I'm sitting on the couch with my housemate on Thursday night, telling her about some article I was reading on the internet and she says, "Man, you're really getting slower." In my head I'm thinking, "How did you KNOW? Do I look fat???" I mean, I should--the work to bike ratio for the last two weeks has been approximately 7:1--but it's unlikely, and I'm pretty sure my plummeting LT isn't visible to the naked eye.
I guess I'm not visibly fatter...
"You can't talk straight. It took you about eight tries to spit out what you were trying to say." she says.
As an engineer, communicating with things that speak languages with names not written in all caps (COMPASS, SQL, MIPS, TASM) has always been challenging, but after being introduced to books a couple of years ago, I thought I was getting pretty good at it; not to mention that my housemate is an engineer too, so if I accidentally slip and say LD r1, 135; LD r2, 15; ADC r1, r2; she'll reply, "150" without missing a beat. If, despite our mutual multilinguality, my housemate thinks my verbal communications skills are regressing to those of a street-performer in an imaginary glass box, there's clearly a problem. So much for all that hard work...
Clearly I'm stressing myself out about graduate school, and what better solution to your brain being tied in knots than a 25deg F mountain bike adventure with not one, but two high energy physicists? (Eric, and our friend Greg) It's like Christmas for wannabe athledorks (TM). Heck, after two weeks of sitting in front of a CRT, it was like Christmas, my birthday, and losing my virginity all at once, complete with
the excess packaging,
dismay with regard to my waning fitness
and awkward fumbling around with parts that weren't quite working the way I expected, respectively.Long story short, my headspace is all sorted-- Remember balance, right?-- and unlike our pavement riding buddies, we didn't get any frostbite, though we did add to our list of busted parts for the season with my shattered chain keeper. Plastic seems somewhat more brittle in arctic conditions...
Cross racing on Sunday!!
[EDIT: 10 pedal points to anyone who can guess where I got the title of this post from. What do pedal points buy you? Nothing, except for pride, or majority ownership in any one of a number of once mighty American corporations and financial institutions. Ugh...]
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7 comments:
Center for High Energy Metaphysics (H.E.M.P.), also known as the Harvard Hippie House. When I lived there long ago, we regularly had people buzzing our doorbells looking for pamphlets and asking whether there were any scheduled lectures.
That's 10 points! (I bet you told them the lectures were are all online)
Oh, I was trying to figure out what the initials stood for... CHEMP didn't make much sense.
Which lab did Dr. Venkman work for in Ghostbusters? Was it a parapsych lab or metaphysics?
We're plasma physicists, not high energy physicists!!!
To Loomis: A Parapsych professor, in fact. and for only £3,200, you can be on your way to being one too.
To Greg: Last time I checked plasma was pretty high energy. You'll have to take your beef up with the other manager.
This wass a lovely blog post
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