Kenny ://

Twenty Oh Ten is coming and I have a list

This was a tweet the other day, but just an FYI, it's about to be the year "twenty ten," not "twenty oh ten."  I kind of did a mental double take when a talkative person at the gym said something about their fitness goals in "twenty oh ten."  Srsly? You're going to run a half marathon in the year 20,010? I'm not sure there will be humans, let alone organized foot races.  

Since it's almost the new year, I've decided to create an actual list of things I want to accomplish in the next 12 months:

• Create a list of things to accomplish in 2010
• • It's still 2009 so I'm way ahead of the game already. I love winning before we've even started. That probably stems from my trying to hide little Monopoly hotels between my mattresses as a kid in the off chance we'd have a family game night. I tried to sneak them onto my properties. 8-year-olds aren't slick enough to pull that off or at least I wasn't as an 8 year old. 
• Accumulate at least 4 new friends
• • What? I'm funny! People tolerate me! 
• Accumulate 12 race tee shirts
• • I've already registered for two races, so I'm 2/12th of the way there, or 1/6th, if you prefer to do short division 
• Finish 12 races thereby earning the right to wear those 12 shirts
•     First race is this Saturday, January 2, twenty ten
• Run at least 2 marathons and 1 half marathon
• • The first marathon will be in April in Nashville. Please show up and cheer/berate/give me a slurpee
  • The first half marathon will be in Germantown in March. BOOM!
• Learn a song on the guitar.
• • I'm working on Iron Man 
  • And the opening to Sweet Child of Mine
  • And Chopsticks
  • Not really 
• Do one 1/2 Ironman Triathlon
• • I'm accepting recommendations as long as each one is printed legibly on a $20 (oh ten) dollar bill 
  • In case you don't know it's a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, then a 13.1 mile run. Piece o' proverbial cake. I prefer cheesecake if you're baking.
• Write a haiku every day
• • I usually try to write one every day but this past year I've been woefully slacking. If you want me to share these with you, please print your request on a crisp $20 bill. 
• Teach Charlie to sit 
• • HAHAHAHA! Just kidding - that pooch is spazzy mcghee 
• Finish a short story that's been in the back of my mind for months
• • I suppose in order to finish it I'll first have to start it. See? That's the problem with lists, you create them and get all overly enthusiastic and have grandiose expectations for them all.
• Get measurably better at what I do for a living
• • (did I really just put a work-related one in here? Sho nuff) 
• Sell my house

And the number one unreachable goal:

• Win the PowerBall
• • I guess it's time to start buying tickets if I want to make this one come true, huh? 

Bye bye twenty oh nine, it's been real but if we run into each other in public in the next six months and it's obvious that I don't remember your name, don't be mad. I'm just not that good with names.

 

 
 

I have only a few minutes here

I know I get a lot of inspiration from the RSS gods, but here's a great one from this morning. 

"Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they don't manage, and those who manage what they don't understand."

- Putt's Law

Oh how true.

Pleasepleasepleaseplease

I'm starting to notice more broad reaching cultural preferences based on geographic region. For example, Northeasterners are typically thought of as more liberal, heartier, and better educated. They don't disappoint on that, so far. I've also noticed that they sure love the Saabs, Audis, BMWs, and Benzs, yo ('s awl bout tha benz, yaheard?).

I am stating in Stamford, CT, this week for work and wanted to catch the train into Grand Central for a night in Manhattan to have dinner and drinks with a friend so I stepped to the concierge to get directions to the metro north station. It's only 4 or 5 blocks from the hotel so I wanted to walk, it's a balmy 35 here right now. The hotel staff looked at me, looked at each other, back at me: "But we have a shuttle that can take you to the station.". "I feel like a stroll. Is that out of the ordinary here?" I'm 25-ish miles from the most pedestrian place in the world and the wonder twins behind the counter were puzzled at my wanting to walk 5 blocks. Future diabetics right there in front of me. They even had to get directions themselves to help me out. Wow. Get out of Stamford every now and then. I promise, it will only hurt for a few seconds.

Haiku (as seen in a twitter tweet from moi earlier):

It's not as cold here
As I was expecting but
At least there's donuts

Pees out.

Here's what it boils down to

I got home from the airport, dropped a dear friend off for her flight home, and caught the last 20 or 30 minutes of a politically charged movie. I have to admit, I want to see the whole movie, but I'll never have the time, but the 20 mins I saw kind of intrigued me.

It intrigued me enough to say that I want to have a beautiful woman (or man,  I guess) I can never have to blow me a kiss from a crowd of thousands.  It happened to a kind of nameless and completely faceless man in the movie so is it really too much to ask for me, a nameless and faceless man?  

I think not. Also, I'm happy being anonymous and kind of boring, as long as I have my macbook and a handful of adoring fans/friends. They put spit and wind beneath my wings, as with any unsung hero.

Do you ever get this feeling?

Just part of being a guy

There's a thing about being a guy who was born after 1970. In my case, born in 1972. 

I think I'm in the majority when I say I come from what these days is called a dysfunctional family but back then was called a "divorced" family. I had a pretty life changing 10th year I guess, but really I don't think I did.

I'm the third of three kids - if you're from a family with more than one child you know there's a prescribed way you should be today. The first born is typically kind of parenting to the later kids, the middle kid is a sort of purgatory between youngest kid born and oldest kid born in that you're both a parent and "not as respected" since you're not oldest. And then there's youngest. That was/is me.

I was the third which means my parents went through some sh*t with the first, my big brother, had those things confirmed with the second, my big sister, and by the time I came around, everything was copacetic. It was cool. If I set fire to the house it was probably much less of an eyebrow raiser than it probably would have been had it happened with Tommy (older brother).  P.S. - I did that. I set fire to our house. I got a spanking - no military academy, no therapy (hadn't heard of that sort of thing growing up in the South back then), no hispanic housekeeper to minimize my acting out. It was normal. I'm normal.  

My point is late in coming but there are things that I do not because of my upbringing, not because of nurture, but because of nature. I believe in nurture vs. nature, don't get me wrong. Actually, I guess I believe in nature & nurture.  I fully believe I'm who I am because of my influences, but I also believe there are things we do because of nature.  

Allow me to illustrate - I'm a guy, I was raised by a mom and older sister who were both mothering, but I'm still stoic. I didn't have a male influence in my life - older brother was (and may still be) a stoner, burn-out, and my dad was and is vacant. He was a weekend warrior but only every other weekend, so even less so. I love pops, don't git me wrong, yo.  I just love him familial-ley, not necessarily respectfully.  

Damn, I'm still not to my point. 

I have an undergraduate degree in English, BofA, in creative writing. I don't write - I did, but I don't, other than a haiku every morning to get the synapses firing, but I do read. I read everything in front of me, actually. I'm a print hound/whore. Lately, with my schedule, I read poetry because it's concise, conveys a lot, and I don't spend weeks reading it like I do fiction.  My favorite poem has always, ALWAYS, been "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas. He's not my favorite poet, for that check William Brautigan or my good friend Michael Graber for my favorite poets, but the poem . . . the poem.  It speaks volumes of and to STOICISM.  I'm stoic. I'm independent. I don't commit to anything deeper than happy hour with acquaintances or standing, recurring good times with my closest friends (and I have less than a handful, Gary, Shawn, and Zack).

Do Not Go Gently . . . speaks mounds and mounds of stoicism. Do not go gently into that good night. Rage. RAGE! against the dying of the light. It's all about standing firm, not giving in to the last thing you could possibly not give in to, it's about being you to the core, in my opinion, and it's also about hope.  You don't hear a stoic talk about hope but what is stoicism but hope? It's full of bravado and the steadfast belief that what you think is true, that it seems as solid a ground to stand on tomorrow as it did today.  

So, my point? My point is to say I rave against the dying of the light, but I also embrace the sunset and the time it affords me with my chosen friends, not the ones I work with necessarily but the ones I seek out, the ones I choose to spend days with because I think I'll learn from them. I'm lucky to have friends like that, right? 

Aren't we all?

I think I know what I look for in a city

I travel. I do it not for fun most of the time, though my traveling turns out to be fun, but usually for work. If I travel for fun, it's a road trip with the tribe, a camping trip, a bike-race trip, anything that I can do in a car. I love traveling, I hate the process of getting there. Kind of counter-intuitive, isn't it? I guess I'm high maintenance that way. 

I was talking to a few colleagues today, or yesterday, or the day before, I forget, and mentioned that I wasn't really that big on Boston the first time I went but the next few times it got better and better. Usually when I get to a city for the first time I either immediately love it or I immediately am non-committal.  I think I imagine myself living in a city the first 5 minutes I'm there. I look for small things - how quickly do taxis notice my hand up, how swiftly are the pedestrians moving through a crosswalk or how smoothly are they flowing down the sidewalk? Is there enough commerce in a particular city to support my lifestyle if I chose to move there? Is there enough access to outdoor activities to support that part of my lifestyle? Is there enough anonymity?

There it is, that's the one. Anonymity. Is there the opportunity to be somewhere where I won't run into someone that a) I know or b) knows someone who knows me?  I dunno why I like the possibility of blending into the white-noise, the background, so much. I think it's the voyeur in me, or the want to observe. I always hoped to be the next great American author, the next J.D. Salinger or the next John Cheever, which would require me to be a great, anonymous observer, but the truth is I love to people watch.

A common claim of mine is that if I could have one super power, and if I got to choose what that super power was to be, I'd choose invisibility. Think of the things I could write about if I could sit, unobserved, on some meetings you wish you were in on.  Think of those things.  

I think about them sometimes.

It's the details where the devil lives

I usually hate the project managers lament "the devil's in the details" but it kind of rings true for me this week.

I've been kind of lollygagging around waiting for the packers and movers, painting here and there, keeping the house neat and clean and going about my usual business except that I've been eerily calm about the entire move.  I should have known the other shoe was going to drop and here it is:

I need to throw away everything I don't want to either send with the movers or carry myself to Charleston. There's a ton of shat in the basement that I don't want. The gist is that trash-pick-up-day is Wednesday and the movers are coming Thursday. I am hitting the road Friday.  

Think about that.

The movers will clear out the day after trash pick up day and I'll clear out two days after trash pickup day. If you've ever moved, you know there's bound to be cleaning to be done after the movers have cleared out and I'm not going to be here next week to take the trash to the curb and take it back to the back yard.  Do I ask the neighbors to do it and hope they do? Or do I throw every single thing away that I can think of now and hope that there's not a lot left over after they're gone? 

I think I'll do a little of this: throw everything away I can and then just put my trash in with a neighbor's one night, late.  I mean, seriously, do I want someone messing with my trash can when they're going to take theirs to the curb anyway? Are they really going to dig through trash to see who put theirs in with it?  I hope not.  If they do, I'll have to make sure I either don't leave anything with my name on it or that I leave anything in there I want, and cover it with something nasty, like dog poo, so they won't go through it.

Recommendations? Leave me a comment.

Never had a list of "last time I . . . "'s

Although I've left my hometown more than a few times for more than a year or two at a time, I've never really had that "I'm never coming back to this Godforsaken place again" feeling.  I do now and for the past few days, I've thought, "This is the last time I'll do this" about a couple o' things. 

For example, each time I leave the office I must look like Forest Gump because I swear I've got the goofiest, less than intelligent grin on my face. "This is the last September 9th I'll leave an office complex in Memphis." That kinda thing, you know? 

So I suppose it's that "you don't know what you have until you lose it" sentiment. I thrive on the rituals and routines I have with my tribe. I know, for a hard and fast fact, that I'll miss the fact that I can call any one of them on a weeknight to meet up for a beer without a doubt they'll be there.  I'll miss the fact that if someone calls and asks me to do just that and I say, "sorry man, just did a hard run" they'll completely understand and not give me grief. I'm sure I'll meet people I can do with that with but it won't be the same, it just won't. You know what I mean. 

So tonight was one of the last Wednesday nights I'll meet the guys at Boscos for pizza, beer, and bee essing.  I have 4 more of these and I am trying not to waste the opportunities.

If you read and haven't been invited to my going away party, leave a comment and I'll see about inviting you behind the velvet rope of Kenny's going away party - I'm leaving, yo, going to the East Coast and have convinced a few people I'm going to become a surf/sea-kayak instructor.  Stranger things could happen. I love the surf and I like the sea kayak enough.

Going away party, September 26th. Zack's crib, yaheard?

Feels like Spring for some reason

For the past week and a half we've had some bizarre weather here in Memphis. I don't mean tropical storms or tornadoes or frogs falling from the sky. I mean, it's August which is typically the balls-hottest month of the year here, and it's been absolutely pleasant.  80's with nice Spring-like breezes and some rain that my yard sorely needed.  Weird. 

Add to that the fact that I've been able to ride more in the past month than I have in the past 3 years and that I'm really looking forward to tearing peoples' legs off at the triathlon tomorrow (at least on the bike section), and it's like I'm re-living every Spring of my childhood when it's finally warm enough to go outside and play in shorts and a tee shirt and school is out.  I can't explain it other than to say I'm having some good times here lately.

Today was a perfect, ease-into-it kind of day and epitomizes what I've been feeling lately.  The dogs are finally house-trained, which is no small victory, so they sleep on a doggie bed at the foot of my bed now, which is sometimes nice, sometimes not because they still get up and tear into each other in the middle of the night.  The bonus is that they let me sleep since they can roam when they wake up instead of barking for me to let them out of the kennel.  Today, I slept late - ~8.00 or so.  Nice.  Then I moseyed around, ate bfast, cleaned some stuff, and went for an opener ride with Shawnee Shawn.  Light spinning with a few efforts to fill and empty the muscles with lactic acid so they aren't complete slumbering bricks tomorrow for the race.

Then we got back to Shawn's house, removed a transmission from one of his cars, replaced a clutch mech, replaced the transmission, bled the clutch, and I'm sure some other mechanically related stuff somewhere along the way that I've forgotten. That's the first time I've worked on a car since a Fiat I owned in 95.  I missed it. Working on a car that is, I do NOT miss the Fiat. That thing was the biggest P.O.S. ever made (but chicks loved it, it's an italian convertible, after all).

Then I came home, wrenched on the mtb for the race tomorrow and am feeling really good about Sunday.  Loogoufuhme.

At least, that's how I feel now. Tomorrow may be a different story altogether.  I may take my camera so there might be pictures, depending on the weather and how I feel.