don't mess with the matador!

(me, victorious at facebook rps)

(The Matador is where you wave paper at your opponent, then paper again, and then: scissors!)

I think I'm going to go down and fetch my air conditioner out of my basement. Now that Stata 10 has arrived, I can use my Stata 8 manuals with abandon to hold it in place.

Update: What's that sound? Is it the hum of my just-installed air conditioner, or the fizz of my having just opened up a tall, cold can of carbonated rps whoop-ass on Sal?


(me, once again victorious at facebook rps)

Updated again: Emily, as ever, is too wily for me. My dreams of an undefeated life end:

a portrait of the blogger as a successful half-marathoner and dissatistfied customer

I am so pissed. I got this e-mail today:

90 days ago you made a smart choice by clicking "YES" to accept your ActiveAdvantage trial membership offer when you registered for an event using Active.com.

This is just a quick reminder to let you know that your 90-day trial membership has expired, and you have been extended for a full year [for $50] as stated in the original offer. You are now a part of the fastest growing program for athletes and people with active lifestyles!

We hope that you have had time to review the amazing benefits and values that you receive by being an ActiveAdvantage member, ranging from travel discounts on air, car and hotel to huge savings with big name partners including: Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Wyndham Hotel Group properties, Choice Hotels, Circuit City, Barnes and Noble, Peets Coffee, AMC, Regal/Edwards Theaters, Rewards Network and more! [...]

What I registered for was the Madison Half-Marathon, which Sal and I ran over Memorial Day weekend. There is no freaking way that I would have intentionally signed up for a "trial membership" in an organization that doesn't offer any services that I have any interest in using, so whatever it is I supposedly clicked on must have kept the cost of doing so obscured. According to the site, I received a $5-10 "free gift" for signing up. I have no idea what this is supposed to have been. Anyway, I have sent them an e-mail asking for my money back, as well as a message to the organizers of the Madison marathon expressing my displeasure about their partnering with active.com. So, what's next? Why, write a blog post telling whoever would listen to be careful with any dealings with active.com.

BTW, I guess I never posted that Sal and I successfully completed the half-marathon (Chris did the whole thing, see his post here). Here we are before the race:



We ran at a leisurely pace, and Sal had to endure me being one of the chattiest people on the course. A high point may have been the half mile or so I spent describing the 1960's Australian television show "Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo."

"So, it's like Lassie, only a wild kangaroo. The characters will go 'Skippy, what is it?' and Skippy will make this toothclicky noise and they'll say 'Colin has fallen down a well?!!' But, Skippy will also do things that Lassie can't. Like there's this one scene where it looks like Skippy is cracking open a safe using only his paws. I think that's the mile marker up ahead. So, when they do the far off shots of Skippy, they use a real wild kangaroo, but then when they use the close-in shots of the paw action, it's just this puppet. Then for some mid-range shots, I think they don't even use a kangaroo at all but instead it looks more like a wallaby. Can you imagine if they sometimes switched off Lassie with some closely related dog species? Like one moment she's a collie, the next a coyote. You're not having any problems with chafing, are you?"

driving to evanston with sal

Sal hooked in his iPod FM transmitter. The tacit arrangement became that he would control what song was played, and I would control what volume it was played at. This worked well after the tension induced by his choosing to follow Metallica's "Unforgiven," for which the volume was sharply lowered, with Metallica's "Enter Sandman."

Later:

"This has got to be one of the Top 5 all-time songs."
"Yeah. Top 5. Ever."
"Are you mocking me?"
"I do think it is a great karaoke song."
"Top 5 all-time!"
"I also agree there is something special about the lyric 'Your hair reminds me of a warm safe place where as a child I'd hide.'"
"Can you imagine a world without this song?"
"It's like the microwave oven. Once it was invented, no one could understand how they'd ever lived without it."
"Nothing brings people of different races together like this song. Everybody, everybody comes together and sings along to this song."

Songs Sal chose that resulted in the sharpest volume increases: "Rehab" by Amy Winehouse, "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson, and "Luka" by Suzanne Vega (for which I also rolled down the windows and opened the sunroof). Non-Metallica song that resulted in the sharpest reduction in volume, "I Want To Sex You Up" by Color Me Badd. There needs to be a way that you can turn down the volume far enough that sound starts to get sucked back into the speaker.

they tried to make me go to prehab, but i'm not going anywhere until i have my luggage

Assorted:

• The wordsmith.org e-mail Word Of The Day for today is "premorse," which turns out to mean "Having the end abruptly truncated, as if bitten or broken off." I was hoping it meant to have regrets about an action even before one has done it.
• Sal has sent me a couple updates from Day 1 of the Lifecycle ride, and all appears to be going well.
• I have not, on the other hand, received an update from Northwest about my luggage. I tried to call them today to ask about it before going out to meet someone. Before being connected with the agent, I was told at the beginning of the call I would be asked to do a brief customer service questionnaire at the end. I went through whatever to get the agent to find my record -- to give an example of the incompetence I was dealing with at the airport last night: despite my having filled out the form accurately in very clear capital letters, my last name was entered in the system as "Jeremy" and my address as being on "Suum" rather than "Museum" street -- and then the agent said, "The computer is being slow today." And then a minute later I got a recording saying "You are now being transferred to our customer service survey" and I was dumped out of the call and into the survey. The survey turned out to be just one general satisfaction item, but I pressed the button on my phone corresponding to "Very Dissatisfied" extra hard.
• Ron from my last post never called to clarify, despite the tease in my comments.
• Chris has posted his summer songs with its 2007 additions, with Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" leading the list. O, how I love the first line of that song ("They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said no, no, no"). I feel almost like it's reached personal anthem status, which if true would mark the most recent anthemly song I feel identified with despite having no justifiable reason to do so, displacing Kelly Clarkson's "Miss Independent."
• If I am repeatedly deleting your comments, I've concluded you are a troll. If I've concluded that you are a troll, I'd prefer you not read my blog, much less comment. I understand that I can't stop you, and I don't feel like turning off my anon comments once again just yet, but you can reflect on whether you really want to be the sort of person who hangs around a space where they aren't wanted just because you can. Presumably, I guess, given that you are a troll, you are exactly this sort of person, but still I feel like pointing that out.

don't let the sun go down on sal

Sal is still $225 away from his goal with just a few days left. He keeps bringing up this idea of going to the mall with a bucket and a bell and wondering if he would get in trouble. Don't make Sal stand outside the mall ringing a bell! He's been training hard for this and deserves to have it come through. He's working on behalf of a good cause. If you can help, it would be absolutely wonderful. I wished I believed in karma so I could make you all sorts of promises about that. Don't make me pretend like I believe in karma! I'd rather stand outside the mall with a bell!

Sal is the kind of guy who would give you a kidney if you needed one, provided you were a match and that he hadn't already given his spare kidney to someone else who reads this blog. Because of the kind of guy his is, he would still give you the kidney even if you didn't help him now, but really that's just another reasons why one ought to help him now.

Thanks of course to everyone who has given so far. Again, the page to donate is here. To my knowledge, this is the only time I have ever engaged in any kind of fundraising on my blog--and there are no plans for JFW pledge week in the future--but I do think this is a great chance to help and do very much want to see Sal succeed because I know much energy and enthusiasm he's given to this.

Update: Sal is good to go! Thank you so much to everyone who gave!

don't get me wrong...

I'm still really excited to be going to Northwestern and all, but I have to admit my enthusiasm was a teensy bit diminished when Eszter announced that it would NOT be okay if Sal and I moved into the condo next door, put on our matching robot pajamas, had perhaps a little too much to drink, and sledgehammered our way through her/our wall to create a Super Social Science Wired Hipster Thirtysomething Mega Compound/Mothership. I hate when friends are unreasonable.

wiijected

The big plan hatched on Wednesday night was to have a Nintendo Wii boxing tournament while I was back in Madison. We sent out invitations Thursday for a Sunday party--to a mixed group of people ranging from a couple who have been here thirty years to someone who's only been here three weeks--and we received 20 RSVP yeses. Only on Saturday, though, did I get around to the matter of actually trying to purchase the Wii. I had just been presumed that, where there's a will, there's a Wii, especially around here, since you can't spell "Wisconsin" without "Wii." Instead, a massive wiisearch campaign resulted in our learning there is not a single Wii for sale within 100 mile circle around Madison. Efforts to rent or borrow a Wii also proved fruitless, or at least not until after we sent out the announcement to postpone the party.

We're hoping to reschedule for Memorial Day weekend, when I'll be in Madison for the Mad City (Half) Marathon and the spring 2007 edition of the World's Largest Brat Fest.

The spring 2004 WLBF, btw, was what broke me of five years of pescatarianism (a pescatarian is someone who would be a vegetarian except they eat seafood). Many lapsed vegetarians/pescatarians have some story about being tempted by being in a group of people at a party or a picnic or someone occasion where it would be really awkward to turn down meat. Me, it was that I had to drive by the WLBF on my way to and fro work, and the afternoon of its last day I just pulled into the parking lot and had two bratwurst with mustard all by myself. Even aside from various concerns about the content of bratwurst, it's a weird food to have crush one's pescatarian will, because vegetarian faux bratwurst is a very close substitute for the real thing. (Indeed, according to the WLBF website, this year for the first time they will be serving vegetarian brats for the first time. If only they had done this three years earlier, who knows how many animals lives would have been spared the unhappy fate of being shoved down my postpescatarian gullet.)

sal promised he would sign up too. will he? stay tuned. (if you are within a few hundred miles of madison, you should sign up too.)

sal told sarah vowell about my blog

(Sal, with Sarah Vowell)

I am not sure what to do. I am panicked, like a deer in headlights, or a deer in floodlights, or a deer that has been astropulted straight toward the sun. I feel like I should be rushing around sprucing up my template, or putting up links to my better posts, or completely transforming myself into a far more compelling human being.

jfw valentine's day special!

So, there's this online service some bloggers are using where you can make a blogwidget and people can send you valentines, which you don't receive until Valentine's Day. What intrigued me about this is a separate feature they have, called the "Mutual Love Note." How it works:

A Mutual Love Note is a special type of valentine that gets revealed only when two people have sent each other a Mutual Love Note. If only one person sent a Mutual Love Note, the other will not find out about it. Your Mutual Love Note will be revealed to the recipient only if the feeling is mutual, in other words only if the recipient has also sent you a Mutual Love Note.

The unveiling of this also doesn't happen until Valentine's Day, so there are presumably there will be people hitting refresh all the way until midnight tonight hoping that the crush for whom they have a Mutual Love Note sitting in cyber-reserve will leave one for them.

When I first saw this, I thought that had the Internet existed Back in the Day, a certain weird and mournful conversation several years after high school ("You mean--you mean you'd always had a crush on me too???") might have been avoided. But then I imagined that if the service became popular, it would lead to the fear that some people out there who wanted confirmation of someone's crush on them would leave Mutual Love Notes like:

I *knew* it!  I knew you were in love with me!  How about we play
a special Valentine's Day game of Wheel of Fortune:

U N R - Q U I T - D

Do you want to buy a vowel?  I am flattered, though, sort of.

So, as with so much else, within the Internet lies great potential to create opportunities formerly blocked by asymmetries of information, but this potential comes along with whole new possibilities for mischief.

Update: Sal has signed up to get Valentines. See Sal and I in our matching robot pajamas here. Leave him a valentine or Mutual Love Note here.

now this feels like the madison i know!

I extended my supposed-to-be-brief trip to Madison through today. Which meant I got to be here for snow. Sal has been amused by my lack of patience for such modern contrivances as ice scrapers:



He's also been amused by my winter driving skills:
"We're sliding again!"
"Yeah, do you think we're going to hit that pole?"
"At least we're wearing our seatbelts."
"Hey, I forgot to put on my seatbelt!"
"I know. That was my way of saying something."
All this, and I still had time to put my seatbelt on before we stopped sliding (fortunately, short of the pole in question).

We're up on campus. Our need to work didn't mean that, on the walk from the parking lot to the building, we couldn't take a moment out to see if a stray laundry basket could be pressed into service as a sled.



Suffice it to say there are reasons sleds do not have wheels on the bottom.

(madison) my mad city pseudo-pretend-not-quite-half-marathon

So, the original reason for me being in Madison this weekend was the marathon I was supposed to be running in. I backed out, but Sal stayed in, so I was there at 7:30 at the starting line to see him off. Feel free to play Where's Saldo? with this photo from the start:


(Hint: He's the guy who is looking in the direction of the camera and waving.)

While I would have rather trained and prepared and then run, I was certainly glad that, since I hadn't adequately prepared, I wasn't running, because it was going to be WAY TOO HOT to be running a marathon (like 85+ degrees hot), and, even in better shape, I'm exactly the type who wilts in the heat.

Next time I saw Sal was about 12 miles into the marathon, when the route came by the lakeshore path down the hill from the Social Science Building:



I was wearing my running shoes anyway, since by accident they were the only shoes I packed other than my dress shoes, and I ended up running alongside Sal for awhile in jeans. The guilt of talking to this guy who had 14 miles to go in 85+ degree weather due to something I told him we should do together and then flaked out on was e-freaking-normous. Anyway, through some complicated compatriotic reasoning, I decided that I would get some shorts on and run the rest of the way with Sal. Through some sprinting, quick dressing, and arguably illegal parking, I was back beside Sal before he reached Mile 15:



Among the things in my man purse was my ridiculously large cel phone because this was such an impromptu decision that I had to make a couple calls while running to re-coordinate or re-schedule things, including telling Dorotha et al. that I wouldn't be able to take them to watch the finish (the finish line being conveniently at the site also hosting The World's Largest Brat Fest this weekend). Dorotha still came, though, and even made signs that were intended to underscore the difference in deserved praise for Sal and I:



(You might note something blue on my sign. It's a sticker. Why did I warrant a sticker? The sticker is a blue star with one of the points torn off. Says Dorotha: "I've been wondering what I would ever do with this torn and ugly sticker, and then I got the chance to make a sign for you.")

Most of what I seemed to regard as "Sal support" as we ran seemed to comprise providing incessant commentary, taking water and stuff from volunteers just like a legitimate participant (thanks especially to the guy handing out Fla.Vor.Ice), and shouting to spectators to cheer for Sal, even if this meant sometimes claiming he had various ties to the TV show "American Idol." I was surprised at the number of people in the latter half of the race who had brought cowbells; every single one of these people had guy with a man purse yell at them, "More cowbell! More cowbell for Sal!"

If I had thought of myself as being able to do a half marathon, much less a half marathon carrying a man purse on an unseasonably warm day, I would have entered the half marathon. So, not surprisingly perhaps, the Jeremy tank ran empty about a half mile from the finish and I told Sal (and Julieta, who ran the last 2-3 miles with us in regular--stylish, even--clothes) to go ahead. I was, however, able to regroup. My original plan was to duck out right before the finish since I didn't deserve to finish (since I hadn't, you know, started). But by the point I actually reached it, I had swung around the rationalization that since the half-marathoners used the same finish line, I was willing to take the karma hit for crossing. As you can see, by the time I did finish, I certainly looked like I had been through something quite trying:


(I think all you need to know about how shockingly unphotogenic I am is that this is by no means then unflattering photo of me in existence.)

Of course, Sal and I got some photos together as well. If you want to know why I wasn't doing the whole marathon, you need look no further than the creeping-paunchiness evident here:



Sal now wants us to do the Chicago marathon in the Fall. The idea being I would actually run this one all the way from start to finish, so we could get a photo with both of us wearing medals.

go, dog. go!

Sal talked me into signing up for this marathon in Madison on May 28th. My original plan was to have a special T-shirt made for it, that on the front said "Where's Sal?", perhaps with a photo, and on the back said, "If you can read this, either (a) you're not Sal or (b) the race has just started." Since then, Sal has been reading running books and training religiously, while I have been writing short short fiction and stewing about health policy. So now, I've reverted back to the same official goals I had back for the half marathon I did in November: I would like to finish it without either (a) having to stop or (b) losing control of any of my bodily functions. (And, in case there is any ambiguity, if I fail at [b], I will also immediately and willfully fail at [a].) After using the winter as an excuse for far too long, I've run my standard (6-mile) loop three times this week, and my basic proximate goal between now and then end of March is to get to the point in which running that was about as easy as it was for me this past fall when I was running regularly and feeling asymptotically immortal.