Reason Breeds Insanity

Never Again

Posted on 16 January 2009 | 1 comment

I know I will never jog in place for an hour again. Unless of course tomorrow is balls cold and I am still too lazy to walk to Irving Gym. The Ramones were helpful in this grim endeavor: they didn’t completely assuage my misery, but they made it slightly less abysmal.

Good news for me: beer is good for us. Runner’s World says so. Since, Runner’s World is the good book—the inerrant word—for runners, who am I to disagree. I am hoping to knock back a couple of cold ones later tonight.

One of our local bars, one of the two that are actually pub-like, has a card where you can keep track of all of the beers you drink. If you get to one hundred in six months, you get your name on the bar. I got to six two nights ago. I decided to start the card.

I do not recommend Anchor Porter. As Porters go, it was not my favorite, which was a let down because Anchor is one of the oldest breweries in the US. Anchor Porter resides in the #6 slot on my card, so my judgement might have been slightly impaired. Don’t take my word on its worth.

Combining the best of both worlds, this race could be the best thing I have ever seen!

1 Comment

Posted in Beer, Running

Freakishly Cold

Posted on 16 January 2009 | 3 comments

I went to Irving Gym yesterday for a cross-training day. I rode the bike. I rode for half an hour on the most uncomfortable stationary exercise bike I have ever met. I generally ride a mountain bike, so the bike I rode was the touring bike from hell. Riding it was like riding to Florida on a unicycle with no seat. It was bad. Like this:

Not only was it uncomfortable, but it was fucking boring! Riding in one place for half an hour watching at the same muscle-bound frat boys lift weights incorrectly is not high on my list of “Top Ten Things to Do Before I Die”—right up there with watching skinny little girls reading fashion magazines, barely pedaling with their bikes set on a tension of two, and flirting with the frat boys.

Apparently, to watch yourself in the mirror while doing inclined sit-ups holding a medicine ball is the new wave of exercise coolness. I might make it into a game of peek-a-boo. (Up, look in the mirror: I see you. Down, look serious and cool: Where’s Corby?) I am sure abdominal work like that would make me sea-sick. I would need a dimenhydrinate drip to make it through the workout.

There is a whole psychology to the gym. One that fucks me up a little every time I go there.

Possibly, I need a thorazine drip after leaving the gym.

I absolutely despise exercising indoors, unless I am swimming. Then I like being indoors, unless I can be in the ocean. I hate that I don’t have to work hard at all to break a sweat while riding the stationery bike or walking on a treadmill. Yesterday, I rode the hell out of that little stationary bike. I only got seven miles, a t-shirt neck sweat-ring the size of China, a further damaged hymen, and the inside track on undergraduate mating rituals.

The sad part of all of this is that it looks like I will get to go to the gym again today, since it is 10 below zero right now. At least the sun is shining. Maybe I will wait until this afternoon and attempt to jog outside. In the sun. By the river. n20722047_35977626_1544

3 Comments

Posted in Fat, Gym, Running, Winter Weather

Snow and Brokenness

Posted on 14 January 2009 | 2 comments

Once a year, I like snow. Today is that day. I won’t still like it tomorrow. I wouldn’t have liked it yesterday. Today is the only day I will like it. And it is beautiful!

Falling in small concise flakes with an occasional conglomeration of them posing as a larger flake or two, the snow has made the usual greyness of Muncie a pristine white. I won’t say the snow has blanketed the city—that would be cliche.

Is it cliche to say that the snow only covers the sins of the world, but the snow doesn’t make them disappear? Is it cliche to say that the snow is a bandage with a wound festering under it? Is it cliche to wish that melting snow would leave behind healing and love?

Today’s snow may be beautiful, but its’ beauty doesn’t change the fact that the world is broken. People hurt and people suffer. We no longer live in Eden. We have yet to see paradise.

I just had a conversation with a woman who is becoming a friend. I wanted to remove her sorrow like the non-beating heart it is. I wanted to make it better, then, but I can’t. I wanted to tell her it will all be okay. I can’t promise that. Things don’t always work out. If they did, we’d have nothing to celebrate.

Today, I celebrate the snow. I celebrate Walt Whitman and his ability to understand. I refrain from singing the body electric, but “I Sit and Look Out” is one of my favorite poems of his:

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all the oppression and shame,

I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,

I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate.

I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young women,

I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid, I see these sights on on the earth,

I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners,

I observe a famine at sea, I observe sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d to preserve the lives of the rest,

I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;

All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,

See, hear, and am silent.

Walt wasn’t silent, though. He wrote it all down. Sometimes the written word resounds more fully than the spoken.

Whitman amazes me because he wrote such sad, and anguished poems as “I Sit and Look Out,” but he also wrote about beauty and life. Take for example this short poem: “I see the sleeping babe nestling the breast of its mother,/ The sleeping mother and babe—hushed, I study them long and long.” How beautiful!

Maybe a better metaphor for the snow is this: The earth is cradled in the bosom of snow. I feel cradled today. I want to study the snow long and long.

2 Comments

Posted in Grace, Literature, Queer, Relationships, Religion, Winter Weather

First Day and No Class

Posted on 12 January 2009 | 3 comments

When I was undergrad I always tried to get my schedule to work out so that I would only have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I remember why I loved it. Today is the first day of the new semester and I get to stay in my pajamas at home. I don’t have class until tomorrow, so I am taking advantage of my last day of vacation by walking the dogs, running, reading, writing, and basically sitting around.

This semester is even better because I only have one actual classroom class on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 330-445. The rest of my classes are independent studies or just sitting in on other classes. The bulk of my work this semester is in the form of studying for comps. I need to have my book list finished as soon as possible so I can spend the rest of the semester and the summer studying.

And, I am spending the day today waiting. Tomorrow I am going to see one of my best friends from seminary. He has lived in Texas since we graduated, pastoring a Church of God. I am pretty excited about seeing him because we were such good friends and I have missed him more than I thought I had.

The last time I saw Feirtag was at graduation and then it was all awkward and we just wanted to get the hell out of there. I won’t ever forget how we helped each other through so much during those three years. He wasn’t the only one. But if I had to pick three people who helped me the most during those times he would be one of the three.

You know how sometimes you see someone every day and you take them for granted. Then when you don’t see them, you really don’t miss them because you took them for granted. This is how I feel about most of my friends from seminary. It is not how I feel about the actual experience of seminary. For the most part, that experience was strange, alienating, and spiritually trying. But I think if I called any one of them up today, we could take up like old times.

I guess I will see tomorrow. Today I will wait.

On another note, yesterday’s sermon was good. I mean really good. I told Bec on the way home that I could stand to trade Sundays—Matt then David—which is a huge compliment to both men.

I think I am a pretty hard parishioner to please when it comes to the sermon. I don’t deal well with gimmicky three point sermons, and I don’t want to be entertained. I want to hear the word, and to hear it wrestled with and rolled around until its meaning is fully extracted.

Preachers get extra points if they include a point that I hadn’t already considered when I read the text. Not that I think I am so smart, but if I thought of every point made in the sermon in the five minutes I had before church to consider the text, then someone (read this to be the preacher) is getting paid for doing what I could do in five minutes.

Yes, I am a little hard on ministers. After all, they are the voice of the Church and that voice should be new every morning like God’s compassion. The voice of the Church shouldn’t bring the same stale message—the voice should cry out in the wilderness bringing a new revolutionary message. As Matt said, it is then our job to go out and meet the revolution and to be transformed by its mystery and grace.

On yet another note, last Sunday Dave spoke about our goal for our church for the year: peace and grace. I think those two words are worthy of body art. Our entire mission as Christians should always be peace and grace, should it not?

This is for you David: canada_flag_peace_symbol_l

3 Comments

Posted in Grace, Relationships, Religion, School

Ice: My Kryptonite

Posted on 10 January 2009 | 2 comments

I got up this morning ready to go. I had put my shoes, sweatpants, watch, headband, and new Smartwool running socks (I recommend these heartily by the way) next to the bed. My plan was to get up, get dressed, walk the dogs, take my first “long run” of three miles. I call it a long run because that is what the plan calls it. Three miles in my mind is not a long run.

I got up, got dressed, and came down stairs only to find a layer of ice covering the entire world. If you know me, you know I cannot walk on ice so there is no way I could run on it. For those of you who say that running on ice is easier than walking, I am in agreement. I have tried that, and while it is easier, it is still not beneficial nor elegant. I slide just as easily moving faster.

I am hoping that it will warm up enough for some of the ice to melt, so that I can go out this afternoon. I thought about going to Ball Gym to use the track, and I thought about using an eliptical or treadmill at Irving, but there is something incredibly unsatisfactory about the jogging experience when it is done indoors. I feel like a hamster.

Until then, here I sit: typing instead of jogging. I have spent the last half-hour surfing the Net, checking up on old friends, and Stumbling through a couple of websites.

Last night, I spent almost half and hour looking for some new running shoes. I want a website that is a collective of fat runners doing shoe reviews. I usually prefer Asics because they seem to have better support and a stronger, longer-lasting upper. Last spring, when I first started jogging again, I went to Indianapolis to a specialty running store to have my gait analyzed and to find “the perfect shoe” for my foot.

I hate the shoes I bought. Over a hundred dollars for a pair of Brooks GTS 8s. They do support well for the slight pronation I have, but the sole and the padding that prohibit the turning of my ankles makes the ball of my foot slide to the outside of the toe box.

They only have about six months or about 360 miles of walking/jogging and they are already shredded. They are in worse shape than the pair of Asics TN 724s I bought them to replace. And, I reiterate that they are NOT comfortable.

For the first month or so, they were heavenly. The workers at the Indy Running Company were right about that part, but they are not made for a heavy runner. My friend Sarah wears them. They are her favorite shoes. She probably weighs a hundred pounds wet—half my weight! She can have them. I will take my Asics.

All this brings me around to my point: can someone start a Clydesdale or Athena website that is helpful to those of us who are a little larger but still like the feel of a good jog? There are plenty of blogs, personal webpages, and the like, but you would think some company like Asics or New Balance or Saucony would create a webpage for their fat clientel. Every fat runner I know wears one of the three above types of shoes. I’m just saying they could make a fortune!