boing!

So I've been posting some pretty depressed-sounding entries recently...

There's a reason for that -- I'd been feeling quite down. But not today :) What's interesting, is that I'm not quite sure why I was down, and now I'm not sure at all what's different, why I'm up again :) That's alright, I'll accept the up-ness as it comes, for the moment.

So yesterday, I was ... still upset, kinda heavy, almost angry for no real reason. Just this feeling that things are Underlyingly Wrong, I think. This might have root in some physical cause, chemical weirdness... or maybe when things aren't going well for me, personally, on a tiny tiny scale, I lose sight of the whole of Everything, or don't think about how much fun I've had or could be having when I wasn't depressed about my shoelaces getting a stain on them or something.

Yesterday, though, a coupla interesting things happened -- one of them, the less common of the two, was that I went to go see Scott McCloud speak. He's absolutely amazing, this really geeky sort of guy who ... could be described as... sometimes as doing cultural studies on comics, sometimes playing with and thinking about the medium itself, and sometimes just as a cartoonist. He describes himself as a formalist sort of cartoonist, one who's good for figuring out new things about the art form. Pretty good description. He talked about digital comics, about distribution models, about new things you can do or will be able to do when not constrained to a paper page, about what makes a comic a comic ("sequential art", he says), and tied in with that, about the nature of the representation of time in this sort of medium. I enjoyed it. He's a really nice guy, and he autographed my copy of his book Understanding Comics, which I'd had for a number of years, and which you should all read if you're interested in this sort of thing. Zot!

In the evening, I did church. This was the more informal sitting-on-couches-and-singing one that happens on Tuesdays at the Heathen Center. That was interesting... what particularly stuck out was this one song, which goes like:

You are my hiding place/You always fill my heart with songs/of deliverance/Whenever I am afraid I will trust in you/I will trust in you/Let the weak say "I am strong in the strength of the Lord"...

... which didn't actually immediately help. I sort of latched onto it in my head, though. It's a really neat song, sung in rounds, minor key... it'd render really nicely in ska, with horns and a slow tempo that builds, I think. I was singing it for a while, in my head, and aloud as I walked back from the Heathen Center to the 211. I was still upset (it sounded more like it hurt, more than anything -- it was more in anguish than in praise) ... just musically and theologically interesting.

After that, though, we found this absolutely amazing music video online, which Scott McCloud had played at the end of his presentation: Tunak Tunak Tun. I've spoken with a few Indian (and one Sri Lankan) folks about this, and thus far they mostly seem to find it really amusing. It's... eh, go google for it. It'll change your life :) Anybody out there who happens to speak Punjabi: if you'd let us know what he's saying, I'd be much obliged.

Today, nothing super-interesting or life-changing has happened (classes, running a 2130 lab, LUG)... but I've just been all up and excited about stuff. I've been running to get places just for the joy of moving, thinking about how it feels, just considering the wonder that is nerve endings. "Ah, my leg is sore", I thought after bumping my knee on something sometime earlier today. It's been really pretty outside. Bright blue sky, nice breeze going.

Ah, and right after I started posting depressing entries, wonderful wonderful friends who're concerned and supportive and angelic asked me to talk about it all, and that's a very healthy thing. I think I've got my groove back, at least for the moment. Call me Stella, I suppose :) Then again, I've been saying this fairly often ("okay, now I'm better") over the past ... however long. Maybe it's cyclical. Maybe I can really get Things sorted out, and then I'll be up and going and bouncy for a long time. That'd be good :)

Tomorrow there's a 5k -- the annual Valentine's Day Sweetheart Fun Run, this time held... the day before. Last year, I was in really good shape for it, the result of doing faster and faster 3- and 4- mile evening runs with Harris, and managed to get it down to about 19 minutes. We'll see how this year goes -- I've been running with Wreck, so my endurance should be pretty good... and I feel pretty quick, when in the right mental state. I tried racing Reeves today, just on the way to LUG -- and he was on skates :) (Sadly, he crashed, and I felt really bad about it, but up until that point, it felt really good). Don't think I've raced since October, and that one was pretty bad, actually. Tomorrow, though...

... I suppose that tomorrow, first I have to get through that Squeak test. Wheee :)

running and thinking

I was thinking about running while I was running tonight -- imagine that :)

I haven't raced in a while. Generally speaking, I screw up 5K races by going out really friskily, maybe with the front pack. My first mile is generally the quickest... then by the time I get to the second mile, I often forget that I was running s' fast, make the mistake of thinking that it'll be alright if I just back off for a bit because I'm hurting from the first mile. I let myself lose focus of what's happening, forget that I was planning on Going Really Fast the whole way, or at least think that a short term rest will be more gratifying than a long term good race. This doesn't happen every single time, but it often does.

I'm not a terribly good distance racer, yet. I think the trick to it is remaining conscious of what's going on. That's probably what running's about in general -- staying loose, not locking on to a rhythm (too slow -- you need to burst every so often, like... the entire last mile or so :) ), considering every step, watching where the foot goes down, and picking people to pick off instead of just trying to hold people off. That's something that applies to life in general, really -- a siege mentality, thinking "I just gotta hold out a little bit longer" ... doesn't allow for winning. If you're not chasing the people in front, you can't win the race. A lot of this is about physical conditioning, but most, I think, is just remembering what running fast feels like, keeping in mind that it's going to hurt, recognizing that fact, packaging it up into a little thought bubble of "hrm, this hurts. I recognize that this hurts, but frankly it doesn't really matter. I actually kind of like it. It means I'm alive and running. Hey! There's somebody in front of me! Let me go rectify that!" Very Zen.

Okie, off to Squeak. Squeaking is like that too.