Midaregami

I’ve been thinking seriously about going back and self-censoring a bunch of my posts, and generally trying to make things a little more professional, distasteful to me though that is.

Then I read this comic and I feel much less inclined to change one goddamn thing.

It’s time to start writing again. Rock.

Some work-related unpleasantness has, happily, evaporated. However, It left behind what could be described as a “badness vacuum,” which was filled in short order by Cyrus, The Littlest Cold Virus. Cyrus is a plucky, can-do pseudolifeform, and while I can respect that, he doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate that my sinuses are not zoned for high-pressure mucus containment.

• My bike (recently rechristened “Buster the Wonder Bike”) was nearly stolen yesterday. I was making a delivery to an industrial section of town, and there wasn’t a convenient post to lock ol’ Buster to. I locked the bike to itself and ran upstairs to make the drop, then ran back down—30, 45 seconds, at the most. When I came down, a scraggly-looking fellow was dragging my bike away, and it looked like he was about to try and ride it off. I yelled at him—something incisive and indicting like “Whoah, hey, hey!” whereupon he handed the bike back to me and shuffled off. For a minute I thought perhaps he was just trying to move the bike because it was in the way of something, but no—the gentlemen was clearly attempting to abscond with it. I say, that was dashed rude of him! Fortunately the encounter did not degenerate into fisticuffs.

• There’s a hill on my old commute to school. I say “old” because now that we’ve moved, my commute route has changed, and I no longer have occasion to ride up that particular hill, though there are others. But as serendipity would have it, yesterday I had a delivery that took me up it anyway. Now, this hill once had the unique property of matching exactly my ability to push up it—I could climb it with some strength, but I would be temporarily exhausted right at the crest, and whatever speed I had managed to carry through the climb was all I would have in the subsequent flat, because my legs were completely tapped out. But yesterday I hammered up that same incline using a significantly bigger gear than I used to use, and still had sufficient anima to accelerate to a respectible cruse upon cresting the hill. I may not be as fast as the other messengers (as the alleycat unequivocally showed) but I’m a lot faster than I used to be. Onward and upward!

This report is late; the event in question happened on July 4. I refer, of course, to the K-VIBE (Kalihi Valley Instructional Bike Exchange) Independence Day Alleycat race.

An alleycat is essentially a glorified scavenger hunt on bicycles. Participants tear through traffic to track down a variety of goals. It’s associated with messenger and single-speed culture, but all kinds of people on all kinds of bikes showed up for this one. Given the participation of local messenger speed demons like Kendall and Rice, I knew I wouldn’t be in the running for the top places, but hey—a real live bike race! Count me in.

In the middle of a bizarre allergic reaction to (apparently) air, that remains unfazed by—indeed, laughs at—my puny earth “antihistamines,” I have been unable to do much so far this weekend. Apparently, though, I found it within myself to finish off the latest ditty, number, song, what-have-you.

It is called A Strange Ostinato Echoes Across the Tharsis Bulge and Through Valles Marineris.

And to preemptively answer a question: Yes, the hand-claps were a great deal of fun to record.

Or, “The Best Shitty Job I Have Ever Had”

Thanks to Herself’s heroic efforts in the area of gainful employment and the mercifully lower rent of our awesome new apartment, I have been able to select summer employment based on the following rigorous criteria:

1. What I want to do
2. How much I want to do it

disregarding insignificant factors like

1. How much it pays

… I considered a wide variety of employment options, ranging from “working at a bike store” to “working as a bike messenger¹.” The latter eventually won. As of about two weeks ago, I am an honest-to-god bicycle courier.

And I love it.

I will read a webpage or blog or comic somewhere online and be blown away by the responsible party’s wit and talent and humor. It would totally be something that my friends would find funny, I think to myself. And then I start thinking about how much more witty and talented and fabulous this person is than I am, and I become irritated and wind up saying nothing at all.

I posted the following reminders above my desk because I can’t seem to remember this stuff to save my life.

Looks like my very first email address is gone for good…

Ah, GR2STARR. Hard to believe that was a decade ago. The DEC Alpha server that hosted that account—and on which I learned Pascal—was rumored to have 64 megabytes of memory. Sixty-Four Megabytes.

I suppose if I wanted the full computer nostalgia experience, I could install GNU Pascal and run GLTerminal full-screen. Of course, that leaves out the insanity of using VMS, but some experiences are fun only in retrospect…

• Figure Bungo
• Alpine Uncertainty
• 1500 meter Speed Rant
• Nordic Combined GarageBand Noodling
• Men’s Half Pipe Of Ambivalence and Doubt
• Short Track Quotidian Irritation Relay (on a team with me, Julia, Bianca, and Jessica)
• Curling

Poor curling. It’s always the punch line.