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I took the “Coastal Starlight” train back to Chico from San Jose, and for once it got me home on time.

Right before leaving my mom’s house, my brother and I recorded this version of The Magnetic Fields’ song I Think I Need A New Heart. Enjoy!

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I’m in Los Gatos this week for Christmas with family, and I’ve been playing around with my mom’s DSLR. Here are some photos I don’t hate, and more can be found on my flickr.

My grandmother is always always rubbing her eyes.

Here I am with my brother, after giving him a copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a wonderful book that contains this awesome chart.

For fun, he & I recorded a cover of Safe Travels by Peter and the Wolf.

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Apparently I’ve started collecting red robots.

I’ll be hopping on a train Sunday night and getting back to Chico in the wee hours of Monday morning, back to work, and back to school in a month. This has been a nice mini-vacation so far.

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Yesterday was my twenty-first birthday, but that happens to lots of people. I went for a cruelly cold bike ride up Humboldt in the morning that featured rain, wind, sleet, and adventure. I had a nice day at work. I went out to dinner with a handful of friends. I went to a bar and drank drinks.

Today my friend Diana finished college, and I’m much prouder of her for working so hard than I am of myself for getting so old. There was a dinner tonight in her honor, and it was really pleasant.

After the meal had settled deeply into our stomachs and several friends had made their ways home (and elsewhere), I sat down and read my friend Quinn’s copy of Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End. I really liked it, and it has motivated me to try writing poetry again.

In the warm and social spirit of the past two evenings, and as another way to make myself write more, I’ve decided to start a poetry gang. I want to write lots and sort through the chaff with friends. I want red faces drinking red wine and sharing sonnets. I want this winter to get warmer at night.

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My brother says it’s started snowing in Portland so I looked out the window, and by “window” I mean internet. I saw that it was true. I almost miss all that whiteness.

Which reminded me of all the super sweet white bikes I’ve seen on Flickr recently, all of them hand-built in Oregon.

• First off, a perfectly photographed albino travel/touring rig built by Aaron Hayes of Courage Bicycles.
• Another white touring bike, this one features some really nice matching fenders and is built bySignal Cycles.
• Then there’s this beauty from Pereira Cycles, a slick single speed winter trainer.

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I was a compulsive liar when I was little.

There’s a very clear memory I have, which is kind of an oddity in itself, of preparing to lie to my mom. I’m sitting on the back stairs that lead toward the kitchen from the second floor of our old house in New Jersey. I can’t remember how old I was, or what I felt I needed to lie about, but I can remember how I went about crafting my forgery.

I imagined I was watching a movie of the lie unfolding. I could see myself lying to my mom in different ways, and her responding with varying credulousness. I imagined alternate ways to frame the lie, and multiple methods of delivery. I even went so far as to try to guess the phrasing of her responses. I would try to discover the most realistic and graceful way of pulling one over, the way of lying that most resembled “the way things really happen”.

(This is one of my earliest memories of the idea of an impassable division between myself and the rest of the world. While I was certain that I had free will {or that at least from my perspective it was a fitting idea} I was sure that everything else in the world happened the way it did just because that’s how things happen. Sure, everyone else experienced the same sensations of free will and choice, but however they acted still fit into my understanding of the way things work.)

Yet despite many moments spent perfecting my spurious parlance, my lies often fell through to the truth. Their success and failure seemed to be determined more often than not by their size, and not by my own crafting. That’s probably not true, I was probably a bad liar too.

Ultimately it seems to have been a harmless habit, as I find myself now to be relatively well adjusted, and for the most part honest. At least, I’ve found a lot more value in sincerity since my early-teen years.

The one valuable thing I got out of trying to con so often was a taste for rolling words over in my mouth. How do you say… what’s the best way to express this idea? Hunting for the right word or the most elegant phrasing of an idea. I think this kind of habitual flexing and articulating of words is why I like to write, even if it’s for little more than my own pleasure.

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34 degrees outside this morning. A long-sleeveed wool shirt under my jacket and some ragwool gloves kept most of me warm, but my toes still froze.

This is the sound of birds in the grass.

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From the second half of Mike Huckabee’s interview with Jon Stewart:

Some choice quotes:

Stewart: “You know, segregation used to be the law until the courts intervened.”

Huckabee: “There’s a big difference between a person being black, and a person practicing a lifestyle”

Stewart: “…religion is far more of a choice than homosexuality, and people that choose, and the protections that we have for religion? We protect religion — and talk about a lifestyle choice, that is absolutely a choice — gay people don’t choose to be gay. At what age did you choose not to be gay?

Stewart: “I think it’s an absolute, it’s a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case, that they deserve the same basic rights as someone else.”

Huckabee: “One of the things that I want to make sure that people understand, that if a person does not necessarily support the idea of changing the definition of marriage, it does not mean that they’re a homophobe, it does not mean that they’re filled with hate and animosity and anger.”

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It’s a strange thing to read George Orwell’s blog.

8.12.38
Two eggs.
In the morning dust-storms, then fairly heavy rain. The afternoon cold & misty, just like England.

Each post has been pulled from Orwell’s diaries and posted just as it was written seventy years ago. It seems these entries were never intended to be read by anyone else, and often record nothing more than simple happenings in Orwell’s life.

6.12.38
Two eggs.
Nights now are distinctly chilly.

Orwell writes about the seasons, about animals and plants, and about numbers of eggs.

29.11.38
One egg.

Alone, the above entry doesn’t really say much. Seen as part of a whole though, these points of information can resemble something like a personal almanac.

In this spirit, I’ve started another blog. It’s a small, simple, and silly thing to do for my own amusement (and possibly yours as well). I’m going to try to record things that I eat, starting tonight.

I will call it eatmachine.

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“Trying to get fast on the cyclocross course is hard enough. Throw in a marriage and two full-time jobs, and you’ve got a whole new level of complexity – one that has forced a lot of people to make some hard choices. … That’s the recipe for Rhonda and Erik and their boy Gus during this year’s cross season…

…While the rest of his competitors are warming up on trainers and taking practice laps and stretching and focusing on themselves in the thorough way of experienced racers, Erik walks the course with Gus in his arms, interrupted frequently by people who admire his boy, want a little advice on the course or their equipment, or just say hello. Gus and Erik play a game called ‘Let’s stick our tongues out.’ … Erik continues his course wandering, cheering when Rhonda races by, and taking a little time to stretch while Gus climbs over his back.

Rhonda’s race goes fine, but not great. She doesn’t spend much time mulling it over, though. While the other women warm down, Rhonda dashes for the Kona tent, pulls off the muddiest and wettest of her clothes and pulls on a few layers of fleece. Just ten meters away, Erik dresses with Gus at his feet. Gel packets tucked into a short. Chunk of cheese stick in Gus’ mouth. Arms into the skinsuit. Put Gus’ hat back on. Stretch a hamstring. Keep Gus from leaving the relatively dry ground under the tent. Pull on some bike shoes. Put Gus’ hat back on, again. Helmet on. Another cheese stick for the boy, and it’s time to pass him to Rhonda.

‘There were several times during the season when I wondered if it’s really worth the effort,’ says Rhonda one evening after Gus is asleep and before she heads downstairs to do an interval workout on the trainer. ‘But we’ve chosen not to do athletics as our sole purpose. We’re just living life and we’re at the stage in our lives when we wanted to have a child. We still enjoy pushing ourselves in races, though.’

Just another fast family in the city of muddy bike riders.”

Words and photos via the fantastic pdxcross, where you can read and see much more.

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I’m normally not very good at waking. Alarm clocks fail as soon as my unconscious hands learn to disable them, I mumble and describe my dreams to bed-mates with no recollection the next day, and I often perform sloppy addition and subtraction of minutes in the morning to absolve myself of sleeping in.

There was a period though, during the summer before last, when I rose early and eagerly from bed each day. I was wrenching at a bike shop in San Jose which was about a half an hour’s ride from my mom’s house. For forty-one days straight I would get up, shower, make breakfast, and leave the house before anyone else had woken up. I came home tired, hungry, dirty, and satisfied.

The guest room of my mom’s house had a large window that faced out over the backyard. I remember often waking minutes before my alarm went off, and watching the sun rise over the Northern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The whole room slowly filled with light, and I was awake. I look back on that brief period as one of intense personal productivity.

As seasonal shades of gray descend upon Northern California, I’ve found myself less than motivated to get out of bed and on to my bike in the morning hours before work. For the past few weeks I’ve considered the battleship gray of the morning sky too heavy to move under, and have instead resigned myself to sleeping in as late as I can.

But this morning I tried something different. I went to bed before nine last night, and was able to rise from bed at six this morning. I quickly dressed in wools socks, leg warmers and shorts under cut-off jeans, and my warmest jacket. Leaving my apartment it was as dark outside as it had been the night before when I went to bed.

It seems the trick to getting up early when the sun hides behind clouds, is to rise before the sun. I rode for an hour. The park slowly filled with light, and I was awake.

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