Monthly Archives: March 2012

A baldness which is full of grandeur

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Late last year, I shaved my head. A few days later I went to a doctor for a physical and as she was taking my medical history, she kept glancing at my head until finally she couldn’t take it anymore and she said, “So, what’s the situation with the… um…”

I wondered if I ought to be offended. Can’t a woman have a shaved head? Didn’t Sinead make that inroad for women’s liberation back in the 90s or something? But medically, I guess it was a fair question. I could’ve been withholding a secret headlice infection or something.

So I just said, “It’s nothing medical, unless poor judgment counts as a medical condition. Hey, is there a medication for that? Anyway, it was a charity-related incident.”

 

Normally I wouldn’t call shaving my head to raise money for pediatric cancer research to be an act of poor judgment, but it was autumn in the Rocky Mountains and my head was already cold. I had begun to dread the winter. Plus, I was having a hard time getting anything done because every few seconds I had to rub my head. Had to. It was mesmerizing. But there were down sides (like people wondering if I’d joined a punk rock band and having to face the disappointment of realizing I should’ve also joined a punk rock band). Without my hair it became painfully obvious to me that my ears stick out and also that my glasses have carved permanent grooves into my flesh. Once again people are calling me “sir” all the time, but that might just be a side-effect of living once again in Utah. (Oh Utah, I love you and I hate you simultaneously, but most days it’s like 70% hate at least.)

Plus, I’m now at that stage of re-growth where my hair has become its own independent being and refuses to bow to my control. Every morning I look in the mirror and think to myself that while my long hair was higher maintenance, it was also not quite as gravity-defying. In another few months, I will undoubtedly have an almost-afro.

I am beginning to understand Joe Flanigan’s hair-pain on a deep and personal level.

Still, having your head shaved in a pub full of drunken strangers is certainly a unique and rewarding experience, and in all seriousness I haven’t regretted it for an instant since. (Well, more than an instant anyway.) It’s such a small thing to deal with when you consider that the people you’re helping have to deal with much greater challenges. And also, it’s a great story to tell at parties. I mean, it would be. If I ever went to parties.

What I’m leading up to here is that having yourself sheared like a sheep is just the sort of behavior I admire, so I was chuffed when my BFF Deborah decided to throw in her lot with friends Chris and Karin for a ritual hair-shaving in aid of St. Baldrick’s. I hope you’ll consider making a donation in support of their team or an individual shavee, and help Team Blissfully Bald shatter their fundraising goal. (As of this writing they are incredibly close!) You can also read Deb’s blog about her epic undertaking over here, and presumably she’ll keep us updated on all the latest in baldness as this story develops. Personally, I’m hoping for lots of baldness pictures from all three of them. I expect that, as the poet Matthew Arnold once wrote, they shall be “Bald as the bare mountaintops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur.”

Pics, my friends, or it didn’t happen.

Tis a far, far greater distance, than I have ever run

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I ran three miles today.

You might not find this terribly impressive, if you yourself are a runner or any other form of marginally fit person, but for me this is an incredible, wonderful, miraculous day. Just over a week ago, I managed to push my way through a mile and a half moving nearly as slowly as I would have at a walk, and finished feeling like I was going to puke and possibly die. It was a new personal best and I could hardly breathe.

My dog just sat down and stared at me. He wasn’t even panting, that bastard.

I’ve been running for a few years now — ever since I bought my first pair of Vibram Fivefingers and realized that running could be awesome again like it was when I was a kid — but to be honest, I’ve been a little incompetent about it. I’d run for awhile and then walk when my calves began to ache or my side began to stitch or I was wheezing too much, and although for awhile I was running on a very regular basis, I wasn’t actually improving much. Even after a good solid year of this, I had yet to do a non-stop mile. I wasn’t very motivated.

My footwear was very stylish, though. I love my Fivefingers and they love me back by picking flowers for me.

This year, a few things came together. First, I was whinging about my lack of improvement to a fellow runner via the Interwebs, and received some excellent advice. It went a bit like this: “You know what I do when I’m running and I get a stitch in my side? I keep running. Also, when I’m feeling kind of winded? I keep running.” I was also advised to slow down — that if I was short of breath before I’d even hit a mile, I was going too fast for my level of fitness. Once I actually took this advice, things began to improve in a remarkably dramatic fashion. After months upon months upon months of a ridiculously short plateau, suddenly I was pushing myself farther and faster not just every week but every single run. When I did that first mile and a half, if I’d been racing a tiny old person in a walker, they probably would’ve beaten me to the finish line, but by god I did the full mile and a half without stopping.

If I occasionally pretend that Eddie Izzard is my running buddy and David Tennant is narrating our adventures for us, that is nobody's business but my own.

Because I’d also realized at long last that the most important aspect of running isn’t physical, it’s mental. It’s deciding to just keep running. So that’s what I did. My calves burned and I decided to keep running. My lungs burned and I slowed down but I kept running. It started raining on me before I’d finished my lap and my dog was acting like he thought he was in Fight Club every time another dog came anywhere near us and my feet were blistering and it was getting late and my mp3 player batteries had died and I just kept running.

When I’m tempted to stop, I think often of Eddie Izzard, best known as a British comedian and actor but also kind of a hero of mine. Eddie wasn’t by any means in shape or a dedicated runner when he decided to do something completely mad: he ran 1,166 miles around the UK in aid of the charity Sports Relief. According to people who are better at math than I am, that amounted to a marathon a day, six days a week, for eight weeks. And watching the documentary series about this exploit, it seems that the man was powered by nothing but sheer mental grit. He seemed unable to stop running. And I’m intensely grateful to him for doing it, more than I can really say, because he’s a beautiful example of what’s possible if you’re just insane enough. I mean, if Eddie can run 43 marathons, then surely I can make 3 miles? And when I’m flagging I can think to myself, “If Eddie could run in this, then surely I can manage with a little weather.”

It can be really tough to keep yourself motivated when you’re getting started as a runner and all you’ve got to push yourself is yourself. I didn’t exactly have a lot of support, either. Quite a few of my friends have enjoyed pointing out to me repeatedly that my toe shoes are the most hideous item of clothing they’ve ever seen in their lives. (That totally helps with my self-image issues, thanks.) When I first adopted my dog and told people that I figured having him around would get me exercising more, I got knowing chuckles and a lot of, “Oh, I thought that too when I got my dog, it’s not going to happen.” When I excitedly told a few runner friends that I’d signed up for my first 5K race, I was thoroughly deflated when I was told that 5K races were so short they weren’t even worth it. I still haven’t run a 5K, but at least now I know I’m capable of it. (And there’s a 5K benefit coming up for University of Utah rugby, so I think I might finally have to do it!) And more importantly, I’ve found that motivation in myself to push on and just keep running. Because even if you look stupid or your friends don’t get it or you feel like everyone else is so much more experienced that you’ll never catch up, the important thing is that you’re still doing it.

So today I ran three miles. I can almost say I ran it easily; I put on more speed than I’ve ever managed before (though I’m still outstripped by pretty much every other jogger at the park), I never struggled to catch my breath, and instead of aches and pains I had delicious heat radiating from every inch of my body. My muscles weren’t sore; they were singing. I felt like I could go on forever. At the three mile mark I ran a little further, just because I could, and felt like I could’ve done another few miles at least, but I had work to do at home and an evening to be getting on with, so instead I slowed myself to a walk, enjoyed the tide of victory and endorphins swimming in my bloodstream, observed with pride that my dog was finally starting to get worn out, and headed back for the truck.

I can always add on a few more miles tomorrow.

Five Songs To Make A Bad Day Better

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There are certain things that don’t come naturally to me. Among the legion of things on that list are doing math, playing the ukelele, and being happy. Mostly I’m not bothered with my inability to play the ukelele, and the math thing only gets in my way every now and again, but the being happy thing is kind of an issue. It’s not that I shuffle my way through life with a constant rain cloud over my head — though some days may feel like that — but it’s more that if I want to feel happy, I often have to work for it. It’s something that takes effort on my part. Especially on Mondays.

I’ve developed some seriously good ways to bring myself out of a funk, though, even if they only work for a little while. And one of the best — barring the availability of a luxurious bathtub, a day off, a hot cup of tea and a good book — is music. I have a few songs in my MP3 library that are guaranteed to brighten my mood and give me hope and energy for the day. I thought I’d share a handful of them for what I’m going to call Music Mondays, because honestly on Mondays I feel like there’s nothing the world needs more than a little hope.

Trevor Hall, “Other Ways”

When I think about all the other ways I could’ve played,
All the other simple moves I could’ve made,
All the other cards that I could have dealt,
All the books I didn’t read upon my shelf,
All the other ways I could’ve sung my songs
and realized that none of it went wrong.
When it was all play,
How could it be any other way?

Jeremy Kay, “Have It All”

Maybe it’s too soon to be sure
But I really do believe that someday
We’re gonna have it all
So I try to hard to keep the rhythm of a train
Rolling right along
When the ride gets rough you got to carry on
Carry on

Andy Grammer, “Keep Your Head Up”

The glow that the sun gives
Right around sunset
Helps me realize
This is just a journey
Drop your worries
You are gonna turn out fine
Oh, you’ll turn out fine
Fine, oh, you’ll turn out fine

The Swell Season, “Feeling the Pull”

And I’m feeling the pull
Dragging me off again
And I’m feeling so small
Against that big sky tonight

Elbow, “One Day Like This”

‘Cause holy cow, I love your eyes
And only now I see the light
Yeah, lying with you half awake
Stumbling over what to say
Well, anyway, it’s looking like a beautiful day

I’m always looking for new additions to my pick-me-up music library; what are your favorite songs to make a bad day better?

Book Giveaway: Reservation Blues and Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

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If you’ve ever wanted to be just ridiculously depressed, you need look no further than the history — and often the present circumstances — of North America’s first peoples. (I’m sure the same is true of South America, but just learning about the ones up here was bad enough for me at the moment.) With this book giveaway of two absolutely fabulous books, you’ll learn more about both.

Bury My Heart at Wounded KneeDee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was published in 1970 and for the first time offered a view of Indian history from the side of the Indians. It isn’t what you’d call a pretty story… with tribe after tribe, treaty after treaty is broken, cease-fires turn into bloodbaths, and time and again the US government and white settlers treat native people as pests to be exterminated, something less than human. There’s a sense of deja vu with each chapter as one tribe after another is treated with the same casual disregard, and either surrender themselves to fate or meet a bloody, hungry end. The book is written directly from Indian sources and accounts, and is peppered with quotes from the men whose history it tells. Perhaps none sums up the entire history better than the book’s closing quote, from famous Oglala Lakota war chief Red Cloud:

“They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”

For those of you who, like me, felt that what we are taught in history class is generally a shallow, one-dimensional version of history written largely by the winners, this book is exactly the kind of different perspective you’ll love, even as it depresses you to tears. It’s the kind of book that I wish everyone in the world would read.

Reservation BluesOur second selection is Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues. I was introduced to Alexie through a film based on some of his work, Smoke Signals, and he’s since become one of my favorite authors. His interesting background gives him his own unique perspective — he’s a Spokane Indian born on the reservation — but I’m particularly enamored of the way he uses language. He’s a very powerful writer and always has something fascinating to say. I’ve read a few of his short story anthologies, like The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven and The Toughest Indian in the World, and this was the first full novel of his that I’d read. It doesn’t disappoint. It’s the story of a group of reservation Spokanes who start up a rock band with a mystical-and-possibly-evil-guitar at its center, but it’s also about the heritage of blood that every Indian can claim, and the difficulty of reservation life, and the fragility of the human soul. The thing I like most about Alexie’s stories is that they’re human stories; if you want to know what modern life is like for the descendants of those people Dee Brown wrote about, Alexie will give you perhaps more insight than any other writer, but his stories are essentially the stories not just of Indian people but of all people, and they’re invariably beautifully written. Reservation Blues is by turns sad, profound, funny, and in whole is utterly fantastic.

Both of these books were crazy-awesome, and I’d like to share the love. If you’d like to win this double book giveaway, leave a comment and make sure you include some way for me to get in touch with you, like an email or blog address. You have until next Sunday, March 11th at 9am Mountain, to enter, at which time I’ll choose a winner at random and probably have another book to give away. I have no sponsors and I do acquire most of my books from used book stores or Paperbackswap.com, so my giveaways are pretty much always for used books.

In Which Trudeau Performs The Reverse Jackrabbit

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My dog Trudeau loves the snow. And by “loves,” what I mean is “goes completely insane at the sight of it and possibly has a seizure.” I’ve often said that he’d be an easy job to track in the snow, because not only are his paws massive, but every few steps you’ll find a bite-mark between his front paw tracks where he’s paused for his own personal version of a snow cone.

I hadn’t realized exactly how much our incredibly mild winter — we’ve gotten almost no snow until this week — had depressed the poor little guy until we had a few storms this week that brought with them a scant few inches of accumulated snow. I took Trudeau out in the early afternoon and snow was just beginning to fall; he didn’t seem to notice. A few hours later I took him to the Jordan River Parkway for a walk — we both needed some exercise before it started snowing again — and it was as if tasty-fluffy-fun-whiteness had just appeared on the ground for his entertainment.

Trudeau isn’t given to the sorts of displays that other dogs might give. He almost never barks, he doesn’t really do much that’s high-energy… but he loves to bound in the snow and he loves to play tug. So I indulged him when he found his joy in the fresh-fallen, almost unmarked snow. He’d leap and twist in mid-air, making a grab for the leash and then dropping it because he’d found a particularly nice drift in which to suddenly flop as if he’s forgotten how to stand. We left mad, looping tracks in the snow (which was already melting away, and hadn’t amounted to much to begin with), and I couldn’t help but think of the next person who came along pulling a Prince Humperdinck (from The Princess Bride, natch) and deducing our epic battle from the tracks we’d left in the snow.

Trudeau proudly displaying the chaos of our tracks in the snow

"There was a mighty duel. It ranged all over. They were both masters."

Trudeau seems to be most fond of aerial moves — and with his natural grace and agility it kind of amazes me that he always seems to land on his feet — but my favorite is one I like to call “The Reverse Jackrabbit.” He jumps, lands in a bow with his forelegs on the ground, and his lower jaw thrust straight into the snow like a shovel. Then he bounds up again, half-melted snow flinging from his jowls… it’s not what John Masefield was talking about when he wrote about “the flung spray and the blown spume” but that’s still the phrase that comes to mind. The tracks Trudeau has left behind in the snow make it look as if a giant jackrabbit has sat there for a moment, before hopping away.

He's a very dignified creature.

It’s nice to see him get excited, at least. One of the things that makes him perfect for me is that he likes to spend a good portion of his day just lying around and sleeping, but it is nice to see him go a little nuts about something other than the prospect of hitting another dog until it pees itself.

He does get a bit excited about walks, though. We had a nice stroll around the Parkway, and I purposely took him down a path that was nothing but mud and goose-related smells, and he had a hell of a good time. Then the neighbor’s dogs threatened him and he enjoyed that too, and then I took him home and we practiced his new tricks for awhile. (He mostly enjoyed that because of the dessicated lamb bits, but his circus-pony rear and his playing-dead are coming along beautifully.) And then he made his favorite derp-face. Again. The end.

Derp!

Free to a Good Home: The Best Horse in the World

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There isn’t a sale ad, as such, just a Facebook post and later a note that’s titled, “FREE TO THE RIGHT HOME: 18yo Mustang Mare.” The title fails to encompass everything that that sentence means. It could just as easily say, “Free to a good home: my best friend” or “Free to a good home: life-changing equine” or “Free to a good home, because I can’t do this anymore.”

Posting the finished ad feels like giving up. It feels like abandonment. It feels like breathing again after drowning. And that’s all well before a single possible home has presented itself.

When it comes to the subject of finding a new home for my horse, my Juno, I’m about out of words. I didn’t have many to begin with. It might seem melodramatic to be so wound up over the sort of transaction that happens every day, but Juno and I have always had a relationship that runs down to the bone, at least from my side of the equation. There were days when the only thing that got me out of bed was having to drag myself down to the hay barn to serve her breakfast. She’s been the catalyst of a tremendous amount of personal growth for me, and I honestly can’t imagine the person I’d be right now without her.

So now that I’m facing the prospect — the reality — of a future without her after eight years with her, and I can’t really imagine what it looks like. Sometimes I think the idea of not being able to drive down to the barn and see her will drag me deeper into the depression that I’ve fought all my life. And some days I can’t help but guiltily think that once she’s making her home in someone else’s barn, I’ll be able to breathe more freely than I have in eight years. There’s no way to know, really, until it’s done.

Of course, finding a home is in itself a challenge. The list of people wanting an 18-year-old, green-broke, undeniably beautiful mustang mare is remarkably short, and shortened further still by the fact that I’m picky about where she goes. On the other side of the equation is the list of exhaustively trained, child-safe, experienced, excellent saddle horses under ten who are being given away or sold cheap in the face of a truly awful horse market. Factored together, these things add up to what can only be described as a really crappy situation.

I can’t afford to keep my horse — have, in fact, never been able to afford my horse, and have been steadily digging myself deeper and deeper into debt to keep her. The end of all this is both sudden and inevitable. So it figures that right now, at a point where I could be looking forward to a summer season of riding for the first time in our partnership, instead I’m looking for a new partnership in an impossible economy. She might have a place with a friend in Oregon, a really ideal placement with a great person in a place with abundant pastures and relatively affordable hay supplies. I wouldn’t have to worry about her.

I want more time.

I want it over with.

I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

So I’m spending what time we have left enjoying Juno’s company, and I’m making an effort at moving on, pre-emptively. I’m changing my blog and my shop and every other piece of me — well, except the tattoos — so that every minute of living my life isn’t a reminder of a face I’ll miss like mad. I felt I should probably also do something to reflect the fact that, although I’ll still be driving a carriage and probably eventually be getting into riding lessons or something else, it’ll probably be quite a very, very long time before I own a horse again.

So, you’ll shortly find this blog continued in all its random glory at BrightStrangeThings.com, and from there you’ll be able to find my art, photos and other endeavors. It’ll take a little time, but hopefully it’ll be more organized this time around. Thanks for reading so far, and for following my chronicles with Juno, and I hope you’ll continue to read. I solemnly promise that I won’t usually be this maudlin.