the Daily Grind: January 2004 Archives
Fairly typical a morning and brilliantly blue-skyed, though the layer of ice over the car porch, cracked by an uneven freeze and dry as the crisp air, said plenty about the temperature outside. Turned on the jets, upped the temperature and jacked off in the shower after weeks of self-neglect, then packed, headed out, and waited for a bus. The bus came. Got on, got off, slumped into a seat aboard a train and watched jaded morning-people while listening to Beck's impassioned Lonesome Tears. Fell out at Vauxhall. Waited for the tube; the tube came. Got on, got off, jogged up the escalator and came out onto the Euston Road. Walked towards King's Cross to find a train to Cambridge, but took a planned detour to the British Library, along the way, to see an exhibition I've wanted to catch for a while, featuring, as it does, Zhao Yannian's graphic-novel-like lianhuanhua ("linked serial pictures"), The Biography of Ah Q; really something else. Got back, caught a movie, solo, at the last minute - Lost in Translation, finally - and sat down here to type this.
Last night, was a little less ordinary, courtesy of Matt; after a rather fine dinner at The Real Greek - I warmly recommend this one to gourmands and sitiophobes alike - we landed at The Circus Space, where he dabbles in body slinging, to watch a variety of performances in the circus arts. I enjoyed almost everything, to a greater or lesser extent, from the exciting acrobatics to the more static pieces involving strength, coordination, and a keener sense of balance than I'll ever have. I don't think that any of the performers were professionals, which was rather impressive, if not inspiring outright. Yet something else to try, though the abilities of the utterly captivating contortionist will forever be out of my reach, accidents notwithstanding.
Afterwards, we went in search of an artery.
Between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, I might well have eaten my body-weight in food. Jon, wherever you are, I love you, but you're evil and I never want you to visit me again. Unless you bring brownies.
I'm currently cooling off over a glass of salt water, having arrived back from the gym a short while ago. In order to prevent my knee injury from flaring up between now and the marathon, I've begun running short four to five mile distances on the mill as often as possible in order to condition my tissues (advice from the physio I saw on Friday afternoon) without subjecting them to longer runs on the tarmac, which isn't easy on the joints and pretty much all I'd been doing to them previously.
Indoors boring? Well, actually no; tonight was the most fun I've ever had on a treadmill; having pulled a bunch of fun and energising tracks - geared towards putting me on the moon or higher - from my recently fortified iTunes library (a big thank you to my dearest patron of the arts), dullsville was just not going to be on my list of destinations.
It felt great, actually to the point that I lost track of time and ran for much longer than I'd intended (oops), at a higher intensity (oops), and at full incline (to add to the pleasure of the pain, no oops, it was highly erotic). By the time I stepped off the treads, the litre of water that I drank was pretty much apparent on my clothes; my tank had become a second skin, my lycra felt downright saucy. Straight boy drops his dumbell, grins at me and says, "Looks like you've been having fun!"
"Yeah, pretty intense, that..."
He pauses to notice a great big bruise at the top of my left shoulder, pulls a sly expression and motions towards it with his chin,
"At least some of us have been getting some!"
"Huh... yeah!" ...and away my eyes roll.
Of course, I'm too innocent to know what he was talking about, but it made me chuckle all the same. I'm bushed; time to wash the layer of homegrown sandpaper off my face and back, and crash. There are days when you just know you're going to sleep like a baby.
A few metres from where I'm sat is a girl, most likely a Cambridge undergrad., judging from the orgillous drone of wordy and slightly comical psychobabble of a not-so-great-philosopher in the making. I could be mistaken; not about her being a student, she's quite clearly cast of the mould, but of her potential; if she can get around talking about the things she mistakenly thinks her audience will be interested in (her comrade is glazed over, just look at him) when clearly not informed enough to make the rather terminal observations that she is, she might very well get somewhere.
Ack. I take it back; she descends steeply...
"I think that rationalists are taking away from nature in denying its obvious divinity." She's a hardened creationist. Also a bible quoter. While I'm not a proponent of blind faith, I care little about what people choose to believe in provided they don't make a point of forcing their logic, particularly the unprovable, upon others. She's explaining the flaws of evolutionary theory now; natural selection is not possible because there's no way that a random process could give rise to the kinds of adaptations that we see in nature. Further, the laws of physics state (I can only assume that she's referring to the second law of thermodynamics) that disordered states are more probable than ordered ones, and that there can be no rational explanation for our [ordered] existence when there's nothing there to drive the unfavourable coalescence of energy into living systems.
Bleh. First off, I think that the ascription of the divine to nature is far worse a thing than 'denying its divinity'; nature isn't miraculous, it's better than that; it is brilliant, wonderful and inspiring in its complex diversity, and putting it all down to supernatural intervention diminishes its awful splendour. As for her treatment of Darwinism, sorry sister, but natural selection is not random; the mutations that drive it occur spontaneously, and yes, randomly, but selection itself is about as stringent and non-random a process as you can get; it's only the beasties with greater developmental advantages that survive and reproduce most successfully in the long run.
As for Law Thermodynamicus No. 2, Madame, I offer you... the sun. The ball of fusing hydrogen, that is, not the newspaper; the latter would very well demand divine intervention to do anything more than irritate.
The Cambridge-London route always has something interesting to offer.
In other news, I bumped into someone special on Portobello Road today; she stopped to ask me for directions to Ledbury Road (Notting Hill), and as we parted, I exclaimed, "Hey, you look just like Maggie Gyllenhaal!"
"I am!" came her smiley reply. Bloody obvious too.
Cue the broad, embarassed grin, "Oh, right!"
I turned and walked away a bit giggly. Stairs, you big idiot. Still, a nice coincidence in light of the last post.
The festive season officially ends for me with the passing of this weekend; yes, most people have been working since Boxing Day, but life in academia occasionally has its plus points, and this has been one of them. Ultimately, it is all up to me; last year I took just a couple of days around Christmas and the new year, but this time round I felt like a proper holiday. It has been... refreshing.
This evening, I got just a little bit pissed (UK - inebriated, not angry) in a couple of bars around Soho with a chap who has, for years, been like a brother to me. Fun; cocktails and breezers. Avoided the mistletoe in the bar. Close call. You'd understand had you been there. Still pissed; I had wine with the fillet I just cooked. Steak before bed. Lunacy.
Tomorrow, dinner with a friend, most probably, and when we part company, I'm expected to go dancing at a club, Heaven, which I haven't been to in bloody ages. I'm hesitant, because it's not always the friendliest of places and I certainly never know anyone there anymore, but the music is usually alright and, running and mad sex aside, dancing is a great way to let off steam while having fun. There's the appeal. Sunday, finally, back to Cambridge.
Right, off to bed; there won't be much time for sleep tomorrow. Oh, and now that 2003, a rather wonderful year bar certain personal issues, is out of the way, I have statistics for the first nine months of my life... the raw data is even more fun. Mmm, street-cred zeroed.
~ the year in numbers ~
