- @SocialBrown @marykateruf @saranmatthews @edwardocean @thecpmcd @SmashleyDubs @suzymags Good luck w/the new digs today! 2013-04-08
- I am writing you from inside The Google. (@ Googleplex – @google w/ 12 others) http://t.co/p0pvLR6Z92 2013-04-08
- Chrome Android says hello! http://t.co/5iClf1ftmH 2013-04-08
- Must resist buying Google baby gear. Must. Resist. 2013-04-08
- @ChrisUrie There were a notable population of people walking around with Glass. They uniformly looked like creepers. Cyborg creepers. in reply to ChrisUrie 2013-04-08
- @mtomasetti Because you recently played Spider-Man in a major motion picture? in reply to mtomasetti 2013-04-08
- @joeross Interested to see what sorts of tea geek resources you amass. I’m just now realizing not all teas want the same temperature water. in reply to joeross 2013-04-09
- After walking up what seems like a neverending hill @not_pele located a Chinese Candy Store that meets her vaguely-defined quality standards 2013-04-09
- Her booty? Fruit flavored beef jerky her grandmother used to buy in the 80s. Possibly from the 80s. http://t.co/0ioAWYgz7s 2013-04-09
- We have reached the end of today’s quest. http://t.co/SV7LG97Q1T 2013-04-09
- This day will last in my memory forever, with its eight mile quest up and down the hills and various unexpected stops along the way. 2013-04-09
- @bengarvey The one we walked up… there are no words. It was stairs up to a point and then they gave up and it was like crawling. in reply to bengarvey 2013-04-09
- @shunmahoney Because you will occasionally be tapped to guest-host? in reply to shunmahoney 2013-04-09
- Okay, this is some really bad sunburn. The Left Coast may have won the day. 2013-04-09
- This is what happens when I travel without my travel hat. Hopefully today’s adventures will be shaded. http://t.co/vKI3Uhqmhp 2013-04-10
Archives for April 2013
The Run Around
I would look for any excuse. Forgot my gym clothes. Wore boots instead of sneakers. My eczema meant I was predisposed to asthma.
Anything not to run a mile for the Presidential Fitness Test in gym class.
I look back and laugh to myself. I barely weighed anything at the time. How hard could it have been to locomote myself 5280 feet? Certainly easier than now, where every galumphing step makes me acutely aware of just where I’m storing all that ice cream I’ve been eating lately.
Actually, now that I think about it, it wasn’t really the running I was avoiding. Well, okay, it was the running a little. Mostly it was where we were running it. I attended a city high school with a tiny school yard on its roof. There was no track anywhere to be found, and letting us loose in the surrounding neighborhood could result in any number of side trips to buy cigarettes or hook up with reprobates lurking outside the college across the street.
No, to keep things contained we would need to run around the parking lot. Just the west half of it, actually. Nine and a half times.
I like to think if they loosed us up and down Green Street I might not have minded as much, but the utter drudgery and the hurdling over mounds of trash bags was too much to bear. Some kids sat it out in protest, no doubt earning a firm note home to mom and dad. I protested, but I was and have ever remained averse to official forms of reprimand, so I would run.
Actually, now that I think back to my time, I was pretty fast.
I was doing just that, yesterday. Not running fast. Thinking about my time. Because I found myself in the drudgery of all drudgeries – running a mile on a treadmill without any music to run along too.
And why was I undertaking this Sisyphean task, you might wonder? Because I was taking the Presidential Fitness Test, along with three of my co-workers. We worked up a devilish little challenge for Q2 of 2013, and it started with timing ourselves on a mile jog.
Now, I had gotten pretty good at jogging by this time last year. Once, a single time, I managed to come within a hair of an 8:30 mile, which is as fast as these luscious Italian thighs should ever have to carry me over that distance. The past year has not been especially kind to my body and I, so that time is now far behind me. I had no illusions of matching it on my personal hamster wheel. No, this was a run for my life. Gasping and wincing and biting my lip and humming one of my own songs just to cut through the digital tick tock tick of the timer on the screen in front of me. I would defeat this electronic taskmaster and its 5280 feet of endlessly looping pavement. I would run that damned mile.
In that moment of sureness I had a feeling not unlike what people might refer to as someone walking on your grave, but in reverse. I knew at that very moment that somewhere in the continuum of time a version of me half of my age had been cajoled into taking nine and a half laps around the parking lot, and was hurdling over a trashbag with secret glee.
If you’ll excuse me, I’m due for another run.
No Fooling
When I was age seven or eight I wanted to be a comedian. I never told anyone.
My mother really liked to watch comedians on television. I guess my parents had that in common, because I could always seem to unearth yet another comedy routine of Robin Williams or George Carlin from our pile of dubbed Beta tapes. My mother would always say they were not appropriate for me, but she never stopped me from watching them.
At the time I didn’t especially enjoy being in front of people. I had to be dragged into performing a simple narration in a school Christmas pageant at age 10, which I have absolutely no recollection of due to what I have to assume was my blacking out from fear.
I did not want to be in front of an audience, but I wanted to be clever. I liked the idea of making people laugh for a living.
Even eight-year-old me understood the precarious economics of the Comedy profession. You would have to be super, ultra funny to get as many people to sit in front of you as Williams or Carlin, let alone Gallagher with his watermelons. I loved Gallagher. Jay Leno. Tim Allen, too. They were zany, and they were clearly very talented. I was sure they wrote their own jokes, which was an awful lot of jokes.
(I cannot speculate on whether that lead me to focus on writing. I didn’t write things that were especially funny at that age. I preferred the macabre. Too much Stephen King, I guess, another one my mother was never sure about but kept letting me read.)
Eventually I gave up my secret comedian wish in favor of one more typical for a bright kid – doctor, I figured. Yet, that early urge to be funny probably informed my profession more than most of my math and science scholastic endeavors aimed at a future in medical school.
Now I don’t like most funny things. Jokes, pranks, comedians, sitcoms – they mostly elicit a groan from me. I still laugh, mind you, but I like my humor sarcastic, or ironic, or soaked in pop culture. Nothing overt. No cartoonish hammers wielded against watermelons. Joss Whedon and Tina Fey are my comedy gold.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “comedy is for kids.” When you are a child, every joke is a new one. Every episode of I Love Lucy or Looney Tunes has a gag so funny you think you will stop breathing. Sitcoms play out tropes you’ve never seen before. Talk show hosts tell groaners, but you don’t understand that you should groan.
I do not want to be a comedian anymore. I don’t think I ever did, to begin with. I wanted to be what comedy represented. An innovator. A trailblazer. Something novel, every time.
Little did I know how in demand that would be when I grew up.