Author Archives: asher
Progress?
My husband has been obsessing about creating, for us, a giant Postmodern Hippie Bus. The idea is that we’ll live in it and roam around the country (or, at any rate, to roam sometimes — perhaps more to be able to roam).
I think it would be great if we could even roam beyond the country — roam to Canada, roam to Mexico. I guess we’d have to park it to roam to another continent, but there’s a contingency for that sort of thing in the works as well.
I call it a Postmodern Hippie Bus because the vision is a little more IKEA catalog than Mother Earth News. We are only quasi-hippies, but there’s room in the universe of traveling people for all kinds.
Anyway, up until now, the Postmodern Hippie Bus has been entirely theoretical — diagrams, research, lots of scoping out YouTube videos about tiny homes and living in buses.
But today, we bought the kitchen sink!
At least I assume it’s the kitchen sink. Maybe it’s the bathroom sink? I don’t know. I didn’t ask.
But it was at the Habitat Restore, and Denis had seen it before, and he said, “Oh, my bus sink is still here,” and I said, “You’re going to buy it, right?” and he said, “Oh — well, I didn’t know if you’d want me to.”
I figured, it’s a nice sink, it’s a good price, and we’re definitely doing the bus thing at some point — so buying it makes sense.
So we bought the sink.
Somehow, that makes the Bus seem like something that really is actually going to happen someday, maybe sooner than I was thinking.
And that seems pretty cool.
The other cool thing is the process of designing the interior living — of really thinking about how we live, how we use space, what we want in our space, and so forth.
This is something I’m kind of doing in my own life right now.
Living with bipolar disorder — finally being willing to look it in the eye and call it by its name and accept it for what it is — has forced me to sit down and really think about my plans, goals, and dreams, and what is and isn’t possible for me.
I has forced me to think about how I want to arrange the furniture of my own being; if you will.
For a long time, I felt like saying, “I am not able to do this thing or that thing” was like quitting, or admitting defeat, or whatever. I think I saw it — for myself, but not for anyone else — as a sign of weakness.
I’m starting to see that it takes a lot of strength to accept your own limitations, and that transcending them doesn’t always mean living as if they don’t exist (though sometimes it can).
Rather, it’s like working with (for example), watercolors. There are things you can do with watercolors and things you can’t — in other words, there are limitations inherent in the medium.
If you want to paint beautifully with watercolors, you learn to accept the limitations of the medium — which are, in fact, at least partly responsible for its beauty — and you work within those limits. Maybe (as, for example, Andrew Wyeth did) you push those limits as far as you can. Maybe you don’t.
But there’s no point in pretending the limitations of the medium don’t exist. Instead, you use them to shape your paintings; within their constraints, you create beauty.
So I am not going to medical school and I don’t think we’re going to raise kids — at least not from the tadpole phase, and definitely not for a while. Maybe not at all.
I am, at this juncture, okay with both of those things, though it was tough getting there — especially med school. That took a lot of internal struggle.
The funny thing is that it’s getting easier. I didn’t expect it to, somehow, but I guess letting go, accepting limitations, and redefining abilities is a skill like any other. The more you do it, the easier it gets.
Anyway, it’s late, and I should try to get to bed. So that’s it for now. We did class today, and it was lovely, but I’ll cover it later.
Keep the sunny side up.
“Productivity” is Relative
One time I saw a sketch from some old comedy show about a dating service called “Lowered Expectations*.” I’m guessing you can kind of get the gist of it from the name of the service.
To an extent, that’s kind of how I’m feeling about living with bipolar disorder right now. The secret to success at the moment (as opposed to overall, long-term success) is to lower my expectations a bit and celebrate small victories.
Really, really small victories.
So, basically, I am like, “Heck yeah! I put laundry in the washing machine!” or, “Right on! I managed to put the receipts in order by date! Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”
Now, admittedly, between bipolar and ADHD, putting the receipts in order by date is kind of a huge thing for me. It also makes me feeling like I’m a step closer to disentangling the horrible Gordian knot I’ve made out of the bookkeeping (the finances, meanwhile, seem to be going along without crashing, mostly because we’ve grown rather paranoid about large purchases since the books are a huge mess right now).
I actually think this might be a good strategy. Yeah, it’s kind of ridiculous, but you know how it is. If “ridiculous” gets you from point A to point B when nothing else will, then you might as well embrace it, right?
This is particularly important because, frankly, doing stuff is hard right now, guys.
Like, I had no intention of writing this post. I paused in my laundry process, sat down on the sofa, and cracked open my lappy for some darned reason. Problem is I haven’t the faintest clue what that reason was — and, in fact, hadn’t the faintest idea by the time I was done logging in.
This happens to me a lot right now.
My mind is feeling clearer right now than it has in a while. I wish I could really explain this — mania kind of gives me mental tunnel vision (though often it feels deceptively like laser focus, which it isn’t); depression makes me feel like I’m walking around with a 2-meter thick wad of cotton wool wrapped around my brain.
That said, it’s still hard for me to maintain attention. I mean, harder than normal. Task-switching is particularly hard; I forget which task I’m switching to before I get through the switch (task-switching is never easy for me, for what it’s worth — like everything else, it’s just harder than usual right now).
Anyway, I’ve done some looking into things and discovered that, unfortunately, my schedule isn’t going to play nicely with the Honors program curriculum, so it looks like that’s out — but I probably will stay until May for reasons I might discuss later. I’ve added an intro-level exercise science class to my schedule because A) it looks interesting, B) it might actually prove useful to my future plans, and C)it’s an online class, so why not? It doesn’t add commute time or classroom time.
I also bought a plain black V-neck t-shirt for ballet class. Up until now I’ve been dancing in my bike race t-shirts, because my gynecomastia makes me shy about wearing plain t-shirts in general. I bought a green version of this t-shirt to go with another outfit and discovered that the fit works well, so I decided to try a black one. The black shirt looks pretty sharp on me. Looking forward to seeing how it performs in class — the fit is a bit more athletic than the average t-shirt I’d wear (go figure). An athletic fit is good because it gives your teacher a better sense of how you’re using your body.
Okay, gonna close here. Obviously I’m still a bit on the uptick. I’ll be going to see my psychiatrist on the 24th, so I’m hoping to maybe work out some kind of medication plan that works. I’m not sure how this is going to work, since Lithium and Risperdal are right fracking out (I was on both in high school, with disastrous results, including the gynecomastia that continues to be a big problem for me).
Keep the upside up!
Notes
*Googled it. Turns out it was on MadTV.
Resolved*
*Ha! At 3 AM, nothing is ever really resolved.
Point the first:
I am going to talk to the honors program folks. I’ve been nominated like four times. Might as well have a crack at it.
This will probably mean staying an undergrad til May. I am pretty okay with that.
Point the second:
I need to figure out how to pay for corrective surgery for my gynecomastia. I have waited long enough.
As ballet continues to grow into a more and more significant part of my life, I find that I would really like to be comfortable in the studio.
Believe it or not, tights and a t-shirt add up to a more revealing ensemble than bibs and a jersey. Also, nobody touches you in cycling unless you either crash and need help or grab the last Chimay.
In ballet class, people be handsy, yo.
So that’s one more huge reason in my list of reasons to just get it done, for goodness’ sake.
Point the third:
This might mean taking a year off before grad school (to rebuild financial stores that the surgery – which is rarely covered by insurance, which justly considers it cosmetic – will most assuredly deplete) .
I might end up doing that anyway, while I try to get my bipolar really stabilized and myself mostly functional before I traipse off to spend two or three years living alone in a strange city with only occasional visits from my husband.
Obviously, I am still somewhat manic. I didn’t take a sleep aid tonight, and so here I am, not sleeping.
Oh, one last resolution. I am finally going to get a driver’s license. Not that I expect to use it much, but health things have happened in my family that make Denis want me to be able to Get There Fast.
I’m hoping to go to grad school in Chicago, which is a long bike ride from here; he wants me to be able to come home on zero notice of necessary. The MegaBus and Southwest Air make that fairly possible without driving, but he’ll feel better if I can drive legally, so that seals it.
He is making a huge, huge sacrifice by potentially letting me go away for what could be the better part of three years – so I can make a much smaller one and get my Legal Driver card.
So that’s it for now. I will chat with the honors program folks this week, I guess, and see what I need to do.
Holy Calories, Pizza Man!
So I have not been having the best time eating.
Specifically, my appetite has evaporated, and nothing sounds terribly edible, so I am not eating much (I am trying).
Today, around lunch time, I made it all the way to the supermarket (feeling weak and whinge-ful the entire way) before realizing I hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and that yesterday I’d undereaten by something like six or seven hundred calories, minimum — so I stopped at Little Caesar’s to snag one of their Lunch Special deals.
Little Caesar’s lunch special, in case you’re wondering, comprises about half a pan pizza (along with a 20-oz bottled drink; I got diet Pepsi). Maybe it’s not quite that big. I’m not sure, because I’m not really into pan pizza so I’ve never ordered one of LC’s pan pizzas.
I seriously hope that I’m overestimating, because if I’m not, the “lunch” portion runs something like 1,590 Calories.
1,590 Calories, people!
That’s like, the vast majority of a day’s share for most people (unless you’re riding a century, in which case it’s just elevenses).
Fortunately, I put in about an hour on the bike, so if I have any desire to eat anything else at any point I can at least swing a reasonable meal without automagically gaining 15 pounds.
I’m not saying that’s, like, wrong and should be banned. Personally, I’m rather glad that I can cram 1,600 down my gullet in a sitting somehow, — there are times in every serious cyclist’s life when maximizing calories ingested per effort expended ingesting them is essential.
However, if I was someone who didn’t know much about how to keep track of my caloric intake, and worked near a Little Caesar’s, the Lunch Special could prove to be a huge stumbling block (of note, the nutrition facts for the Lunch Special are not yet posted on the LC website).
Just something to think about in America’s ongoing battle of the bulge. It would be awesome if LC made the nutritional information for the Lunch Special more readily available. I think people would still choose to buy it, but they might also choose to eat half the pizza (which is what I ate earlier today; I ate the second half for dinner) instead of the whole thing.
In other news, I’ve been kitting myself out for the upcoming wedding of two of our dearest friends, so here’s me looking … well, frankly, ready for the first day of 10th grade or something:
In case you’re wondering, I own maybe two of the shirts in our closet. The belts, on the other hand? Almost all mine.
But, anyway, I’m posting this because I really love this shirt, which is super-sharp, and which actually fits me (well, it’s a little roomy, but that’s fine).
I am short-coupled and I have short arms, and that makes finding dress shirts a huge pain. Recently, I discovered that clothes made for the Asian market tend to fit me (evidently I’m Korean on the inside?); that said, this shirt isn’t marketed as such.
So anyway, if you are a short-coupled, short-armed Velociraptor of a dude, and you find yourself in need of a dress shirt, you could do far worse than Stacy Adams’ “Rome“. It even comes with a set of basic cuff links, though I ordered a pair in purple because Fashion! (They match the tie I’m wearing in the terrible selfie above).
I’ve got some reviews pending for Levi’s 511 commuter-line trousers and shorts. Bottom line: BUY THEM, especially if you can find them on sale. I didn’t expect them to be all that, but found some on TheClymb.com for a ridiculous price, so I bought some anyway.
I have been pleasantly surprised with their fit and functionality, so consider me schooled.
Anyway, that’s it for now.
On Ballet! — Monday Class Notes. About Danged Time.
We missed class on Saturday, because I was woozy as heck (trazodone!) and Denis was out picking up our truck from our mechanic, whose wife is one of his oldest friends, and stopped to chat with the wife. An hour and change after I figured he’d be back, I called to make sure he was alive. By then it was too late to make it to class, so needless to say: no ballet.
As such, we high-tailed it to Margie’s class tonight after I wrestled with the incredibly delicious smoked duck our friend Kelly prepared for us (it did not want to reheat).
There were only four of us tonight, and we had a brand new dancer (who did, I think, a lovely job; I hope she’ll be back soon), so it was a slow and easy class — which is good, because slow-and-easy means you get to really focus on your technique.
Which meant my tendus looked kind of awesome, I found the connection between my leg and my back again (that probably only makes sense to you if you dance?), and I kept everything strung together so my grand battement wasn’t wiggly. At least, not on the right. The left was a little wiggly at first.
I also worked on making my arms do graceful things while doing adagio, and so forth. We honed our glissades (both with and without a change of foot). I got distracted and playful towards the end. That might actually be a good thing: I realized during the first bit of barre that I am often screwed down so tight at the beginning of class that I couldn’t dance* if you tossed me onto a hot skillet.
I’m still not sure if I’m really “back” yet. I won’t be doing Wednesday class because we’re taking our nephew to the opera. I’m considering hitting up the Wednesday morning Intermediate class, even though it would be a reach in terms of my abilities right now. But, hey, your reach should exceed your grasp, right?
I just don’t want to be the obnoxious, under-skilled interloper who screws up everyone else’s class. So we’ll see.
No awesome carefully rendered ballet graphics this time. I blew my creative energies this morning working up a poster for a totally imaginary movie for no good reason and I just can’t think of anything funny to present.
Besides, I was pretty much mostly not a spaz in class today, except for the part when Margie told us, “Don’t do this thing,” and I did it A) to demonstrate and B) because I was curious about what would happen. Apparently, I’m still that kid. You know. Every class has one.
So, anyway. More ballet soon. ‘Til then, keep it together. Sunny side up, rubber side down, etc.
Notes
*Doing Ballet Stuff is not necessarily the same as Dancing. You can execute a perfect pirouette, but if it has no musicality and no soul it’s not dancing.
Aggregated Thoughts
First, it’s Digital Book Day, peoples, so go get your free digital books! Who knows — you might discover a new favorite author.
If you get an “Error establishing a database connection” message, be patient. Some of the categories (mystery and thrillers in particular) seem to be pretty overwhelmed, but once you get a given category to load, you can ctrl-click or right-click > open in new tab/window (or however Mac users do it) and the individual pages for books load fine (they’re on different sites — so far, I’ve downloaded maybe four or five promising titles from Smashwords and two from Amazon).
~
Second, it seems that everybody but me considers the word “twink” to be an insult. Who knew?
Last year, Thomas Rogers contributed a thoughtful article to The Awl about twinks, what the world thinks of them, and what happens after they outgrow their category.
As someone who both self-identifies as a sort of permatwink (or am I a “party ferret?”) and tends to be perceived as such by the world at large, I found Mr. Rogers’ article to be both informative and thought-provoking. I honestly had no idea that basically the entire gay universe assumes that “twink = walking disaster area” is a natural law, but there you have it.
I should say that I self-identify as a kind of permatwink in a way that perhaps doesn’t align neatly with all assumptions about what “twink” means: I am not a slave to fashion. I am not … okay, well, not always … a disaster area. I would say I’m not a party boy, but in fact I do like going to parties and clubs and dancing — but that’s where I draw the line. I am a sort of chaste, mostly-sober party boy, I guess. Yawn?
The thing is, I suspect the same can be said for a lot of us who get sorted into the “twink” slot — perhaps especially those, like me, who wind up there by default, because they are slim and hairless and young or young-looking and playful and like to dance and don’t particularly feel any need to change any of those things. Seriously. I embrace my twinkhood, but it’s not because I’m trying to be a twink. I just am what I am. If the label fits, wear it.
Re-reading bits of Mr. Rogers’ article on twinkhood (yeah, you’re right, it does feel weird to say that) and how maybe we should evolve our assumptions about it (check out Rogers’ list of Important Historical Twinks!), it occurred to me that a lot of the behavior that we attribute to some kind of defect endemic to the twink population is, in fact, simply young-people-trying-stuff-out-and-sometimes-getting-it-wrong behavior.
We sort of expect adolescents and young adults to try on different identities, experiment with different form of self-expression, and basically ride the failboat all the way to Failtopia. Mostly, we kind of roll our collective eyes and say, “Oy vey, I hope they grow out of that.” We assume that they’re doing stupid crap because they’re, you know, young. Basically, we sort of assume they’re inexperienced and still figuring it out.
Meanwhile, when twinks do stupid crap, we evidently assume it’s because they’re, you know, twinks. Basically, we sort of assume that they’re (should I, as a permatwink, say “we’re,” here?) somehow defective human beings who cannot hope to transcend their current mire.
In short, we expect young people to grow out of it. We don’t expect that of twinks … though I don’t know what we do expect of them. Do people expect us to grow into Sad Old Queens? Do Sad Old Queens even exist anymore? If so — beside the discomfort of being Sad — what’s so awful about being Old and a Queen? If there’s one thing the gay male community needs to learn, it’s to honor the elders. Sad Old Queens are, by definition, elders. At least, I think so. I guess it depends on what you mean when you say “Old.”
I’m not going to try to come off all smug and superior here, by the way, like I’m the One Person Who Never Judges The Twinks.
In my experience, while we are eternally the laughing stock of the queer universe, nobody is harder on twinks than twinks. I am as guilty of this as anyone, I guess. I recognize that when I point out that I’m the chaste and mostly sober twink at the party — the one who doesn’t use recreational drugs, keeps a tight grip on his alcohol use, etc. — and that I’m not some trend-worshiping fashion victim, I’m making value judgments.
Likewise, there are other denizens of the Twinkiverse who would decry me as an uptight, elitist, silver-spoon-fed bore.
Covertly, I am basically saying, “Yeah, I’m a twink, but I’m not like those twinks; those guys have problems.” In fact, they probably do, and so do I, and — here’s the rub — my problems make it much more likely that I will not be a terribly productive member of society (fortunately, I’m a twink, so I’m decorative … right?). Other twinks may seem defective, but they tend to go on to be productive human beings. Meanwhile, I’m struggling with a serious mental illness that will make it much harder for me to contribute my share to the world. So, yeah. There’s that.
At the end of the day, though, other guys are still going to sort us all into the “twink” box and make all kinds of assumptions about us that probably aren’t correct (or, well, that probably aren’t exhaustive, and that aren’t correct all the time even when they are exhaustive).
Here’s the thing: I don’t think you’d catch a member of the bear community throwing his fellow bears under the bus like I throw other twinks under the bus and so forth. The bears (and their leaner friends, the otters) possess a sense of community; of fellow-feeling that makes them more forgiving of each-others’ faults (though, being pretty much the opposite of a bear, I have only observed bears from the outside, and thus could be totally wrong here.) They certainly don’t seem to do the whole, “Other bears are like x, y, and z, and I’m totally not like that,” bit — which is, by the way, what I just did to my fellow twinks and meta-twinks and permatwinks and whatever the hell else we are these days.
I suspect that lack of community spirit, of coherence and brotherhood, is one of the reasons so many of us — so many twinks, that is — eventually adopt some other queer identity. It’s not just that “twink” appears to be an age-limited category, but because it’s one that includes no built-in community. Maybe that’s because it’s a category one we’ve basically accepted as pejorative, and one that we assign to others far more readily than we assign it to ourselves.
Seriously, I am the only guy I know personally who embraces the word “twink” as a descriptor relevant to his own identity.
In short, every twink is an island.
So, yeah: I grok that I am part of the problem; that I have on more than one occasion attributed someone else’s idiocy to his twinkhood.
And, like Thomas Rogers, I’m really not sure what twinks evolve into (though “party ferret” sounds pretty fun, I’m not sure that’s what I’d want to put on my CV, if I was forced — bizarrely, because why would this ever, ever happen? — to categorize myself according to my place in the spectrum of queerness).
I’m not even sure why we’re so obsessed with categorizing ourselves. I grasp that a lot of our queer sub-categories operate as a kind of mate-finding shorthand, but what makes us extend those categories to the far edges of our identities? (I say this, mind you, as someone whose memberships in the broader categories of “cyclist” and “dancer” extend all the way to the borders of his selfhood and splash out all over the world around me — so maybe a lot of us just really like categories; I don’t know.) What makes us retain them after our mates are, you know, found? Yeah, “twink who likes older guys” was a convenient label when I was single. Now I’m a twink who’s married to an older guy, so……
Anyway, this is something I intend to think about. Who’s afraid of the big bad twink, and why?
Lastly, because this is now a bajillion times longer than I intended it to be, it’s Tour Time and I am once again basically failing to watch the race. I have decided that I am Cycling’s Leastest Fan (yeah, that’s grammatically incorrect, but it scans better, so there).
I peripherally sort of enjoy the thrills and spills of bike racing, but I am apparently not capable of being committed enough to actually watch races if it involves making effort (if Le Tour is on in, for example, a pub where I’m shoving pizza into my maw, then I’ll watch as if hypnotized; I won’t, however, go dig up a feed on the innertubes).
But, anyway: the Tour is happening, so if you’re into watching it, go watch, and let me know what happens, because I can’t be bothered to find out for myself.
That’s it for now.
Sunny side up, and all that.
Quickie: A Hundred Pounds of Rocks in the Tour (Not So Literally); Ballet Dreams (Literally)
I’m taking a more conservative approach than I have in the past to managing my bipolar disorder.
This means that I haven’t returned to a three-classes-per-week schedule yet, or even a two-classes-per-week schedule. I wanted to go to class last night and did not feel ready, end of story. I need to learn to listen to that voice or reason, even though sometimes it feels like it’s standing between me and my dreams and goals.
I try to tell myself, instead, that it’s like not pushing yourself too hard on the bike when you’re recovering from a serious physical illness (like the last time I had pneumonia, or the time I broke my leg). You have to build back into it with a modicum of caution. Sometimes that means it takes longer to reach your goals than you had hoped.
Dottie (my therapist) and I talked about a similar thing yesterday. I found myself telling her about how frustrating and sometimes disheartening it is when this whole bipolar thing throws me off the rails, and how I sometimes really resent my difficulties instead of really appreciating what I can do; what I am doing. We also talked about how I tend to forget that I am living with a serious mental illness; one that can be really debilitating.
We wound up with this crazy Tour de France analogy: living with this is like riding the Tour de France with a hundred pounds of rocks in your chamois. The Tour isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s really freaking hard when you’re carrying a hundred pounds of rocks (or maybe when you’re the domestique and you have to carry … all … the water bottles?!)…
Here is a high-quality graphical rendering, replete with cheering fan, to help you visualize this concept. (An oldie, but a goodie! You might remember this from last TourMonth July, in fact.)
Riding the Tour with a hundred pounds of rocks doesn’t mean you don’t get there. It does mean maybe you don’t ride all of every stage, or maybe sometimes you don’t ride a given stage at all. It certainly means that you’re probably going to finish each stage long after the crowds have gone home.
It means that, if you’re smart, you might be willing to accept some help — maybe a motor to get you up Mount Ventoux, maybe a partner to carry some of your rocks when you’re really struggling. Maybe an extra book of matches or two.
Maybe, sometimes, you even stop halfway through a stage and climb into the team car.
Maybe you try medication. That’s why they make medication.
In short, carrying a hundred pounds of rocks on the Tour takes a hard job and makes it harder. It makes you reassess your goals. When you’re carrying that load, there’s no way on Earth you’re going to win — not even if you ride the best eBike in the world and hop yourself up on so much EPO and caffeine that your veins stick out like the Alps on a topographical map. Instead, making it to the finish becomes a goal worth achieving — in fact, sometimes, just making it to the end of the day is a victory.
Anyway. I didn’t mean to wax on about that for quite so long. I meant to write about literal ballet dreams.
Lately I dream about ballet all the time — that is, about dancing. Literally, it’s like I’m practicing in my dreams on the days I don’t do class (and, in fact, these dreams often take place on the nights following would-be class days; I should say will-be class days, because I will work back into it). Last night I had a long, long dream entirely devoted to perfecting the very simple combination (demi-petite allegro? ;)) from Margie’s class on Saturday — tombé – pas de bourrée – glissade – assemblé.
It was kind of a dream about mastery, I guess, and about confidence. And also about the fact that my arms are a heck of a lot less awkward than they used to be.
It was, in fact, a pretty cool dream. I love dancing, and my dreams are extremely vivid, so it was like having the opportunity to dance for a long, long time on a day that I didn’t get to dance in my waking life.
It will be interesting to see if the dream in question has, in fact, acted as practice. There’s good evidence supporting the hypothesis that athletes (including, presumably, dancers) are not just exercising their egos (a nebulous concept at best) when they use concentrated visualization, but actually firing the neural circuits they would fire when performing the athletic task in question*.
Anyway, today I’m feeling fairly okay, I think. The challenge is not to tip myself back over into mania. People who do not suffer from bipolar disorder often imagine mania to be a pleasant state, and it can be — but for me, mania is often “black,” characterized by immense irritability, agitation, expolosive rage, near-psychotic paranoia (though I suppose I don’t really talk about this: because it’s only near-psychotic, I know it’s irrational, so I simply try not to give in to it), and a restlessness that prevents the completion of even the simplest tasks.
I know I’m not “better” yet, not quite back on an even keel, because I’m not feeling much need to sleep and I keep forgetting to eat (among other things). But I’m at least close enough to earth orbit to be getting stuff done, and the agitation and anger have passed for the moment. I’m into the kind of hypomania that can be very pleasant (Lots of energy! Reasonably positive mood! The ability to talk about things! Fast but not totally out-of-control streams of thought! Accomplishing lots of tasks! Wild productivity! Not so much total inability to feel the presence of G-d!) as long as I don’t let it get out of hand.
Okay, well. This is now much, much longer than I intended for it to be — but I guess it’s illustrative, nonetheless.
So far, I’m feeling kind of okay about being more open in this blog. Recently I had a long and awesome conversation with another person with bipolar disorder who seems to experience her disorder in much the same ways that I experience mine, and that was very heartening in a totally unexpected kind of way.
If even one other reader stumbles across my ramblings and goes, “Hey, this sounds really familiar. Maybe it’s not just me,” and it helps … well, that would be really awesome, and make it all very worthwhile.
Notes
*Non-athletes do this as well, as far as I know. I believe there have been some studies of this process in musicians. I’ll have to see if I can dig them up.
On Ballet: Saturday Class Notes
I finally figured out what my glissade-assemblé problem is.
For some strange reason, I sometimes throw a change of feet into the middle of my glissade where one is not needed. Then the assemblé assembles in the wrong direction.
This is basically the same thing as putting the right foot in when you should be putting the right foot in in the Hokey-Pokey.
No disassemblé!
I’m not sure why I do this. When I don’t (and when I can prevent my brain from immediately going, “Did I do it right?!”) it links up to the assemblé rather nicely.
Funny How That Works.
So, yeah. I guess I’ve got the glissade-assemblé sorted.
For now.
Tear the Whole F**king Thing Down
Recently, my friend Robert asked me what I wanted for a username on his Mumble server. I told him, “Mystif,” because that’s a concept that holds a great deal of meaning for me, where I am right now (yeah, I know, I totally sound like a woo-woo hippie, here).
He, being my oldest and bestest friend, gave me some crap about never sticking to one thing and mentioned he’d basically had the same internet identity since forever (which, btw, is and isn’t true — like me, he’s got at least one internet identity that goes back a decade, maybe more, but has also had a bunch of ephemeral ones that served some or another purpose at some or another time.
I should issue a caveat: when I say “internet identity,” I don’t mean “a totally fake persona.” I just mean a different username, handle, whatever you want to call it. Mine always point back to me. I’m pretty transparent about the really relevant facts of my identity. In short, I’m not trying to hide anything or be someone else.
To belabor an analogy, the armature is always the same; it’s just that sometimes the artist hangs different things on the sculpture that highlight different aspects in its nature. And, of course, the artist in question is probably not me, but G-d, and I just change the title of the sculpture accordingly, or whatever.
Robert, of course, was just messing with me about my internet chameleon status. I know that now, and I knew that then, though at the time it actually kind of ticked me off (and I told him as much, and also that I knew being ticked off about it was totally irrational). What I didn’t understand was why it ticked me off; what nerve it struck that garnered that juvenile, “Heeeeeey, stop picking on meeeeee!” response.
Having had some time to reflect, I realize that some of it is that I’m uncomfortable with my own sort of ephemeral nature.
Like most people, at my core, I am basically one thing — an evolving, elaborating thing, but one thing. On the outside, I would hazard that I probably seem very different to different people; so much so that if two people who know me in two different areas of my life described me to one-another, they might come to the conclusion that they knew two different guys with the same name or that I am a giant fake.
I think the former of these conclusions would be closer to the truth. I have lived a very compartmentalized life (I think I’ve written a bit about this, here). I’m not sure how to stop doing that. It’s a coping mechanism that mostly works most of the time.
It doesn’t help that I regularly pass through what I think of as “iconoclastic phases” — periods in which I want to destroy not the cherished icons of the world around me, but my own cherished icons. Phases in which I want to sweep all of the detritus from the table and start over new. Some of them are sane — they represent, I think, the desire of a creative personality for a fresh canvas. Some of them are not sane — they represent the struggles of a brain, mind, and soul with the intricate pulsings of an illness that sometimes makes bad ideas seem like good ones.
Basically, what I mean is that sometimes the phoenix does need to burn in order to be reborn, and sometimes it doesn’t. Right now, the phoenix doesn’t need to burn.
I’m in the midst of one of those phases now. This one is not a sane iconoclastic phase, so I’m trying not to give in to it. A part of me, for reasons I don’t really entirely understand, wants to basically burn my entire internet presence to the ground. Right now, my established history here, in email, and on G+ seems like a sea anchor; like an albatross around my neck.
Part of the problem is that compartmentalization thing. My history here is mostly one of writing about happy bike stuff; happy ballet stuff, with intermittent episodes of writing about religion, about mental illness, about the difficult things in my past, about my struggles with life.
I think maybe writing about that harder stuff is important, and yet part of me feels as if to do so muddies the waters. It’s such a weird way to feel. Then, part of me also feels exposed when I try to do this — the part of me which learned at a very young age that if your vulnerabilities can be detected, they will be exploited in order to cause you harm. That part of me refuses to listen to reason: to understand that things are different now, and that while that’s still a possibility, I am much better at protecting myself than I once was, and that the vast majority of people don’t operate that way*.
So, yeah. I have built this whole thing; this internet presence, I guess. And sometimes, like right now, I want to burn the whole thing down, raze it to a clean slate, start over.
I think instead I’m going to just try to let my history stand, but also let myself write about everything. Particularly, perhaps, about how hard it is sometimes to live inside a brain that insists that you act “normal” and do “normal” things and maintain a “normal” image when you’re dancing on the brink of madness. Which is, by the way, totally me right now.
At the end of the day, perhaps it will help if I remind myself that the difference between kitsch and art is often unflinching honesty — not, as some with imagine, an unrelenting focus on whatever is socially inappropriate, dark, or unpleasant, but rather the willingness and ability to present the whole picture, even when sometimes it’s really hard to say what exactly the whole picture is (hello, Mona Lisa).
I don’t know if I’m supposed to be an artist or whatever. I kind of feel like that’s a word other people use to describe you; “Oh, he does this work, he’s an artist.” Here, I am just a dude writing about ballet and bikes and sometimes about being wacko (and using funny words to deflect the weight and perhaps the vulnerability and pain of saying “mentally ill,” or whatever). I am just doing the work. Later on, people can decide about its value. It just is what it is to me.
I’m not promising a regular series about this, though perhaps I should; perhaps it would be therapeutic, or something, to force myself to write about all this crap, unflinchingly, on a regular basis. The thing is, I am not doing so well with consistency just yet. I’m still working on forcing myself not to live as if I’m under seige, withdrawn in my fortress and depleting my stores, even though there are no enemies at the gate; no invaders waiting to storm across my drawbridge.
Maybe eventually I’ll get there. That’s the best I can do right now in terms of making positive statements about the future. I realize I’m supposed to have faith and so forth, and when I stop to think about it, I do — I just can’t see the path G-d has laid before me right now, so it’s hard for me to say anything with certainty. I’m stumbling around in the dark, and I don’t always remember to reach up and hold my Father’s hand.
I guess that’s it for this post. This is hard, and I’m tired. This is much harder than riding a bike up a big hill or hanging by my hipbones from a trapeze or doing a million fondues in Brienne’s class (which is, come to think of it, probably why I do those things: in my life, those and loving Denis are the easy things).
I’ll try to write more soon, though making that statement kind of fills me with dread, since it’s like making a promise I may or may not be equipped to keep.
Meanwhile, keep the rubber side down, your waterfowls in a linear array, and your eyes on the bacon donuts.
Notes
*To this day, it weirds me out that film and TV writers imagine that screaming in response to a perceived threat is a normal behavior. Is it? Because that sure as heck seems maladaptive to me. If you scream, you reveal your location to the source of the threat. I have never been a screamer. My native response to perceived danger is silence.
Ride Report: Century 101
Saturday night, I went to bed at 10:30, thinking it would be nice to get almost 8 hours of sleep before a big ride for once.
Sunday morning, I finally heaved my carcass out of bed at 5:45 AM. I had slept a whopping one hour.
Yes, one.
I asked myself a single question: “Can I ride 101 miles on 1 hour of sleep?”
The answer, it turns out, is yes.
I suppose I should explain my logic. We are dealing with stuff and I am not getting to ballet class three times a week, or even two times a week, though I hope to get back to that this week at least. I am also not getting any other exercise because I have been grappling with an episode of very agitated, unpleasant hypomania, which has made sleeping and completing projects almost impossible for the past couple of weeks.
As such, I’ve spent basically all my time wrestling very basic household tasks (and, I am forced to admit, mostly losing), and haven’t even done my grocery run by bike since things started getting really tough.
Saturday night I decided that it was really important to try to get out and ride, even if I didn’t make it the whole way, because getting some real exercise in would help me get some real sleep (maybe). I figured it might also take the edge off my agitation.
Sunday morning I decided that it was important to try to go as far as I could: to complete at least the 50-mile ride, then to continue if at all possible. I felt sure I could do that much.
I’d organized my stuff and printed out a checklist on Saturday night. This made it easy to get up and running in the morning. I threw my clothes on, ate my oatmeal, gathered my stuff and headed out — .95 miles to the bus stop 😉 (I didn’t think I was quite up to the 200k I’d be rolling if I rode all the way to the ride start and all the way home.)
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| Riding (the bus) to the ride! |
I hopped off the bus a little less than five miles from my destination, grabbed some ride snacks and Gatorade (I’d managed to forget one water bottle, somehow, but remembered absolutely everything else) along the way, arrived at the wrong destination, and then backtracked until I reached the right place, which I’d somehow overshot.
Fortunately, I was still 15 minutes early — really 30 minutes early, since the ride left on “Wheelman Time,” 15 minutes late. I signed the release form (basically: “If you die on this ride, you won’t sue Louisville Bicycle Club”) and picked up both 50-mile and 100-mile cue sheets. Our Ride Captain, Richard, gave us the obligatory quick talk about things we might need to know on this ride (construction areas, detours, that it was possible to bail at the 50-mile mark even if you had the 100-mile cue sheet). Then we all turned on our Garmins* and rolled out.
Soon we were whipping along in a big chatty group, making good time on familiar roads. Most of us had ridden most of the route on other rides, so we were all feeling pretty comfortable. It helped that Timothy Stephen was along; later in the ride, having around who I felt really comfortable talking to would help pass the miles, not to mention a rider I completely trusted in a tight paceline and someone to trade pulls with**. It was also cool to finally be able to ride all the way across the Big Four Bridge, our new pedestrians-and-bikes-only bridge (which will feature in upcoming school commutes).
After twenty-five pleasant miles, I was feeling pretty great — especially since those miles included a climb that made me say, “Huh, this used to be a hill.” I guess my fitness really has improved (the remainder of the ride confirmed that fact!).
We hit up our first store stop at a gas station called Temco, where I threw back a Payday bar (the cyclist’s friend!) and a Cherry Coke Zero. I joked that my Payday bar (at 240 calories) had probably just about replaced the fuel I’d used on a long pull cranking away into headwind.
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| Timothy and Company at the Temco store stop |
I had decided to take in a bit of caffeine at each food stop to stave off the potential effects of sleep deprivation. This strategy proved highly effective; I left the Temco store stop feeling refreshed and ready for more. Timothy and I decided that finishing the full century route was much likelier than we thought.
By the time we were sweeping back through Utica, IN, we were absolutely certain we had the 50-mile route in the bag, and we were both still feeling pretty strong. We again encountered a stiff headwind along a stretch of road heading south-west; this would become something of a theme throughout the first seventy-five miles of the ride. Soon, though, we were at our lunch stop — a Subway in Jeffersonville, IN — where, evidently, my food must have looked a wee bit suspicious or something:
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| Did something just move? |
As we ate and dawdled, we came up with a plan to incorporate both an extra food stop and a couple extra miles into the ride by detouring to The Comfy Cow on Frankfort Ave at around mile 99. Then we found ourselves reminiscing about the lunch stop on last year’s July 4th Boston century, which we kept much shorter, since we were soaked to the bone and freezing our butts off in the air conditioning***.
Soon — refueled and refreshed — we were back on the road. We zipped back over the Big Four Bridge (the ramp, by the way, is steeper and a bit narrower on the IN side than on the KY side), rolled through downtown, and headed west-by-southwest on Main.
Immediately, we realized that the next several miles were going to be, well, interesting. We were feeling well-fueled and pretty spunky, but we were already chugging into a significant head wind — and once we got out on the Levee Trail, we would be very exposed.
Still, we were determined. Timothy and I rolled along, sometimes chatting side-by-side, sometimes swapping pulls to save energy. Much of this segment of the ride took place on the Louisville Loop Trail, so we didn’t have to deal with too much traffic. Likewise, for much of this segment, we didn’t spot a single other soul from the ride. We began to speculate about the fate of a pair of tri-girls, also on the ride, who’d been dining across from us at lunch. Had they undereaten and bonked? Had they blown away?
I suppose every long ride has low point. Mine came while riding the Levee Trail, which runs (perhaps unsurprisingly) along the top of a riverside levee. It’s scenic, but very exposed — and now we were heading straight into the wind, with occasional significant gusts.
Fortunately, we were too far out to bother turning around. It might’ve meant riding 91 miles instead of 101, and I wasn’t about to let that happen. I kept my mouth shut (except for the occasional non-verbal grumble after a particularly emphatic gust) and rolled, because that’s how we do it, right?
Then, after what seemed like forever, we passed the site of the next store stop, which meant we were only a mile or so from the turnaround.
…Which meant, in turn, that we were only a mile or so from the tailwind.
As we came about in a concrete circle on the grounds of local landmark Farnsley-Moremen Landing, I was filled with triumph, jubilation, and — yes — even a little bit of relief. As we headed back to the Five Star to hit the mile 75ish store stop, our pace — which had dropped to a grinding 12 MPH — picked back up, and we spun along at around 17 MPH once again.
At the stop, we caught up with a bunch of riders. I enjoyed another Payday bar, a half-and-half Diet and regular Pepsi from the fountain, and a Gatorade. For some reason, I really wanted a chicken salad sandwich, but that seemed like a bad idea, so I skipped it.
I also skipped taking any more pictures — but not on purpose. I just forgot. I was having too much fun chatting with other riders and enjoying the rare Payday treat (Paydays and Salted Nut Rolls are about the only candy bars that I’d say I enjoy enough to be dangerous — so, with exceptions of surpassing rarity, I only get to eat them on long rides).
Other riders began to head out. We finished up our snacks and headed back to the Levee Trail soon after — and there, we finally got to really enjoy the tailwind we’d earned ourselves.
That tailwind lasted most of the way back to downtown. With more than 75 miles and counting under our belts, I can’t say that all of the remainder of the ride felt entirely effortless — parts of me were starting to hurt, and I had long since decided that the Tricross needs a shorter stem if it’s going to fulfill its promise as a go-to century bike — but parts of it did.
I watched my Garmin’s Total Distance meter tick up and was filled with the sheer joy of knowing that, yes, I was going to finish this ride. I was going to do this thing I’d set out to do — and I was going to get to eat awesome ice cream in the process.
On the way back downtown, we caught up with fellow riders Laura and Patsy (on her awesome ‘bent). We rode with them for several miles, from the end of the Levee Trail portion of the Loop all the way to just past Saint James Court, where we made all kinds of crazy loops around the scenic, tree-planted, fountain-bedecked medians just because we good (and also encountered a minor traffic jam).
By then, I was really starting to get tired. I wasn’t actually sure I could make it up the climb on Frankfort Ave — one I used to ride daily, and which once seemed pretty stiff. Once again, though, I had the good sense to keep my mouth shut … and when we got there, I found that the climb in question must have eroded considerably in the past few years 😉 (That, or else I’m just a lot stronger now than I was back then!)
We rolled up Frankfort Ave and deposited our bikes in the not-so-effective rack in front of Comfy Cow. As we parked, my Total Distance readout read 99.0. We were not just going to make it, but we were going to make it feeling strong.
Timothy got some kind of sundae concoction in a chocolate-dipped waffle bowl, and I got the Milkshake To End All Milkshakes: a pure, unadulterated coffee malted (just a few years ago, it was basically impossible to find one of these in Louisville, which didn’t know from coffee ice cream). There was no need to worry about sugar, calories, or caffeine content: I was already well over 100 miles for the day, I had eaten nowhere near enough to even begin to approach working off the burn of 8+ hours on the bike, and I knew I would have exactly no trouble sleeping when bedtime rolled around.
Once we’d thrown back our ice cream treats, we leapt back on our bikes and banged out a final four miles. I rolled up to the car (Timothy had offered to drop me at home) with 103 miles on the meter.
After factoring in the morning’s two transport rides, my total distance for the day amounted to 109.74 miles. A pretty nice day out, I think!
A few stray thoughts and some things I learned on this ride:
- Even tough I try not to overdo it with sugar most of the time, it works pretty well as fuel on really long rides as long as it’s accompanied by appropriate amounts of fat and protein.
- I can ride longer and harder than I thought.
- Even though I have way, way fewer miles under my belt this year than I did at the same time last year, I’m a stronger and fitter rider than I was then.
- If I can ride just shy of 110 miles, I can ride a 200k.
- If you feel like maybe you can do something, but you’re not sure because you’re a wee bit sleep deprived or whatever, give it a go. You might just surprise yourself!
Notes
*Garmin units seem to be nearly universal around here. The beginning of any club ride is now accompanied not only by the unmistakable sound of cyclists clipping in, but also by the signature Garmin beeps as everyone simultaneously begins to record.
**Sadly, swapping pulls with Timothy benefits me much more than it benefits him, since I’m both shorter and skinnier than he is.
***In case you’re wondering: given the choice, I think I’d take Dairy Queen as a lunch stop on a century, even though Subway offers better nutrition — but I think my Number 1 Fast-Food Ride Fuel choice would have to be Burger King. Unfortunately, Burger Kings are pretty scarce around here, and the only one that’s on one of my regular long-ride routes is currently closed for remodeling.
danseur ignoble 