So the blog’s been dead for a while, and believe me, I have an excellent excuse. I had two papers due on the Monday of finals week– a 10 pager and a 25 pager, along with two finals. I had been prepping to write the 25 pager for a while, taking meticulous notes on my laptop (I even made a rough outline, and I am not an outliner.) On the Friday before the papers were due, I was merrily tapping away in the Coop (Pomona’s version of a student union) amidst recycled Top 40 traxxx and underclassmen wailing about the stress they were under. After an hour or two, I was pretty burned out on Beyonce and decided to relocate to my room, so I snapped the laptop shut with confidence and self-satisfaction. (This particular Laptop Snap is a hallmark of that obnoxious breed of student that makes progress in a given study session while everyone else around them just pretends to work. I wish I could be this kind of student all the time, but on that afternoon I actually was sailing along, and executed the Snap with bravado.)

When I returned to my room, I opened my laptop only to be greeted with a blue screen and a flashing question mark. Thinking it was just a fluke, I shut the laptop and opened it again. I felt as if I was trying to get a friend to stop playing a trick on me. “Haha, very funny. Turn back on, now.” Again, the question mark. My default move when my computer is not working is to just turn it off and then turn it back on, which is about as far as my computer-fixing knowledge extends. Off, on. The question mark was still there, and I started to sweat. Off again. On again. Question mark. Off again, on again. I was providing one-buttoned CPR to a computer that was dying before my very eyes. Off, on. Off, on.  

I seized the laptop and sprinted over to ITS (our computer service), barreling down a visiting tour and looking like a true psycho with my crazy, desperate eyes. After practically busting down the door to ITS, I tried not to shriek at the poor little guy at the counter, but he greeted my problem with words I do not ever want to hear coming from an IT guy:

“Huh. I’ve never seen that before.”

He brought in two other guys to look at it, and they actually ended up disemboweling the computer, but didn’t have a definitive answer for me. I went into survival mode as soon as he first told me that he didn’t know what was wrong– I’m pretty good at grappling a problem and constructing a Plan B midcrisis, and as his lips told me that he wouldn’t be able to save anything, my brain was already trying to sort my next steps out. No time for mourning, only typing. Long story short, I lost everything– a semester’s worth of notes, my outlines, two half-finished papers, and all of the other fun stuff that comes with a computer: photos, music, writing. I spent the next 48 hours in a blur, and somehow managed to race a tremendous 5k, eke out 25 pages worth of passable material on a computer in one of the labs, and retain most of my sanity, all while barely sleeping.  I am a superhero.

Whenever I recount this story to anyone, the first question I get asked is, “Did you back up your files?” It’s difficult not to pummel the inquisitive soul that lays this gem out. NO. I DID NOT BACK UP MY FILES. NO ONE ACTUALLY DOES THAT.

“I do.”

WELL, …. WELL…well…I have no comeback. You’re clearly smarter than I am.

So the blog’s been dead because I don’t have a computer right now. I’m in the library writing this on a desktop. I leave for DC on Sunday, and I start work at the State Department on Tuesday. I’m really looking forward to getting out of Claremont. I didn’t make Nationals this year (though it was close– I ran 17:14, and the last time they took was 17:13 high, so at least that’s comforting), and it will be  nice to start my next project. Onwards, and upwards, as they say.

On my run this morning, I ran my shoes apart. I probably should have been paying attention to the fact that for the past few days I could see my socks through holes in my shoes, but I had much more pressing problems: deciding how I’d be celebrating my 21st birthday (Texas bar with mandatory hats and bull riding) and what I wanted in my 21 choices froyo (I went for rainbow sprinkles, oreos, animal cookies, and cookie dough in dutch chocolate, and the cookie dough was a horrendous, metallic mistake.)

Needless to say, thank goodness for Amazon. I’m picking out a new pair as we speak.

(Sidenote: I’m frugal about the dumbest stuff. I’ll use a razor to the point where it could probably give me tetanus, wear regular clothes to death, borrow people’s shampoo and detergent, and use cardboard boxes to organize my stuff instead of plastic bins like normal people. Hobo-chic. But point me in the direction of running clothes and/or food and I am actually a crazy person. Sports bras for everyone!! I actually have 21 different ones that I cycle through. I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that.)

Given what I just told you, you’d assume I was on top of my shoe situation. But with my past foot problems, there’s only one kind of shoe I really like to wear, and though I started the season with two pairs, I cut the backs off one pair so I could run through my bout with achilles tendonitis. (The tendonitis has since been tamed.) I’ve just been so focused on the various things I have going that I didn’t pay attention, and so I spent the last ten minutes of my run with my shoes flapping all over the place while I ran down Mills.

Annnyywayy, new shoes today. And also (Mom), I dyed my hair pink. (Just on the ends. But very pink. More on that later.)

It was a professional choice.

It’s been two weeks since I last posted, and a lot has happened since then. Last Thursday, I ran my first 10k (25 laps around the track) at Mt. SAC, which was a cool experience both in that it was my first 10k and because it was such a high caliber meet.

I raced at 10:30 pm, which in retrospect was kind of a struggle because that’s pretty much my old lady bedtime on school nights. Racing at night is always seems more exciting though, so for the most part adrenaline did the job. When I got home, I was so wired that I didn’t sleep that night, and because of classes, practice, and other obligations, didn’t get to sleep until 7:00 the next night. I spent the day feeling like I had just taken the 17 hour monoflight from Singapore to LA in the baggage compartment. It was a bit rough, all around. (I went to get my hair cut at one point, and the hairdresser actually briefly put my to sleep while she was kneading my doughy head.)

Just get me through the day...

The race itself was pretty much a breakthrough for the season for me. The mental state that I’m in now compared to the mental state I was in pre-10k are worlds apart. The time itself wasn’t great (36:48– but not terrible for a first 10k, and it was split 18:20/18:28), but there are moments I can point to in the race that I’m very proud of, and racing (not just getting around the track, but actually racing) 25 laps galvanizes your mental toughness in ways I didn’t realize. If I can do that, I can do anything. It also was the first race that I knew as I cooled down that I can run so, so much faster. This is a familiar feeling that would sneak it after races last season, even successful ones– it was a motivating, positive kind of frustration, the kind that keeps you looking forward to your next opportunity. Prior to the 10k, my post-race cooldowns were the negative kind of frustration, like I was beating my head against a wall and not getting anywhere. But the skies have opened up and things are turning around. Most of all, I realized that I want to make a 5k hurt very, very badly, because I’m no longer afraid of that. I need to know I left this season having put everything I have on the track.

I talked to a NCAA.com journalist last week, and a cool article came out of it:

http://www.ncaa.com/news/trackfield-outdoor-women/article/2012-04-17/lydens-excels-and-track

I’m also going to be on the radio on Wednesday (thanks to our sports information director), in a segment called “This Week in the NCAA” or something like that. A filler in between NCAA play-by-play coverage of sports people actually pay big money to see. I’m a puff piece, which is both awesome and amusing.

I have very few classes left, and 17 days left in the semester. One problem set, two essays, and one test to get through and I’m done. Where did the semester go?

At the end of last semester, I finally succumbed to a friend’s pleading that I visit the Cheese Cave, a little place in the Claremont Village that sells cheeses, kick-ass sandwiches, and an assortment of things in small jars. (You know. One of THOSE places.) After an 11 o’clock class, I decided that I had had just about enough of Frary dining hall, and biked down to the store. As I was locking my bike outside the store, a homeless guy sitting on a nearby bench commented on the weather.

“Pretty windy today!”

Realizing quickly that he was talking to me and expected a response, I agreed, and we made small talk for a few minutes, talking about the weather, Claremont, and Pomona. He was friendly, a little scruffy, and kind of looked like a shorter, much older, and more upstanding version of The Dude. His name was Karl, but he drawwwwllllled it out, so it sounded much more like “Kaahl.”

He asked me why I was in the Village. I’m pretty sure all I said was, “Sandwich,” with a finger point. (Obviously my Pomona education has made me an eloquent rhetorician.)  On a sudden whim, I asked him if he wanted one too. We wandered in together, the epitome of an odd couple, and both settled on smoked salmon & cotswold sandwiches. I liked him. I had time, so we sat on the curb outside and mused. I vividly remember talking to him about the nature of luck. Most of the time, I believe you create your own luck– opportunities arise, and you have to capitalize on them to the best of your abilities. The opportunities themselves may come about by preparation or chance, but it’s what you do with them that counts.* Karl, oddly enough, had a similar perspective, though his across-the-board agreement with me changed my viewpoint significantly. He owned his bad choices–  he got a girl pregnant when he was 19, had been arrested twice on drug possession charges, and had done some pretty shitty things. He talked about the things he wished he could change, and the offers and chances he wished he had taken, but at the same time, the guy had been given a pretty lousy hand to begin with. He grew up in a bad household and just got entrenched in a crap-cycle: it became almost not worth fighting the circumstances he was in, so he just rolled along and did what the people around him were doing. He chalked most of this up to bad choices; he was completely willing to blame himself. I wasn’t so sure. By the time we finished the sandwiches, we hadn’t really made any progress on the luck/choice problem, but it was a memorable interaction all the same.

I didn’t see him at all after that.

Earlier this semester, I heard about the death of a homeless man in Claremont, and because I hadn’t seen him in so long, I sadly assumed it was Karl. It wasn’t.

Today, I saw him sitting two benches down from the first bench I had seen him on. I was delighted to see him, but it took him a second to remember me. (He goes on a lot of sandwich-curb dates with blondes.) Turns out Karl had gotten himself an unofficial job gardening for a church in Montclair. He lives by the church in a kind of halfway house sort of deal (as best as I could understand, anyway), and spends most days blowing leaves and reading the Bible.

By any conventional standard, this man would be forgotten about. But he has such personality and humanity, despite (or probably more accurately, because of) his life. If my life was a movie, I feel like he’d be some significant character, even though he’d only be in it for a fraction of a second. I have yet to put my finger on why, and I don’t know if I ever will.

You’re a hell of a human being, Karl.

*(This needs to be a much more nuanced argument, but I’m not interested in going into it here. Here I’m heavily discounting certain privileges I know I have– after spending a semester reading Rawls on distributive justice, I’m well-versed in the concept of the ‘veil of ignorance‘, pure genetic unfairness, and the subsequent post-veil disadvantages. (Believe me, when you have one kid that brings it up EVERY CLASS, you definitely get it.) A rumination for another time.)

I had a surreal experience this morning: I woke up lateish (at 9) and rolled out of bed to get breakfast. Without much thought, I pulled on some clothes and walked out of my dorm room. A boy I didn’t know was out there standing in the hallway, and as I passed him, he called out to me. “Hey! Hey, you!” I slowed and turned, thinking that he just needed to call an RA. I turned to face him, and he asked, “Are you alright?”

I was suitably confused, and I furrowed my eyebrows at him. “What?” There was an awkward pause. “Do I look like I’ve been crying or something?”

He didn’t say anything, and just stood there facing me. Just staring. We were standing about ten feet from each other, and I fidgeted uncomfortably– we probably stood like that in silence for ten or fifteen seconds. It was such a bizarre interaction that I thought it was a joke or a psych project. I kept waiting for him to say something, and the silence drew out, long and tense between us. Finally, he did.

He said, “Well then, you suck!”

I was taken aback, but was able to come up with something, even in my bleary-eyed state. I flashed him my so-happy-it’s-obnoxious smile and said, “Why, thank you! Do people tell you how charming you are?”

I didn’t wait for his response. There was a blueberry bagel calling my name.

Med news: Got a blood panel today: serrum ferritin, thyroid, kidney/liver function, etc, etc. Results on Monday. Lot of random theories, no real definitive answers. Things are better, but I cancelled my next two appointments with my physical therapist because I felt like she didn’t know what she was doing. I’ll work on finding somebody new. Pelvic alignment causing nerve impingement, etc. In case you can’t tell, I’m not really interested in mulling this over too much, because I’m a person that likes having a plan to fix things, and if I don’t know what’s wrong, I can’t fix it. Still doing all my little foot PT, and that helps tremendously. I’m okay, and more importantly, I’m happy. Not 100% okay, and it may take some time, but I’ve got time.

The Medical Mystery Tour continues, but there have been some recent positive developments: thanks to the PT I’ve been doing, I don’t notice the foot floppiness as much walking around, and I’m able to run for a lot longer before my form deteriorates. I had a pretty unhelpful visit with a physical therapist who checked my spine yesterday to make sure I didn’t have any disc problems (all clear). I wasn’t super impressed because she spent most of the time standing off to the side, blowing air in little bursts out between pursed lips as she scrutinized me. She would intermittently make a move  to adjust a limb before deciding, well, maybe that’s not what she should do, and she’d retreat and she’d blow another puff of air. Lots of muttering. Her theory is that my pelvis is hitched up on one side, making my back muscles really tight, which is somehow impinging on the peroneal nerve, causing the numbness. That one seems like a bit of a stretch, especially because she wanted to blame all the problems on the scar tissue around my surgery site (makes me walk oddly, gets my pelvis off, makes my back tight, pinches nerve, etc). We were not a cohesive pair, and by the end I was resentful and she seemed more anxious than ever. She told me she’d give me some exercises for my neck, because she knows that too much hunching over a laptop can cause problems in the future for college students. I probably should have picked up my floppy foot right then and whacked her over the head with it. All told, it seemed like she didn’t have an explanation, so she was trying to find other solvable problems with my body.

I’m getting an EMG to find out at what point the nerve is getting bothered, but I want an explanation for why I physically feel so off. I’m getting a blood test today to get hemoglobin and serum ferritin levels checked, because hell, maybe this is anemia. (Doesn’t explain the nerve thing, but since that’s improved so much since last Thursday (SO MUCH- I can now walk on my heels briefly without a foot drop), I’m less concerned about that.

Both Kirk Reynolds and Kirk Jones (the trainer for Pom-Pitz) have been absolute saints while I sort this business out. And Kirk’s been gently correcting my expat-brat idiom use. I didn’t realize that I was incorrectly saying “don’t give up the goat” in place of “don’t give up the ghost.” I had always wondered why people were giving up goats.

In other goat-related news, I took a midterm a week ago that I thought I absolutely bombed. I had no idea how to solve one of the (three) problems, so I drew a picture of a goat instead. Gotta love when you start taking upper-level classes, and you only need to solve one problem out of three to walk away with an A. Despite some recent disappointments (mostly track/body-related), things are pretty good here. It’s a gorgeous day (as it always is in SoCal), and I’m off to go bob around in the pool for a while.

Don’t gaue vp the goost!

Meaning

To die, or in the case of inanimate objects, to cease working.

Origin

There are many uses of this phrase in the Bible, including this, from Miles Coverdale’s Version, 1535, Acts 12:23:

Immediately the angel of the LORDE smote him, because he gaue not God the honoure: And he was eaten vp of wormes, and gaue vp the goost.

The metaphorical use of the phrase, i.e. in relation to something not living and not able to become a ghost, is 19th century; for example, James Kirke Paulding’s, Westward Ho!, 1832, includes:

“At length it gave up the ghost, and, like an over-cultivated intellect, became incurably barren.”

A lot of the time I have a hard time (ugh repetition) cramming all of the things I want to do and need to do in a day, which I’m sure is not unfamiliar to 99% of the population (except maybe the 99% previously camped out in Zucotti Park).*

When I’m AWOL, often I’m not actually AWOL (as much as I’d like to be). I’m off trying to catch up with someone else, and that person is most likely telling me how AWOL I’ve been.

7:00 AM: I wake up. I know things are going well– I’m not sick, I got enough sleep, and things are cruising along– when I string together several days of waking up at 7, almost to the minute. Rough days and my wake-up time will fluctuate anywhere from 5 to 9.

Post-waking up, I’ll grab breakfast from Frars– usually a peanut butter bagel, a coffee, and the NYT– and attempt the crossword and browse through the paper. Mondays and Thursdays are stellar– Monday because hell, the crossword’s cake so you feel like a genius, and Thursday because (let’s be honest) the style section comes out. Breakfast is really the only time I’ll be alone throughout the day until after dinner, unless I have serious work to churn out, so I guard my solitude like nobody’s business.

9:00 AM: This morning I aqua-jogged with members of the MIT distance team, which was chatty and fun, and got me really excited for the potential for the season. I love my team, but we definitely don’t have the same focus on making Nationals, and when you’re in a collective, focused environment, you get inspired by the different kind of drive. Aqua-jogging let me work out some achilles crunchiness, and I felt great after.

10:00 AM: I bomb through the last pages of reading for class that I was too tired to do last night.

11:30 AM: I wander down to the Coop Fountain to meet two prospies from Singapore, Pomona-spiel in hand, and my mind on lunch.

12:00: I bike up to Scripps to meet a new friend for lunch– an interesting expat girl from Harvey Mudd and a few of her friends. I like making rando friends throughout the year– so often people here seem to stop making friends after they make five ones their freshman year.

1:15-2:30: I have only one class today, and it’s one I really like at Scripps. I definitely just throw out some lines about ethnonationalist theory and ecomarxism, and basically slide by on what I like to call the Thesaurus Strategy, happily employed by academic bullshitters the world over.

2:45 PM: Back in my room for the first time, I change into yoga things and eat a snack, despite knowing I’m violating the Fundamental Laws of Bikram: Thou shall not eat before thy session. Eh, whatever. I have a stomach of steel.

3:50 PM: Strongly consider not going to yoga, as I always do 10 minutes before I’m supposed to leave. Usually my dislike of yoga wins and I don’t end up going, but today my feet hurt enough to prod me in the right direction.

4:00 PM: Bike to yoga. It’s the first time I’ve been since…I dropped the class at the beginning of the semester, but Bikram’s been my saving grace with little niggling injuries in the past, and I’m praying it will do wonders for me again.

6:00 PM: After showering, I meet a guy friend named Brian and two CMCers for dinner, both of whom exclaim, “Where have you been?? We haven’t seen you in forever!!” Great, yeah. Working on that. I walk back to Pomona with Brian, and we get in a heated debate about… something. Not even really sure what the topic started out as. (Sorry, Bri.)

8:00 PM: I think about going out for an EZ run to keep my season moving along, like I had planned earlier, but for the first time in ages my achilles wasn’t squeaky and my body felt good, so I decide not to push my luck. I prioritized yoga today because of the timing, and also because it might get my season out of the gutter. I hated yoga the whole time I was doing it (really hurt my achilles and peroneal tendons), but they feel great now. I should force myself to go once a week.

9:00 PM:  My hallway man-candy peanut gallery provides helpful commentary while I do the PT stuff I’m supposed to. (So responsible. Helps when I have a foot that flops like a dead fish– it’s a constant reminder.)

I talk to my sister about nothing in particular for a few minutes and we exchange music recommendations. Always necessary. I talk to KB and he gets the brunt of my moping. (Sorry).

10:30 PM: There’s nothing really going on tonight, party or socializing-wise (except for Symposium), and at this point I’d rather sleep. Bed. I’m tired and glad to have four minutes to decompress by myself and putz about my room. Big day. Another one tomorrow. I don’t really know how I get homework done, to be honest. (Although I’m pretty sure I tanked on my last econ test, so maybe I don’t.)

*No digs against Occupy, but class inequity is as good a reason as any to spend a week in a tent.