For the record

Why do old people take pictures?
I’ve always assumed that there are two phases in life.

Phase 1: Picture taking
Phase 2: Picture reminiscing

I’d say most of my imaginations about being old involve sitting by the fireside, leafing through photo albums and reading all of my old journals, finally culminating a lifetime of thoughts and experiences into sweet sage wisdom.  (In my head, the photo albums and journals are actual books stacked next to my armchair, although I suppose it’s more realistic to assume I would be swiping at a screen or batting my eyelids at a hologram or something… but that’s not so romantic.)  This is the scene I am thinking about when I snap a picture of the sun setting on a river or of a pretty plate of french fries.  It's that old woman, wrinkly grey-haired me, that I am preserving all of these moments for. 

So naturally I am confused to see anyone over the age of 70 fumbling with manual zoom lenses and peering at the world through a viewfinder.  

This is a photo I sneakily took of the old man in front of me on the plane.  He must have taken at least three dozen photos from his window:

When are you going to look back at that photo, sir?  What are you still collecting memories for? It seems to me a bit like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.  But I’ve never understood the things old people do — how could I possibly?  I won’t have the chance to culminate sweet sage wisdom about The Meaning Of It All until I’ve stopped taking photos myself. 

The sole motive behind all of my picture-taking (and writing, for that matter) is a latent fear of memory loss.  Creative expression, artistic value, reflection, emotional catharsis, social sharing etc. are mostly happy byproducts.  There are plenty of things I document that are never edited or posted, that are neither insightful nor beautiful.  I must have a Russian novel’s worth of the world’s most mundane lists in my Google Drive folder labeled “Writing.”

e.g.

Mar 22, 2012

-morning run in the park

-last day before taper, feeling fit

-flat tire on the way to work

-called Ali about travel plans

-Dinner out with the roommates.  Japanese restaurant downtown.  Way overpriced.

-Started Infinite Jest

Keeping these records is a fruitless exercise that I can’t stop doing any more than a baby can stop sucking on a pacifier.  Rationally, I am aware that even wrinkly grey-haired me won't be able to juice any wisdom from 80 years of done to-do lists.  But when I go for a period without documenting and then try to think back on what I’ve missed, my lack of recall frightens me.  It's like a small segment has been erased from my timeline.  

Traveling only intensifies the impulse — since each experience is so singular and fleeting, they are even less likely to stick in brain storage.  I just returned to California after spending a few weeks in London and I can’t sleep for the itch to quickly capture the quicksand memories of my time in the city. (Also my body still thinks it’s 11:00 A.M. even though it is 3:00 A.M.)

The first person I met in London was my host Heath.  Heath looked like what Benjamin Franklin would have looked like after a couple years developing a moderate cocaine habit.  He was bald on top with a few strands of oily locks falling just short of his shoulders.  His wiry circular spectacles matched his wiry body frame — all cheek bones and elbows and one long pinky fingernail.  One cat was called Zipper.  The others scampering around the house were never formally introduced to me.  Heath had the Australian knack for leaving “h”s off of words like “he” and ending his sentences with rhetorical questions.  But if not a scholar, Heath was certainly a gentleman — helping with my bags, pouring me a cup of tea, and offering a detailed verbal treasure map of the neighborhood’s best pubs: “You’ll go out just to the corner here and then carry on past the little statue at the end of the main road.  There’ll be a cigarette store to your right and then, if you keep on ahead past the old fire station, you can’t miss it just there.”

According to AirBnB, my second host was named “Sylvie,” but when I arrived at the two-bedroom mini-apartment in Marylebone, I was met by six Italians and one Scott, none of whom introduced themselves by that name.  The Italians were young, mostly gay, all pierced and dyed some shade of citrus.  As far as I could tell, they all shared one kingsize bed.  The Scott was maybe in his 60s, also gay, and—while the noisy vie bohème-ers passed around bowls of pasta and marijuana in the kitchen—he kept mostly to himself in the storage-closet-turned-bedroom, except to occasionally venture out to refill his champagne glass with chilled Prosecco and make a nostalgic and endearing comment about the beauty of youth. 

Marianella liked to ask me the meaning of English words like “prancing” and “glitter” that she heard in songs.  Nícolas like to tilt his head and say “Awww” every time I spoke.  Alberto liked to call me Darling and insisted on giving me a haircut — for which I was, admittedly, long overdue.  I’d like to say that was the first time I let a man shave my head under the auspices of a free haircut…. but that would not be true.  

June 2008:

This time was less drastic:

People say that London has no soul and I think I know what they mean.  There are simply too many types of people to talk about the “Ethos” of the city in any coherent way.  As a whole, it is a ruthless place.  It is the kind of place that might knock you down and mow you over if you don’t have your wits about you (literally, in the case of bikers, and figuratively in the case of anyone earning a sub-executive salary who might wake up one morning to find themselves flat broke).  But as much as people moan about the weather and the prices and the Tube, I think people find London’s grandeur liberating.  Even I — the sniper’s eye for anything even remotely resembling a cliché — couldn’t pin down a stereotypical Londoner.  

Coming from San Francisco, where literally e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g has been stamped, labeled, satirized, ironically iconized, and hashtagged, the slightly dizzying cosmopolitopia of London was actually a breath of fresh air.  There is no headlining war between Mainstream vs. Counterculture vs. Trendy vs. Hipster etc etc etc…. No one seems to give a damn.

London says, “I don’t care who you are - stay to the right of the escalator, the left of the bus lane and get the hell out of the way.”

Running into trouble

It was 8:00 on Saturday and my heart was a flutter.  I had a date with a lake.  It would be just me and her and nothing to interrupt our glorious morning together.  I braided my hair and dawned a fresh pair of running shorts and went to the shoe shop on the corner to buy a new pair of trainers for the occasion.  My beloved Saucony Fastwitches just turned 350 (in miles) and I’d spent the previous two days and nights tossing and turning, wondering if the holes in the sides would hold together for the next three weeks of my time abroad.  Thankfully I fell asleep at my computer before, in a 3:00 A.M. frenzy, I almost clicked “Buy” on an identical pair of Sauconys that would have cost $50 for international shipping alone.  But by the time Saturday morning came, the bottom of the right heel had worn through my old shoes and I had two options: 

1. Buy an over-priced pair of inferior shoes.

2. Not run.

The little store on the corner only had one pair of trainers available in my size so I bought them with the rationale that, if I found a better/cheaper pair at the department store down the street, I could return them.  

I looked up the German word for “return policy” on my phone and attempted to repeat it to the owner. 

“Rook-gab-ebel-rung?”

He replied in a gush of jolly German and I gathered from his nodding smile and pointing at the register’s printer that he was saying something along the lines of, “Yes, yes of course! As long as you have the receipt, no problem!”  I later learned (after purchasing another pair of shoes at the department store that were €15 cheaper, for I am nothing if not my mother’s daughter), that what he was actually saying was: “No, we do not do returns.”  I walked out of the store holding a €70 gift card that I would never use, breathing deeply and chanting the mantra Sunk costs. Sunk costs.   Fortunately, there is no better antidote for the stress of wasted money than spending time with Mother Nature who couldn’t give a damn.  One mile into the sweet humus trails of Grunewald, and all tears over spilled Euros were long forgotten.

The lake and I flirted for a while, we got personal, we got philosophical, and we shared some intimate moments… 

In the thralls of romance, I lost track of time.  Then I lost track of space (namely, my location relative to the trailhead).  Then I regained my sense of time and my entire body was poignantly aware of the fact that it was 2:20pm which was exactly six hours and 20 minutes since I had woken up and over twelve hours since I had last eaten.  I had somehow skipped past the hunger phase and went straight to the tingly nirvana phase.  The blood in my veins sparkled like the surface of the lake and the little stars that reflected on the water also glimmered in the sky and on the trail and on everything I looked at.  

At a trail crossing in the woods, I paused at the intersection to consider which direction to go.  Out of the forest, a band of people emerged.  They were a band, as in a small group, but they were also a band, as in they were all carrying brass instruments — french horns, trumpets and trombones.  Just when I was deliriously wondering how to ask them if they had any food in universal human sign language, they began to play their horns.  It was a regal tune, like an announcement.  On cue, a heard of beagles came running from the trees — at least twenty of them — ears flopping, tails wagging, tongues hanging.  Not far behind them, a low thunder rumbled.  Horses!  Dozens of horses!  Trotting along with uniformed men perched officially atop their saddles. The spontaneous parade surrounded me on all sides and I was suddenly engulfed with music and fanfare and guffawing horsemen who called down to me in German.  What are they saying?  What the hell is going on?  I must be very hungry.  What a bizarre mirage...  

I rubbed my fingers together and felt nothing.  I was still seeing stars when I blinked but I couldn’t blink the strange parade away.  I pulled out my phone to take a picture and when I looked back later, I realized I wasn’t hallucinating after all.

That night, admitting to myself that I should not be trusted to go out running on my own, I googled “Running club Berlin.”  There was one group meeting on Sunday afternoon and, even though they had not posted the exact address of their meeting spot, I had no trouble finding them.  Across all cultural/ethnic/socio-economic differences, runners are a species of their own.  Common traits can be traced among them, no matter where in the world they are found.  In the pre-workout huddle, they mill around a pile of backpacks, some standing like flamingos with one bent knee rolling a foot in circles at the ankle, some with their hands on their hips that jut out to one side as they lean into a cross-legged IT band stretch.  I spotted them from 100 meters away: my people.  

I entered into the circle (in which I heard at least a few English speakers) and joined the conversation like I was catching up with old friends.  Not an eyelash was batted until I asked what I thought was a perfectly normal runners’ circle question: “So, where does the route go today?”  Heads tilted, eyebrows furrowed.  

“Is this your first hash?” said one woman in a German accent. 

I thought I had misunderstood her English.  “My first what?”

Slowly, sinister grins lit up faces like candles in a row of jackolanterns and knowing eyes met one another from across the circle, while my own eyes darted from face to face trying to read the meaning behind their expressions. 

“Ah, it appears we have here a virgin!”

I later learned that this was a meeting of Hash House Harriers, an infamous international organization with the slogan: “A Drinking Club with a Running Problem.”

But at the time, I sensed it unwise to ask too many questions.   So when they started running—each person in opposite directions—I just followed the bearded Dutchman who went straight into the woods where there was no path.  When they shouted unintelligible things and suddenly changed directions, I shouted too and found someone new to follow (just far enough away so they wouldn’t notice I was following).  One random thing led to another and within the hour, we were all back in the circle drunkenly bellowing a song about foreskin to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean.”  By the end of "practice", I was on my knees in front of a pot-bellied Scottish man who--ignoring the protests from the formerly unsympathetic crowd--was pouring beer into my mouth from my brand new shoes (because new shoes are apparently against the Hash ethos).  

On Tuesday I decided to go run on a track--my flat, round, red and white, surprise-proof haven.  I found four using Google satellites (tracks are conveniently easy to spot from space).  The first three were closed but the fourth was open.  There were two burka-covered Turkish ladies waddling in the outer lanes and a class of preteen coeds with their gym teacher gathered on the home stretch.  Normally I would have been disappointed to share my sanctuary, but on that day I was glad to have the audience.  It’s easier to run 600 meter repeats when you have some pressure to impress the spectators, even if they are little Turkish grandmothers who could probably care less.  

On my first lap, I flew by the gym teacher, who stood tall and stern, stopwatch in hand, unashamed to follow me with his stare all the way around the back curve.  On the next few sets, I had to swing out to lane six to avoid bowling over the cluster of students as they lined up at the start line.  On my fifth set, I came up behind them as they were running a lap of their own.  They were spread out enough that I could weave between them and, even over the music from my headphones, I could hear their giggling German commentary.  With about 130 meters to the finish line, I felt a surging gait at my heels.  I glanced down to see a spaghetti noodle kid sprinting up next to me.  He couldn’t have been more than 4’10, 90 pounds.  Witnessing the challenge, the gaggle of girls sitting on the infield started to squeal and cheer.  I changed gears and went in for the kick.  Noodle boy surged harder, panting his little lungs into hyperventilation.  But he didn't drop.  I kicked harder.  He stuck.  I pushed harder than I’ve pushed in a long time (half marathons don't involve sprinting) and I leaned at the line.   

I like to think we tied. 

At home a mere twenty minutes later, when I explained to my housemate why I was holding a bag of ice on my foot, I said that I won. 

Wie sagt man, "I would like all the baklava, please."?

The day before I left for Berlin, I bought a suitcase at Ross for $70 because my roommate’s was too big and my coworker’s was too small.  I bought a neck pillow and an eye cover and earplugs. I would have bought Ambien if they sold it over the counter but I bought Melatonin instead and got some Xanax from a friend.

I bought these things in secret because it’s not like me to buy things.  I am supposed to be Carefree Katie.  I am Go-With-The-Flow Girl.  I am from Colorado and my feathers don’t get ruffled when the wind blows.  But I’ve been in California for too long and now I can’t deal with things like jet lag or mediocre sandwiches or bad internet connections or air colder than 50 degrees.  

It’s a slippery slope down to neurosis.   On the morning of my departure, I was struck with a sudden wave of paranoia about dropping my rent check in a mailbox.  At line in the post office behind a dozen or more tardy taxpayers (it had not occurred to me that April 15th would not be a normal day at the USPO), I literally started tapping my foot in a nervous twitch.  Normal Katie would not have batted an eyelash about running twenty minutes behind schedule.  The only items left on my pre-departure checklist were 1. Assemble plane snacks (two minutes max), 2. Remove toenail polish (optional) and 3. Research best practices for taking Xanax (which I could do from my phone while waiting in line).  But OCD Katie could only see a clock arm ticking dangerously close to 10:45 which was the time I needed to leave my house in order to arrive at the airport one hour before boarding. (I decided the two-hour rule for international flights didn’t apply to me since I’ve been TSA prescreened.)  

Of course, as Normal Katie would have known, everything worked out fine.  Despite checking in at the wrong airline (“Lufthansa flight 730 is operated by United, ma’am”), leaving my passport in the self-check kiosk scanner, having the wrong name on my ticket (“I’m sorry miss, the reservation is under Katie but your ID says Kathryn”), and getting bounced from the TSA prescreen line (“If the stamp isn’t on your boarding pass, they won’t let you through”), I still managed to board the plane before takeoff.  And despite not sleeping on the plane (neck pillows and Xanax be damned!), I still managed to feel relatively normal upon arriving in Berlin at 11:00am.  And despite not having the exact address of my AirBnB host or any way of contacting her without internet access, I still managed to serendipitously run into her just as she was leaving the building.  

Despite still having chipped nail polish on my toes, everything was going to be just fine.

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Lucy, my host, has a bob cut and wears a jean miniskirt bunched up over leggings that tuck right into the lace-up boots whose heels barely touch the ground when she walks with a slight duck-footed bounce.   I wanted us to be friends but the tone in her voice when she asked me if I had any questions told me she’d be keeping our relationship professional.  She offered me a cup tea and then headed out for the night.  

The house was cold. I made another cup of tea.  Then another.  I poured more cups until the leaves in teaball were blanched and I was just drinking hot water.  After fidgeting with the knob on the radiator in my room, googling "How to turn on german heater", and pushing all the buttons on a mysterious box in the kitchen, I decided to cook some pasta. Lucy had technically said “Help yourself to whatever” but I could tell she only said it to be nice and didn’t actually want me rifling through her cupboards.  But I didn’t have any Euros yet and I was descending into a manic state of cold and hunger.   I would have stolen a secret slice of her birthday cake if there would have been one in the fridge.   I felt like Lucy owed it to me for abandoning me in her ice house.  But the pantry was all pots and jars of tea leaves and dried beans and one half bag of rotini noodles, of which I stole one cup.   I held the warm pot to my body and stood over the stove, which I left on even after the pasta was done.  

When Lucy got home around midnight, she explained that the central heat for the building never comes on in April so there is no way to turn on the radiators.  Perhaps she felt guilty about sending me to sleep in a room with an unsealed window because she offered me some of the egg scramble she was cooking.  We ate together and had a lovely conversation -- at least I enjoyed it.  I can’t speak for Lucy because once she finished eating she said, “Well you must be very tired...”

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Other than the lack of space-heaters, Berlin seems to be the perfect city.  To me, it is Goldilocks’s middle bowl between my other two favorite places: Bogotá and San Francisco.  The street vendors and jabbering pedestrians and third-world chaos that give Bogotá its charm can also make it impossibly dysfunctional at times.  On the other end of the spectrum, San Francisco’s efficiency-obsessed tech fever is sexy and exciting and famous… and solipsistic to a sometimes nauseating degree.  Berlin has the urban hum, it has the hipster-hating hipsters whining about gentrifying neighborhoods, it has the cultural hodgepodge that makes it tricky to pick out tourists from locals.  It works without trying too hard.

Being a foreigner here is neither exotic nor cliché, which is quite relaxing.  However, for the first time in my life I am in a place where I cannot ask for directions from just anyone on the street.  I, the Queen of Eyelash-Batting for Favors from Strangers, have been quitted of my most resourceful superpower.  Thankfully, universal human sign language has been sufficient so far.  That is to say, sufficient enough for me to walk into the Turkish pastry shop and point to the baklava behind the glass and hold up all my fingers to indicate “I would like all the baklava, please.”

 

On weddings

I had no intention of crying but before the bride even appeared in the doorframe, my lids had welled up quicker than flowerpots in a rainstorm.  This wave of emotion struck me as especially odd considering that only hours before,  as I was writing the Congratulations card, I struggled to recall memories of my friend (the groom) from college.  We spent countless hours together over those four years but, sitting there in a hurricane’s eye of wrapping paper scraps and ribbons with only thirty minutes before the start of the ceremony, I could only summon blurry vignetted flashbacks of sitting in the passenger seat of his SUV or stirring boiling pasta in the speckle-stained kitchen of his all-guys house.

But somehow, where my conscious memory failed to produce much substance of our friendship, my subconscious managed to conjure instantly at the sight of him walking down the aisle.  Seeing him in that moment filled me to the brim with an overwhelming pride and happiness that can only be felt about someone rooted in your life — whether or not you remember all the circumstances of the rooting.

The ceremony followed the conventional pattern: Guests mingle amongst themselves sitting in chairs facing the “stage”/altar.  When the music comes on, everyone stops talking and turns backwards to watch a slow motion parade of people down the center aisle until (cue song change) the bride appears and everyone stands up.  Once she has arrived at the center of the arrangement -- groom on the right side of the MC/priest who is flanked on the left by a file of matching women and on the right by a file of matching men -- everyone sits to listen to a series of readings, speeches, vows and “I Dos” and then they whistle and cheer at the official pronouncement and subsequent Kodak Kiss.  The slow motion parade then happens in reverse at a slightly faster pace, there is more mingling while the couple is absent, then food, tearful toasts, drunken dancing and then the couple’s epic exit (usually involving some sort of bombardment).  

I recognize that each element of this ceremony has origins in various religious and cultural traditions.  Allow me to preface the rest of this post by disclaiming that I am not a hardcore feminist (anymore) out to condemn the patriarchal symbolism.  I am simply surprised by--for all the time and energy that people spend planning their weddings--how few people depart from the standard structure.

And it’s not for lack of wanting to be different.  People love kvetching about other people’s weddings more than San Franciscans love complaining about rent prices.  I could invade Russia with the army of bemoaners of how expensive weddings are “these days” and how overdone the whole charade is and how awful it is to be around so-and-so the Bridezilla.

And yet, there in the Graveyard of Famous Last Words, among the skeletons of college student oaths to never vote republican and daughter’s vows to never become their mothers and all of my resolutions to eat dinner before chocolate, is the mountain of promises people make to themselves to have a simple and inexpensive wedding.

But I think that's OK -- getting married is a big deal!  All the most important people in our lives are going to be there, it only happens one to four times in our lifetime, and -- in case we have any insecurity about how to plan a successful and socially acceptable wedding -- there is a billion dollar industry ready to sweep us up in breathtaking capitalistic efficiency and tend to every worry we didn’t even know we had.   It’s going to cost a lot of money, it’s going to be a production, we will fret over details we never imagined would be important, but we should all be prepared to accept this.  Maybe even embrace it.

However, I still don’t understand why the day itself has to follow such a specific formula.  Let’s consider the objectives of the event:

--To celebrate the love between two people

--To commemorate the new union of two families

--To reunite old friends

--To inspire sentimental feelings about the bride and groom’s lives and relationship

--To take a lot of pictures, especially of the young people in their physical prime

Other than that, it’s just a party where the standard objectives apply: to enjoy entertainment, food, drinks, music, dancing, and general merriment.

It seems like there are a variety of ways to achieve these ends that don’t necessarily involve sitting backwards in chairs watching a slow motion parade.  For example, why does the couple hide before the ceremony?  If all of my closest friends and relatives traveled from near and far, requested time off from work, painted their toenails and ironed their shirts to come and see me, I might consider greeting them at the door.  Of course, there will be a lot of people to chat with and ask about how their flights were and compliment their haircuts and it may be exhausting but, if we consult our handy list of objectives, “Enjoying a relaxed and introverted evening” did not make the cut.

As for the rest of the ceremony, I am one hundred percent in favor of putting on a show starring the couple and their families and best friends.  I, as evidenced by yesterday’s sneak attack of tears, find the slow motion parade very moving.  But it occurred to me that the same effect could be accomplished in another scenario with, for instance, the main cast of characters actually facing the audience.  Perhaps, instead of readings, each person could share a funny memory or sing a song or show some old photos.  What if the bridesmaids and groomsmen sat together on stools on one side of the stage?  What if they didn’t match their outfits? What if, instead of the father/daughter mother/son dances, the first dance was a big group dance so that everyone is already on the floor when the party music starts?  Again, it’s not that these ideas are any better -- they are just possibilities that seem to never get considered.  

These are probably my own famous last words.  I can see myself reading this the day after my own daffodil-themed Pachabel's cannon white-dress fairy tale wedding and scoffing at my youthful hubris to invent a new version of something steeped in centuries of tradition.  

But, mark my words, if I ever get married, there will be chocolate before dinner.

Rooftop reflections

Have you ever had one of those days when you are riding your bike and you feel a tire go flat?   And  you notice that every pebble jostles your balance and you push the pedals twice as hard but go only half as fast?  But then, when you get off to check the pressure of the tires and they are both tight as drums, you have that moment of realization that the flatness is in your own body?

The morning stains the western tips of the sky with a citrus glow, but above the horizon’s blush the lavender dawn is almost unblemished.   The only interruptions in the entire dome of the Earth’s cap are the moon (whose unsubtle and pearly presence looks like the work of a bad Photoshop artist), a diamond gleam in the east (whether a star, planet or spacecraft is unknown), and, in the bottom inch or two of skyline, chimneys, satellite dishes, rooftops, and various other urban spires of mysterious name and function.  All is still as a picture, save for the occasional aviary silhouette gliding from one spire to another.

Climbing up to the roof is to take a camera lens and crank it ninety degrees to the left so that all the things that were impossible to ignore--traffic lights, swerving mopeds, skateboarders, slamming gates, sirens, dogs yanking on leashes--suddenly blur out of focus and the silent plume of steam exhaling from a roof pipe above the Picassoesque geometry of shingles upon housetops upon balconies upon towers comes into sharp relief.  

I come up here to think.  After several months of chasing after my life with a butterfly net, I was due for a moment of pause.  For I have learned this about myself: I am a creature of The Now.  Whatever is happening in this waking moment takes precedence over all else and unless I forcibly remove myself from my daily Ferris wheel, I will follow the breadcrumb trail of buzzing phones, work emails, dinner invites, race registration alerts and free samples all the way down into a sleepless oblivion, in a comatose state of knee jerk Yes! reactions to all immediate stimuli.

Some people struggle with living in the moment.  They buy books about the art of Zen and present-mindedness.   For these people it is an effort, a prayer, a New Year Resolution to bury memories and anxieties and to just bask in each of life’s savory moments as they pass.

I am not one of those people.  All of my cares about the future weigh less than Forrest Gump’s feather.  I lose sleep over nothing (unless I am on a plane in which case I lose sleep for lack of prescription medication to make me forget that I am trapped).  Most of the worries I discuss with friends are more topics of conversation than actual sentiments I mull over when I’m alone.

The go-with-the-flow lifestyle is ulcerless and lovely… to a certain point.  The only problem arises when “the flow” starts drifting in an unintended direction.  The problem is when there are so many things to do but, when you look closely, no real reason for doing any of them, other than the fact that the opportunities presented themselves, in sequined and sexy nowness, at the door.  The problem is when getting out of bed every morning is more a result of muscle memory than will power.  It’s when you find yourself moving through the days by some unnamed inertia, happenstance gusts of wind and the momentum of a busy-ness addiction, without any internally anchored drive to arrive at any particular destination.  But a wheel can only roll for so long without a motor.

As I pondered this on the Rooftop of Catharsis, I decided that, in defiance of Carrie Underwood and in homage of Incubus, it was time I take the proverbial Wheel and outline something of a life plan for myself.  

I dug up my faux-leather serious-thoughts-only notebook, and started thumbing for a blank page.  At almost exactly the midway point, I found the end of the inked section and stretched the stiff binding open flat, like cracking vertebrae on a stiff back.  Upon closer inspection, I realized the page I had opened to was not, in fact, empty.  It was almost blank except the top corner was labeled 12/2/2013 and on the header there was a single scribbled word in all caps: “GOALS.”

I suppose I am nothing if not consistent.

Superhuman

Sometimes I’m pretty sure I am a superhuman.  Last night, for example, I managed to unlock the outer gate and the front door to my apartment, carry my bike up the stairs, walk into the kitchen without knocking anything over, and assemble and consume three medium sized burritos (each with a flawless chicken:guac:slaw:salsa ratio).  I accomplished all of this with a blood alcohol level of whatever results from chugging five 5% beers while running 2,000 meters plus two 8% celebration beers.  

I deserved a trophy.  Made of carbs.  The fact that I got last place in the Beer Mile was overshadowed by the olympic execution of this complex series of tasks.  The last and most challenging event of the Frontal Lobe Decathlon was to make an online reservation.  I needed to reserve a Getaround car (like Zipcar but better) for 7:15 the following morning.  It needed to be under $7/hour, automatic transmission, within a mile of my house, and big enough to fit my bike.  Processing this amount of information with so few available brain cells would not be easy, but I was in a herculean mood.  Using mostly my index fingers and one squinted eye, I clicked and scrolled and entered my correct password (on the third try) like a champion.  

The day’s work done, I slept the sleep of a sweaty baby on a merry-go-round but, thanks to satellites that remember daylight savings, my cell phone alarm did not fail to punctually end the restless night.   I “awoke” (if you can call it that) feeling just enough head pain to make me feel alive.  I stood and faced the world outside my window and inhaled all the momentum my lungs could hold.  By 7:30, I was heading out the door with my helmet, goggles, swim cap, running shoes and registration number for the Redwood City Triathlon.  How did my dehydrated raisin brain remember to assemble all of these things? I marveled.   

But alas, at the height of my invincibility, the universe saw fit to remind me of my mortality.   Right before I left, I went to loosen the anti-theft pin on the front fork of my bike so that I could easily remove the wheel when I got to the car.  If you’ve never seen one of these, they look like this:

I twisted and heaved until my palms were purple — the pin would not budge.  My pajamaed roommate leaned against her doorframe, watching with lips pushed to one side of her face.  I stood up and looked at her.  

“I’m going to the streets to find a man.”  

She gave an earnest nod.  “Good luck.”

There is only one type of man to be found on the streets of SoMa in the early morning hours on a Sunday.   He is not known for chivalry.  There was a pack of four of them on the corner of 8th and Howard and I rolled towards them at an uncertain angle, like a grandma’s bowling ball toward a cluster of four pins.  When I was close enough to realize they were all simultaneously spitting profanities at each other, I rolled straight on past without a word.  Gutter ball.  The bike shop was closed and so was the liquor store.  Sleepy weekend dawns in The City are normally one of my favorite things.  Most Sunday mornings, I love nothing more than riding through the still urban streets, quiet as the apocalypse.  But on this particular morning, I was just annoyed by the astounding lack of non-drug addicted humans within a mile radius of my house.  I stared up into the windows of the new gleaming high rises — come on hipsters!  I know you’re in there!  Don’t you want brunch already?!  

Fortunately, right as I was passing the gas station, a cop car pulled in to the coin vacuum.   I silently apologized for cursing the San Francisco police just one day earlier after getting pulled over on my bike and I gave the officer my brightest debutant smile as he stepped out of his car.   He was obliged to rescue my distressed damsel self, even when I muttered something about “yeah well I loosened it” when he unscrewed the pin on his first attempt. 

I checked my watch — 7:48, plenty of time.  Everything was back on track… until I got to the parking lot and the car was not there.  I called Getaround and was informed that I had made the reservation for 7:15 PM.   Wait a minute.  What does that mean about my perceived success of everything else that happened at home last night?  The stealth entrance, the perfectly ratioed burritos??  (Suddenly I saw a grizzly flashback of a clanking bicycle, scattered tupperware lids, guacamole plopping to the floor.  Nooo!!)  God bless Josh, the phone support guy at Getaround, who immediately booked me another car—a Prius, automatic, $7/hour, big enough for my bike—only two blocks away.  

This post has been brought to you by Getaround — official sponsor of the Peace As In 

✌ blog and the best invention since Craigslist. 
(I’m kidding about the sponsorship, but serious about the rest.)

As someone who hasn’t owned a car for almost a year and hasn’t consistently driven at all in the past three years, I have a question for the automotive world: when did keys and ignitions go out of style?  To an outside observer, I must have looked like a chimpanzee in a science experiment trying to start the Prius — turning and flipping the fob, lifting it to my eyes to stare at it from every angle, smelling it for clues as to where the actual key might be.  When I finally deduced the right combination of levers and switches to pull a tiny key out of the fob, I couldn’t find anywhere to insert it.  

I spent about ten minutes triggering windshield wipers, clicking the emergency lights, activating the brake and turning on the radio before finally resorting to a YouTube tutorial.  My IQ pride was slightly comforted by the fact that I only needed to type “How to start a P” for Google to know what I needed on the second guess.  Apparently there are almost as many dumb drivers as people who want to start a photography business, so at least I’m not alone.  

But nothing restores healthy ego like a bunch of white people giving you high fives for swimming, biking and running all in a row — especially when they assume that your lack of wetsuit is not an act of stinginess, but an intentional act of bravery.  I am not cheap, I am daring!  Icy cold water be damned!   You amuse me with your attempt to freeze me to death!  By 11:00 AM—less than 17 hours after I was clutching my knees to hold back Budweiser vomit on the track—I was strolling the strut of a king out of the triathlon finish area, bike in one hand, bagel and a banana in the other (did I mention I think I may have superpowers?).  

Back at the car I realized that the Prius is actually big enough to fit my entire bike without having to remove the front wheel so… I’ll know for next time to skip the charade with the street men and the cop.  Somehow it took another ten minutes of monkey detective work to put the damn car in reverse (seriously Toyota, what is with that shifter?), but when I was finally driving out of the parking lot with the windows down, sun on my forearm, Bay salt in my hair and crumbs of peanut butter bagel all over my face, I was a winner. 

When it rains

I ran a race on Sunday so I technically could have taken Monday off, but I wanted to take my visiting friend on my favorite loop around Mission Creek.  I could have taken Tuesday off but Tuesday is team practice day at Kezar which I skip about as often as my Grandmother skipped Sunday Mass (i.e. only on her death bed).  I had already RSVPed to my neighbor’s birthday run on Wednesday and since I knew I’d be taking a day off to drive to Tahoe on Friday for a company trip, I figured that, despite the steadily increasing soreness on the side of my foot, I should go ahead and run on Thursday too.

After the eleventh mile on Thursday (the 48th of that five day span), I was walking with a bit of a limp.   Nothing a little ice massage and 24-hour break couldn’t heal, I thought.  But on Friday I was still sporting a Quasimodo-ish strut and on Saturday morning in Tahoe, when the rest of my coworkers piled into cars with goggles and boots and company-expensed lift tickets on their jackets, I stood on one foot in the parking lot like a pathetic flamingo, waving goodbye in the rain.  My boss stayed back with me and agreed to participate in whatever non weight-bearing activity I could come up with.

Since swimming in the lake wasn’t exactly feasible and snowmobiling is about as appealing to me as driving around in a convertible sports car (pastimes I don’t understand), we walked to the nearest rental store and asked for a pair of bikes.  The employee, a woosh-haired kid with lanky arms, started laughing through his braces.  A woman that was arranging a stack of skis behind the counter stopped what she was doing to turn over her shoulder and raise her eyebrows at us.  An older bearded man at the cash register who looked like the store manager and a Knower Of Things Related To Outdoor Sports looked at us with a confused face as if he was unsure if we would understand his English and said, “You know it’s raining outside?”

Under different circumstances I might have let myself get talked out of the idea.  I did, after all, have a thick novel, a perfectly lovely leather couch by a crackling fire, and Olympic figure skating playing on flat screen TV back at the hotel lodge.  But the thought of everyone else having adventures in the mountains filled me with a college freshman’s determination to have fun at all costs.  Not R&R fun.  Extreme fun.  So I put on my confident “What on earth is everyone so concerned about?” face and proceeded with the checkout process for the rentals.  My boss bought a facemask and I considered getting some waterproof gloves but they were $40.  I found two ziplock bags in my backpack, dumped the crumbs and banana peel slime, scraped off the wad of gum, and put them over my wool mittens, tucking the tops into my jacket sleeves for optimal air-tight element protection.  

The rain was coming down in sheets.  Within five minutes my snow pants had tripled in weight from absorption of water.   We tried to stick to the bike path but when the snow was too deep we had to ride along the highway where ski-and-snowboard-laden SUVs splashed us with their grumbling chain tires. My boss’s ski gloves "resisted" water with as much success as Justin Bieber resisting arrest and when we stopped to check the map, he rung out a small faucet’s worth of rain from each one with yellowish-white hands that had clearly stopped receiving circulation.  The map was soaked and disintegrating but after a quick study, we knew the general direction of our goal: Lily Lake.  It was the place the lanky braces kid told us would have been beautiful in nicer weather and the destination we had deemed worthy of our epic trek.  

A couple miles down the road, my boss, in an I’m-not-complaining-just-stating-the-facts tone, said he was not able to use his brakes because his fingers were unresponsive.  We pulled over into the nearest cafe and I asked for two plastic bags that I tied around his hands (Dear Gortex, You should consider partnering with Ziplock for your next product line.).  My fingers, although relatively dry, were also frozen but I refrained from mentioning it.   I actually couldn’t stop laughing because, besides my mission to achieve maximum Fun, the entire scene was so ridiculously miserable as to be legitimately funny.  I also think the cold was making me slightly hysterical.

We rode on.  We rode through puddles up to our pedals and across clumpy ice that made our handlebars shake and our back tires fishtail.  The worst parts were traversing snowy bridges or unplowed back roads in low gears moving slower than if we were to just walk carrying our bikes on our backs.  The best parts were the climbs that required enough physical effort to get our pulses up.  There was a moment on the mountain when we were pedaling up a trail that was essentially a creek, water and mud spraying from all directions, where I was seized with rush of crazed adrenaline and it occurred to me that there was nowhere else I would rather be.  My elevated heart rate was sweeter than sex.  It was also the only thing keeping blood pumping to my extremities (at least that is what I hoped was happening since I couldn’t actually feel anything past my knees or elbows).  

At the crest of the hill my boss asked how long it generally takes for frostbite to set in after feet go numb.  Just out of scientific curiosity.  I’m not sure how close we were but we never made it to Lily Lake.  I like to think we were only within a couple miles when we surrendered and turned back.  Going down the mountain was much more challenging than the climb.  I’ll take a tingling fire in my quads over a needle-stabbing numbness in my brake-clutching fingertips any day.  The sight of the highway at the bottom of the back road was a relief, scenery be damned.  There was too much rain to see beyond a ten-foot radius anyway so, as long as my tires could roll forward without sliding from side to side, I had no problem riding next to metal side rails and piles of dirty plowed snow.  My mind lost the capacity to do anything but fantasize about a steaming hot shower.

Much to my momentum-obsessed chagrin, we made one last stop at a thrift store on the side of the road where my boss bought another pair of socks.  Our shoes were essentially ice sponges at that point (I was secretly hoping the extended cold treatment would heal my injured foot).  When he sat down to take his shoes off, his entire body--from his hands to his thighs to tiny muscles on his back--was trembling in unsettling jerky spasms.  I made a short speech about perseverance and endurance which gave us just enough emotional inertia to get to the first bridge where a wall of gale force wind nearly knocked us off our bikes and knocked our spirits back down to base survival mode.  

When we finally made it back to the rental store, I half expected the employees to throw us a parade.  A few of them did clap.  Most of them just shook their heads.  When I tried to make a joke about Just a little water never hurt anyone ha ha, it came out slurred and in slow motion from my frozen lips.  My boss, definitely not in a joking mood, said he would rather run ten marathons in normal weather than walk the mile back to the hotel in the rain.  But a sunny ultramarathon was not on the menu, so walk we did (me limping on my bad foot) in a single-minded zombie delirium for warmth.