The Painter

It was a particularly beautiful day, and I decided the best way to enjoy it was to slowly grind my knees into dust by going out for a jog. As I was dragging myself down the sidewalk of a busy four-lane road, I saw something unexpected: a car actually signaling its lane change! Ha-ha! Just kidding! That never happens! Actually, what I saw was a woman on the sidewalk painting. She had her canvas held by an easel. She was facing a small pond on the side of the road, her back to the passing traffic.

Now, I’ve encountered painters before, but it's usually been in a state or national park, and never on the side of a busy road. I was immediately impressed by the woman’s nerve. I’d never have the guts to set up shop where she was - assuming I was a painter - in a place where my work could be scrutinized by every passing person and car, which could easily lead to heckling. (“Paint Forrest, paint!” “What the heck are you painting anyway, a giraffe stuck in a phone booth? Or a mutated carrot fleeing the police?”)

As I jogged past her, I had to take a quick peek at her work. I was trying hard not to be too obvious about it, so I only got a glimpse. As I expected, it was a painting of a pond. What I couldn’t tell was if she was painting the exact pond on the side of the road. My suspicion is that she wasn’t, and she was just using this pond as a frame of reference for trying to get the water to look right.

Anyway, this has got me to thinking: If you’re a painter and you set up shop on a busy sidewalk, you have to know that everybody passing by is going to look at your painting, and with that in mind, how fun would it be to throw everyone for a loop by, for example, working on a picture of a unicycle-riding clown who’s juggling bowling balls, even though you're facing a picturesque pond surrounded by lush trees? You could squint at the pond dramatically, your face screwed up in determination, all while trying to get the clown’s makeup to look just right. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that’d be pretty fun. Well, at least more fun than grinding one’s knees to dust while jogging.

Voice Mail Buffering

We all have our faults. Some of them – such as watching The Bachelor – can be addressed and perhaps even corrected, but some, unfortunately, will be with us forever. Of those that can’t be changed, the best you can hope for is that they’ll provide some form of entertainment to others.

One of my “forever” faults is that I’m terrible at leaving voicemails. This inability to piece together a coherent message after the beep is embedded deep in my DNA, to the point where I’m certain it can’t be fixed. The result is that anybody who listens to a message I’ve left them will have no choice but to shake their head and chuckle, wondering how I even manage to make it down a flight of steps without seriously injuring myself.

My main issue with leaving voicemails is that at some point in my life, I decided that the quality of a message is related directly to its length. A short message, even if direct and to the point, conveys a lack of caring, due to its abruptness, whereas a long, rambling message – whether it makes sense or not – shows that I’m taking the task seriously.

Let’s say, for example, that I wanted to leave somebody a message telling them to pick up milk and eggs. (I’m not sure why I’d ever leave that message, but I’d rather focus on a hypothetical rather than something that cuts closer to home, such as asking somebody to go my bail.)

One way to go about this would be to keep it simple: “Hey, can you pick up some milk and eggs? Thanks!” However, at least in my mind, this is a message of very poor quality. Here I am, heaping loads of responsibility on one's shoulders – trusting them with the sacred task of picking up milk and eggs – and yet I have the audacity to do it in only ten short words? How arrogant! How rude! How insensitive!

Instead, I’d choose to buffer out the message a bit, to try and convey how important this task is, how I’m trusting one of only a handful of people on the face of the earth capable of carrying it out correctly, and how appreciative I’ll be if said person is successful.

My strategy for buffering is where everything breaks down. (Or gets “shot to heck”, to put it in technical terms.) It consists mainly of repeating myself, just in case the unfortunate person listening isn’t able to comprehend it the first twelve times: “Hey, if you have time later today, would you mind picking up some milk and eggs? No big deal if you can’t, but it’d be nice to have some milk and eggs. Then I could do stuff that involves milk and eggs that, as of right now, I can’t do. That’s milk and eggs. Pick them up. If you can. I’d appreciate it. Milk. Eggs. Milkandeggsmilkandeggsmilkandeggs! M-I-L-K. E-G-G-S. Well, I gotta get going. Remember, milk and eggs. Call me if you have any questions about the milk and eggs.”

To make matters worse, I sometimes become aware that my message is getting ridiculously long and try to joke my way out of it by rambling even more, which is the equivalent of fighting a grease fire with water: “Hey, I just realized this message is getting a little long here! Sorry about that. But if you’re still listening, remember: milk and eggs. Ha-ha! As if I have to repeat myself again! But seriously, milk and eggs. This is important. Sort of.”

I’ve long since stopped feeling embarrassed after leaving a mammoth, semi-coherent message on somebody’s voicemail. Instead, I now just laugh at myself as I hit the END button. Wow, I think, that one was a real doozy! Probably Top Ten all time! I hate to be the poor sucker who has to listen to it!

So, be forewarned, if you ever see a voice message from me on your phone, brew a pot of coffee and prepare yourself for the long haul. But with any luck, instead of boring you to death, you’ll at least get a laugh or two out of it.

Alternately, you could just listen to the first sentence and then erase it, as the rest will undoubtedly be needless repetition. And don’t worry, I won’t be offended if you do. Just remember the milk and eggs.

Half Marathon Highlights

It was a cold and windy day for the half marathon. I’m pretty sure that the weather was better for the Thanksgiving Turkey Trot in the U.P. a few months back. (Plus, there was pumpkin pie to look forward to.) This should have been enough to keep me in bed, but my stubborn pride – combined with my entry fee – managed to drag me to the starting line. I won’t bore you with the details and will instead just share the highlights:

5.) Despite my best efforts to sabotage my training, mainly by barely training at all, I still managed to finish in a semi-dignified manner. No bones were broken and no muscles were pulled. My only complaint was that by the end, because of the cold and the wind, I felt pretty much like a Klondike bar, just not as delicious.

4.) I got to feel what it was like to turn a corner and find yourself suddenly running into gale force winds of the type usually accompanied with airborne cows and other large objects not firmly anchored to the ground. Fun!

3.) I wasn’t disappointed in my quest to encounter at least one runner who apparently doesn’t know what headphones are, and who instead blasts terrible music from a portable device strapped to their arm, since it’s obvious, at least to them, that whatever they’re listening to is exactly what everybody else around them wants to, also.

2.) There were people I knew at the race, cheering the runners on. This is the first time this has ever happened to me, and I’ll admit that it was pretty fun. Not that I handled it well, mind you. When I saw somebody I knew cheering along the course, I always wanted to do the polite thing and acknowledge said cheering. Unfortunately, this didn’t go well. I couldn’t cheer back, as that seemed weird – at least for me. Doing a manly head nod didn’t seem like it’d be enough of an acknowledgement. I probably should have just gone with a simple wave and smile, but I instead decided to try and come up with humorous remarks to blurt out as I ran by. Unfortunately, my body was devoting upwards of 98% of its processing power to keep me from collapsing into the ditch, so that left precious little resources to come up with something humorous to say. This resulted in me stringing together several words that in a best case resembled the earliest stages of a humorous comment, but which still needed major refinements before they could even be considered a bad joke, and mumbling them as I ran by. With that in mind, to anybody who may have been there and wondered what I doing, sorry about that. Next time I’ll just smile and wave.

1.) This is by far the absolute number one highlight: I got to see a chick execute a picture-perfect snot rocket. All guys are masters of the snot rocket at birth, since it’s embedded deep in their DNA, but this may have been the first time I’ve ever witnessed a girl attempt, and successfully land, one. I should have proposed to her on the spot.

How Not To Train For A Half Marathon

So apparently, I’m going to be running a half marathon in a few days.

Not that I’m surprised by this, as I distinctly remember signing up for it way back in March.

It’s just that when I signed up – blinded by the folly of youth – I foolishly assumed that I’d actually be able to train for it. Little did I know, mainly because I never checked the Farmer’s Almanac long-range forecast, that this was going to be the Year Of The Never-Ending Winter. (Which is also providing fodder for the Year Of Blog Posts That Discuss Nothing But The Never-Ending Winter In Nauseating Detail.)

Needless to say, my training’s been a bit lacking. It’s consisted mainly of the following:

• Shaking my fist out of the window as the snow pours from the sky.
• Thinking about running on a treadmill since I can’t go outside, even though running on a treadmill is quite possibly one of the worst things ever, ranking slightly below multiple fillings at the dentist.
• Deciding to just bag the whole thing.
• Desert. Possibly two of them.

I’m not going to use the weather as an excuse for my poor training, as that would be the coward’s way out. If I really wanted to, I could have braved the elements and trained correctly. However, when given the choice between napping on the couch or going outside in a blizzard to run then and slipping on a patch of ice on the sidewalk and breaking my hip, it turns out that I pick the couch every time.

While I initially planned on using one of those standard half marathon training schedules you can find online, I instead ending up using the standard “Wait – That’s Next Week!?” schedule, which consists mainly of blind panic and running around like a chicken with its head cut off. (For the record, this schedule is mainly used by males in preparation for such events as their wedding, their significant other’s birthday, their anniversary, and Christmas.)

With the help of this schedule, I’ve managed to salvage my training to the point where I now know that I’ll be able to finish. However, that’s all I can be sure of. Every thing else is up on the air. I strongly suspect that when I cross the finish line, it won’t be the confident, dignified finish you might see in promotional literature for the race. Instead, I’m expecting a hunched over, hands scraping the ground, eye-bulging, chest-heaving, green-in-the-face sort of finish.

Luckily, everybody else has also been handicapped by the same lack of ideal training conditions, and I’m expecting a lot of similar finishes by those running with me. Hopefully, I’ll just blend in, and nobody will notice what’s bound to be a complete train wreak of a showing by me.

Still, I’m not one to take unnecessary chances if I can get a little insurance. With that in mind, I just need to find somewhere that sells those combination-fake-moustache-and-nose disguises…

Do Your Worst, Achilles!

So it’s May, yet there’s a winter storm warning here in the Twin Cities boasting a potential of 6 to 9 inches of snow. Apparently, based on what I've read, this winter storm is named “Achilles".

Oddly enough, I’ve discovered that this never-ending winter no longer has an affect on me. When I saw the storm warning, I simply yawned and went on about my business of randomly yawning.

My lack of ill-will towards Mother Nature is odd because a week ago, I was caught up in a tremendous case of teeth-gnashing and foot-stomping because of a late-April storm that had come through and buried everything under a fresh layer of snow. (My Facebook status update, of which I rarely make unless I consider it to be something of dire importance, was: “Walking in a winter wonder-PPPHHHBBBBTTT!!!”)

But this time it’s different, and I think it’s because there’s a bunch of sand in my kitchen.

Confused? No worries, it barely makes sense to me, and I’m the one in control of my brain. I think.

What I mean is, summer has already arrived. This storm is nothing but a slight aberration as winter is finally pushed out of the door, like that weird uncle who never knows when it’s time to leave, despite plenty of less-than-subtle hints. (“Wow, it’s way past my bedtime! Got an early start tomorrow, too! Hopefully I get enough sleep! If not, I might get fired!”)

My proof of summer having already arrived is the fact that I’ve played outdoor volleyball twice in the last week. (You can tell I played because I’m limping around and constantly muttering about “old bones.”) Despite the aches, this turn of events has made me immensely happy, so happy, in fact, that a little snow can’t possibly dampen my spirits. Bring it on, Achilles!! We’ve already looped around the alphabet in naming our storms, so one more of you guys can’t possibly hurt!!

I suppose you’re wondering about the sand. Well, that’s because I didn’t sufficiently shake out my clothing after volleyball the other day, and when I walked into my kitchen upon getting home, I accidentally deposited enough of it in there to make a small beach. It’s a wonderful sight, actually. Proof of summer, right there underfoot!

As for Achilles, let’s see what you've got! You don’t scare me! You’re like a toothless vampire, or a ghost that forgot the word “Boo!”, or a used-car salesman with laryngitis.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to look out of the window and stick my tongue out at the falling snow.

After that, I should probably sweep up a little.