What’s interesting, though, is the speed I rode at today. After 2 months away from biking and generally not being all that active, I not only broke my time and speed records in both directions, but I broke my outbound by 10%, which I feel significant. My previous best had been a about 52 minutes, and today I rode it in 47. My average speed beat my old average speed by almost 2 miles an hour.

My ride back wasn’t so impressive, and although I beat my previous best by about 2 minutes, I think it was likely because of extreme luck in stoplights. I barely hit any.

I have noticed a theme with physical activity for myself. Any time I take about 1-2 months off of doing something, I usually get a small window of really high performance right when I start doing it again. This has been true of most of the stuff that I’ve tracked; fencing, lifting, and now biking. Running seems to be the exception, but I feel like my biggest foe running is mental: not exhaustion, but boredom. I get really bored running, and it takes me awhile of doing it to find the zen ability to let my mind drift and THINK about things to keep myself from getting so bored running that I stop.

I find when I am doing any long-time-frame (anything over about 20 minutes) solo physical activity, the only way that I can continue to do it is to find some kind of balance between pain and boredom. Pain I can deal with, boredom I can deal with, but apparently I can’t or won’t deal with being bored and in pain. (I’m good at differentiating between healthy working pain and you’re injuring yourself pain, so to protective friends and family: I am not, and never will, hurt myself or try and “tough it out” through injurious pain.) If I’m gasping for breath, and my legs are getting tired, and I’m bored, not only will I likely quit, I likely won’t come back to it.

This is one definite reason I’ve always been better at team sports. One of the things I’ve noticed on my bike commute is that when I get passed, I can outperform my normal best easily and without much mental sacrifice just staying close on the tail of whoever passed me. Competing, even at the same thing that bores me without just a hint of competition, keeps me entertained.

It’s all very odd.

Then, I went to the store for cream, bagels, and bacon to make myself a breakfast sandwich. When I was creating my sandwich, and toasting the bread in the oven, I wondered why the butter wasn’t absorbing into the bagel, but was simply running off and seasoning my pizza stone. Then I realized that the butter has to melt BEFORE the bread gets toasted, which won’t happen when you use cold butter from the refrigerator. So, next time, I need to remember to set the butter out before I go get the bacon. I’m fairly certain everyone else knew this, but I just figured it out this morning. Also, using taco seasoning in your eggs on a bacon breakfast sandwich is as tasty as it is with an omelet breakfast sandwich.

I just now discovered that most of the time, when I type “butter”, I type it as “buttor” and have to back up and replace it.

I discovered that my EEEtop that I use as a media server can handle it when I send data to it from BOTH of my other boxes (I’m backing up my entire DVD collection), which is odd because it often loses network connection under normal circumstances (I need to find a better media-server.) I still haven’t figured out why.

Finally, I was reminded that I love wordpress, but I still wish they didn’t need so many damn updates. Every time I log in, it seems like there is a new version of wordpress available. Sigh.

Still…it’s been a good morning. :-)

Here’s your chance.

Incidentally, the riesling spätlesse that I bought on saturday has a decidedly peachy flavor that I only noticed now, but not at the tasting.

Anyway. pursuant to the above flight of fancy, my imaginary counterpart of myself gets irritated, rolls his eyes, and mocks the gay jokes. My co-workers, no doubt mere maligning shadows of their actual selves, respond in a manner paraphrased adequately as, “light up, dude, it’s just a joke.”

Now, I have, over the past..mm…5-6 year or so, lost some of my sense of humor, especially or, hopefully, exclusively when dealing with people I don’t know. So I asked myself….what is the big deal? Why am I making such a big deal out of gay jokes, even in stupidly pointless near-future fictions that I’m telling myself to pass the time?

As I opened and poured the wine, the answer came to me. The reason that it’s worth posting is mainly because this isn’t the first time that this question has bothered me, but I’ve never managed to come up with a response that I felt was adequate. I think many of you, dear readers, especially those of you who think for a living (my academic acquaintances, associates, allies, advisory friends), will have had this revelation long ago and wonder why I’ve spent all this time building it up. Chalk it up to wireless, wine, and winded mind. Anyway, the revelation, the deep thought, was this: that humor that understands is funny. Humor that the listener believes** to be based in ignorance is not. This is why I usually get annoyed or even offended when most of the folks I know from the Air Force community make gay jokes…they rarely show any understanding of the gay folks that I’ve known. Further, reinforcing this belief of mine, they often make serious references to show that they do not understand the truth of the matter, but are operating out of fear or ignorance.

As an example, it’s why when Chris Rock or Dave Chapelle make a joke about blacks, it’s usually pretty funny to most of it. Their humor seems to convey understanding, even when it is a harsh or satirical humor that exposes or questions even as it entertains. It’s why people inside of a group are more able to make jokes at that groups expense…their audience will feel, rightly or wrongly, that their joke is based on understanding and truth. Conversely,*** when people like George Allen or Rush Limbaugh (or, really, any republican) make a joke about black people, it comes off as in poor taste at best, and deeply racist at worst.

Back to the original fiction. Despite the fact that I believe that I’m right in this, I may not be giving my peers from work the benefit of the doubt. If their understanding is greater than I suppose, than I am guilty of having no sense of humor. Which, these days, seems likely.

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*…by which I mean pulling yesterday’s pork out of the fridge and putting it on a plate for the purposes of consumption.

**I wanted to use “knows” here, but it wouldn’t be accurate enough. It’s why the cultist cannot see the humor when his cult is mocked, or the nationalist her nation, or the starry eyed lovers their childish romance. The truth and fact of the matter, objectively or subjectively, don’t matter. Only the audience’s perception of it, individually.

***Ok, is that the right usage? My logic usage of conversely, inversely, etc., has never been accurate.

For coding, this is an essential concept. It allows you to abstract a whole idea into a single word.

Now, this sort of thing is almost as useful in human to human communication as it is to human-computer communication. However, because of the (approximately) 500,000 EXISTING words, at least in English, there are those that frown upon taking this action.

I think that, especially in written communication, preventing this kind of thing is silly. Even if it does mean you redefine some things, in the end it makes for more efficient and enjoyable communication.

The fun part about this is I’m only writing this post in order to be able to reference it when I define some words in my next post. :-)

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* This isn’t apparently a word. I hope you’ll recognize the irony.

Nature is crazy and whacked out. But it works. And we know a lot about how it works. What is the religious explanation for this? I’m actually quite curious…I can’t come up with anything that makes any sense from a religious perspective.

So, I jokingly started calling myself a liberaltarian. This was about 4 weeks ago.

Today, I see this.

Sadly, my “new” idea is about 2 years old. LMAO.

I’m always a day (year) late on these things. If I’d been 4 years older, I would’ve made some bank in the dot com era. ;-)

Very well done, in layman’s terms, but really tells you how and why this happened.

Oh yeah…you can lay this one squarely at the feet of the Bush administration as well, although it did begin in the last year of Clinton.

But it looks like we didn’t pick up minnestota, oregon, georgia, or alaska. At least two of those should’ve been solid blue. We didn’t take out shadegg, we didn’t take out bachmann, we didn’t take out McConnell.

THe only thing I can think of is that we’re the victim of people thinking it was a done contest and not getting out and voting. That’s the only thing I can imagine.

So it’s a win…but it’s not a grinding, decisive, run up the score win. And that’s kinda sad.