Sunday, March 29, 2009

Making the trainer more bearable

I hate winter

It snowed 3 inches last night. I have a mountain bike race in two weeks, and it might be the first time I get on the trails.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Lost

I got lost. Damn cue sheets. He said right when he meant left, so I was stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone or GPS coverage. Best freaking road ride in my life. Almost no cars, a bunch of little one-lane roads at almost 20% (at one point, I looked down and saw 400 watts and 5 mph), the best of central California happy cow and vineyard country, and even a stream crossing (and a Hostess fruit pie at a little general store that wasn't used to men with shaved legs).

Seriously, it's hard to explain how cool it was. I got back to the car
at 99.19 miles (after 6.5 hours) and didn't feel like it was appropriate
to ride down the road a half mile to get to 100.

Unfortunately, my camera battery ran out before some of the coolest
stuff (or I couldn't stop to take photos because it was too steep), so
the photos aren't that great (and my phone takes crappy pictures for
some reason). You'll just have to imagine.





Wednesday, March 11, 2009

I have nothing to say...

So I'll steal from someone else:

He'd been innovating extensively. He'd been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn't. They just couldn't think of anything to say.

One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.

When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn't think of anything to say.

He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they'd confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn't bluffing him, she really couldn't think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.

It just stumped him. Now he couldn't think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: "Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman." It was a stroke of insight.

She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.

He was furious. "You're not looking!" he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn't looking and yet somehow didn't understand this.

He told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick."

Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street," she said, "and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don't understand it."

Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

I couldn't decide....

what I wanted to be when I grew up, so I picked everything. Now I'm on bike racing.