Category Archives: Swimming

Sherlock. Writing. Coffee Shops. Emerson.

Posted on 20 January 2010 | 6 comments

I started reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and so far, I am intrigued. I posted the quote, “Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts,” as my Facebook status, and I had more than one response that said it reminded them of some evangelicals. This, in turn, made me think about how I present my ideas about theological concepts, or my ideas about anything for that matter. Do I present them as if I have twisted the facts to suit my preconceived ideas, or do I try to let the facts guide me into a new and different understanding? I would hope that I practice the latter, but I am not sure that I always do. I think too many times, as humans, we do not recognize the fact that we actually twist facts and ideas to fit what we already believe. And, I think it is good to know this about ourselves, so we are better able to handle the way we process ideas and engage with other people whose ideas differ from ours.

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Yesterday when I was at the bookstore picking up my books for teaching, I saw a book called Now Write! Nonfiction, which is a collection of writing tips and exercises designed by some well known creative nonfiction writers and essayists. The first exercise is to write down moments that stop you in your tracks, then to elaborate on those ideas picking out the common threads. The idea is that you will then be able to chose one or all of those moments to elaborate and make some kind of coherent meaning. I am waiting for my first “stopped me in my tracks” moment. Then I will wait for another, then another. Then I will slowly weave them together into an essay.

Okay. One day. I will do that right after I actually finish reading through the Bible in a year, which I have been working on since my seventh grade lock-in, the first event that I attended at the Wesleyan Church. I think Susan Wolfgang challenged us to do that after one of the speakers talked about memorizing Scripture. She also challenged us to memorize a whole chapter of the Bible. I did end up doing that in seminary. Well, actually I memorized three chapters, but I don’t remember them verbatim, although I did retain their themes and subjects. The three chapters I memorized are Matthew 5,6, and 7, the Sermon on the Mount. The most Buddhist passage of Christian Scripture ever written. Or the most socialist, as a friend of mine would argue. I think it is both somehow.Can you be Buddhist and socialist? Wikipedia says yes.

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I just read an article in the Ball State Daily news about Vecino’s Coffee Shop. Guy says it a “third-wave coffee shop.” If that is anything like third-wave feminism, then I am not sure it is going to do much. In fact, I am not sure it will do anything at all.  At the very least the article was filled with Guy’s usual coffee-related pompousness. Almost straight up obnoxiousness, but with a little decorative foam in the shape of concentric and contiguous hearts. Fancy. Guy claims that he is only one of two third-wave coffee houses in Indiana. From the what he says in the article, the Blue Bottle does most of the same things: roasts their own beans, grinds their own beans, free pours lattes, and serves well-made coffee. I guess their sin is adding flavors. Shame. they should learn how to make some fig-leaves with their foam and cover their nakedness. Dirty.

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Finally, today my students read Emerson. They were supposed to read Thoreau, too, but we only got through talking about Emerson. They did a great job with both exerpts from Nature and Self-Reliance. I think I want to get part of my sleeve tattoo of this paragraph from Self-Reliance:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Or at least this part of it: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” But, I want it around the outside or underneath this labyrinth:Or maybe this one because Jane and I walked it together in San Francisco:I think that would be a sweet tattoo. Maybe get it done in bright greens and purples. We’ll see. The first one I am doing, provided I have the money, is my new one on my foot. I plan to do it right after we run the Indy-Mini. I figure I can take a week off after the race. I may do it right before I go to Merideth’s wedding. I may wait. Who knows.

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I am thankful for new experiences and learning to love things I previously didn’t (Emerson).

Food: banana, juice, pure bar, chocolate milk, Tootsie rolls, almonds, cheese, apple, two tangerines, vegan lasagna, grapefruit, tea

Exercise: dog walking, ran 30 minutes, swam a mile, walked from Burris to RB

6 Comments

Posted in Coffee, Food, Reading, Religion, Running, School, Swimming, Teaching, Writing

Swimming

Posted on 18 January 2010 | 3 comments

I went swimming tonight. Just for good measure and to reassure myself that I could still do it, I went to the diving well and fished a diving brick up from the bottom. Yes, I can still dive to the bottom, and yes, I can still tread water for a minute with the bastard held out of the water. I am tired, and I have to get up early to run. Hence, the short post and the fact that my eyelids are getting heavy.

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I am thankful for being able to get a bunch of work finished today.

Exercise: swam a mile and walked dogs

Food: banana, juice, soy milk, Pure bar, pad thai, vegan lasagna, decaf americano

3 Comments

Posted in Food, Swimming

Dissertation, Schmissertation. Not Really.

Posted on 13 January 2010 | 1 comment

I received feedback on my dissertation proposal today, and I have some revisions to make. I feel pretty confident that I can get them finished by next Monday night and send Debbie a draft by Tuesday morning at the latest. I actually think I am going to enjoy this dissertation process because the most difficult thing about writing, for me, is knowing what to revise. I can look at my drafts and recognize that there is not enough of some ideas, too much of other ideas, and some ideas missing, but I can’t pinpoint what those ideas are. I can write all day about most topics, but without a second person looking through what I’ve written, I have a difficult time deciphering where to go from there. It was liberating today to have someone else essentially say , “You have some good stuff here, but you really need to work on organization and clarification. I know that you know what you are talking about, but your reader doesn’t necessarily know that you know what you are talking. Nor can your reader read between the lines. You must be very explicit.” I sort of already felt like I was writing for children in my level of explicitness, but apparently I wasn’t. See, that is why everyone needs someone else to look at their drafts: it never hurts to get a second opinion.

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It was my goal to start swimming again this week, but I think it will have to wait until next week. Apparently, next week is the week for exercise to begin, since I also begin my mini-training on Tuesday. It isn’t as if I haven’t been running, but on Tuesday, I really have to step it up because I want to run this beast; I don’t want to walk it for the fourth time. Between running and the cross-training of swimming, I hope to get in good enough shape to finish without walking, but if I have to walk a bit, no one will die from it.

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Finally, I was invited by a friend to go watch a Blackford girls basketball game and was delightfully surprised to learn upon my arrival that they were playing against Burris. About halfway through the game I realized two reasons to be even more thrilled about working there than I was before. The first reason has to do with the level of fitness of the Burris players. They really were running the Bruins up and down the court pretty well. I think their fitness level is a real tribute to our PE teacher and their level of commitment to their subject. Secondly, I was impressed at the level of sportsmanship the girls showed. Because the reffing was so horrible—probably the worst I have seen at a high school game in a long time—the Burris girls could have easily been poor sports, but they weren’t. Instead they held their heads high, and continued to play hard until the end of the game. At one point one of Burris’s girls was on the bottom of a pile of players and she ended up being the one called for the foul. It was pretty obvious that the referees either didn’t know what the heck they were doing, or were helping Blackford win. At any rate, I say Burris out-classed Blackford, so they were the real winners. And, I have to add that the Blackford girls were good sports as well, but the officiating was simply bad.

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I am thankful for girls’ sports.

Food: banana, granola bar, milk, juice, sloppy jane with cheese, grapefruit, veganhead, decaf coffee, peanut brittle, two peanut-butter cookies, popcorn

Exercise: dog walking, bike transporting

1 Comment

Posted in Dissertation, Food, Running, Swimming

Getting My Poop in a Pile, So to Speak

Posted on 9 January 2010 | 8 comments

I have spent the better portion of today in the bowels of Bracken Library, sorting out syllabi and preparing for the first week of my newest endeavor. I am really excited about my children’s literature classes, and I hope my students will love the class as much as I have loved putting it together. My hopes are that we will all benefit from our journey together and that we will all come out on the other side with a greater appreciation of literature and of each other. It seems like the class is going to be quite a bit of work for both my students and myself, and the key will be not to get behind.

The new scheduling device on my cell phone will help with time management because I have scheduled everything in and given alarms to each activity. At the very least, I will feel guilty for not doing what I am supposed to do at the right times, and I shouldn’t miss appointments like I did last semester. We’ll see how it goes. My office mate says my cell phone is fascist. I tend to agree. I may not listen to the alarms just to spite it, to stick it to the Verizon Wireless Man. I still call Deer Creek by its proper name for the same reason, sticking it to the man.

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I just signed up for a life-guarding class in March. I am more nervous about it than I ever am about teaching. I haven’t done any of those skills since 1999 or 2000. Wow. I haven’t used my life-guarding skills for ten years. I just made myself feel old, as in the age of rocks or dirt or air. Signing up for a class in which I have to wear a bathing suit and be groped by other people is a bit daunting as well. I am always embarrassed of my size. In my head, I know I can run farther than some of the people who will be in the class, and I can certainly swim farther than many of them. But, there is this element of fear at being stared at, picked last, shunned as a partner because of my pudge. Trust me, life-guarding class is always weird and there are bound to be several skinny, little bitches who only want to get good tans and sit in a chair in a bathing suit all summer long.

During the class, I will be in the middle of training for the Indy Mini, too, which means I will have to rearrange my running schedule to accommodate the weird-ass hours of the class. We meet on March 19-21 and 26-28 (Fridays, 6-10PM; Saturdays and Sundays 8AM-2PM). Swimmers are such freaks. I am hoping that by this time next school year, I will be fast enough at swimming to join the Master’s Swim Club at BSU, but I need to shed a few pounds (30-50 is my goal) before that happens. Although, I am unsure if I can stand the rigorousness of their practice and meet schedules. Maybe the swimming and running can help me accomplish doing it, but we will see. I suppose I should actually try eating healthy, too.

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Last night Bec and I tried to go to Puerto Vallarta for dinner, but there were no parking spaces, so we drove over to Victor’s Gyros, Pancakes, and Ribs. Yes, you read that properly: Gyros, Pancakes, and Ribs. An odd combination, I thought to myself. We started with the combination platter for an appetizer—mushrooms, onion rings, and cheese sticks (all fried and oh, so healthy)—and I had chocolate chip pancakes while Bec chose the gyros, as I knew she would. Bec enjoyed her gyros platter, which came with an insane amount of food: gyros meat, a pita, feta, onions, tomatoes, rice, vegetables, french fries, and tzaziki sauce. My chocolate chip pancakes came with chocolate chip pancakes. They were sprinkled with powdered sugar, but I was fine with that because they were pretty doggone tasty.

I enjoyed the place more for the atmosphere than the food. It has a greasy spoon sort of diner-y feel, with waitresses who argue over tips and a hostess—maybe owner-ish sort of person, but at the very least super tight with Victor—who constantly told the wait staff to be quiet and to wash and sanitize their hands several times throughout our meal. One waitress protested that she had just washed hers, so blondy, the hostess, said, “Go, do it again,” as she flitted her hands in front of herself like distasteful birds. If I worked there, I would kick her in the trachea.

As a customer, though, you have to love a place that will work a high school student, our waitress, for more than nine hours without a break, simply because she doesn’t smoke. And who wouldn’t want to go to a diner where more than once you could hear one of the seedy attitudinal waitresses say, “I swear on my three kids ….” You can fill in the blank with whatever you think she might have been swearing about. Once it was her credit card tips. I felt right at home, honestly. It reminded me a great deal of working at Pizza King and to a lesser degree, Starbucks. On some levels, it even reminded me of the English department as each waitress jostled for favor with the man I assume was Victor.

I will go there occasionally to write. simply because of the entertainment value.

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I am thankful for seedy, greasy spoon diners and for the people who work in them.

Exercise: walked the dogs

Food: banana, orange juice, chocolate milk, Pure bar, salad, Feng Shui rice chips, sloppy-jane (veggie sloppy-joe), spinach, chocolate milk, oat muffin

8 Comments

Posted in Food, Literature, Running, School, Swimming, Teaching, Writing

Still Twisted Up in My Midsection

Posted on 30 September 2009 | 4 comments

This is how I feel. Like a puddle of yuck by the side of the road.

I_see_this_colour_by_dev1n

I am still a bit twisted up, but for different reasons. I am finished wasting away over not studying for my exams as thoroughly as I should have–barely at all–and still passing them. I do occasionally, like right now, feel guilty about my ability to get by, but more importantly,  I think I am disgusted at my apathy. I assume one day my ability to get by will cease to exist, and then I will be stuck not knowing how to do it any other way. I just want to finish school, to get a job, and to do what I think I love, which is teaching, though sometimes I still wrestle with what I perceive to be my calling into ministry. What am I doing with that?

Really, I just want to find what it is that makes me happy. I think it is teaching. I love it when I am teaching, but can I see myself doing it forever? Yeah. But, I want to sense that passion that I see in other people for doing what they love. I want to be in a position where I can do what I love and not worry if it makes money. I suppose that is what everyone wants. I guess I am not finished stressing about any of this, but I have just added more stress on top of it. And, as always, I have shoved it all down so I don’t have to deal with it. I suppose one day I will explode. Then I will really look like a puddle of yuck by the side of the road.

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I am struggling right now with being a Christian and not liking my pastor. I feel sort of shallow for disliking him, because he hasn’t really done anything wrong. He just doesn’t wrestle with the text in an intellectual way. He processes it emotionally and thinks it is okay to stop there. I want a pastor who stresses himself or herself out over a reading of Scripture that s/he can live with, not who moves solely by emotion to interpret it. I want exegesis and hermeneautics. You know, intellectual wrangling, cultural application, and faithful interpretations. I don’t want Muppet videos, funny voices, and jumping up and down. I can get excited about a life-changing, hierarchy-smashing ethic without fireworks. If God’s word doesn’t have the power to change and shape my heart and my mind, no amount of emotion is going to either.

Does this mean I am above emotional response to Scripture? By no means. I simply mean that I don’t think hearts are changed through emotive blasts of performance, but they are changed by the Truth of the words spoken. If the words spoken contain few Truths, it doesn’t matter how excitedly they are spoken. If the words are empty, they bang hollow off the back wall of the church and resound slowly around the room. Their hollowness is not masked by their magnitude or frequency. They are still just words.

So, please give me solid spiritual food. I am finished with the milk. Or am I? Maybe this is my problem: I am not finished with the milk. I am still trying to figure out whether I follow Paul or Apollos. As Paul writes:

Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere human beings? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings?

Is this my problem? Am I still so worried about the human I follow that I deserve to still drink milk? Maybe, my goal in addressing this problem should be changing my own attitude about it, rather than expecting some type of external change. After all, it makes Bec happy to help lead worship, so I guess I should try to change my own heart before bailing out. I should change my heart to follow Jesus rather than being so needy and leaning on a man who is merely God’s servant. I am sure he is trying to do what he thinks is best. I am sure there those who didn’t like Paul, Peter, Apollos, James or any of the other apostles or early teachers of Christianity, but their dislike for their human leaders did not dissuade them from being part of the Church.

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At times like these, I am especially grateful for my relatively new athletic endeavors.

Swimming is going well. Last night, I swam 1000 yards in under twenty minutes, which isn’t bad for me. I was going to time myself on a mile, but I didn’t have much time to swim because I had to get a ride from Bec. I didn’t ride my bike yesterday because my bag was too heavy, and I didn’t want to walk home in the dark. Still, I swam 1600 yards in about 35 minutes. That should count for something.

Running is going okay. I ran five and a half miles yesterday, and I am scheduled to run the same tomorrow morning. After I ran yesterday, my feet felt like I had been hitting the bottoms of them with a hammer. I need new shoes, so I will go get those since I finally got paid. I hope they have a pair of the same ones I got last time. If they do, I will just buy them so I don’t have to try on a bunch of new ones. I could really use new trail shoes, too, but I only have enough money for one pair.

On Sunday, I am going to run with Adam. We are going to run the five miles that we will run together in a race on November 1. Apparently, the race is grueling and Adam wants me to run the trails before race day. Either way, I am running it. I may come in last, but I will finish. If I have to walk, I will finish. The race and practice run should be good times. And good stress release.I am surprised I don’t run more, fueled by my stress.

4 Comments

Posted in Grace, Just for Fun, Religion, Running, School, Swimming