Who Died and Made You Suck?

Its official.  Someone here at Anderson University does not have a sense of humor.  Being a math guy, I posted several SMBC comics to my door, including this one, because its roughly the greatest thing ever.  That comic lasted three days.  I put it up on Friday and now I come in to the office on Tuesday morning and find that someone has taken the liberty of taking it down without even having the decency to talk to me about it.  I almost hope someone comes to give me a stern talking to so I can roll my eyes at them.  Boo on unnecessary censorship.

I hate to say I'm starting again

Saturday, it was 43 degrees and raining.  It was definitely fall weather, but one of those days where you want to stay inside underneath a blanket with a book and just wish it was still summer.  Instead, I was out running a half-marathon with some pretty shaky training.  It didn't get off to a great start as I was struggling a little early and my shin was acting up which was new.  Thankfully though, I was able to fall in line right with the pacer for the 3:15 marathon time and that kept me right around 7:30 miles.  Other than a few zipper issues with my jacket, things went fine until I hit the hill at mile ten that Krista and I had joked about.  That hill sucked the life out of me and I started to fade.  Thankfully though, the end was a few short miles away and once I hit mile twelve I was able to put a little more oomph in my stride and finished in 1:38:18, which is a little slower than I would have liked, but given the conditions and my mindset, I'll definitely take it.  I did get beat though by an eleven year old though, which is kind of a kick in the nuts.

After I finished the race and got some food and a space blanket, I went to go look for Krista.  I wandered down to the last turn, roughly a quarter mile before the finish.  I got there at around the 1:55 mark figuring that I'd see her come by in the next couple of minutes.  By the time it got past 2:20, I started getting a little worried that Krista was hurt, nevermind the fact that I was freezing my ass off.  I decided to head back to the finish area where they had a few fires going to warm up.  Right as I get back to the area, the first person I run into is Krista who decided to be all awesome and finish in 1:55, easily a p.r. for her.  We had ended up missing each other by a matter of seconds when I first went to look for her.  After that, it was off for a burger in a tent filled with stinky runners followed by a drive home and a much needed hot bath.

Yeah, the weather made the run fairly miserable and my lack of training certainly didn't help because I would've been screwed without the pacer.  Neither of those things bode well for future half-marathons.  I'd like to say I'm smart enough to take this as a sign, but I've already signed up for my next one and will be running the Indy Mini in May.  I expect that will be quite the experience since there's about 14000 people running it and it finished on the track of the Indianapolis 500.  I have six months to train properly and see if I can't knock a couple of minutes off of my finish time.

I'm working out, I'm eating right, I'm living well

Local H lyrics to title the post in honor of the band splitting in half.  Admittedly, that's not hard when its a two man band, but I'm sad to see Brian go as I loved the fact that he's an animal-style drummer.  The title isn't even all that accurate.  Outside of training for next week's half, I'm not working out.  I'm definitely not eating right based on the fact that I just went through a batch of peanut butter no bakes with chocolate drizzle in about three days.  I am however living well.  If you're reading this, I wish you lived closer, but other than that I have no complaints about my life.

I've decided I need to stop posting the status "First time doing yoga in forever" to facebook since I only do yoga about once every six weeks now.  I probably would've even skipped Thursday's session, except my hamstring has been screaming at me, which is really bad news a week before a race.  I need to make sure I get another session in tomorrow night and probably a couple of more in the next week.  My running has been off lately because of my cold from the last two weeks, but there's not much left I can do about that except get healthy.  I did get a ten miler in today in under eight minute miles so that's encouraging.  I'm still hoping for my pace to be around 7:20, but I won't be overly upset if its closer to 7:40.  Eight minute miles would be really disappointing however.  I don't know what it is with Anderson, but I still occasionally get a few people who yell "Run Forrest, Run!" at me when I run by.  Most people are pretty cool and several actually encourage me, but I still end up with those jackasses who don't realize that what they're saying hasn't been funny since 2000.  Its just a good way of outing yourself of being incapable of running a mile.

Besides this morning's run, I've spent most of the day cleaning.  This weekend has been a perfect storm for cleaning seeing as how I've needed to clean for the last several weeks along with Iowa having a bye week, MSU playing Indiana and the Giants playing on Thursday.  So far, I've knocked out both bathrooms, most of the kitchen and five loads of laundry.  I still have a little bit of prep work to do for school and the living room to clean, but I'm definitely happy with what I've accomplished so far.  Time to get back to it.

Today's reminder not to complain came from one of my students, a normal 18-20 year old girl.  She wrote me an email in which she apologized for missing class BECAUSE HER PACEMAKER WAS MALFUNCTIONING.  I'm sure its a very scary situation, but her email was very cool and collected like it was no big deal.  I take back everything I have complained about in the last month and apologize for complaining in the first place.  My bad.

You are everything I want 'cause you are everything I'm not.

Okay, I really should be finishing up grading Finite exams, but I don't want to do that because I've been doing for the past three hours and there's still a couple of hours left.  Going through it can be a little disheartening because its low level math and some students struggle with it greatly.  I appreciate a lot of them because the lower levels normally include the hardest workers and I truly love their drive and I want them to know that I will do all I can to help them, but still, this is stuff that shouldn't be that hard.

What I really wanted to talk about was spontaneity.  From my online dating experiences, I've found that most women really appreciate spontaneity and that got me to thinking if I actually was spontaneous.  There was the road trip up to Toronto with LDub, but that was back in undergrad.  Besides, is there total off-the-cuff stuff that I just throw myself into? Probably not, but that's not necessarily the best way to go about it.  My Gatlinburg trip two months ago wasn't a spur of the moment thing, but my decision to do it was; I just then spent the next month or so figuring out all the logistics of doing it cheaply, so you know what, I'm counting it, especially since this may lead to a ritual of traveling somewhere for hiking.  In fact, I just picked up an extra session of Finite for the spring to fund next May's trip to go stomping (very gently because it might kill me) all over the Southwest.  So yeah, I'm considering myself spontaneous, but very much in a poor grad school way.

If you're wondering what the title has to do with this post, the answer is absolutely nothing.  I just wanted a break and 'Makedamnsure' was what was playing so I took that.  How's that for spontaneity? Yeah, its pretty bad, I know.  Whatever.

But Cohesing Is Possible If We Strive

Its been two weeks since I've posted.  Sorry about that, but life just got busy and with the rest of the week ahead looking like more 10 hour work days due to the first round of exams, I decided I needed to be deliberate about posting. 

About two weeks ago, Krista and I went out to Purdue to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson speak and while he essentially turned it into "The Neil deGrasse Tyson variety hour" instead of talking about anything new, it was still a good time.  In fact, its better he probably didn't go into any research because it would've been over my head in about five minutes.  It was quite refreshing to see his support for the liberal arts while still acknowledging that if we want to solve the economy's problems, we mostly need to focus on the sciences.  It was very pragmatic and fairly easily applicable and everything I would've said if I was more eloquent and roughly a million times smarter.  I mean, the man does outrank me in honorary doctorates by a score of roughly 20 to 0. 

The interesting thing for me to watch though was how much some people really got into the rift of science vs. religion during the Q and A session.  Dr. Tyson himself is a skeptic but the viewpoints he expressed seemed to align more with willfully ignorant agnosticism.  Many of his supporters though strongly supported skepticism or straight out atheism and were eager to jeer those who did support religion.  This confounds me because there is no natural rift between science and religion.  Science is there to explain the natural while religion deals with the supernatural.  A strong rejection of one usually comes from a lack of understanding of it while placing too much reliance on the other.  It is a failure to recognize the legitimacy of both science and religion that causes this confusion and contempt against each other.