my earphones out, and I couldn't really make out what she was saying. So I just nodded a little, smiled and said, "Umm." Then she kept talking and from her tone I could tell she was asking me something. I'd have to take my earphones out.

When I did she started telling me about her troubles. She said she was so stressed out she felt like she was going to lose her baby, (she looked about 18, rundown and dressed poorly). Her husband had got hurt at work and had burns from his fingers to his bicep, and he couldn't work anymore, so they were moving in with her parents. The way she said it made it obvious it was the last thing she wanted to do. What was worse was that her husband was super depressed now because he didn't feel like he was helping his family. There seemed to be the implication the way she said it that he felt like they'd be better off without him. So she was starting to cry, wiping tears and holding her stomach with one hand, and I knew it was my turn to speak, to make her feel better.

And I couldn't. I was so tired that I decided not to muster up the courage to offer anything real by way of advice, or simply commiserating or sharing her feeling like a good human would do. Instead I said in a bland voice, "Things will work out." And then I looked away uncomfortably, in a way that would make her feel that I was embarrassed by her tears and her forwardness in telling me about her problems. It worked. She left me alone after that and a moment later I got my bike and I transferred over to the Trax.

The whole way home, riding the Trax then walking my past the reflecting pond and all the fountains at Temple Square and up 2nd Ave, I was thinking of the things I should have said to her, the experiences I should have shared, and feeling bad about it all. What bothers me is that this is becoming a pattern with me. Somewhere along the line I was offered some human contact and I said no. The next time it was easier to ignore, and the next, and the next. And now I've become one of those people who are shut off from everyone. I was thinking about my picture on my profile. The older one was monochromatic. No color. This newer one is even more honest. I look a little like a ghost.

So anyway, I've been trying a little to change that. A little at a time. I hope one day to be the type of person who would give that girl whatever she needed, the type that would make her feel better.

About That Last Post...

So I was going to relate like three stories, one of which was the real thing. Then that story stretched out and got too long and then I wanted to go do something else, so I just published it and left it alone. The real story was that I was riding my bike home from school and got hit by a car. And for my troubles I was rewarded with a $70 traffic ticket.

I was heading east in the bike lane on 8th south, and I turned left to go north on State st. A couple of the other teachers from my school were waiting a few cars back at the light and they honked and waved. I was waving at them as I turned, and didn't realize that the light was about to turn. I looked up and saw it change as I was crossing the first lane of eastbound traffic. As I entered the second lane I looked to my left and realized the car that had started toward me wasn't going to stop. He didn't.

So I got kind of mashed up and someone called an ambulance. They took my up to LDS Hospital and they cleaned me up and put six or seven stitches in. I have to take them the forms from the other guy's insurance. I've been putting it off as is my custom when dealing with forms. I don't know why, but forms make me anxious.

Anyway, school ending has been a good excuse. Graduation is on Wednesday evening and Thursday is the last day of school. After that I'm going away to California. Things are going to be a little weird when I get back.

This has been a strange year for me. I'm probably mis-remembering Moon Palace, by Paul Auster, but the beginning seems to me to have been an overly long but cool description of a guy who looses his grants for school and decides to just see how long he can last without any income. He starts rationing his food, then his energy, and in the end he almost starves to death.

That's what I did this year, but with human contact. I guess it's been going on for a couple or three years. I had a lot of friends around me when I graduated the first time and moved to Logan. Then that whole group of friends seemed to graduate all at about the same time and move away. I tried to keep relationships going for a while...

This is the type of stuff that it seemed like it was important to write in the past. Now I can't imagine anything duller. I guess I stopped caring at some point.

The other day Mark LaRocco was telling me about this first date he went on the other evening where the girl is really free spirited and just asked him to stay up all night with her. He did, and they talked for like eight or nine hours straight and told each other their whole stories.

It made me think of a few weeks ago when I went to one of Mark's parties at his house and I was hiding from people by making burgers and manning the grill. This girl came out and sat down and started asking me about myself. In less than two minutes I ran out of things to say. We lapsed into silence, then about fifteen minutes later, when all the burgers were cooked, I went home and watched old episodes of Law & Order on my computer.

Oh well.

Anyway, my face is better now.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

So this happened on Wednesday. I figured out pretty early on that I didn't really want to explain it a thousand times when I went to school, so I started thinking of stories to explain it. Here they are. You can choose your favorite.

Story #1 - I was feeling restless on Wednesday night. All evening I'd felt like there was something happening down in my sub-conscious, something I couldn't see or understand. It frustrated me. So around 10:30 I got up out of my chair and I went for a walk up into the Avenues, climbing higher and higher up the hills.

Eventually, near the top of the hill, where the streets peter out and the mountain climbs on, I came to a cemetery (I don't remember the name of it right now). I decided to go in and walk around. I was still feeling like I was in the middle of something on the inside of my head and I guess I felt like maybe looking at the graves might fit with the moment. I was walking along, looking at some of the really old headstones, folks who might have been among the first pioneers into the valley, I remembered a personal narrative that one of my kids had written when I was doing my student teaching. This kid was super quiet and truthfully, I didn't think he was very smart. But one day I was reading these narratives and his popped out at me. It was a story about him trying to start dating and having this really embarrassing experience taking this girl who was much more popular than him to a dance and for the date they helped his mom, who was the PTA president decorate the gym for it. He wrote about how he felt foolish because his mother treated him like a little kid even though he was supposed to be on this date. His story ended with him going out for a walk while remembering the experience and deciding to climb a tree. He got to the very top and felt very free, swinging around as he leaned back and forth.

I saw a tree and wondered if I was still up to climbing. I'd been pretty good at it as a kid, maybe even better than most. I thought the view from the top of a tree must be amazing, so I decided to climb a very tall pine tree that I was passing on the little road.

It was hard to get to the bottom branches. I tried to run up the trunk and jump to catch at them, and it took several tries to get it, but I finally did. I was scratching my wrists and knees on the rough bark as I climbed, but I went up, twisting and stepping through the limbs. It was gigantic tree, probably planted around the same time as some of those old headstones below. I went up and up until I got as high as I dared because the narrow trunk was leaning and I was worried about the branches being able to hold my feet.

For a moment I didn't feel like I was almost thirty years old with a life curiously devoid of the status markers I usually missed (wife, kids, house, even a car whose title was in my name). I felt like a kid. The view was fantastic, the valley a sea of lights that showed the shape of the low puffy clouds underbelly's. There were a few places where the overcast broke and you could see the night sky above. It was beautiful, and I was feeling so good that almost unconsciously I began to sway around in a lazy circle, like my old student in his story.

The circles got bigger, and all of the sudden I realized I was too high on the tree and it wasn't very stable as the top began to lean out farther over the ground. Panic was rising because the arcs kept getting larger, and no matter how I tried to restore my balance I couldn't get the tree top to quit swaying. In fact it was moving faster, and creaking loudly.

Then there was a loud crack and I don't remember very well what happened after. I think I remember hitting the branches on the way down. There was a really good whacking branch that caught me on the left leg and left a bruise as thick as my hand, and one that dug some ruts in my left shoulder. I think it might have been the truck that dug out my face, but I'm not sure. I remember hitting the ground and having the breath knocked out of me. It seemed like forever before I could breathe again.

Almost immediately I got up and walked started walking around, maybe a shock reaction to the fall, but I thought better of it and sat down. I ran my hands over myself looking for the injuries, and found where I was bleeding. After a while I staggered out of the cemetery and flagged down a passing car, which took me to LDS Hospital and dropped me at the emergency room.

Bla...

On Thursday I was at the library checking out the Viking Portable Jung. I had been reading something else on the internet and it was making references to archetypal characters identified in Jung's writing and I got interested. I thought it might help me figure myself out a little. Anyway, while I was scanning the shelves around it a children's book caught my eye. It seemed a little out of place in the psychology section. So I picked it up and began reading it.

It was titled something like "Let's Make Some Friends!" At once I began to mentally criticise it. It was like so much other self help literature that I don't trust. "Follow our proven program to happiness..." But I continued to flip through it. One of it's first admonitions was that if we were going to make friends then we had to like ourselves. Why would we ask someone else to like someone we didn't, even if that person was our self? It was an interesting question; one to which I've struggled to find the answer for years. I'm still looking.

Anyway, as the solution to the problem of self-esteem, the book suggested sitting down and making a list of everything that we did well. The illustrations on the page showed a little black kid with a curly hair sitting at a school desk scribbling on a piece of paper with his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in concentration.

From there the book went on, but I was kind of stuck there. How did the boy determine what he did well? What did "well" mean? By what standard was he measuring himself? To whom was he comparing himself to determine his worth? Could it be arbitrary? I am the best at brushing my teeth the way that I brush them, but I am horrible at brushing them the way the dentist wishes I would.

When I was a young boy I compared myself to members of my family. If I was better than Peter at something then I was thrilled and exhilarated. I knew I was good, but I was scared too, because it upset the natural order of things. Later on I compared myself to my classmates. I was all about being better than them at the things I wanted to be good at. There were a lot of problems with that standard too, the least of which was that I kept running up against the fact that no matter how good I became at anything that you'd turn over a rock and find someone else that did it twice as good without even trying.

At that point being the best at anything started to become meaningless to me. I couldn't compare myself to anyone and try to be better. I tried to go by the standard of pleasing myself with my efforts for a while. I guess it didn't stick, or I lost it along the way somehow. Obviously it didn't make enough sense to me to try to really run with it.

My mission changed things a lot. I got stuck on the idea of justification. I just wanted to be good enough, to be a good enough person to please God. I didn't ever feel so good about how I was doing though because of that whole "Be ye therefore perfect," thing. I know everyone who reads this is going to think, "But that's what mercy is for, because no one can live by that standard at this stage of life". Sadly, mercy doesn't make sense to me. I kind of get it intellectually, but it's like most math to me. I can see how to do it how to do it sometimes and why to do it, but it doesn't make much of an impression on my mind, and I resist it. That analogy doesn't work all of the way, but hopefully enough that those among readers will remember having tried to explain math concepts to me and get it. If you've stumbled here accidentally and are reading incidentally them mazal tov, welcome to my life.

Anyway, bla bla bla. So, the standard was perfection, I wanted justification, I don't deal well with the concept of mercy, and I didn't go anywhere for a lot of years with that. Somewhat recently I got tired of trying to be anything and kind of gave up. So all of this leads to Friday.

Mark invited me to go to an International Dinner with his ward. I was picturing going eating some food and going back to his place to do something else. We made some Thai peanutbutter grilled chicken. Somewhere along the way Mark was talking about going on a date with a girl the other night. I asked how he felt about her and he just kind of shrugged. He said he should have known because it was almost a year between when he asked her out the first time and took her out again the second time. He said he just couldn't feel that interested and that he had tried. I asked you could ever really honestly make yourself feel anything by trying. He replied you probably could not but then said maybe just by force of will. I didn't tell him I disagreed. That's why I stopped trying to date about a year ago.

I felt weird pretty much from the moment that I walked in. I haven't really been to any church activities at all for a while and I just felt a bad feeling being there. I felt really uncomfortable, but I tried not to let it get to me. Mark wandered around talking to girls and I sat at a table surrounded by people I'd met incidentally but didn't feel like I could talk to. The children's book was in my mind. So was Dad's comment to me the other day that he thought that my discomfort when I went to church wasn't with church but transference of my own feelings about myself. I tried to think of things to say to people, and tried not to feel as bad as I was beginning to feel.

I couldn't tell Mark outright that I wanted to leave and get on with the evening, but I tried to let him know. Then someone found a basketball and my heart sank. Half an hour later I was sitting alone, and a bunch of guys were alpha-maleing. Mark asked me if I wanted to play and I told him that I felt like I was flashing back back to p-day's from my mission. He didn't get it. In that moment I was feeling about as depressed as I tried not to realize I felt most of the time on my mission. It was a trapped feeling. After a while I realized that I wasn't on my mission and asked Mark if he could find a ride home, and I left. I was really miserable as I drove home. I went immediately to bed even though it wasn't quite nine yet. I had to get away from feeling as bad as I felt.

So it's Sunday night, and I'm realizing why this was all so disturbing to me. Mike Forsberg lost his job at the DA's office last week and is probably moving back to Cache Valley, and Mark is going to be moving to Provo again to work as a law clerk. Summer is coming and I won't have school to distract me. I see another crack up on the horizon.

Anyway, in the grand tradition of Mike-ness this is all pretty pathetic, and I'm tired of it myself. As sang Billy Joel, "The good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow's not as bad as it seems." I'm sure things will be fine. It just won't seem like it, but that's probably just because I'm me.

Holy Crap, People Read This...

I spoke to my brother Peter on the phone the other day and he said that Cami had put up a new video of Calvin on their blog. I went to it and watched it, and realized two things. First, their life is far more interesting than mine. Second, Cami really kind of has a knack for blogging. Maybe I'm biased because I'm interested in their lives, but she really seems to put things together in an appealing and intriguing way. In any case, I was looking at all of the links on the side of the page and saw one to my blog. Following this link I found that I hadn't posted in a very long time. Also I noticed that there were some comments on the last post. I was astounded to find out that people actually read the blog and checked it from time to time. That kind of blew me away, and I decided that on the off chance that anyone was still checking back here from time to time that i should really post something new.

So, I went out and got in my car and drove to the Albertsons to buy some milk. This is an illustration of how I feel about writing and about sharing anything about myself these days. If there's anything else I can distract myself with, I'll do that instead.

On Sunday I looked at my phone and realized that there was a message from Mark LaRocco. I called him back and he told me that there was going to be a birthday party for a girl he'd introduced me to a year or two ago and he asked me if I wanted to go with him. I guess I was lonely, because I said yes. We arrived at her apartment and there were about five people there. We sat down and I watched Mark talk to people, then the room was filled. A few times girls came and sat down next to me and asked me who I was and what I did, so I told them and when I didn't ask them anything about themselves or try to figure out what we had in common they would drift away. Then this really pretty girl came in and all of the guys in the room immediately approached her like iron filing to a lodestone. It was really kind of funny. It looked choreographed. They all broke their conversations and walked directly to the center of the room where she was standing and encircled her.

After a while she sat down next to me and didn't speak to me. I thought she was waiting for me to speak to her, assuming that because she was the pretty girl that it was my responsibility to be the aggressor and she the defender. I really enjoyed ignoring her as we sat there, less than six inches apart. I could tell it was throwing her that I didn't even look at her.

Finally they cut the cake and I ate a piece, then Mark and I left. As we were getting in Mark's truck we started talking about the pretty girl. He said that he'd gone out with her once before, but hadn't asked her out again because he figured that she was too pretty and he didn't want to deal with that baggage. I told him about how much I'd enjoyed not talking to her, and watching her squirming when I didn't pay attention to her. He said that was kind of too bad because it wasn't that she was conceited, but rather that she was notoriously shy. In that moment I realized that I had acted kind of like a jerk, and also that I'm hopelessly far from being capable of developing a significant relationship with a girl and that I won't be doing so any time soon.

Anyway, that's probably enough about me for just now. So, I guess I should put a picture up. I haven't taken any for the last couple of weeks, but here's the latest of me. There's a good chance you've seen it elsewhere.