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orange juice out of a martini glass: life is good …

orange juice out of a martini glass: life is good

i’m drinking my orange juice this evening out of a pretty cool martini glass (the martini glass story is true, as were many of the other chloe-era stories. take an ordinary day, add chloe, stir, rinse, repeat) which is about fingertip-to-wrist tall. it has this cracked-glass thing going on at the bottom, and flares out to a fairly sharp edge. a sharp edge, particularly on a martini glass, lends an avant-garde air to anything you drink out of it. the edge can’t be sharp enough to cut your lip. even the hippest of the milan hipsters couldn’t pull off a bloody lip in a trendy bar, and this will never be the new fad to come out of new york.

the hipsters get their image by doing things on purpose. they dress or act or live in a way that surprises people, and they do it in perfect control, with an overarching air of I Did This On Purpose. and if no one has sported a bloody lip in the name of fashion, someone will. but it won’t catch on, becase it’s impossible to look like you’re in control of the situation with blood pouring out your lower lip. that’s bleeding: you’re not in control of it. blood gets on your shirt, and you spray blood all over the place when you try to talk. even your hipster date is grossed right on out.

so the edge is sharp enough to remind you that you are drinking out of a Cool Glass, so you should scowl lightly while you drink. slowly now. good. now you can move into a loft-style apartment with a stainless steel countertop. and now, because you were cool before cool was cool, you can put in a stainless-steel floor too. your hipster friends will think its the latest and wonder when you found time to browse the galleries in milan. meanwhile, when they’re not looking, you’re busting out the fleece socks and sliding across the floor likea five year old on speed. or, anyway, it could happen. check out my new digs in about six years.

i did my weekly hard workout today, too. i also run hard on sundays, but it is with other people so it doesn’t take so much out. the schedule, as it is settling out, is:

which puts me around 60 miles a week. i usually take one of the easy days off because i’ve not got the fitness to recover well without taking a whole day to rest. but i digress: today i went out to the res and ran tempo for about a hundred years. thirty-one and a half minutes it was, by my watch, but i went out in 5:15 – 5:20 for the first two miles and paid dearly for it coming back along the west edge, slightly uphill and into the wind.

anyone who has ever run too hard at the beginning of a race is intimately familiar with time dilation: as you approach the speed of light, time slows down (also, your mass beomes infinite – more on this later). but it doesn’t happen right away. only after you’ve thought “wow, i must be a lot fitter than i thought” are you punished for your disillusioned hubris. you knew better – you always do. i knew i was up a creek when i hit the mile in 5:15 (my favorite part of the whole loop, actually, is a misplaced milepost that i reached in four minues seventeen seconds, nice job gebrsellasie) but still slowed down hardly at all. time didn’t really slow down until minute sixteen of the workout, which took a minute and a half to get through. from there it was an exponential decay, accelerated by the rollers from minutes 22-26, which were a molasses-in-february slog that took me nearly six months to plow my sorry way through. but the end, the last minute, was by far the worst. it was uphill, and i was kicking for the little line in the road like nobody’s business. anyone will tell you my kick is dangerous, but the time at altitude has made it deadly. in short, i was cooking. but then, i got going too fast, and as iapproached the speed of light my mass became infinite, and i didn’t have the strength to keep going up the hill. were it not for one of the peculiar perks of relativity, i’d still be there now.

as my mass became infinite, my own gravity became so great that the little line in the road peeled up (along with most of the pavement, hence the big bruise on my leg) and came roaring toward me. stopped the stopwatch at 31:30 and time, speed, and gravity went back to normal at the boulder res. so you see, it was actually a pretty good workout. i’ll have to work on my pacing though, lest i get cited for causing gravitational anomalies.