I love watching a white sky diffuse to blue. The moment it happens. Whether the wind is blowing the clouds off or the sun burning them up, there’s a point where you start to see the open sky peering down at you. Looking back up into it, it’s as if some wonderful understanding has just been reached. The feeling wears off awful fast. I could stand to spend more time watching the sky.
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I’d taken a crummy mountain bike that’d been sitting unused on campus for as long as I could remember, unlocked. I rationalized that with no rider, someone must’ve just left it, and if anything I was doing everyone a favor getting the eyesore out of there. I bought a new chain for it, stripped off the derailleurs which had rusted unusable along with the chain variously fixed it up in different ways. I found a good chain length and set the thing up as a single speed, chain around the big cog in front and second smallest in back. It was a high gear ratio, and fun to ride. I didn’t need to mess around on snow or ice, the tires with thick with good tread, which is nice.
I probably got two or so months of riding out of it when the front cog completely failed, bent in half. (What one hand gives, another may take away.) I don’t know if it was just crummy metal combined with cold or somehow the chain wasn’t running straight enough, but it was unfortunate. I liked the bare-bones, even if I had to stand up and pound at the pedals until I almost couldn’t anymore to get up the hill on the way back from town. So I went back to my Schwinn, which runs far smoother and takes half as much pedal cranking (because of wheel diameter and tire thickness maybe?), but with super-bald and thin hard tires it’s an exercise in balance and skids to ride in the winter.
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The other night there was a spaghetti dinner benefit for a fellow in the athletic department who came down with cancer recently. Held at the Legion, it was a demonstration of small town cohesiveness. Huge amounts of people showed up. All the teams had to come and help out, I was debating whether or not to go. Both my roommates were, so why shouldn’t I. I really was impressed at how many people were there. Hundreds of people had to have showed up, the line bent back and forth all through the bar from 5:30-7:00, and the spaghetti got dished out faster then we could heat up the 6 or so pots to cook it. It was fun to help out.
I burned two of my fingers pretty bad. I was doing odd jobs, cooking the spaghetti was one of them. I wasn’t exactly cautious around the stove (which was huge and burned gas, as I wish mine did) reaching back and forth above 7-inch blue flames to move pots around and throw spaghetti in. But I got burned thanks to a bad pot-holder. On my right pointer and middle fingers, while carrying some cooked noodles over to the strainer. So now I have a blister that’s inflated to about the size of half a marble sticking out of pointer, and I popped the blister on my middle finger before someone told me that was a bad thing to do. But it was probably three times the size.
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Epiphanies last night:
A guy I know through a few friends somehow knows me by a photo he saw while in Florida, before he came up to Morris, on the school website. Something to do with cookies. I never heard about this picture, I thought they had to make me sign something before they get to use my ugly mug on their website. But I kind of want to find it.
Another guy who now goes to morris, unbeknownst to me, remembered me from our soccer team in 5th/6th grade. (The Arroz!) Which is awesome. I wouldn’t have ever placed him there, but once he did it for me it brought back good memories. That makes 3 of us who ended up going to morris, though only the two of us were there to talk about it. I really have no idea how he could have marked me other than by my name, but it’s amazing to think that I look close enough now to myself as a 13 year-old.
Whether or not you like the song: it’s darn cool when an entire room full of people sing along to Journey. Don’t stop believing indeed.
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