Day 123

By all accounts, today was a good day. I think I'm beginning to integrate with some sort of loose-knit community of alternative lifestyle types. Today has two case-studies to illustrate this point.

1. I went running at the track during my lunch break and met another eccentric: The Philosopher. We were both running without shirts or shoes. We both had shaved heads. He had a tattoo of an enso on his stomach, offset to the side.

"It's the only way to go, huh?" he said, noticing our mutual lack of shoes.

We ran a few laps together and talked about different Buddhist practices, about how he made the mistake of majoring in Philosophy as an undergrad, about the beauty of the Marin Headlands. After a while, he broke off, giving me a pat on the shoulder. The whole exchange just felt really genuine. I couldn't help but smile for a while after that.

2. There's something of a colony of people who walk slack lines by the Campanile, the bell tower on campus. At the base, there's a little grove of trees planted in rows that make them ideal for setting up the lines. During one of my breaks, I stopped by because I knew a couple of people there. I came with a bag a trail mix. I left with some new friends.

Another heart-healthy meal.

Day 116

I'm slowly building up my street cred as one of the regular eccentrics at the dirt track where I run. It's only a couple blocks away from my apartment, and it's attached to Clark Kerr, the dormitory with the highest proportion of student athletes, which is why they also get a soccer pitch, a baseball diamond, and some tennis courts. It's pretty convenient to do laps there, and the dirt is nice and soft enough for me to run barefoot, which is a habit I've taken to as of late.

Yeah, I'm that guy.

I'd say that demographic breakdown of the other people who use the track goes something like this: about half students, a quarter middle-aged Berkeleyites, and a quarter senior citizen power-walkers.

And then there's the other crazy. If I get to be Barefoot Guy, then I'd like to refer to the other crazy as Rambo. Rambo likes to do his laps in the mid-morning, just as I do, and I seem to see him every time that I go out to the track. I'm pretty sure he's out there everyday, judging by the crumpled tissue paper texture of his skin and the fact that he's browner than me. He brings his dog along, and lets him hang out in the shade near the aluminum bleachers. He always wears cut-off muscle shirts that bear only the manliest of logos, like Everlast, which I like to imagine implies his past boxing career. That would explain his massive guns. He runs with knees braces on both legs and weight-lifting gloves. Finally, there's the headband, for which I give him his namesake. No, he doesn't wear a bandana, because bandanas are for hipster pussies. No, Rambo is fucking hardcore, and only a torn strip of plaid flannel, quite possibly leftover from the aforementioned hipster pussies that he eats for breakfast, has adequate sweat-wicking properties. Oh, and he wears a tape-player, not a Sony Walkman but a knockoff, for his tunes. I assume he loops a mix of Bruce Springsteen and the Rocky soundtrack. His routine usually involves running forwards and backwards, sidestepping, and looking tough. So that's Rambo.

I wasn't feeling especially brave today, but I gave him a sideways glance and a nod of acknowledgment, from one eccentric to another.

Well, my vision is starting to go, which usually means that I haven't had enough to eat. Time for some quinoa!

Day 91

I went running with Yang this morning. I'm in better shape than him, so I felt like taking on a handicap and ended up running barefoot. It was a little chilly out, and my toes went numb pretty fast. We stayed on a dirt track and occasionally I'd feel something sharp, freaking out that it might be glass. But otherwise, the experience of having sensation on the soles of my feet whilst running was delectable. It seems like the foot is a too commonly neglected part of the body, sensation-wise.

After the run, I went online and started a search for the pertinent alternative-living fringe community that must surely inhabit some web 1.0 angelfire abomination, and surely enough, I found it. Well, pretty soon I was convinced that all ills in the world could be traced back to the moment in human history when primordial fell from grace upon the first donning of shoes.

Once my blisters heal up and harden into callouses, I'll definitely try barefoot running again.

Day 75

I took some pretty cool pictures, I think, on campus today. The first one is of Wellman Hall, the entomology building. The inside's got a lot of nice wood paneling and exudes the spirit of the agricultural land grant college that Berkeley once was. The hallways smell like lacquered wood, and you can just swear that at any given moment, a man wearing a tweed coat and handlebar moustache, carrying his leather brief is going to stride out from behind the frosted glass pane of an office door.

Later on, I got to sitting on the steps of the old administrative building, California Hall, when I noticed a pine tree sapling poking up through a crack in the cement. I'm a sucker for tiny plants in inhospitable locales, which also explains why I took the third picture, which is of bryophytes growing in a cement ash tray. Anyway, I took a special liking to this pine tree. The little guy reminded me of the plants I used to see while hiking above the treeline in the Sierras. Basically, they find a crack in the granite and hold on for dear life, in spite of the intense UV light, poor soil, arid conditions, and daily temperature extremes. I'm always rooting for those little guys out there.

The last picture, as I mentioned, was taken in an ashtray. This particular ashtray is located in Ishi Court, named after the last known "wild indian." It's a pretty nice open space, with a bunch of benches and trees. The courtyard itself is tucked away in Dwinelle, the most labyrinthine of all the lecture halls; I usually make it a point to take a ball of twine with me whenever I go there. And minotaur spray. Never forget to bring your minotaur spray. Legend (or hearsay, whatever you want to call it) goes that there were these two brothers, both architects, who were working together on the design of Dwinelle. During construction, they had a falling out of sorts, and they stopped talking to each other, leading to a building filled with weird half-levels, abrupt jumps in room-number sequencing, and circuitous, redundant hallways. Apocryphal? Maybe. Fun to tell? Always.


Stairwell of Wellman Hall (the entomology building).


Pine seedling.


Bryophytes in an ashtray.

Well, later in the day, blinking in the sunlight after emerging from chemistry lab, I decided to use some of the remaining glorious sunlight (thanks, daylight savings!) to go for a run. Let me begin by saying that running without a shirt on is one of the great pleasures of being a boy. To feel one's chest tingle with sunlight is a joy I will refuse to ever surrender. I went up Strawberry Canyon, which is the watershed that the university originally bought to supply all of its drinking water. I ran past the frats, avoiding the crusted sidewalk puke that stood testimony to a weekend of revelry, and past the football stadium, eavesdropping in on the beefy Australian accents as the rugby squad strolled out onto the pitch, before I started climbing up the canyon.

Running alone is a meditative experience. I can breath and sweat out whatever demons I have inside of me when I go for a run. It's hard to describe, but running up hills always makes me feel strong. I think it has something to do with discomfort, and the discipline it takes to deal with that discomfort, which comes to stand in for whatever frustrations or anxieties I may be feeling that day. Mostly it's breathing that carries it away. Knowing that I can breathe and be fine is always a comfort.

The way it usually works for big climbs is that I feel disciplined on the uphill and cocky on the downhill. On the descent, I took the meandering firetrails, rather than bomb back down the road, which shoots straight down the hill. Cruising back, I seemed to be in the mood for greeting my fellow runners, of which there were many because of the nice weather. After a few smiles and friendly nods, I ended up conducting some observational experiments in social psychology. I made some unscientific generalizations and noted that lone female runners had the tendency to look down or away as they listened to their iPods, whereas lone male runners either made eye contact and returned the greeting (the old guys) or looked straight ahead with a neutral facial expression (the young guys). Just to keep things interesting, I alternated between the hang loose sign and a two-finger salute, both accompanied by a grin. The occasional stare or giggle from a group of girls was a nice ego boost, even if they were all wearing their identical sorority workout shirts. I try to keep my diet low in vanity, though I sometimes indulge myself.

By the time I made it back to my apartment, my legs were rather jelly-like. I still need to get used to running for an hour plus. On the upside, the slow release of endorphins was wonderful; taking that shower felt something akin to flying.

Day 28

Went running this morning. I felt pretty great going in to my first class. The pre-class run, shower, and oatmeal were definitely the deciding factors in my feeling like a million bucks.

Tonight I said goodbye to one of my friends from high school. He's going away to do missionary work for two years, as is mandated by his church. It just made me think about all the other people I knew in high school I haven't seen since graduation (which was about two years ago), and wonder how much their lives have changed. I felt kind of eerie thinking about these people I had almost completely forgotten about; it was kind of like raising the dead from their graves. My mind was filled with strange apparitions of ghosts of schooldays past.

Day 17

Home at night.

I finally went running for the first time in about a month, and I sure picked a doosey of a day to run to Twin Peaks. It was pretty windy, and about halfway through the run it started to drizzle. I was cramping up and my breathing was labored as my asthma started to kicked in. But I earned some major hardcore points when a car passed by, not too far from the top of the peaks, and gave an encouraging honk, its occupants smiling and giving thumbs ups. That kept me going.

Miles Ran: 4.5
Currently Reading: 1491 by Charles C. Mann
Dollars Spent: 0

X-Country

A parable of the current novel-writing situation:

A tinny bang and a puff of smoke. The girls ran through the damp grass with springy mesh running shoes, ponytails bobbing, elbows jockeying for position in the pack. It was the second heat of junior varsity girls.

She was in the thick of it, the undulating sea of bibs and numbers and gaudy school colors. The air was brisk but she didn't feel the cold; all she felt was the sting in her lungs. Each stride she felt the tight then the slack, pulse in then out of her quads.

She started pushing up the hill, planting firmly each time into the grassy hillside, the smell of the damp almost perceptible. She was turning over and climbing the hill, steadily, still with the pack. She felt the first beads of perspiration, not yet congealing into sweat. And in a moment she felt for the firmness of the ground, and it was not there, just the sudden jerk downward of a hamstrung horse. She went down, grounded, no more rhythmic pulsating forward.

She got up and limped back toward the start.

Smells

I remember the smell of waking up on Saturday mornings in my house. The aroma would hit me as soon as my foot touched the last step at the bottom of the staircase into the dining room. Sitting in his dining room chair with its sagging cushion would be my dad, back from his morning run in the Marin Headlands. That was back when he ran marathons. Sometimes he still does, even though it's bad for his knees. Anyway, he'd sit there and read the newspaper and maybe eat some junk food as a reward. And the room would smell like his sweat. Not like the body odor of the armpit in need of deodorant squeezing against you on the bus. Rather, it was the smell of sweat that has gone cold and permeated into one's clothes.

Usually (always, actually) it was just me and him, awake that early in the morning. I'm pretty sure I prided myself on being the second earliest waker in the family, even if it was only to watch morning cartoons instead of train for a marathon. I liked the tense stillness in the air of those Saturday mornings, like the house was holding its breath, about to sigh. My dad sat there, seemingly at rest, and yet I knew where he had come from and how the house would start buzzing again once my sisters and my mom woke up.

But for the time being, it was still quiet in the house, so I would make my bowl of cheerios and head towards the living room TV, without saying anything.

This morning I went running with my roommates. When we came back, I got a whiff of that same sweat smell, and was immediately transported back to this memory.

Year

I don't really know whether to look forwards or backwards. Time is funny like that. Maybe I should just stay trapped in now. Like the woman I talked to the other day. About twenty years ago, she was in a coma for eleven days. She had been riding her bike in San Francisco (something I do with a certain irregularity but with great pleasure) when she was hit by a car. Her advice: live every day like it's your last, because you might not wake up to see the next. I bumped into her as I was running in my neighborhood and she was walking her dog. We started talking because she made some crack about running the Bay to Breakers. So I stopped and we chatted, and I learned about her daughter with a learning disability and how she likes running to the ocean and how I absolutely have to run the Bay to Breakers next year for its centennial. What a sweetheart.

But under different circumstances, I might not have so wholeheartedly approached her the way that I did. I'm not sure if the version of me from a year ago would have allowed myself to give a stranger a chance to open up a little. Well it was a nice chat, and it only reinforced the idea that the most valuable things I can ever hope to accumulate are the connections I make with other people.

What a nice thought.