24 May 2005

San Francisco

Time Travel

Brain Activity

Mike Shaver recently recommended I read Delivered From Distraction, a book about adult ADD.

It arrived today, along with about fifty other things that had accumulated in my Amazon shopping cart (a new Gore Vidal book, some Manu Chao CDs I already owned, Marathon Training for Dummies, a chess strategy book, a toy airplane). I cracked it open and skipped directly to the self-assessment quiz on page 45.

The first question was, “Did you turn directly to this quiz before reading the other parts of this book?”

The next question wasn’t, “Did you receive twelve other books on disparate subjects with which you’ve already lost interest and a toy airplane along with this book?” But it might as well have been.

Running

I started running a few weeks ago as a way of keeping the urge to smoke at bay. The theory being that you can’t just stop smoking, you have to adjust all the other parts of your life such that smoking doesn’t make sense anymore. You essentially have to become a different person, a person who would never smoke.

So I’ve been running three or four times a week, and I’m up to about an hour a run. Yesterday was my longest continuous run so far, at a little over nine miles (in an underwhelming but not totally pathetic 1:20). My shins hurt today.

Last night, I ordered a super-cool wrist-mounted GPS to show me how far and fast I’m running. All the benefits of a treadmill without the massive suck-factor of going to the gym and contracting foot diseases in the bathroom.

Last week was spent in Europe, and running was much more fun there. The little towns of Ede (in Holland) and Bad Homburg (in Germany) had very accessible parks and forests through which to run. Dirt trails are a lot gentler on the joints than sidewalks.

In Bad Homburg, which is not as good as Good Homburg

“Bad” in German means “bath,” and Bad Homburg is an old European spa town; a place you’d visit to recooperate from serious illness or decades of too much sausage and beer. Like in Der Zauberberg, but without the mountain and the long expositions on Humanism.

Sort of sinister