My November 2023 Running/Walking Report

In November I ran a total of 363 miles, and on every day of the month. My runs were spread throughout each day more or less, and I made much use of my local gym, which is Gainesville Health and Fitness.  Maybe it's counterintuitive, but when I get off from work in the evening I'm often tense and tired...yet getting on the treadmill for a brisk run relaxes me and takes the edge off the day.  I also ran a couple of Depot Parkrun 5Ks in the month...but my biggest race was the Tom Walker Half-Marathon, organized by "my" Florida Track Club and held on the 14th on the Hawthorne Trail.  There I surpassed my personal expectations when I employed the Jeff Galloway method of alternating running a set number of minutes (for me, 5) with a set number of walking minutes (1).  The result was the best finish I had at the distance since 2015.  I even applied it to the much shorter 3.1-mile Parkrun distance and finish with a personal best out of 27 Parkruns.  In December I plan to continue doing the Depot Parkrun 5K, but on the 9th I intend to run another Hawthorne Trail race: Season of Hope 15K (proceeds to go for the fight against dystonia) for my third time, and the first since 2019.  As for walking, I may walk one of those upcoming Parkruns...speed-walking rocks, too...

Weekly Short Stories: 1994 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today it's time to once again check out some of the 1994 short stories appearing in Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction Twelfth Annual Collection.  In April of that year, sadly, grunge rock star Kurt Cobain killed himself at the peak of his band Nirvana's popularity.  I was and still am a fan of this genre, and Cobain's death deeply saddened me.  Later that summer, the Atlanta-based alternative group R.E.M. (I'm also a fan) released their studio album Monster, one of my favorites of theirs.  It features a deep track titled Let Me In.  Band frontman Michael Stipe, who would befriend Cobain's widow Courtney Love, wrote the lyrics in tribute of the fallen star.  But enough sadness...back to the stories...

THE HOLE IN THE HOLE by Terry Bisson

This is one of my favorite types of sci-fi stories, where there is a special, hidden passageway linking our world to another, be it in space or time.  Here a modest lawyer in a big city needs a special part to repair his car and runs across such a portal behind a ramshackle junkyard.  The place it leads to it is literally out of this world.  There's an interesting character in his story, the lawyer's academic friend Wilson Wu, who it seems is almost as mysterious as the portal itself with his deep knowledge and expertise in so many diverse fields.  A very funny tale...

PARIS IN JUNE by Pat Cadigan

A "man"...at least the story seems to start out that way, is an itinerant, homeless hustler who collects experiences in Paris (and June, of course) and transfers them to the Creators, apparently some alien race that from time-to-time whisks down in the sky to sweep up his thoughts.  Since he's telling the story, it's a bit cryptic as to what is really going on.  But he does come across a "woman" who he recognizes as another creation like himself, only that she has asserted her own independence.  Frankly, I didn't get this story...

FLOWERING MANDRAKE by George Turner

Capella is a first-magnitude star in the northern constellation Auriga.  In this story it is the system of two different intelligent life forms on two planets, constantly in bitter warfare against one another: the Greens and the Reds.  One of the Greens is the sole survivor of his blasted spaceship and drifts for centuries in his escape pod until he encounters Earth sometime in our not-so-distant future when we've begun to mine the asteroids.  When he is gradually introduced to life on Earth through images projected inside his pod and sees a picture of a human, the truth about the nature of the Greens and Reds becomes clear.  This was a brilliant story that expanded the baseness of human nature to include so-called "intelligent" life elsewhere in the cosmos...

Next week: more from 1994...

Just Finished Reading Exercised by Daniel Lieberman

Daniel Lieberman's academic title is "paleoanthropologist", a mouthful that I'm confident he's gotten quite well at enunciating...I, though, have some catching up to do.  I first saw him in a YouTube interview on the excellent channel Diary of a CEO and was impressed enough to check out his book Exercised from my public library.  Its premise resounds like Lieberman's interview: humankind evolved not to engage in exercise, but to avoid it. He posits his theory based on his academic research living among different ongoing hunter-gatherer cultures in various parts of the world.  There the people's lives are doubtless physically strenuous, but only when their necessities, such as hunting, demand it.  Otherwise, they seem quite lazy, sitting around and definitely not jogging or weightlifting.  Lieberman says that this is why people in more "advanced" technology-based cultures (such as presumably yours and mine) need to intentionally move our bodies even when labor-saving devices can do most of the physical work for us.  He believes that the advancement of the species through evolution is focused on getting the individual successfully past reproductive age, beyond which their survival into old age becomes more extraneous to the process.  But by assigning special social roles to the elderly that benefit the group's survival, they, too, can achieve long and healthy life spans.  Daniel Lieberman is a big advocate for both resistance and aerobic fitness training, and he himself is a long-distance runner. He also has something to say about the very passive way of sitting for long stretches of time in "advanced" cultures as opposed to the more squatting, fidgety way he observed in his field work of the more "primitive" peoples...our ways lower longevity. I liked both this book of his and his online interview.  Check it out if you have the time or inclination...

My Favorite Songs for 2023 So Far

 I know it's been a while since I wrote about my favorite ongoing popular music.  Truth be told, for most of 2023 I had been largely listening to a playlist of favorites from last year.  Up until October I had considered the curiously-titled song A Hairdryer by The Smile to be my "song of the year" but since then I've explored some album releases from some of my favorite alternative music acts and now have quite a playlist just from them. I purchased Sufjan Stevens' latest album Javelin and have been listening on YouTube to 2023 releases from Depeche Mode (Memento Mori), Gorillaz (Cracker Island), Metric (Formentera II) and the New Pornographers (Continue as a Guest).  So right now here's my current "top ten" list of favorites for 2023, naturally subject to revision by year's end...

1 OIL by Gorillaz

2 SHIT TALK by Sufjan Stevens

3 MY COSMOS IS MINE by Depeche Mode

4 WHO WOULD YOU BE FOR ME by Metric

5 PEOPLE ARE GOOD by Depeche Mode

6 NEW GOLD by Gorillaz

7 PONTIUS PILATE'S HOME MOVIES by New Pornographers

8 BOTTLE EPISODES by New Pornographers

9 A HAIRDRYER by The Smile

10 MY FAVORITE STRANGER by Depeche Mode

Enjoyed Watching College Football Rivalry Games on TV Yesterday

Yesterday I enjoyed watching college football as the regular season wound down to its very end with rivalry matchups dominating the schedule.  The three games I followed were Michigan-Ohio State, Alabama-Auburn and Florida-Florida State.  All three turned out to be close-fought, exciting games...although of the three, easily the best was the late afternoon Alabama "state championship" Iron Bowl contest played at Auburn University's Jordan Hare Stadium. It was nip-and-tuck all of the way until it looked as if the Crimson Tide, behind 24-20 late in the game, weren't going to beat Auburn after they punted deep into the Tigers' territory.  But the receiver fumbled the punt and Bama recovered with a golden opportunity to go ahead...they needed a touchdown.  But on the subsequent series of downs, they made mistake after mistake, moving backwards from a first-and-goal at the Auburn 7 to a fourth-and-goal on the 30, with less than 40 seconds to go in the game and little to no hope of winning.  But Tide QB Jalen Milroe, with his stellar offensive line providing plenty of time for him to sort out the field, threw a long pass into the corner of Auburn's end zone, hitting his receiver for the highly improbable winning score. Until last season I had been rooting against Alabama, but then switched my allegiances.  This year I'm pulling for them to beat Georgia in the SEC championship game and sneak into the college playoffs, alongside Florida State, who came from a 12-0 deficit to beat my hometown Gators in Gainesville in the evening contest, 24-15.  As for that first game, I "kind of" pulled for Ohio State to win it, but to no avail: Michigan remains undefeated but will still need to beat Iowa to win the Big Ten championship and advance to the playoffs.  It should be fun to watch the upcoming conference championship games...including the game between Washington and Oregon.  As for Florida, their season is now over at 5-7, although in yesterday's game they showed some promise for the future...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

After my half-marathon on November 12th, in which I had my best final time since 2015 by employing the Jeff Galloway strategy of inserting regular short intervals of walking over the course of the race, I decided to see how this would work on a shorter, 5K race.  Although in earlier years my final times of this distance had gotten down to 23-24 minutes, since 2019 for the span of my previous 26 Depot Parkruns here in Gainesville (a free weekly Saturday morning run/walk run by volunteers) I never ran faster than my 30:00 finish in that first Parkrun.  Until today, that is.  This time I ran the first 6 minutes, then speed-walked 40 seconds...then ran again until my timer hit 12 minutes, then speed-walked 40 more seconds, alternating like this until I crossed the finish line at 29:47, finally breaking that frustrating 30-minute barrier.  I already knew I could do it anyway because in another relatively recent local 5K race I had run it even faster, but this time it seemed more satisfying since it pointed the way to how I intend to run any future race, regardless of the distance.  The race time (7:30 am) temperature was 50 degrees with 93% humidity...lots of folks lined up bundled up: I dressed as usual, tee-shirt and shorts.  Running this Galloway method is more than getting faster finishing times...I actually feel that I could continue on for an indefinitely longer distance.  So now I'm wondering whether I really should set half-marathons as my longest race in the future.  You can view today's results by clicking HERE...

Quote of the Week...from Steve Kaufmann

I study on my own when I feel like it.  When I'm tired of whatever I'm doing, I move on to something else.                                   ---Steve Kaufmann

In his latest podcast, polyglot Steve Kaufmann, who has at different times in his 77-year-old existence mastered some 20 different languages, describes himself as a "lazy language learner".  He is the creator of LingQ (pronounced "link"), a language-learning website app, as well as a weekly podcaster I regularly listen to.  On one of Steve's latest shows, he gave the above quote after claiming that he is a lazy language learner.  That may be true now, but I happen to know that in his early adult years he underwent intensive language training in Chinese and Japanese while he served there in his country's (Canada) foreign service.  So, Steve Kaufmann knows on a deep level how to successfully tackle languages, and that can partially be attributed to life experiences that wouldn't be applicable to most of us, me included.  But I understand the gist of his argument, which is that repeated exposure to the target language, both listening and reading, can activate the mind's natural language learning abilities without subjecting oneself to graded classes with exams or memorizing long word lists and intricate grammar rules.  Yet in my own past I did memorize and repeatedly reviewed long word lists...including 1,700 Chinese characters...and this I feel has greatly helped me to understand what I am hearing and reading today.  I think each of us has our own special set of experiences, proclivities and skills that we bring to the table of language learning and that it's okay to use them to our advantage...no one formula fits everyone.  What I call "lazy" language learning greatly overlaps Steve's version while differing in some respects.  I just need to get easier access to instant translation of unknown words I come across in order to make my learning more meaningful... 

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody

I'd like to take a moment to wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving Day.  It's a time to reflect on all the wonderful things in my life to be thankful for, especially my loved ones.  I hope you can also find the time to do the same with yours...

Weekly Short Story: 1994 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I deliberately made the number singular on this weekly blog feature of mine.  Usually, I'll read a few entries from an anthology and then briefly review each story.  But this week as I was reading through Gardner Dozois' sci-fi anthology series, specifically The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection, I ran across a pretty lengthy novella.  Dozois has always had a penchant for inserting long stories like this one, not quite at novel-size, into his series.  So, here's my reaction to that novella...

MELODIES OF THE HEART by Michael F. Flynn

As Gardner Dozois intimated in his intro to this story, it's a time-travel piece, but in a special sense.  A physician has been assigned duty caring for elderly people at a facility while his little daughter is suffering from progeria, which causes her to rapidly age to a premature death.  He treats what he has been told is a 100-year-old woman who has been complaining of old songs loudly playing in her head.  Her cantankerous demeanor ruffles him...he's already developed a cynical view of the elderly, most likely in light of what is happening to his little girl.  The story develops as the woman's songs recede decade by decade into her past until the good doctor begins to question how old she truly is...and he begins to connect her plight with that of his daughter.  There is a subplot about his distant, obsessive-compulsive wife and the nurse hired to care for their stricken daughter.  It's a very sad story, but one I'd recommend if you have the time to spend on it...if only for the wealth of old songs with their time of popularity pinpointed as well as some lyrics that were changed over the years: political correctness isn't just a recent phenomenon...

So, there you have it for this week's feature.  Maybe I'll come up with some actual "short" stories next time around from 1994...

Sixty Years Ago, Tomorrow

Tomorrow marks the sixtieth anniversary of one of the most traumatic single events this country has ever experienced: the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.  The President was visiting Texas, riding in a motorcade in an open car with his wife Jackie and Texas governor John Connally when Oswald shot him twice with his rifle from the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository building.  I was just a kid of seven in the second grade of my West Hollywood, Florida elementary school when we heard the news of the shooting just after lunch on Friday.  Numerous conspiracy theories sprang up in the ensuing years, but like Stephen King, who authored the fantastic 2011 time-travel novel 11/22/63, I always felt that Oswald was the lone wolf behind the assassination.  As I mentioned in an earlier article, my family and I visited Dallas in 1994 and retraced the motorcade route...I wonder how many others have done the same.  I am praying that in this upcoming tumultuous presidential campaign of 2024, all the candidates are safe and more tragic bloodshed is avoided... 

Just Finished Reading Level Up by Rob Dial

Very recently Rob Dial, known for his Mindset Mentor personal development-themed podcast that often offers topics for my blog articles, had published his first book: Level Up, long title Level Up: How to Get Focused, Stop Procrastinating, and Upgrade Your Life.  This pretty much describes the book, which incorporates the gist of Dial's podcast messages and presents it in more whole fashion.  Level Up is divided into three sections: why you're not taking action, how to take action, and creating habits and making them stick.  In each of them are subtopics that logically contribute to the main message. At the chapters' close are personal journaling questions...Dial believes strongly in introspection and writing down on paper one's inner thoughts and feelings.  In that sense this is an interactive book...not in the adopted cyberworld sense but in that the reader is invited to participate, step by step, with the program as it is laid out.  I haven't sat down and begun this interaction...no, I've procrastinated, dang it!  But there's no better time than now...actually, there's no time other than now.  I think you'll find this book helpful regardless where you happen to be in your own personal walk through life...there's none of that mystical nonsense that I've encountered in other works of this sort.  Hopefully, the public library web service Libby will begin to offer it for checkout before long...

Computer Problems Cause Gap in Blog

I've been experiencing some technical difficulties with this blog and my computer in general...I'll be back before too long.

People and Happiness: Not Synonymous

A few weeks ago, I discussed a "Goth Kid" quote from the cartoon series South Park.  The Goth Kids embrace that alternative culture complete with black clothes and idiosyncratically gloomy music while smoking, drinking coffee and talking about bad everything is.  Well, I had to check myself to see how Goth I was...at least from the South Park writers' perspective: "yes" on black clothes, gloomy music and coffee, "no" on smoking and "sometimes" on running down what's going on around me and in the world. I think a lot of so-called "self-help" gurus out there, religious preachy-types and unapologetic extroverts tend to confuse being down on people and society with being down on life. But you can be highly critical and even cynical about people and society while at the same time thoroughly enjoying life: those Goth Kids seem to dig their own scene! I am tired of those who think I'm unwillingly in some kind of shell that they need to crack in order to expose me to the company of all the annoying, problematic people that they feel will bring me real happiness.  But truth be told, I'm already pretty happy, thank you, and for the most part hanging around a lot of folks tends to drain me mentally and emotionally while elevating my anxiety. On the other hand, I've always enjoyed good one-on-one conversations, so go figure. People and happiness, for me, are neither synonyms nor antonyms...they're completely different concepts and if the former piss me off from time to time I'm gonna call it like it is, whether I'm "Goth" or not...

Weekly Short Stories: 1994 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to three more science fiction short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection.  1994 was the year of the incredibly dumb Major League Baseball strike that ended the year in the middle of the regular season, no postseason or World Series...it should have bothered me, but it didn't.  About the time that was going on, my family and I made a summer road trip to visit my sister Anita and her family in Plano, Texas and later a friend of Melissa's in Murfreesboro, Tennessee: it was a lot of fun and memorable.  We even retraced the Kennedy assassination route in Dallas: it was a lot more closed-in than I expected, making me wonder whether some of the extra shots that witnesses say they heard weren't reverberations off buildings.  But back to those stories...

MARGIN OF ERROR by Nancy Kress

This is a story about revenge as two sisters meet up again after five years.  Paula has bullied and manipulated Karen their whole lives.  Her intellectual theft of Karen's own work at a genetic research company was the final straw.  Karen's revenge? I'm not telling, but I will say that it's interesting that the perpetrators of vengeful acts often seem to think it's necessary to let their victims know what's going on...even when it sets themselves up for payback...

 

CILIA-OF-GOLD by Stephen Baxter

This is a great old-style sci-fi tale set on Mercury, told from the viewpoint of both its own indigenous life under the surface and of the human explorers based there.  It also presents the twists questioning what truly indigenous life is and what is advanced and intelligent.  The explanation for the multiple mysteries is given through conjecture, but you just know it's true...

GOING AFTER OLD MAN ALABAMA

In generally our present time (c. 1994, that is) it's rural Oklahoma and Native Americans there are practitioners of their own traditional magic, with medicine men and witches and their own special talents and proclivities...move over, Harry Potter.  One sinister old man among them is Old Man Alabama, and a couple of medicine men think he's up to something really bad...and they follow him to a destination that reveals both his great knowledge...and great ignorance.  A very funny ending... 

Next week: more sci-fi reviews from 1994...

NYC Marathon Open to Slow Finishers, Unlike Gainesville-Area Marathons

The New York City Marathon took place the Sunday before last, and I enjoyed watching ongoing television coverage.  Although there was a channel devoted to showing the top elite competition at the front, there were also several YouTube live feeds at different parts of the running course, depicting what was going on from the sidelines.  The most compelling of these, which I watched in the early evening toward the event's end, showed 59th Street in Midtown Manhattan on the southern rim of Central Park, just one mile from the 26.2-mile race's finish line.  There, exhausted and sometimes limping entrants mostly walked past the exhorting, shouting dude behind the camera as their impending finishing times crept higher and higher toward the seven-hour mark.  This scenario...at least the part allowing the race's stragglers to finish without closing the course because of an imposed time deadline...made the NYC Marathon an open race.  We used to have a couple of those in the marathon distance here in north central Florida, but sadly, no more.  Let me explain...

My only "official" marathon...although I had run a practice one the week before in four hours and twenty-three minutes...was the Ocala Marathon of January 23, 2011.  Regrettably, I sustained an IT band injury which hobbled me in the second half of the race, forcing me to walk slowly for its final seven miles. My time?  Six hours and four minutes.  I had also intended back then to run the next month's scheduled Gainesville Five Points of Life Marathon, but my need to recover cancelled that and I then resolved to stick to half-marathons as my longest racing distance.  But lately I've been thinking it would be nice to have another go, if only for just one time, at a marathon-distance event.  But both the Ocala and Five Points of Life marathons are no more, and the only other races of this distance in my area have very restrictive time limits.  The biggest of these, the Florida Track Club's Mary Andrews Marathon next January, sets just five hours as its limit...even with good training and without any injuries, at my age (67) I would be hard-pressed to get a sub-five hour finishing time. So, although I sympathize with the race organizers who don't want to hang around waiting for someone to finally get to the finish line after seven or eight hours, I do think that since they are charging a hefty fee to enter the race in the first place then they should be more flexible with the allotted time and at least extend the limit to a more reasonable six hours.  That is, if they're really interested in popularizing and growing the sport and not just stuck-up elitists.  I think all public races, even the two extinct ones I extolled, have limits on finishing times. But since they're public, they should take that public in mind and avoid oppressively short limits on finishing times.  Sadly, at least in my area, the opposite is happening...

Enjoying the Change of Weather, If Only Briefly

The weather here in Gainesville has turned interesting, with yesterday marked by overcast skies and cool mist condensing out of the air with temperatures staying in the sixties.  At this writing today it's continuing like this, although I expect the sun to start peeking through sooner or later.  Rainy days are on the menu for this week at least, at least according to the sometimes-flawed weather forecast I got off the news yesterday.  I'd like to see this somehow finally leading to more seasonal, cooler weather with clear skies...I miss those good old crisp autumn days.  In any event we're enjoying a respite from the extended summer that looks to finally be packing up for 2023. As I was expecting warmer weather yesterday during my race, I'm relieved for the change.  I've always kind of liked dreary, cool, overcast weather as long as it doesn't rain, although I'm realistic enough to expect some showers if not outright downpours. That's okay, too: I'm a Floridian, after all...

Ran the Tom Walker Half-Marathon This Morning

This morning I got up early and once again headed out to Boulware Springs Park off 15th Street in southeast Gainesville to run in yet another Hawthorne Trail race...this one the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon, hosted by the Florida Track Club, of which I am a member.  It's my fifth Tom Walker Race...I ran it in 2010, 2011, 2019, and 2022.  Last year's race took place under unusually warm and humid conditions...I didn't properly prepare myself for that and had to walk the final three miles (yet still won my age group).  Today the weather was much more conducive to running, being 61-62 degrees although the humidity was still high...and the cloud cover made things better as well. This time around I employed the Jeff Galloway run-walk strategy, with me running five minutes and then fast-walking one minute, repeating the cycle throughout the race.  It worked better than I could have imagined, and I had no shortage of energy as I finished strong at 2:18:06 chip time, once again winning my age division.  It was also my fastest half-marathon since 2015...I didn't expect that to happen!   Recovery after the race seems to be going well, and I appreciate all the encouragement and support from my loved ones, especially Melissa.  You can view the race results by clicking the link HERE...

Volunteered at Gainesville's Depot Parkrun This Morning

Although the nice middle-age English lady who pretty much manages Gainesville's free weekly Saturday morning 5K (3.1 mile) run/walk suggests that participants do approximately a 4:1 ratio of runs to volunteering at the event, I think most of them don't even remotely meet this request.  And then there are a few who see volunteering as their primary fulfillment.  I say good for all of them, but to me volunteering is sheer drudgery, involving me to be stuck around people I frankly dislike (although there are some really sweet, charming ones as well) and who I feel marginalize me and are obsessed with where they stand on the social pecking order.  Well, I got through it, having volunteered this time around because "my" race is tomorrow morning's Tom Walker Half Marathon.  It's hosted by the Florida Track Club and is held every November (except for pandemics and nuclear holocausts) on the Hawthorne Trail, starting and ending at Boulware Springs Park in southeast Gainesville.  This will be my fifth time running this event...the first two took place with temperatures in the shivering thirties while last year's, a debacle in which I had to walk the final three miles, was in unseasonably sweltering heat and humidity. Tomorrow it will be a little bit cooler, but still unpleasant.  During the race I'm planning to alternate five-minute runs with minute-long fast walks, to be repeated throughout the race...should be interesting to see how it goes.  In any event, I'm looking forward to it...and NOT forward to volunteering again: will I ever learn...

Quote of the Week...from Neil Gaiman

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you.  Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.          Neil Gaiman

I've read quite a few of Neil Gaiman's novels in past years, although recently I've gotten a little bit away from his fantasy-based genre of fiction writing.  Today is his birthday and I thought I'd drop in on a thought of his that appealed to me...so here's the above quote.  It sounds on the surface self-contradictory to say that we're all the same in that each of us is unique, but there you are: it's true!  Yet with the explosive advent of artificial intelligence permeating so many aspects of our being...impelled by the development of quantum computing...I'm beginning to wonder in fact whether a virtual "myself" couldn't just as easily be created, if not now, then in the not-so-distant future.  But now is now, and in my daily walk through life I want to act out that unique nature of mine, be grateful for it, and appreciate the differences and similarities I see in others. And maybe it's time for me to dig back into some more of ol' Neil's works... 

Podcaster Discusses How to Make Oneself Miserable

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you already know that I am a regular listener to personal development coach Rob Dial's podcast, which can be found on number of sites, including YouTube...it's called Mindset Mentor.  Usually if I write about a specific podcast, I'll have waited a few days beforehand.  But today he presented four mindsets people have which make themselves miserable in life.  The first is trying to control that which I cannot control, be it situations on the other side of the world or the people around me.  To a certain extent I can do my part to make things better by expressing opinions or voting on election day.  And speaking truth in a compassionate way to others is also something I could do more.  But sitting there letting the negativity stew around in my mind helps no one, especially myself.  The second of Dial's points is comparing myself to others, bemoaning the supposed advantages others enjoy that enable them to have or experience a more interesting and bountiful life.  To that he recommends intentionally setting aside time to focus on things that I can be grateful for in my life...and there is definitely a lot to consider here.  That doesn't imply that I shouldn't strive to improve myself and my circumstances, but once again I shouldn't just sit there fuming inside about how unfair life is.  Number Three on Rob Dial's list of things making folks miserable is focusing on the past.  We all live in the present and the past is gone...in spite of all the science fiction stories I've read or watched using the literary gimmick of time travel.  Moping around about past regrets can mess up my present, yet I don't think I should ignore the past either...it's how I learn to better live in the present!  Finally, our host presents the fourth pathway to misery: worrying about the future.  To be sure, that's where we're all heading...but most of the disasters predicted ahead don't materialize.  I am rooted to the present, and only in the now can I act to do my part to bring about a better world.  But once again, I present a caveat: of course, I need to notice danger and problems on the horizon and, if possible, try to effectively deal with them.  But static worry accomplishes nothing to alleviate anything.  If you think I'm getting a little preachy here, rest assured: I wrote this down primarily as a way to reinforce to myself the show's message...which today seemed quite profound...

Weekly Short Stories: 1994 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin a new year in retrospect as I examine some select sci-fi short stories from 1994 as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois-edited anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection.  This was the year of the gimmicky mid-term elections in our country, where the party opposing the previously elected president comes up with some dumbass slogan to rally their own forces, along with the easily media-manipulated.part of the electorate, to retake Congress. In this election the president was Bill Clinton, and the insurgents were Republicans with Newt Gingrich leading the charge with his "Contract with America"...transformed by opponents into "Contract on America".  The switch in congressional power, sustained in two subsequent elections, would lead to Clinton's eventual politically motivated impeachment in 1999.  But back to those stories from '94...

FORGIVENESS DAY by Ursula K. le Guin

In le Guin's science fiction "universe"...several writers, like Isaac Asimov and Cordwainer Smith, created their own future scenarios in rather great detail. A female envoy from the Ekumens, this story's version of Star Trek's Federation of Planets, is assigned an outlying world that seeks admission to their body.  Only problem is that they have a highly stratified social order, with slavery a prominent element.  The envoy is very annoyed with the standoffish officer provided for her protection...but then all hell breaks loose and it's a case of who is double-crossing who.  It's actually a novella and, as such, tended to drag a bit...but I liked the outcome...

THE REMORAS by Robert Reed

This is a brilliant tale that leads to an anticipated conclusion but then veers off to something entirely different...yet had I been more attentive to the beginning I wouldn't have been so surprised.  On a humungous, planet-sized ship in the distant future, people have attained immortality through genetic manipulation.  One such woman lives in luxury with her recent husband...but then a representative of a very deformed subclass of human one day visits her home to demand her husband pay off a debt.  Sympathetic to the visitor although taken aback at his appearance, she goes to the ship's hull where he and others of his kind work on the exterior in space.  One important lesson from this story is that you can't always go by appearances...

NEKROPOLIS by Maureen F. McHugh

In a future society where biologically induced voluntary servitude based on personal bonding, called "jessing", is prevalent, one such servant is having second thoughts about her choice after she is paired up with a young, "manufactured" human male whom she initially regards as no more than an abominable machine.  Soon she discovers he has more human feeling and compassion that the so-called "real" people she works for and around.  A depressing look at a potential future?  I hope not but you can never tell...

Next week I continue reviewing science fiction from 1994...

Just Finished Reading 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

I just finished reading, on audiobook, Jordan Peterson's 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.  Peterson is a Canadian psychologist who has a podcast which features long shows usually involving interviews.  The tone in this book is very moralistic and on audio his adamancy for his opinions can get to the point of coming across a bit shrill and plaintive...at least that's how he sounds to me. In spite of that, I was a bit blown away by the depth of thought and insight underlying his enunciated principles and felt alternately convicted and affirmed by many of his conclusions about society and how individuals can and should function within it.  It's a tough-love kind of message here, and I believe that not everyone would receive it as well as myself.  I'm planning to go for a reread of this remarkable work in the near future...

 

Here are the rules:

1 Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

2 Treat yourself like someone you're responsible for helping.

3 Make friends with people who want the best for you.

4 Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

5 Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

6 Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

7 Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).

8 Tell the truth...or at least, don't lie.

9 Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't.

10 Be precise in your speech.

11 Do not bother children while they are skateboarding.

12 Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street.

Some of the above...especially the final two...are a bit tongue-in-cheek while others have much more expansive interpretations, which the author is quite willing to reveal in each chapter.  This is an idea-packed work, and I don't automatically subscribe to everything Peterson has laid out here...but he did a masterful job of presenting his own thoughtful views about life and how to live it...

Some Comments After the NYC Marathon

I watched some of the day's events at the New York City Marathon yesterday...most of it was through live feeds on YouTube with cameras strategically placed at various points in the race.  I enjoyed the coverage of the leaders...Tamirat Tola of Ethiopia and Hellen Obiri of Kenya won the men's and women's events respectively.  I also dug seeing runners of different degrees of training and speed at places like south Brooklyn (Bay Ridge), north Brooklyn (Williamsburg), and one spot on the southern edge of Central Park on 59th Street, just a mile from the finishing line.  That last viewing I saw of the runners taking three times as long (or more) than the race's winners...they were pooped and most of them were walking.  The guy behind the camera kept yelling out for them to "bring it on home", "you did all the work" and "get your medal"...I wonder how long he was standing there doing that over and over again.  As for me, I'm happy to witness the madness from afar, content as of now with more sedate (and shorter) racing experiences with fewer accompanying hassles.  Tola and Obiri are obviously top-notch athletes...for most of those in this marathon, that clearly wasn't true.  Yet being an athlete per se is more a state of mind than an objective truth...I consider myself to be one, in fact.  There are people who never would run in any public race and only run for their own personal self-fulfillment or exercise to maintain health.  Although these are good motives and I run for those reasons as well, I feel that there's a little more to it all in my case.  I'm looking forward to what the future brings and congratulate those runners and walkers who tackled that difficult course in the Big Apple yesterday...

NYC Marathon Taking Place Today

Of all the marathons that I have NOT run...and the now-extinct Ocala Marathon is the only one I have...it's the New York City Marathon, held on the first weekend in November, that captures my imagination the most.  On YouTube I've been able to get a runner's-eye-view of the race on three very different videos: one from 2019 features a Chinese-speaking entrant who is relatively fast and the other two are from last year, one filmed by Alex, who has made numerous other race videos in the area and ran an average (for me) race and the other by a novice who ended up walking much of the distance.  In all three I got a great sense of the geography of the city's five boroughs, in this order of the race: Staten Island (at the beginning), Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Bronx, and then Manhattan again at the end.  If these three videos showed all there was to running the NYC Marathon, I'd say "Sign me up and stick me on a plane."  But after viewing other videos of the event, it seems most of the effort goes not into actually running it, but rather first getting approved to enter it over all the other aspirants through either their February lottery or by joining with a charity and generating a lot of money.  Also, since we're talking more than 50,000 runners clogging the streets of New York, every time anything is considered, be it making hotel or restaurant reservations, picking up bibs at the required exposition at the Jacob Javits Center, checking in a post-race bag in Central Park, just getting to the starting line (no subway access to Staten Island) and going through the security check there after which there are hours of standing around before the race actually starts, we're talking endless lines and waits...ugh!  Yet those who speak of this event think it's a great thing and keep wanting to return next year.  I think that if I could escape somehow all that extraneous tedious b.s. and just start it like in all those racing videos, I'd think it worthwhile as well.  But if someday I do run a big-city marathon or, more likely, a half-marathon, then it will probably be in another place.  I wrote about it this morning because right now that same New York City Marathon is ongoing, to last throughout the day as they have staggered the massive number of runners into five waves and subdivided them further. It's a bit cooler there and windier than last year's race...a lot of the runners also seem to underestimate the fluctuations in altitude throughout this not-so-flat city: NYC does have some badass hills as well as a lot of extended upward and downward sloping!  I think a TV channel is covering the event, but most likely it will focus on the top finishers.  Funny that for someone as enthusiastic about running as myself that I am so clueless about the top athletes in this sport...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun This Morning

Today's Depot Parkrun 5K would be more appropriately named the "Darkrun" since, after all, this is the Saturday just before the clocks go back an hour from Daylight Savings Time to good old Standard Time. It was slightly chilly before the race at 58°, with just 69% humidity.  There didn't seem as many folks here at Depot Park, a few blocks south of Gainesville, as last week...suits me fine!  As usual, I ran the 5K as an exercise in establishing a comfortable but brisk pace.  I went slow the first lap but finished strong, at 30:14...you can view the results by clicking HERE.  After I finished, I waited about ten minutes, then did an extra run, involving both the park and the adjacent Hawthorne Trail, for 2.4 miles, with this one alternating five-minute runs with a minute of fast walking.  Next week I'll once again run in the Florida Track Club's Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon, to take place on the same Hawthorne Trail, but further south and east from where I ran today, beginning and ending at Boulware Springs Park.  Because that race happens on Sunday the 12th, I can still participate in next Saturday morning's Depot Parkrun, either (or both) as a runner/walker or volunteer...I'll have to see how I feel in a day or two.  After leaving the park I noticed the local traffic was unusually heavy for a Saturday morning. Of course, I should have known: there's a Gator home football game starting at noon...

Quote of the Week...from Mark Twain

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.     ---Mark Twain

For me the king of monologues has to be the late Jean Shepherd, author and narrator of the famous television movie A Christmas Story and a legend on New York's talk radio station WOR for his show that lasted for decades in the last century.  From 1974 to 1976 I would avidly listen to rebroadcasts on my local Miami station WKAT/1360 and marvel at Jean's ability to maintain an ongoing monologue for around a half hour.  Of course, even back then (I was 18-20 years old) I knew that he would most probably enter the studio with at least a rough outline as to what he would sit there and discuss (with himself) for any set program.  But it's also obvious that he was speaking very conversationally and was spontaneous, not reading something straight from a prompt as so many politicians and media jocks do today.  Being someone interested in beginning a podcast, I'd like to emulate Jean Shepherd's style...and that's where Mark Twain's above quote kicks in.  I don't know whether the famed author was referring to writing a detailed outline or a script to be memorized, but it seems that regardless, it seems that some kind of preparation is in order before a final podcast monologue can be recorded.  Right now, I'm just practicing (without recording) listening to myself (try to) tackle various preset topics verbally in my car to establish the skill of maintaining a smooth, viable narrative.  But after seeing on YouTube how much podcasters edit their product, a lot of that smoothness you hear and see is often artificially produced in hindsight, after the initial recording.  Well, recording artists remix and mess with their music as well, and few complain about the final polished product.  I imagine my own final product, which I want to sound impromptu, will also...as with Twain...demand some foresight and organization requiring extra time and effort... 

My Progress So Far on Budding Podcasting Efforts

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about considering starting my own podcast, with the same basic goal as my writing except that it would be speaking instead.  Again, I want to instill a regular, disciplined habit of publicly available expression, this time making it verbal.  I mentioned that preliminary to starting an actual podcast I would make unrecorded monologues about preset topics during my drives to and from work.  Well, that was an eye opener for me, with me stumbling about tongue-tied for the most part, more a stream of disconnected consciousness coming from my mouth than a coherent narrative...is that really how I think? I do think I've improved a bit, and I've decided to alter the strategy with my "carcasts", as I call them, to do a "rough draft monologue" on the drive to work, let the results simmer in my mind for a few hours, and then on the drive home revisit the topic, hopefully in a more structured and comprehendible (to others) way.  I get that most of your regular podcasters develop outlines, some detailed, beforehand of what they will discuss om a podcast.  I'm not yet at that point, preferring right now to make the experience more extemporaneous.  Yesterday, for example, I set out to discuss the University of Florida campus as I remember it and as it is today.  During the first monologue I felt I was awkwardly groping about to find something to say while in the second, I felt more organized and with more knowledge at quick recall.  Now let's see what my carcast topic for today will be... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1993 Science Fiction, Part 8

Today's the final installment of my review of 1993 "short" science fiction from the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eleventh Annual Collection.  In all fairness, Dozois doesn't use the word "short" in his series title, and for good reason: some of the stories are novellas and, in, say, books of decades past could have passed for full-blown novels.  Such is the case with this book...and its final story, discussed below.  So why don't we close out this year with the last two tales...

WHISPERS by Maureen F. McHugh and David B. Kisor

A plague has beset the world, and an American woman, while not technically a "doctor", is essentially performing the same duties in rural Shandong, China, treating disease victims.  One patient is a young man who seems to be withering away and dying...but this is a new strain of the plague, and he seems to be defying all expectations by returning to general health...although he still looks withered.  To make it all creepier (remember this was published in 1993), the story takes place in 2018. I've always thought that evolutionarily speaking, it wasn't an enduring strategy for a disease to kill its hosts...eventually it would need to evolve to keep them alive and in a state of equilibrium together: that's the case here, although the author ends up making this particular plague into something that makes me wonder about the nature of identity as it applies to microorganisms, especially those causing pandemics... 

WALL, STONE, CRAFT by Walter Jon Williams

The only "science fiction" in this alternative history novella is that it is an alternative history.  With Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein in "our" time, as the chief protagonist...with her eventual husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and sister Claire, she is still single for most of the story, retaining her maiden name Wollstonecraft (hence this story's title).  The three of them are traveling through France immediately following Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, a British victory largely engineered by Lord George Byron, in "our" world a famed poet while in theirs a cavalry leader.  The often-antagonistic exchanges between populist Mary and aristocratic George mark this story as they together cross France and then meet up again in Switzerland...roughly retracing their travels in both real and alternative worlds.  In our world Percy and George are good friends...in theirs it's more distant but still amicable.  I did learn a bit about these famous writers, but as is the case with alternative histories, sometimes it's difficult to filter out truth from the author's creativity.  Frankenstein, which I read not too long ago, did come up at the story's end, but since this is alternative history, you might correctly infer that it wasn't spared from a little alteration as well...

Next week I begin my look at the year 1994 in short science fiction...