David Foster Wallace, one of my favorite writers and someone on whom I’ve been waiting for another big book for years now, killed himself over the weekend. He had been severely depressed for a long time, and in fact wrote quite a bit about mitigating the pain of life with the use of legal and illegal pharmaceuticals. His writing is, to an extent, an acquired taste, full of long sentences, digressions that whip back to the main narrative, self-conscious wordplay, hilarity and pathos in equal measure, and out-and-out crazy ideas. If you don’t have the time or interest to try his magnum opus, Infinite Jest (1996), try his hilarious account of a cruise-ship voyage, “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise,” from Harpers in 1996. (Harpers released all of their DFW pieces today as a memorial to him.)
As I huffed and puffed in the gym a while ago, watching the close-captioned MSNBC news on the TV in front of me and half-listening to the music on the speakers, I hit a freaky little juxtaposition. Just as the news switched to a “story” on the carnage on Wall Street, the opening lines of Bruce Springsteen’s “Cover Me” came on: “The times are tough now, just getting tougher/This old world is rough, its just getting rougher.” The talking heads yapped at each other for a few seconds, and then the Boss sang, “Well I’m looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me” over a picture of Sarah Palin and the GOP’s economic plans. Blah blah blah, and then, as the images switched to the damage of Hurricane Ike, Springsteen again: “Outsides the rain, the driving snow/I can hear the wild wind blowing.”
I’ll have to listen to the rest of Born in the USA to see what else the Boss can tell us about Decision 2008.
(For what it’s worth, I shot this on a walk in Northfield when the girls spontaneously starting reciting the letters in the interesting sign across the street. They did it long enough that I could pull out the camera to capture it.)
8:30 – 11:30 a.m. Pro-life rally. Life begins at conception! Embryos are children!
Noon Lunch. Veal and foie gras. Spilled gravy on my purse made from fetal calfskin. 🙁
1 – 2 p.m. Gave a speech promoting abstinence-only sex education. Whole family was there, except Gristle, who said she had other plans.
For the past several months, VIvi has been answering state-of-things questions (“How are you? How was your night? Is your diaper okay?” by saying “mine,” her version of fine. Just this week she switched to saying “doog” for “good.” Even cuter.
At dinner every night, Shannon and I try to slow the girls’ plate-hoovering by asking about the “favorite part” of each day. Tuesday night, I asked Vivi first. Mouth jammed with peaches, she looked around the room and then up at the painting of flowers on the wall. “Fowers!” she said. “Your favorite thing was that painting of flowers?” I asked. “Ah-hah,” she said, swallowing one mouthful and going after the next.
Seeing this was a lost cause, I asked Julia. She first gave her usual charming answer – “Everything about today was my favorite!” – but then, when I asked for one thing in particular, pondered for a minute before saying happily, “Mama taking care of me all day.”
I don’t know, the military and the intelligence services don’t know, and George W. Bush sure as hell doesn’t know. Chances are, though, he’s near the Korengal Valley, a bloody battleground in Afghanistan which Sebastian Junger has grippingly described in a couple of incredible pieces for Vanity Fair. On the seventh anniversary of the attacks, I recommend reading them to see what the fight against terrorism really entails.
I’ve been using the new Google Chrome browser for the past few days – alas, only at work, since Google hasn’t yet released a version for Mac OS X. So far, I’m impressed. First and foremost for a Google fanboy like me, it’s ridiculously well integrated with the Google apps that I use the most: Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, and of course search. Being able to type any random thing into the main bar at the top of the browser window and automagically have it become a Google search is fantastic. And so far, the browser is much faster than even Firefox – which, admittedly, I usually run with 50 tabs open. And there’s a sick amount of screen real-estate, too. Thanks to the trimmed-back toolbars and just plain wasted space at the top of the window, you can see an awful lot more of the actual site you’re visiting. Not a bad idea at all.
On top of all that good stuff, the edges of the user experience are pretty smooth, too. Check out these two screens from the setup and crash-restore processes.
Google Chrome Setup WindowGoogle Chrome Crash Window
Granted, this is not world-shattering stuff, but the sense of humor is appreciated.
My friend Todd pointed out this tree, catercorner from the starting line of last Sunday’s race. It was, for both of us, the first tree we’ve noticed to have significantly changed colors. It’s not a bad pioneer.
Today’s the day the freshmen arrive at Carleton and “New Student Week” begins in earnest. I remember my arrival at college very, very clearly – right down to picking my roommate out of the crowd based on his NY Yankees cap.
What better day to read the first page of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, a brilliant novel which starts with the arrival of students to a liberal-arts college? (Click through for a good annotation of this all-important first page…)
Julia is slightly obsessed with her inability to pronounce the word “zero.” She actually can and does say the word correctly, but if she thinks about how to say it, she winds up saying “zewo” instead of “zero.” (I had the same trouble with the word “enemy” when I was about her age.)
To make matters worse (and by “worse” I mean “more entertaining”), she has fallen into the habit of contriving questions to which the only answer is “zero.” A sample from the last week or ten days:
How many rain clouds are in the sky?
How many cousins came on this walk?
How many Mamas came on this walk?
How many brothers do I have?
How many frogs did we see today?
How many dead frogs did we see today?
How many cats did we see in the park?
How many swings have I been on today?
How many times have I been in the bike trailer today?
How many desserts will we have at dinner?
How many Wise Men did we see at the store?
While Big Sister ponders the nature of absence and nullity, Vivi typically trots along ahead, beside, or behind, singing funny little nonsense songs, investigating things on the sidewalks (good: colorful leaves; bad: goose poop), and occasionally shouting, “Zewo!” to one of Julia’s questions.
I’ve had one or another funny American accent my whole life – Yooper twangs until my twenties, now a pronounced Minnesooooodah thing – so this is pretty much throwing stones from my glass house, but my god, I hate Sarah Palin’s accent. I hope I’d find it just as annoying if she was reading an Obama speech aloud.
Over the weekend, Julia and Genevieve and I went to a small little playground tucked away at the northern end of Sibley Swale Park here in Northfield. It’s a gorgeous setting: ringed by trees but open to the sky, shady but not dark, grassy but not just a field, quiet but not somnolent. The girls love the place. Some days, they like to go up and down the play structure. Other days, like Saturday, they like to swing.
I was pleased with my race this morning, even though it didn’t go quite as planned. I finished in 20:12 (just off my goal time of twenty minutes, but 1:56 faster than last year), good for fourteenth place in the 140-man field and first in my 14-man age group. Still, I could have run a smarter, better, and faster race if I had handled a couple errors better.
The first big error was the race organizers’ – they didn’t tell those of us at the 5k starting line (a couple blocks away from the starting line for the 15k race) when to expect the gun, so we were just milling around when there was a bang and a puff of smoke down the block. Here was the second error, mine: I went off way too fast, leading the race for the first 500 meters. The only good that came of this was being in front of all the tweens and teenagers who run like oxen, clogging up the road over the first mile. Anyhow, I led through the first corner, and then started giving up places as the real racers caught up to me and the front of the 5k field hit the back of the 15k field.
From there, I was pretty much in survival mode, with my heart rate averaging about 179 (something like 95% of my maximum – which I nearly reached in the last sprint) and my legs feeling increasingly cooked. One by one, other men passed me, with the last one – an old guy! with gray hair! and colossal thighs! – going by just before the two-mile mark. I tried to latch on to each one, but each time, my legs said, “WTF, dude! No way.” I just couldn’t overcome the lactate built up during my stupid all-out start.
Thankfully, the course rescued me. The last third is flat and then gradually downhill to the finish line, helping me hold my position to the finishing chute and even look sorta fast there at the end. (Shannon took this shot just about when I heard Julia cheering for me.)
This year, I trained all spring and summer to run the sibling race, a 15k over a pretty hilly course, but my training regimen was blown up by illness last month, so I stepped down to the 5,000 meter race. This is not only hella shorter, but the course includes just one climb worth mentioning (300 meter run, 10 meter rise). Hoping that my distance-oriented training will translate to this shorter event, my race goal is to run under 20 minutes. Depending on the size and quality of the field, this time might get me into the top 10. In keeping with my goal for tomorrow morning, my goal for tonight is to avoid partaking of the chocolate ice cream in the freezer.
