Yes, I’m crap for posting lately. I’m working like crazy, ducking a crazy insurance lady, trying to get my back healed so I don’t have to get an MRI, and planning on doing a 25-mile ride Sunday (a short part of the Portland Century). I hope, soon, to have something to say.
In the meantime, I’ve got plenty to say about the state of the arts. Here are links to 2 reviews that just came out today:
Book: Shorts Are Wrong by Mike Topp
So you may have noticed (or not) that I’ve studiously avoided the question of whether or not I continued with the bike race. I was on the fence for a while, but I eventually decided it wasn’t going to happen. Or, if it did, that I wasn’t going to enjoy it.
Dropping out isn’t something that I take lightly. Not only am I generally driven to completion and success, but I’ve also got juuuuuuuust enough OCD to make me incredibly uncomfortable with leaving things undone.
That said, over the last few years I’ve been working on cultivating a bit more of an “if you love it, set it free” approach.
Meaning, if I don’t finish it and it never gets done, maybe it’s for the best. Or if I leave it for a bit and end up coming back to it in one way or another, then we’ll all be better for the time off and redirected approach.
By “we all,” I include four-fingered hand-knit gloves, half-written novels, grad school, and bike races, of course.
Finishing something just for the sake of finishing it it pretty ridiculous, and a little too big-corporate for where my head is going these days. If there’s no joy in the process, then the product has profoundly less value.
To take this out of the editorial section of Philosophy for Dummies and bring it around to reality, I realized that I wasn’t enjoying the bike rides. I mean, I WAS enjoying the bike rides, I just wasn’t enjoying everything that went along with them. The long hours of practice, the rides that were about distance, not the experience, and the feeling that I was somehow “less” if I didn’t have a bike that I could quote the stats on, or if I didn’t have a bike computer that could tell me specific miles traveled, or I wasn’t wearing the right amount and kind of Lycra… The people on the bike team were (and are!) incredibly nice, good people. But they wanted something different than I did, and it took me a while to figure that out.
And thus, the 2007 century ride became yet something else I’ve dropped out of.
I’m still riding my bike, and trying to go new distances and give myself new challenges. But I want my rides to be about the rides themselves–seeing new scenery, feeling the wind across my shoulders, zipping over hills and slowing down as I feel like it.
Tomorrow is the Bridge Pedal, a yearly event where they close all of Portland’s bridges to traffic for a few hours and you get to bike over them. It’s incredibly cool to ride over these monsters that you’re usually traversing at 55 mph or more and actually SEE things. Last year, we rode 8 of the 10 bridges. This year, we’ll probably do the same, though I’m gunning for the full, 10-bridge ride.
But either way, we’re going to ride at the pace that works for us, and stop and look out over the bridges from time to time, and it’s going to be a blast. THAT’s the kind of bike riding I want to be doing these days. Not some crazy Bataan Death Bike that has me cursing everything around me.
So that’s what I’m doing, damn it.
And I feel so much better for it, I know it’s the right choice.
I tend to pay attention to my health in spurts.
I’ll ignore it for a very long time and then something will get me into the doctor’s office and I’ll realize, “Well my goodness. Maybe I should I mention these other chronic issues I’ve been sublimating, what with me being here and all, and having already paid my insurance company’s outrageous co-pay.”
So I’ve been working through my back issue, and because I just looooooooove having people in white coats and/or cool-spectrum scrubs poke and prod around in my personal space, I also brought up to my doctor that I’ve had some shortness of breath issues.
Many posts ago, I mentioned that I heart my doctor (the first time I’ve liked a doctor since Dr. Elmer Groff, RIP, my childhood family practitioner) because she actually listens to her patients and tries to solve their issues. I never realized that this would be a trait you’d actually have to seek out in a physician, but apparently it doesn’t just come with the stethoscope.
This difficulty breathing thing (just feels like my lungs can’t quite fill up, and it makes people around me think I sigh loudly just to get attention) has been an intermittent issue for a couple of years now, and previous doctors have listened to my chest, patted me on the back and said it’s probably just tension.
I would then be grateful that, while they didn’t help me solve my problem, they also didn’t tell me I seemed “hysterical” and try to remove my uterus.
Dr. Pam, however, said it might be mild asthma and we should do some tests to be sure. Yes, she may just have a buddy in the lab who she wants to see get paid a little more…but it could actually be that she is trying to do her job. A novel concept in today’s world of medical fast food.
I did a little reading online, and remembered some stuff I’d found the last time I had this issue…I’ve got mild adult-onset allergies….never been allergic to anything in my life, until I hit my thirties and suddenly was allergic to grass, dust, feathers…basically all the things you see peppering the landscape in a Claritin commercial. Folks who have this issue are also more likely to develop asthma.
Rockin’.
So. On Friday morning I went out to the west suburbs of Portland during morning rush hour, to take a pulmonary function test. I was ushered into a small room by my technician Randy, who struck me as a bit of a cross between the dad from Empty Nest (age and eyebrows) and Steve Zahn (voice). Randy explained to me that I’d be taking all of these tests (which would last an hour) from inside the plastic box that sat across the room.
I’m pretty sure Houdini used to practice in boxes like this.
But they’d adapted it for medical use, with tubes and hoses, valves and barometers sticking out of it. And in the center, a small wooden chair.
The tests all involved me wrapping my mouth around a rather vulgar mouthpiece and breathing in and out–sometimes with air available and sometimes not. The first test required closing the door on the little plastic box and having my body heat warm up the cage before we could start. So that during the test, I had the distinct pleasure of puffing into a tube and praying not to discover I’m also claustrophobic, but I was also sweating through my shirt.
For many parts of the test, we had to wait a period of minutes between them, either for the machine to recalibrate, or for my lungs to do so. After a few awkward minutes, Randy and I tried to chat about home ownership and the merits of getting a fixer-upper. but I kept seeing Steve Zahn in Sahara whenever he spoke, and I didn’t want to distract him from his work.
In the end, I think my lung function was normal — which pisses me off, because while it means I’m healthy, it also means there’s still no answer. I guess I’ll know in a few days when it all comes back. But I did get to leave with a hyperventilation headache that really hasn’t gone away, well over 36 hours later.
Ah, science.
So I’ve been offline for a while.
Between getting married, trying to remember to do thank-you notes to everyone and their brother, staying on top of a job that entered its “busy time” a month earlier than last year, and remembering to actually spend time with and relish the company of this fellow who just signed on to be Mr. Temple, why, I’ve been a busy little bee.
I’ve taken my exhaustedness out on the interwebs…not fucking around online and checking out weird sites, or checking out obscure reviews and blogs…barely even reading the news feeds I’m a little geeky about from time to time. Let alone actually posting on a blog. It all just seemed “too much,” like the online world was just too broad and expansive and dipping into it even slightly would ruin me for good. I’dsit in my chair, make an attempt to dive into my screen and see what piqued my interest…and I’d be uncomfortable in only a matter of seconds, shifting in my seat and aching to be anywhere else.
So I’ve been reading a lot of magazines, touching the hard edges of books in stores, playing Scrabble and relishing the hard edges of the wooden tiles, and biding my time until I felt I could come back.
We might be there now. The weather today turned a bit cooler and I realized that my online malaise might actually have nothing to do with the intertubes.
We don’t have air conditioning, and what with it being the middle of summer, there have been some warm and sticky days. It’s come to my attention that my home computer sits in a decidedly unventilated corner of the room and it’s just really too uncomfortable to web-surf and sweat.
With a little cloud cover and temps in the 70s, this evening is a web junkie’s paradise. Soon we’ll all be wearing sweaters and my posts will be a mile long.
Of course, it’s August…so we probably shouldn’t hold our collective breath. One more heat snap like the one we had a few weeks ago, and I’ll be forsaking the web in order to leaf through a newspaper in the freezer aisle of the grocery store.
