Introduction
This is the seventeenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, and Volume XVI is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another, and can be read in numerical order, reverse order, liturgical order, purchase order, mail order, and/or in good working order.)
July 24, 2007
I’m pretty sure I didn’t have any kids back when we were colleagues, but I have two daughters now, A— (age 5½) and L— (age 3½). Parenting has been both satisfying and exhausting. The girls always want me to “play Cassandra,” where I speak in this booming voice and pretend I’m an evil sea witch while acting out various scenarios they come up with. It’s really tedious, but they love it. Well, the other day I realized that playing Cassandra vaguely reminded me of some other wearying activity I’m routinely involved in, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. Then it hit me: conference calls. The dread I feel as I enter the passcode is identical to the dread I feel when I’m asked to play Cassandra. And yet both activities have to be done.
May 8, 2008
My back is seriously jacked up. For years I have lived in fear of my back suddenly going out: no apparent cause, no diagnosis, no treatment, no prognosis … just a purgatory of suffering that ideally will subside at some point. And now it’s upon me. The hardest thing for me is transitions (e.g., sitting-to-standing), and the hardest transition is from riding my bike to standing up and walking. So literally the most painful part of my morning ride today was carrying my bike up the short flight of steps to the porch. Then I had to maneuver the bike through the living room, around the landing by the stairs and through the kitchen, and then down the short flight to the office. A fresh stab of pain accompanied every change in direction, and one spasm caused me to catastrophically lose my grip on the bike when atop the steps down to the office. My poor bike fell and the top tube hit the arm of a chair, and now I have this huge dent in the top tube of my almost-new bike. It is absolutely heartbreaking.
The dent isn’t so bad that the ride would be affected, I don’t think. It’s just a really bumful blemish, like if Natalie Portman had a permanent whitehead the size of a pencil eraser on her forehead. Since this disaster I’ve twice had the bike up to a pretty good speed in a full tuck without any problem, so I reckon it’s good. It breaks my heart every time I look at it, though. Sometimes when I look down at that dent while riding I get so pissed off I can actually suffer more, so I guess that’s a silver lining. Man. I’ll still be whining about this on my deathbed, I’m sure.
February 9, 2009
Sorry it has taken me so long to reply to your simple inquiry. I’d forgotten all about it until I awoke at like 3 a.m., for no apparent reason, thinking, “pork shoulder recipe!” The recipe is below. E—’s handwriting is a bit hard to read, as she wrote this in a hurry. We were eating at Rivoli (on Solano Ave) and in a perfect storm of E—’s journalistic skill, our waitress’s helpfulness, and the amazing generosity of the chef, soon E— was being told the whole recipe, by the chef herself, right there at the table.
Let me decipher some of that for you. The pork gets half-covered in stock. (“Covered” gave me a lot of trouble in E—’s rendering, even though I know the recipe already.) Not given is how much chopped onion, carrots, and garlic to throw in. It probably doesn’t matter. The garlic should be chopped with a knife or razor blade (like in that movie), not put through a garlic press. (To hear Anthony Bourdain tell it, you should never put garlic through a press: “I don’t know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain’t garlic.”) Real stock always helps but standard chicken broth is fine (except the Swanson “Unnatural Badness” style … you would want to pay the extra for “Natural Goodness,” which might be the same thing and they just added some margin to cover their substantial marketing costs, but you never know). Use the foil over the top even if you’re using a Dutch oven with a lid. The magic is that the pork just gets tougher and tougher and tougher as it cooks until it reaches some invisible threshold and then it just gives up, the proteins collapse (I might be making shit up here), and the whole thing becomes as tender as can be. I’m hoping that’ll happen to me eventually as well.
April 9, 2009
I agree, it’s pretty sad how many guys are running 27s [i.e., 27-tooth rear cogs on their racing bikes] and don’t even have the decency to be ashamed of it. They speak of this as though it were normal, inevitable even, and like it’s as acceptable as using, say, lightweight inner tubes or cork bar tape. “Oh, I love my 27,” T— has said on several occasions. This is as shocking to me as if he said, “Oh, I find that a feminine pad works so well as a chamois liner.” And don’t even get me started on the guys who advocate compact cranksets (as M— did on my blog post, eliciting what I hope was a sufficiently diplomatic response … my tongue is still bleeding).
Man, a pro racer using a giant rear cog? What’s gotten into these guys? It seems to me that if you have a larger rear cog than your competitors, you will either a) not use it, or b) get dropped in it. I remember before some collegiate race (in my Cuesta days) some guys gave me a hard time for having only a 19 rear cog. I predicted that nobody would be using anything bigger than that on the climb. As it turned out, I was dropped while still turning the 17 over pretty smoothly. These days I ride a 25. Sure, I’d rather have a 23 for aesthetics, and could probably handle this even on Lomas Cantadas in the summer on a good day, but I find I’m sometimes having to weave across the road even with the 25. Weaving of course isn’t the prettiest sight, but I’d rather see a guy weaving with a decent gear range than spinning along ineffectually in some really low gear facilitated by a triple, a compact, or a giant cog, or (worst of all) any combination of these.
April 19, 2009
[This pertains to the news that cyclist Tyler Hamilton had tested positive again after having totally denied doping before, but years before coming clean by writing The Secret Race, which is reviewed here.]
Yep, turn out the lights … the party’s over. Actually, for Tyler, the party should have been over in 2004. Since then he’s been like that one dude at the party who never went to bed and is still drinking the next morning.
May 11, 2009
Thanks for the feedback on my blog … that is a rare treat. Only occasionally do I get feedback and when I do it’s just verbal commentary from my biking buddies, such as on the corn cob post. Nobody actually said he liked it, per se. I think there’s some unspoken rule like “Don’t say anything nice to Dana.” Perhaps this is for fear my ego will get too bloated or something. One guy started off by saying, “You should write for the ‘New Yorker,’” which of course sounded like the highest praise I could imagine, but then he continued, “because your articles are so fricking long nobody could ever finish them.” Well excuuuuuse me! (My longest piece so far, on indoor training, took me half an hour to read aloud to E—; it would take less than that to read it silently to yourself, and I’m sure everybody on the ride watches stupid sitcoms that take that long. But as you said, reading is a chore.) Another guy, who I happen to know does read the “New Yorker,” agreed about the corn cob post … sort of. “Yeah, it was way too long. In fact, I even thought the poem itself was too long. I don’t have time.” I took this as a subtle dig at the first guy, but then that’s just the kind of total egomaniac I am.
July 4, 2009
Thanks for the copious feedback on my Father’s Day email. To answer your main question, perhaps the hardest thing for me to convey about my relationship to my dad is how it actually affects me: which is to say, not really that much. I think you are spot-on with your “arbitrary scale” concept, about a son living up to vs. rejecting his father’s example. My dad’s poor performance stands mainly as a cautionary tale, kind of a reverse how-to guide, rather than anything for me to be really bitter about. Certainly I’m disappointed in him, and when I bother to think about him I can get pretty irked, but I don’t feel I’m struggling to bear the emotional weight of my upbringing as I move through my life.
The ability to learn from a parent’s mistakes, even if you’re the victim of those mistakes, seems utterly obvious and straightforward to me (so long as substance and other abuse aren’t involved, of course). At least, that’s what I have traditionally told myself, but I’m gradually realizing that not everybody believes this. B—, for example, believes that my dad couldn’t have succeeded at being a good husband and father because my dad’s own dad, my paternal grandfather, was such a jerk and that family so dysfunctional. To my retort that as parents ourselves we can improve on the parenting we got, B— said, “These things take time.” He spoke as if this were an evolutionary process, one generation gradually improving on the one before it, to which I reply, bullshit! It’s revolutionary, not evolutionary—we make up our minds to not just repeat the cycle. As a metaphor, let’s say you watch a guy stick his hand in a fire and sizzle all the skin off and howl in pain. You think, “Note to self: do not stick hand in fire. Bad outcome there.” Now let’s say your father, and his father before him, and his father before him, all had this tradition of sticking their hands in fire. You’d think, “Note to self: dad and ancestors all idiots. Do not stick hand in fire.”
July 28, 2009
My kids did their first bike race, a criterium on residential streets in Albany. It was a “fun” race, meaning nobody was paying any attention to who finished where (supposedly). My kids were pretty excited about it. A— got ahold of my Blackberry the other day and started writing about her race. Here’s what she has so far:
I went to a race. It wasn’t just any old race. It was a kids race. I made the decision to inter. Though it looked hard it looked fun and I went with my dad to sign up. I was put in the 6-9 group and I was escorted to the start line. L—’s start line was closer to the finish. It wasn’t indicated where the finish
That’s as far as she got. The race was funny because A—’s group was only supposed to go about a quarter lap, but they just kept going after the finish line and did a whole lap of the crit course after that. I was announcing the race over the PA and got to say, “And ladies and gentlemen, crossing the line now is Albany’s A— Albert of the East Bay Velo Club!” I hope she was listening…
August 7, 2009
Yes, we’re in London! Compared to my previous vacation in France, this is very easy because I can speak the local language, having majored in English in college. There’s still a bit of challenge here (a “spot of bother, “ I guess I should say) regarding certain phrases and concepts. For example, at a pub last night I gave the barkeep a five-pound note and asked him to break it. He was nonplussed. “Break” seemed to mean nothing to him. “You know, give me singles,” I said. His confusion continued. Did he think “singles” was some kind of bar snack that costs under five pounds? Finally he grasped my meaning. Apparently England doesn’t have one-pound notes, which might explain why the term “singles” doesn’t carry any meaning for them. They’re all about the coins over here. It’s weird to think of spare change actually having value. I left a bunch of coins on the dresser last night without realizing they comprised most of my liquid net worth here. Three of the coins alone are worth like seven bucks!
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