A Thousand Times No

I’m a regular reader and longtime fan of blogger Heather Armstrong, the Wondrous Being of Light and Splendor best known as the writer, photographer, and all-around life force behind the Dooce website.  (I also follow her Mac-o-phile husband Jon over at Blurbomat.)

When your site’s name manages to enter the annals of UrbanDictionary.com as a synonym for getting canned after you blog about the unscrupulous fatuousness of management in your workplace, yours is the firing heard ’round the cyberworld.  But in today’s economic situation (a phrase that should hereafter simply be abbreviated as “BITES”), it’s probably best not to provide anyone with ammunition to dooce you.

So… *ahem* …I won’t.

As part of my training for riding in the Philly Livestrong Challenge in August, I’ve been trying to find ways to start putting some pedaling mileage into my legs.

Yes, I’m a gear addict — and yet, mysteriously, the neoprene bootie covers cyclists use to prevent frostbitten toes during the winter months hold no allure for me.  Maybe it’s because they remind me of Ice Capades costumes, and I feel the irresistible urge to form jazz hands whenever I see them — not the best impulse while barreling downhill at breakneck speed.  So, no extended bouts of outdoor riding for me this winter.

During the past few weeks, I’ve begun logging miles indoors at my gym, and my machine of choice has been the spinning bike. Its flywheel and clipless pedals are the closest thing in the building to actually rolling along on the road.  Eventually I’ll get around to attending spinning classes, with their oddly effective stand-up-sit-down intervals, but for now I’m just working on extended, low-intensity pedaling.

Why not begin working with an instructor immediately? Last weekend, while performing stretches and core strengthening exercises in a quiet work area in my gym, I heard a man screaming in short, agitated bursts from somewhere outside the room.  I honestly began wondering whether someone was having a fit of ‘roid rage on the nearby weight room floor.  It took me several minutes to realize that the source of the shouting was a spinning instructor who was in another room, behind a wall and a closed door.  (Okay, so my aerobic workout is supposed to simulate being dropped into the middle of a round of Mortal Kombat?)

This is a million light years away from what Johnny G., the inventor of spinning, had in mind when he created the workout.  Many years ago when I was traveling in the Los Angeles area, I went to Johnny G’s studio to take a public class.  A set of headphones was suspended from the ceiling over each spinning bike.  Every session began with a sound check, with each rider giving a thumbs up or thumbs down on the volume for an individual headset until everyone was comfortable with the sound level.  Then Johnny G. himself saddled up on a spinning bicycle and, using a headset microphone, gently talked everyone through the 45-minute session in his lilting South African accent.  It was all very Left Coast — pleasant, healthy, affirming, with a nice afterglow.

Nowadays, I head into my gym’s spinning room when no one else is there, pulling the door shut behind me.  One particular machine at the edge of the room is positioned almost directly under a spotlight.  Armed with a steady supply of trashy magazines, I clip my bike shoes into that machine’s pedals and silently grind through the rotations while reading about celebrity breakups, designer clothing, illicit surgical procedures, and what men or women really want.

True, it’s akin to huddling around a garbage can full of burning broadsheets for warmth.  But there’s still a little afterglow at the end, so why not?

Several days ago I finished knitting up another Koolhaas Hat, this time using the infamous orange yarn I acquired during our recent Yarn Crawl.  The yarn turned out to be far fuzzier than I expected, so the hat wound up having a somewhat critter-like feel, but I decided to keep knitting until it was done.

Since I was mailing the hat away in a small shipping box, I wanted to find something lightweight to use as a protective wrapper.  I thought to myself that tissue paper — the gift enclosure kind, not the nose-blowing kind — would be the perfect thing to surround the hat. “In a nice contrasting color, like blue,” I said to myself.

So while I was walking past the paper recycling bins in my office, what should I see but an enormous pile of…blue tissue paper!  No joke!

Later, when one of my co-workers saw the sea of tissue paper in my office, she asked what I was working on.  I explained that I had been musing about gift wrapping accoutrements and the paper had magically appeared.

“Quick, think about warmer weather!” she advised me.  “Or think about something you really want.”

Okay…

Last night I returned home late and fell into bed, so tired that I forgot to remove a long necklace of garnet and gold beads that I was wearing.  When I woke up in the morning, I noticed that I was still wearing jewelry from the day before.  Half-awake, I began tugging at the strand to remove it by pulling it over my head.

In an instant, the threading snapped — and beads flew in all directions across my bedroom floor.

I picked up as many stray pieces as I could find and tossed them into a small ceramic cup.  I’m still a few beads short.

It was only later, once I had gotten dressed in my running gear and I was jogging through the thin dusting of snow we received last night, that I realized I had completely forgone blogging yesterday.

Gotta say: extra sleep is really sweet.

Yesterday was a day of dervishlike activity for me.  I ran five miles, completely cleaned my kitchen, gave in a filmed interview for a short documentary film (in my newly scrubbed kitchen), picked up a new color printer, stopped to peek at a ginormous house that is being sold short, and went to the movies.

Which means that today I barely managed to get out of bed. Yay me.

A recent piece in the New York Times entitled “No Snickering - That Road Sign Means Something Else” highlights some of the more unusual place names in the United Kingdom.

In the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Some are mostly amusing, like Ugley, Essex; East Breast, in western Scotland; North Piddle, in Worcestershire; and Spanker Lane, in Derbyshire.

Others evoke images that may conflict with residents’ efforts to appear dignified when, for example, applying for jobs.

These include Crotch Crescent, Oxford; Titty Ho, Northamptonshire; Wetwang, East Yorkshire; Slutshole Lane, Norfolk; and Thong, Kent. And, in a country that delights in lavatory humor, particularly if the word “bottom” is involved, there is Pratts Bottom, in Kent, doubly cursed because “prat” is slang for buffoon.

As for Penistone, a thriving South Yorkshire town, just stop that sophomoric snickering.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that the names date back to a time when such terms did not have their modern connotations.

As a city with place names that date back several centuries, Philadelphia also has its own variations of this problem.  One Philly neighborhood that is recognized in real estate circles as an up-and-coming region is Fishtown, a moniker that sounds less than entirely appealing to most people outside the city.

A more prominent local byway that leaves visitors scratching their heads is Locust Street.  (”I feel like it should intersect with Pestilence Lane,” one of my friends recently remarked.)  Locust Street is part of the original collection of streets named after trees by William Penn, including Pine, Spruce, Walnut, and Chestnut.  Appropriate, considering the fact that Penn + sylvania = Penn’s Woods.

Despite its horticultural origins, “Locust” still sounds odd to the modern ear.  If you live long enough in Philadelphia, though, it will eventually cease to bug you.

It should come as little surprise to anyone who has worked with stringed instruments that the Inauguration performance by violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Gabriela Montero, and clarinetist Anthony McGill involved the playback of a prerecorded audio track.  The public disclosure of this information, however, was contextualized in a most unfortunate way.  As the New York Times reports:

“Truly, weather just made it impossible,” Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. “No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t a matter of Milli Vanilli,” Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because the duo did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts.

Invoking the name of one of the most infamous hoaxes in recording history doesn’t exactly lower the ante.  But it does raise the specter of a handsome young biracial man who never really knew his birth father — namely, Rob Pilatus, the German-speaking half of Milli Vanilli.

Pilatus was the son of an African-American military man and a German striptease dancer who was raised by adoptive parents in Munich.  After the scandal surrounding Milli Vanilli broke, he spent the next several years battling drug addiction, and made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide in 1991.  He later died of an accidental drug overdose in Frankfurt in 1998.

The New York Post coverage of Pilatus immediately after his death noted:

Pilatus told Ebony magazine in July 1990 that he felt like an “outsider” as a child and remembered being taunted by German classmates who called him Kunta Kinte (the black hero of “Roots”).

“I was a lonely guy,” Pilatus said. “Imagine being black without a black community anywhere.”

(Like, say, Indonesia.  Indeed.)

Now that the air of inevitability has begun to descend around the most recent American presidential election, it is easy to forget how just how different Barack Obama’s childhood was from yours, mine, and that of everyone we know.  You can struggle your entire life to find your authentic voice, and you may even die trying.

Despite considerable obstacles, and against tall odds, Obama found his.  His eloquence makes it seem easy, but don’t let that fool you — after all, appearances can be deceiving.

One thing that was striking to me about the real-time coverage of Tuesday’s Inaugural benediction, delivered by Southern Christian Leadership Conference co-founder Rev. Joseph Lowery, was the lag time involved in recognizing the source of Lowery’s opening words.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.

Most of the mainstream outlets later (sometimes hours later) identified the lines as being from the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the century-old anthem that was the official song of the NAACP in the 1920’s.  Since Lowery was quoting the final verse of the song, the actual title of the hymn never emerged.  It was an on-the-spot cultural litmus test: either you immediately recognized the reference or you needed to call a lifeline.

It’s notable that cultural commentators like Maureen Dowd, who was so bent on establishing that she was not too old to hear the “generational dog whistle” in Obama’s Jay-Z allusion last spring, have remained completely silent (and quite possibly clueless) on this deeply resonant and historical call from a man recognized as one of the deans of the civil rights movement.  Members of the chattering class may dread the prospect of appearing old and unhip, but are stunningly unabashed about their ignorance of a major cultural touchstone for millions of Americans.

James Weldon Johnson, who penned the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in 1900, also anonymously released a novel entitled “The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man” in 1912.  Written in the first person, the novel’s biracial protagonist ultimately leaves the African-American community in order to pass as a white man.

In the novel’s closing paragraphs, the nameless protagonist — Narrator X, if you will — wistfully muses after attending a public appearance by Booker T. Washington.

Even those who oppose them know that these men have the eternal principles of right on their side, and they will be victors even though they should go down in defeat.  Beside them I feel small and selfish.  I am an ordinarily successful white man who has made a little money.  They are men who are making history and a race.  I, too, might have taken part in a work so glorious.

…when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remains of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.

Our new president, when presented with the similar choices throughout his life, did not buy the crock — and that, I think, is a benediction for us all.

Yesterday at the Inauguration ceremony, Aretha Franklin sang a rousing version of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” the American lyrics set to the same tune as the English national anthem, “God Save the Queen/King.”  Most American schoolchildren are taught to sing the words at a very young age:

My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring.

In fact, I was so young when I learned the song that I went through the following exchange with my teacher at school:

Me: It’s not the land where my father died.  He’s still alive.

Teacher: It doesn’t mean your actual father.  It means your forefathers, or your ancestors, like your grandfather and your great-grandfather.

Me: But they didn’t die in this country.  They all died in China.

Now we have sworn in a President whose father (and father’s father, and so on) didn’t die here either.  I’ll gladly take that over a President whose father was President, thank you very much.

Even for a habitually leaky weeper like me, it’s not every day that you get to cry tears of joy.  Today was one of those days.

Which means I’m completely tuckered out.  I expect to sleep easier tonight than I have in a long, long time.

Good night and good luck, Mr. President.