mim’s blog

I did the New York City Triathlon again this year, it was fun, but tough. I didn’t train as much for it this time, especially the swim, but I did ok. This year Joanne, Mom, and Dad all came to the race to cheer me on and I’m really glad they did. You can see from this picture the effect a fan club can have on a runner. I was also very afraid of bonking this year, so I ate a lot, probably too much, in the days leading up to the race, but I did survive in the end.

The swim was pretty rough. I took a calculated risk and didn’t worry too much about training for the swim. It takes a lot of pool time to shave a minute or two off of a mile swim, which doesn’t matter so much in a two and a half hour race. As a result, I was passed by people from at least four different waves. It didn’t help that the current was much weaker this year than last (start time 7:15am), that there were big tentacly red jellyfish in the Hudson, or that my un-wetsuited jersey unzipped at some point. I only realized that my jersey had turned into a parachute as I got out of the water, at which point I also noticed the stinging pain in my nipples.

The bike was better than the swim. My glutes didn’t die and I managed to put up a pretty decent time without aero bars, even though it seemed like everyone else was riding a cervelo. They would pass me on the downhills, but I would pass them right back on the climbs, which there were quite a few of, as I’d learned last year. My glutes did start to heat up towards the end of the ride, but they kept working the whole time, perhaps because of the hill repeats I’d done in training or the extra effort I went through to properly fuel during the race.

On the run, I thought I was way behind. I was told around mile 2 that it was 9:30am, which I thought meant that my time was already 2:45. In reality, it meant that my time was 2:15, which I didn’t realize until around mile 5, when I passed another Columbian who had started in the wave before me. I felt fine running across the finish line, but as soon as I stopped running I nearly passed out. After I finished, Joanne told me the athlete-tracking text message system said I finished in 2:41 with a 28 minute swim. But my time kept improving after I’d finished, my official time was 2:37:19 with a 24 minute swim, the discrepancy being attributable to a late start. This is 2 minutes worse than last year, but the heat and humidity set the field back even more and I moved up from 95th to 52nd in my age group. Graham did quite well, even with an injured leg and his friend Matt Worstell finished 4th in our age group again this year.

For my reference later, there are lots of stats online from this year and last, some pictures taken by professionals, some pictures taken by my mom, and a video of me crossing the finish line.

We’ve had a series of “bias incidents” at Columbia recently. In fact, there have been enough for the Columbia Spectator to create a nice timeline of them, which doesn’t include the most recent one. In October, right around the time of the Jena Six were getting a lot of media coverage, a black professor at Teacher’s College found a noose hanging on her door. A few weeks later a swastika was spray painted on a Jewish professor’s door.

I don’t know if it’s just that I’m a grad student and therefore out of the loop, but it takes ages for me to hear about these things. To make matters worse, president Bollinger is fond of sending cryptic official statements via email that never actually mention a specific subject or supply any context. Take a look at the email he sent which first informed me of the noose incident. I had to hunt for an article online to decipher his message.

The phrase “bias incident” has got to be the most blatant case of newspeak I’ve ever seen in real life. It spread from Bollinger to the Columbia Spectator and then assistant dean Tiffany Simon. Even if hanging a noose on someone’s door isn’t criminal enough to be referred to as a “hate crime,” how about “racist action” or “prejudice incident” or “bigoted vandalism”? According to dictionary.com, “a bias may be favorable or unfavorable: bias in favor of or against an idea. Prejudice implies a preformed judgment even more unreasoning than bias, and usually implies an unfavorable opinion: prejudice against a race.”

After the swastika, he got a bit more riled up, sending an email that led off with this paragraph (emphasis mine):

On the morning of November 29, the University and its affiliated institutions will join the City Council to commence New York City’s “Day Out Against Hate.” It is fitting and proper that this citywide campaign begin here, where in recent weeks, we have witnessed unspeakable acts of prejudice intended to intimidate members of our communities. While we have met these incidents of hate with forceful expressions of protest and a shared determination to defend our deepest values of tolerance and empathy towards others, we welcome further opportunities to do so again.

I don’t know how many more of these we can look forward to, but I rest assured that they will be accompanied by all sorts of uninformative correspondence.

I just got my hair cut. The cut was free, but the cab ride down there at the last minute cost $20. Looking at the haircut, I guess I came out just a little bit ahead. I went to the Bumble and Bumble model project, as seen in every issue of NY Magazine and Time Out NY I’ve ever read. Bumble and Bumble is primarily a hair product company, but they also run some salons in the city. The idea is that experienced stylists who are taking some kind of course in the use of their products and techniques get to practice on you, and you get a free haircut.

They apparently have a lot of classes on cutting women’s hair, so it’s easier to get in if you’re a woman. For men, they said they only have one class a month, so it’s harder to get an appointment, but this was my third time in eight months or so. My next appointment is in March. Joanne got me into the whole thing, we were both going to meet up there and try to get appointments, but the men’s class was all booked up. While I was waiting for her, a guy approached me looking for people who would be willing to let him cut their hair. He was a B&B stylist doing some kind of retraining, hanging around poaching “models” from the actual class.

The haircut they do for men involves a straight razor, kind of like the ones you see in westerns, but with a disposable blade, so no strop. For my hair, they try to bring out the curls by cutting it in sort of a zig-zag pattern, which seems to work pretty well, although my most recent cut was less successful in this regard. They also do a lot of planning for the cut, which involves combing hair around and up and to the side and all sorts of weird ways with lots of product. They said I have a very “masculine, square head.” I don’t really know what that means, but I am pleased with the description.

Event the worst haircut I’ve gotten at B&B still beats the $13 haircut at Astor Hair in both style and price.

Recently we had a party at our apartment and I wanted to do myself one better than last year’s lychee bubbletinis.

So in addition to making tapioca pearls and this time soaking them in a dilute honey solution to give them flavor, we made some watermelon “juice” to add to the drinks. I had cut up another watermelon a few days earlier for eating and then blended it for drinks, but it took so long to cut the watermelon into slices and then cut the rind off and cube each slice.

Clearly a better method for converting a watermelon to a gallon of watermelon juice was called for. Enter Joanne’s 200 watt hand-held blender. All you have to do is cut the top off of the watermelon, scoop a bit out for splashing room, and blend away. Not only do you avoid all of the extra cutting and cubing, but you have a perfect watermelon juice container that can be used as an all natural vase after finishing the juice. It might be a little unwieldy, but it’s guaranteed to hold all of the juice. In fact, I was surprised that the juice took up exactly as much volume as the pulp that I blended, I figured there’d be a little bit of air in there or something, but no. The total yield was about 1.5 pitchers of juice, good enough for a party’s worth of watermelon-lychee bubbletinis and then some.

Last Sunday I raced in the New York City Triathlon. It hurt, but was a lot of fun. It was an olympic distance race, so the swim was 1.5km down the Hudson, the bike was 40km up and back on the Henry Hudson parkway, and the run was 10km into Central Park and around the loop. My times were 19:03 for the swim, 4:37 for transition 1, 1:18:11 for the bike, 2:09 for transition 2, and 50:58 for the run for a total of 2:34:57. The results of all 2945 participants are available in a big pdf, and mine are available separately as well. There were also some photographers on the course and they got some good shots of me. There were a lot of other people from Columbia there, Graham did an amazing job, coming in 6th in our age group of 300 with a time of 2:14:52.

My race started at 5:15 in the morning, when I got to the transition area at to set up my stuff. I had almost enough time to get everything organized and fill up my water bottles at a water fountain. The transition closed at 5:45 and I commenced waiting around until my swim wave started at 7:45. I got to take a leisurely stroll up to the swim start and then listen to the announcer interview people about to jump in the water. He kept asking people, “What’s yer name? Where ya from?” and I wanted to shout out, “What ja wanna be?” Well, maybe I did shout it out once or twice.

The swim itself wasn’t bad at all. We were swimming downstream in the river with a 2-3 knot current at our backs. In fact, the current was supposed to be at its strongest at 8:30, so our wave got a particularly nice push. It was hard enough to wait for the starter’s signal once I got in the water, the water was pushing so hard. One guy apparently floated the whole swim in 35 minutes.

The bike also went well, until the end. I thought there wouldn’t be much wind since we were riding so early in the morning, but I was wrong. During the first part of the ride, the highway was right next to the river, and there was a strong headwind coming off of the water. After we got inland a little, the wind died down and I sped up a bit. The course was also hillier than I thought it would be, which actually worked to my advantage as I climbed past lots of people on their aero bikes, only to be watch them zoom by on the flats. I don’t know if I didn’t eat enough on the bike or the night before or what, but about 1 mile from the end my glutes and hamstrings seized up. It was all I could do to limp up the final hill and into the transition at 10 mph. That slowdown brought my average speed down to 19.1 mph.

I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do the run at all, but after having a little trouble getting up after putting on my running shoes, I was able to start the run with minimal pain. I guess my running muscles were still intact, even though I couldn’t have biked another mile. The hills in central park usually kill me, but even thought I haven’t be running hills, I hardly seemed to notice them. Maybe I was just too hepped up on endorphins. My pace on the run turned out to be 8:12 per mile.

The race was also the physically challenged triathlon national championships, so there were lots of racers with prosthetic legs and arms. You wouldn’t think they’d be able to complete all of the events, but they were really fast. One guy in particular, Byron “Soulja” Breeze had no legs and only his upper arms, which he used to push himself on a skateboard during the run. I have no idea how he did it, but he finished the race looking pretty fresh. One of the other athletes shouted to him, “you’re an inspiration to all of us,” as we were running.

I left the race tired, but proud. I’ll definitely be back next year.

I had jury duty in New York City last week and it actually wasn’t too bad. It started off with a rather humorous video narrated by Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer. The humor mostly derived from the inordinate portion of its brief legal history devoted to the medieval practice of trial by ordeal. Then there was the usual spiel about how even if we don’t get picked we’re participating in the legal system, blah blah blah. The idea was similar to the one they showed in Boston, but this seemed to have been made more recently (ok, Ed Bradley has been dead for almost a year).

The woman giving the in-person part of the orientation was also entertaining and in surprisingly good spirits, although she was a bit harsh to people who didn’t follow her directions. She also informed us that we’d be there for at least 2 days, even if we didn’t get picked. Even if we did get picked for a panel and then not picked as a juror, we’d have to go back to the pool until our 2 days were up. I waited there for the whole morning, watching almost everyone else get picked for a panel. It seemed like 2/3 of the jurors called were women, I guess New York really is mostly women.

Through some legal maneuvering I don’t pretend to understand, I started in the pool for civil courts, but was transmuted into a criminal juror for a case in criminal court that was settled before it got to the jury selection process. I was then flushed back into the criminal jury pool, where I waited until being dismissed. The keeper of the criminal waiting room was also in entertainingly high spirits and at one point announced, “thank you for sitting here waiting, just remember you are the only people separating civilization from anarchy.”

Back before I got busy with the end of the semester and the beginning of the summer, I attended a talk Oliver Sacks gave at Columbia. His book An Anthropologist On Mars shaped the way I think about the human brain and its abilities. Before reading the book, I knew that psychologists and neuroscientists and neurologists studied the average behavior of average people in order to build models of the mind and the brain. Sacks’ approach, however, is to study the abilities and concomitant limitations of individuals with unique neurology, due to a disease, condition, or injury, exploring the boundaries of neurological possibility. The idea that the examination of a single individual could illuminate so much about the brain packed quite a punch. It seems to be related to what I think the core of philosophy might be, the study of the possible, or the extension of a set of premises to their logical completion, where a single example can define swaths of boundary between the possible and impossible.

Hearing him speak was fun and interesting, but it couldn’t top the excitement you feel when you learn something really new. He’s on the speaking circuit pushing his new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, studies of neurologically interesting cases involving musical abilities, right up my alley. Columbia invited him to give the talk because, as Eric Kandell described in his introduction, Columbia is trying to attract “public intellectuals”, scholars gifted in spreading their message to the lay public. The idea seems to be that they are recruiting professors with their best work already behind them, and the idea didn’t seem very tempting to Sacks. I’d never heard Kandell before, and his wit impressed me, re-stating the audience’s questions in condensed and humorous ways when Sacks couldn’t hear them.

Sacks’ talk was good, but he interested me more as a person. He came off as extremely thoughtful, kind, caring, understanding, and insightful. After Kandell’s lengthy introduction of Sacks, Sacks spent almost as much time introducing him right back. When you hear someone talk in person, you realize things like, “hey, he has a British accent.” I’ll check out his new book when it comes out, but now I’m more interested in his autobiography, Uncle Tungsten.

On Friday, Joanne’s manager at work was trying to get tickets to see Tarzan for Saturday night. As she was checking out, she noticed that the total was $10.25 per ticket, including a $1.25 facility fee and $9 ticketmaster service fee, making the tickets “free”. She figured it was a computer glitch, but just in case, Joanne got us a couple of tickets too. We showed up expecting them to turn us away at the door, but they let us in and we saw the whole show. Did I mention that the seats were in the first row?

The show itself was alright. There was some cool swinging around on “vines”, which mean an awful lot of winching and clipping and unclipping of carabiners. There were some incredible flower costumes that looked like something out of little shop of horrors. The acting was decent, the singing was good, but the music itself left something to be desired. The lyrics included such gems as “Oh, the power to be strong / And the wisdom to be wise”.

Not too bad considering we would have had to pay more to see the movie in a theater.

To follow-up on my last post about the shooting in the Village, I just wanted to thank everyone for their kind wishes, in person, in the comments to that entry, and on the phone. While thinking about all of this still makes me quite sad, especially thinking about the senseless loss of life, I’ve been feeling a bit better.

In case anyone is interested, a number of articles have been written about the event. I’m afraid the Times articles will disappear in a little while, but I’ll post them anyway. First, they wrote up a thorough description of the event itself. Then they wrote up a long piece about the people involved. New York Magazine published a piece that is in rather poor taste, as usual, about the gunman’s writing, with a link to his website.

I know the guy was an ex-marine, and I don’t know how he got his guns, but I still think that stricter gun laws might make occurrences like these less frequent. I’ve made a donation to the Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence in memory of the victims, Alfredo Romero, Nicholas T. Pekearo, and Yevgeniy Marshalik.

Last night I went to hear my friend Mitch’s band, which was playing in NYC for the first time at the Lion’s Den. As we were standing outside the bar, on the west side of Sullivan Street, a guy walking across the street, pulled out a gun, and pointed it towards someone on the other side of the street. We all ducked and started running down the sidewalk when almost immediately he started shooting. He kept on shooting. He fired a lot of shots. I think I had time to get six or seven storefronts north on the street and duck into a doorway and he was still firing.

Almost immediately, a police car pulled around the corner from west 3rd Street and drove down to where this was happening, the police got out and there were a lot more shots fired. It was like firecrackers, they just kept going off. Then, or maybe before the second volley of shots, dozens of plainclothes police officers swarmed down Sullivan Street. It seemed like every person on the street was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans and had a badge, gun, and radio. One of them paused to demand, “Who’s behind this?” from me and Mitch.

They arrested one person and two people were lying on the ground on our side of the street, with cops all around them. Three ambulances showed, up. They closed off the street. A helicopter with a searchlight was flying overhead. The police were running around with another guy who had been standing outside the club who had a fraction of an ID of the shooter, “bald, light jacket, maybe white.” Mitch asks me, “does this always happen here?”

The most surreal part was the way the guy pulled out the gun. It was so premeditated that all I could think of was the Godfather movies. He didn’t rush, didn’t do it dramatically, just matter-of-factly pulled it out and actually started shooting. His hand wasn’t shaking, he didn’t pause. I don’t know if it’s just the way I remember it, but all I could see of the guy was his silhouette, like something out of a Sin City comic.

It was amazing that for standing so close to all of this, we really had no idea what was going on. Maybe the guy with the gun was a plainclothes officer, maybe someone had an automatic pistol, maybe it was a sting, a hit, a drug bust, who knew. Something big was going on if that many cops showed up that quickly, but we had no idea what. According to the newspapers, it turns out that the shooter had already killed a guy working behind the counter at a pizza place around the corner, shot him 15 times in the back. The cops were already out looking for him for that, when he started shooting again.

I always thought I’d make a terrible witness, and after this I’d have to agree with myself. I don’t remember what the guy looked like, if he said anything, what order events happened in, if there was a pattern to how the shots were fired, anything like that. All I remember is seeing the gun and running down the sidewalk.

Luckily for me, I’m ok and Mitch is ok, and the rest of the band is ok, but not everyone was.