RyanHarne.com

Though I have passed by the VT cycling team on several occasions, each occasion traveling in the opposite direction, I have always shied away from their open rides for fear of being dropped from a faster-paced pack. This past Monday, I went to their general club meeting and decided to just dive in.

While I was unavailable Wednesday for their sprint run - Wednesday Worlds, which fortunately runs through my training grounds - I made it out to their slow-pace ride this afternoon.

It had lightly sprinkled just before the 5pm departure and I was running a few minutes behind my expected early arrival, so I took a faster pace out from Progress St. taking Turner St. just to get to campus in time. I pushed off quickly a bit after the Main St. intersection and began the long, sweeping, flat turn of Turner. But. It had lightly sprinkled. And it occurred to me too late that this turn was covered in crosswalk paint. Wet crosswalk paint. I began to bank. And my bike started banking more than I deemed necessary.

Then it happened. Traveling 20 mph around a turn. I went down. In full cycling regalia. In front of a dozen or so traffic-stuck vehicles.

I slid an easy 15 feet. Somehow, I naturally turned onto my stomach and let the cycling clothes take most of the hit. To my surprise, of course after having finished the slide, my cycling jersey and bibs were as tough as armor. Several motorists looked at me with jaws dropped, one got out of her car to check if I was ok. I felt a stinging all down my right leg, but first, instinctively, looked the bike over for any damage.

So, I learned a few things this afternoon. Giordana makes cycling clothing out of microscopic chainmail. Trek makes some amazing bikes that can handle serious accidents without so much as a few scratches on metal components. Don’t ever take that Turner St. turn with a sharp bank, even in good weather. Get back on your bike after a fall and take it like a champ.

Once I met up with the rest of the team, I was showed some trophy injury marks from their past accidents. My huge right leg scrape, inner right elbow scratches, and right thigh mini slices couldn’t compare to some of the scarring I witnessed. Thankfully. I think my fall could have been much worse. My previous falls have all been from a standstill when I was new to my cycling shoes and couldn’t unclip before I came to a complete stop. This was my first moving fall. My first slide.

Hopefully, I will have toughened up those now-somewhat sensitive parts so that I can join in on some mountain training Sunday.

If you haven’t seen this video, either linked via an email forward or from another blog, in the last four days, you must have been in hiding - or at least not living in US America.

I have watched this clip dozens of times in the days since its continual YouTube rotation began and have consequently experienced every nuance of humor, shame, horror, mutual embarassment, and revulsion. Yet, only today, has it sunk in that this 48 second clip shows us possibly the most extreme example of stage fright combined with social ineptitude combined with involuntary self-sabotage. For 48 seconds, the neurons in one human brain all misaligned and fired without remorse, sending miniscule electric shocks to various bodily organs in order to function in the most unusual manner. Unfortunately, it happened to Miss Teen South Carolina 2007. Unfortunately, it was caught on tape. Unfortunately, the person who Tivo-ed it immediately posted it to YouTube.

If you analyze her verbiage, you are left wondering how she made it through Miss Teen South Carolina, or Miss Lexington SC, or even how she made it through high school. Such a “grammarless” response cannot be the common form of a state pageant winner. This is the work of extreme shock that pushed this young girl to the realm of psychosis.

Her body language in the last handful of seconds is awkward. She appears defensive. Weeks, months of training would otherwise have prepped her for an appropriate demeanor in these tense moments; what we see exhibited is the result of an unnatural breakdown. You can’t doubt her prior experience, nor her coaches, nor her own prayers that things would work in her favor. To get to Miss Teen USA, you can neither be entirely illiterate nor entirely incoherent. But some assembly required.

I mean, she did win third runner up (fourth place, it seems) in the end. So, we either have some spectacularly sympathetic judges or Lauren Caitlin Upton is smashing in a two-piece.

It’s worth a second watch, all the same.

I have read blog after blog after blog about email organization this week, really throughout the whole of the summer. As my total count of mail messages has comfortably cleared five digits, containing and segmenting that amount of information becomes necessary.

One of the great disasters I had this summer as an Apple campus rep was trying to make sense of one professor’s inbox. All email was kept in his inbox - it was received, read, and just left there. All 100,000 messages in his inbox. It was shocking. The worst part about it is that he signs himself up to a myriad of useless daily email spotlights or newsletters which sit along beside the requests for help from his Ph.D. students. I think the plethora of email articles/blog entries combined with this worst case scenario gave me the motivation to rethink email on my Mac.

Then, I discovered Apple Mail’s ability to incorporate Rules. An email is received sent to a specific VT listserv that I subscribe to and is launched away from my various inboxes and into a folder where I spot it has something to do with Mechanical Engineering, for instance. A Rule for family emails, for cycling emails, and so on. Rules have really changed the way I organize my mail. My inbox situation is still a mess - certainly no Inbox Zero immediate hopes for me - but I now understand the importance of cataloguing and archiving my messages.

At this moment, I have about 5,000 mail messages sitting in my general inbox. It could take years to sort them through, were it not for Rules; but even with that help, I am simply used to using my inbox as an archiving folder itself, so much so that it is hard for me to actually move the mail from one folder to another (albeit, one is officially archived while the other is an inbox).

I have a quagmire of email. But at least I know what I have on my hands. I suppose, with a weekend-worth of time, I could go through all personal email and move it around, too. My efforts, at the moment, have brought a few rays of email clarity, but a likely scenario suggests that I have much to learn and much to press through.

And if push comes to shove, I always have Spotlight - the all-mighty computer tool. I’ve actually gotten lazy enough that sometimes I Spotlight Safari to save myself clicking on it in the Dock. This is just a geek blog. What a waste.

This was my first successful attempt at waking up very early Sunday and getting on the road before any detrimental weather could befall me. For those unaware of the advantages of exercising early Sunday morning, I have generously compiled a list:

One: traffic is sparse which, for road-going exercisers, is a significant safety benefit.

Two: extra energy from the adrenaline gas released over the night by pine trees but later devoured by afternoon pollution.

Three: cool humidity that will bathe you in sweat but will seem more like soaking in a waterfall than hiking through the midday rainforest.

Four: being able to inwardly snicker at all those who, upon your return, are just begrudgingly waking up and looking childish with their crumpled hair and unfocused eyes.

Five: all of the other, kind, exercising people who discovered these advantages long ago but kept them hidden so that they could participate in Four.

Six: two breakfasts, which apparently was discovered even longer ago by the talented race of Hobbits.

Seven: I’m taking a sabbatical on this one, because I deserve it for getting up that early and returning just as Mr. Sun pierced through the 11am humidity.

The Blacksburg gnats hatched today. Following my ride, it was necessary to turn the shower to maximum power in order to blast them off of my exposed skin and hair. Even my sunglasses had smears. The ride itself was very similar to riding in light rain. Though, this rain would collide with my skin and wiggle around for a moment before expelling its energy to comply with the first law of thermodynamics.

Finally, this is so amazing that, despite being entirely unrelated to gnats or cycling, it overcomes all thermodynamic laws and, therefore, requires perpetual watching by all internet attendees.

I will go ahead and confess that I may be dropping that introductory German course. Which means I would be dropping my earlier passion to learn the language. It boils down to time, mainly. The textbook (plus workbook plus CDs) is $140 new or $20 used on eBay with neither workbook nor CDs. All the same, a semester of time is worth more to me than $140. I am probably going to need a lot of time this semester, maybe $900 worth of it.

So, with my own dashed hopes out in the open, allow me to reflect on a freshman’s assessment of synonyms when my current German instructor revealed multiple ways of introducing oneself:

“Why is there two ways of saying the same thing?”