A Thousand Times No

During most of the past weekend, I was nervous about what was going to happen this morning when I got in motion for the beginning of Week 4 in the Couch-to-5K training program.  Yesterday, I was far more unsettled by how my shins might behave when I started jogging again than by the plummeting of the stock market, or even by the vagaries of my digestive system that had kept me home from work.

Lance Armstrong is fond of saying, “Pain is temporary; quitting is forever.”  But when you develop an injury like shin splints, it feels like recovery is the thing that takes an eternity.  The harder you push yourself, the worse the condition becomes.

During the past week, I read up a bit on shin splints, did a lot of stretching, hung off the edges of stairs, and waddled around balanced on my heels whenever I was stuck at a curb.  I also began to suspect that my cadence was simply too high for a novice runner, so I resolved to trot at a more leisurely pace.

This morning, I started out slowly, trying to keep my cadence down in the neighborhood of the 140bpm music, waiting for the familiar burning sensation to engulf my shins.

It never came.

I had spent so much energy fretting over the possibility that I would have to abandon the training program that I lost track of how many intervals I was supposed to run today.  When I reached what I thought was the end of today’s workout, I heard the telltale ascending chimes in the Podrunner Intervals music mix that tell you, “Start running now.”

Bong-bong-bong-b…WHAH?

I picked up the pace one more time, which made me feel better, not worse.  (Is this what they mean when they say “swimming with endorphins”?)  Before I knew it, I had finally finished this week’s new routine, and my shins were not on fire.

I was tempted to do a little dance, but instead I stretched my muscles and then made straight for home, where icepack and aspirin awaited.  Absent-minded?  Yes.  Stupid?  No:  after pushing my legs during the new routine, I wasn’t about to push my luck as well.

Look, the New York Post is having a headline party in my honor!

This afternoon the 7-11 bailout bill (a seven, followed by eleven zeroes, hurtled through during the wee small hours of the night), intended to help rescue the American financial industry, went down in defeat in the U.S. House of Representatives.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 777 points at the end of the trading day.  The phrase “Black Monday” is being bandied about left and right, and October hasn’t even begun yet.

The funny thing is, I remember very clearly what I was doing during Black Monday in 1987, nearly 3 x 7 years ago: I was a temp worker in an office that confirmed employment information on mortgage applications.  During that brief stint, I learned that plumbers and construction workers could easily bring in more money than young college instructors, that lawyers and doctors often had no idea how to keep track of their own personal finances, and that talking to people about money was a very delicate business indeed.

We sat in a room full of desks and old-fashioned, Ma Bell, standard-issue telephones, working our way through the stacks of paper in the manila folders compiled for each mortgage applicant.  In that era, before the proliferation of new telephone area codes, we simply dialed seven-digit numbers.  We were instructed to try to phone a general switchboard number for the applicant’s employer, rather than what might be an invented direct-dial number, and to ask for the applicant’s stated supervisor in order to confirm the length of employment.  Other figures, like bank balances and additional financial information, would be confirmed elsewhere through an entirely separate process.

Back then, we had no cell phones, no email, no World Wide Web.  If you weren’t actually sitting inside a brokerage house, it was difficult to find a stock ticker to keep you appraised of what was happening on the exchange floors, where share prices still moved in fractional (rather than decimalized) increments.  But that afternoon, someone called the man who was supervising all of us to let him know the markets were in complete freefall.  I have a vague memory of him trying to tune in on a radio in the office once he heard the news, and repeating as the day wore on that the losses continued to mount.

I honestly can’t remember whether we were sent home early that day or not.

For all the talk of the losses involved during the bursting of the tech stock bubble earlier this decade, nothing else in our lives even comes close to 1987 in terms of a white-knuckle ride during a single trading day.  Before you let the news of today’s record-setting point drop in the Dow turn your head, consider this: today’s dip in the Dow amounted to just under a 7% drop.  On Black Monday in 1987, the Dow lost over 22% of its value before the closing bell.

Since then, various curbs have been implemented on the exchange floor to halt trading in the event of a precipitous, market-wide plummet.  Ironically, the very task I was performing during the last so-called Black Monday — the simple due diligence of verifying a mortgage applicant’s employment history and income — has became strictly optional.

My father, a retired financial professional, is fond of repeating the dictum that an investor’s greatest enemies are greed and fear.  I knew he had managed to steer clear of the clutches of greed, but I wondered about his experience with fear.  When I asked him once whether the stock market had ever made him feel truly afraid at any point over the years, he said, “Only for a single day — in 1987.”  By the following evening, things already looked better.

I called my dad this afternoon when the market started to tank; we’re both buckled up for the crazy ride ahead. Like true roller-coaster connoisseurs, we’ve just thrown our hands up in the air, we’re hollering on the way down, and our hair is standing on end…but we’re not genuinely frightened.

Not yet.

Forget about the world being divided into cat people and dog people — the globe is populated with White Rabbit candy lovers…and everybody else.

How to describe the much-treasured, iconic milk candy of China?  It’s cloyingly sweet, an oddity for a culture that tends to favor much milder flavors in candies and desserts, and it ambushes people with a resounding, unsubtle vanilla thump.  Its texture is notoriously variable; like a Tootsie Roll, it could range from alluringly chewy to frightfully petrified, depending on how long it has been left to sit.

What makes White Rabbit candy special is the rice paper that is wrapped around every single piece.  Unroll the candy from its outer wax paper cover and the fun begins:  How will you consume the rice paper this time?  Will you nibble off the excess free edge, and then let the remainder melt in your mouth as the candy rests on your tongue?  Will you dampen it and then methodically scrape it from the candy using your teeth?  Will you chew the candy in segments, leaving the rice paper in place and allowing it to mitigate some of the sugar rush?

When I heard on the BBC World Service the other morning that White Rabbit candy was being pulled from shelves worldwide because of the recent Chinese milk contamination scare, I was crestfallen.  “Everybody else” may not have noticed the headlines, but this is really a huge wake-up call for fans of the White Rabbit.  When the White Rabbit disappears, it’s virtually impossible to deny that a food safety issue exists in China.

Now if only they could make Coca-Cola magically vanish when the U.S. national debt exceeds $10 trillion, then this country might actually pay attention to the fact that its fiscal policy has been coasting along a certain Egyptian river without a paddle.

This morning, I managed to finish the final routine in the third week of the Couch to 5K training program (”W3D3″ to aficionados).  I’m not particularly winded at the end of the jog-walk combinations, but my shins are starting to protest a bit.  Nothing painful or persistent, but a burning sensation similar to the feeling one gets from lactic acid buildup.

So I’ll be stretching more, icing my shins after cooling down, and searching for a softer running surface to use at least once in a while.  I’m probably going to be giving in and taking an anti-inflammatory on days when I run.  My house is loaded with “baby” aspirin, since I was already slowly headed down the path to regular aspirin consumption as a preventative care measure.

Shins, don’t fail me now…

That slide presentation I’ve been yammering about over and over and over during the past week?  Here it is, as part of Ignite Philly 2:

The most effective rate for chest compressions is 100 compressions per minute – the same rhythm as the beat of the BeeGee’s [sic] song, “Stayin’ Alive.”

– American Heart Association news release

This afternoon, I went through CPR/AED recertification at work.  An automated external defibrillator, or AED, is a device that essentially “reboots” a human heart by delivering a powerful electric shock when it detects the kind of irregular activity that causes a heart to stop pumping.  I first learned how to use an AED two years ago, when the university where I work began placing the devices in buildings throughout the campus. Today, it was time for me to take a refresher course on what to do when someone goes cold quicker than an investment bank.

While AEDs are becoming far more commonplace, appearing in schools, airports, and all federal buildings, I’m guessing that most people still don’t know how to use them, or even where to find them.  (Why is there no standard for AED placement, like putting it next to a restroom?  That would certainly make it easy to find in a public setting.)  This contrasts with the instructions we are given during training, in which we’re told to ask a specific bystander to get an AED.

During training, I felt compelled to press the point:  What if that particular person has no idea WTF an AED is?

Our instructor reassured us that a surprisingly high number of people know about AEDs; I think he was soft in the head and spends day after day exposed to a skewed sample — namely, people who are signed up to receive AED training.

Why am I so jaundiced in my view?  Well, let’s see: when someone like veteran broadcast journalist Tim Russert drops to the floor in the NBC newsroom, surrounded by people whose business it is to know what’s going on in the world, and begins receiving immediate CPR, and they actually have an AED in the building, and they don’t get it on him until the EMS crew shows up with their own AED, and Russert dies from the very condition (ventricular fibrillation) that an AED can address but CPR can’t…well, let’s just say I’m less than entirely confident that a random person in a crowd will do anything but freeze if someone points at them and says, “YOU!  Get an AED, right now!”

It doesn’t help that recommendations for exactly how to carry out CPR have been skipping around like an arrhythmic heartbeat.  When I was a teenager, every single student in my school was trained (and tested) in performing CPR as part of our mandatory health class, leading to years of jokes about feeling around for young ladies’ xyphoid processes.  In those days, it was 15:2 — fifteen chest compressions, two breaths, and it remained that way when I was recertified in CPR by the Red Cross about twelve years ago.

Then they moved the numbers around.  The instructions we received two years ago during my first AED training were to stick with 30:2 — thirty chest compressions to two breaths.  But the American Heart Association is going even further, now advocating that untrained bystanders skip the mouth-to-mouth altogether and just continue chest pumping until help arrives.

Ten years from now, this won’t be a problem.  We’ll have settled on a resuscitation standard, and most people will know what and where AEDs are.  But it’s probably good to try and refrain from going into cardiac arrest between now and then, just in case.

Now that there’s a proposal for a $700 billion federal bailout on the table, people are trying to get their heads around just how to count that high.  Over at Slate, Juliet Lapidos slices and dices the figure in a number of different ways.  Since I’ve spent a fair amount of time during the past week working on video footage, I couldn’t help but think about how that number translated cinematically.

Let’s start from a standard frame rate of thirty frames per second for a moving image, always rounding down to make this a conservative calculation:

700,000,000,000 divided by 30 =  23,333,333,333 seconds of footage

23,333,333,333 divided by 60 = 388,888,888 minutes of footage

388,888,888 divided by 60 again = 6,481,481 hours of footage

6,481,481 divided by 24 = 270,061 days of footage

270,061 divided by 365.25 (leap years!) = 739 years, plus several months

Let’s say you happened to start filming with a motion picture camera back in the time of Geoffrey Chaucer was penning the Canterbury Tales in the 1380’s, and you kept it rolling continuously up to the present moment, paying a dollar for every single frame along the way.  (Remember, that works out to $2,592,000 per day.)

At this point, you’d still have to keep shooting for more than another hundred years in order to run up a $700 billion tab.

Just be sure you have enough money left over to add some subtitles for the Middle English part of the film.

After spending numerous hours this past week putting together a slide show, I finally had the chance to deliver it in public tonight.  Footage is bound be up on the netterwebs very soon, but for now I’m glad that I can just kick back and fall asleep tonight without thinking about what else to tweak on the slide deck.

I love Apple’s Keynote presentation software — except when I hate it.  It gives people fine-grained control over the placement and movement of screen elements, has a whole set of useful slide and text transitions, and effectively permits people to create rudimentary, prompt-triggered animation.

It also creates files that are more bloated than the Wall Street of, oh, a year ago.

I know I’m using film clips and lots of photos, but why on earth does the resulting Keynote file have to be over 150MB in size?  For a five-minute presentation?

And why is Keynote refusing to accurately capture the timing whenever I try to pre-record a timed presentation?  I click, I click, things go along, and then the replay stalls.  I click, I click, things fail.  Peforming a “Save As” or a file duplication doesn’t reduce the file size.

On top of all this, Keynote will almost certainly forget my birthday, never send flowers, and probably be seen around town with lots of other women.  Yet I’ll keep going back, because I’m a sucker for a pretty face, not to mention how it handles in the dark.