Life Aquatic

My eldest son, Edward, said his first swear word yesterday. He was, of course, mimicking his father who in a moment of frustration over a spilt mocha on a changing table launched the explicative. In my defense, during the week I take care of the kids during the 6’s of a.m. and p.m. - the twilight between sleep and exhaustion. The mocha is my fuel, my milk drink as opposed to his.

To my son, who has so few words, perhaps the swear could have meant the same thing as “boom” or “uh-oh”. Life with two small children is a series of liquids and spills and there is the never ending clean up of wipes and towels. It has become part of our routine enough that Edward will sometimes grab a towel if he spills something. His favorite person for a while was the trash man.

We have a life aquatic with our heads out of the water barely enough. Parenting is the process of riding the tides of toddler attentions - the fast shifts of the currents of desires.

Edward for the most part has been living well. He has a collection of aunts and grandparents whom I refer to as the mutual admiration society. He has gotten used to having a younger brother in the same sort of way of getting used to eating using a spoon. It isn’t always, and when it doesn’t work out it gets a little messy. But the intention is there.

To get him out of the house away from the newly steam cleaned carpets and couches, he goes to a bevy of activities. He has soccer tots on Mondays, where he insists on stacking cones as opposed to running around them. He goes to Jameroo and Music Together, which are meant to cultivate his artistic side, but wind up being places where he runs around the peace circle screaming. Someday he will do exercise in sports classes and art in art classes, but for right now he explores things impulsively.

On Thursday mornings he goes to swim classes at the JCC. We got our first report card a couple of weeks ago - never too early to start measuring kids in San Francisco. He had top marks in enthusiasm and confidence, but did not fare so well when it came to the section of skills. It looks like it will be a career of venture capitalism.

Not all of the kids in the class are unafraid of the water. Some luckier parents have children with a better sense of danger. There was one girl, Olivia, who would cry the entire class. I would get the updates on Thursday dinners about how everyone was doing. In my mind Olivia was of Russian descent with large eyebrows, and a power set of lungs. She is, in fact, Chinese and didn’t scream as loudly as my imagination. More of a whimper.

I kept asking about swim class over dinners. Did we think the instructor named “Blaze” lived in the Haight or were the rents to high there? Was Edward kicking on his back? Did he put his head underwater? Does Blaze have good earplugs?

The updates kept coming, and one day I got the major news. Olivia had stopped crying during class. Edward had held her hand and made her feel safe in the water. I like to think that with his hand held he could not splash as much either, and that the two of them could start to learn about the aquatic life with a sense of calm.

I then learned that at the next class they had started to kiss. We spent a few weeks of Thursday dinners speculating about the two. About how he would think of his summer romance with his few words of “up” and “down”. Would he grow up to be an olympic swimmer, because he had found true love in a sea of chlorine.

And then yesterday it was broken to me softly. Olivia had spent the entire class with Sebastian who was both blonder and younger than my son. Edward was very troubled that she would not hold his hand anymore and could not understand why she would kiss Sebastian instead of him.

When he came home from class, he took a longer than usual nap. That evening he didn’t pick on his brother except for a few times of pulling his hair.

I was, of course, devastated by the news. How could she I wondered. Was my son just a stepping stone for the shallow end of the pool? You have such little time to give your children the advice they need to handle the world. You won’t be there for all of the heartbreaks. I can only hope that Edward reached down into his small list of words, and after going past things like “apple” and “blue” would come to say what his father told him. 

Shit.

Watchmen

February is a dreary month, and I decided to enact my own cultural stimulus package by purchasing a platinum membership to the Cartoon Art Museum which included a ticket to the Watchmen premier and by taking a new class at BATS called Improvisation for Dating. I wish instead they had a class called Dating for Improvisers.

Granted I wasn’t expecting any dating opportunities from going to the Watchmen premier. My motivation for that was pleasing the 18 year old version of myself by seeing the favorite thing I read at the time. There was a thematic parallel of the novel which is about heroes in their late thirties/early forties who are nostalgic for their youth but are coping in a world that is cratering and my own, even if I am not radioactive and rarely encounter psychic giant squids. One of the leads in the Watchmen has a potbelly and in the middle of the book awkwardly tries to make out with another superhero on the couch in his messy apartment. It was a moment that felt true, because while the first time with anyone has the delight of discovery, there usually is also the difficulty of trying to figure out the mutual mechanics. The good news for all is that they eventually did while at the same time accidentally set off the flamethrower in the owl hovercraft.

In Improvisation for Dating, we didn’t get as far as doing our own love with a flamethrower scenes. Mostly the class was about learning to listen to each other, respond positively, and practice to fail gracefully. I like to think we were our own band of super heroes weighed down by our personal kryptonite whether it be an icy disposition, small stature, or a weakness for investment bankers/actors - folks who use entirely too much hair product. It is not that we will ever get around our flaws, but we can learn to forgive ourselves and try to appreciate the best in others.

We talked about status and how in dating that you wanted to at least match your partner. Low status, with its slouches and self deprecating humor, at times is quite funny, but people are looking to date heroes not sidekicks. We talked about the perfection of Cary Grant, the ideal of being both high status and generous. One should carry themselves as positively as they can while at the same time being kind. There is a fabric of relationships in the world that dating necessarily tugs at. Be responsible.

The flaw in the translation of the Watchmen to the screen is that in trying to get the movie under three hours they had to leave large parts of this fabric out. In both the book and the movie one of the characters meets with a psychologist to go over some rather vast issues. The difference between the two is that in the book we see the psychologist take that burden home to an unsympathetic wife. Their marriage deteriorates which is a scene I have never seen in a comic. Not that the action isn’t good in the Watchmen, but it is the psychic weight of watching how the ripples of dread can affect makes it a masterpiece. The movie was reduced to an unrelenting id while ignoring its better ego and super ego.

Not that there is anything wrong with an unrelenting id. After all part of the motivation of taking Improvisation for Dating. was to find someone to practice mutual mechanics (with the other part being to find someone to share a laugh on a sunday morning). As I wander through this new month I do realize it will take the deep superpowers of listening attentively, responding positively, and failing gracefully. Who knows - with a little bit of luck then perhaps I will get to the that moment of finding you are meant for somebody without needing a flamethrower or a hovercraft.

Bipartianship

It is another valentines day, the midwinter gasp of optimism. Realizing that I have spent too many of these alone, I decided it was time to change my approach. We are on the tip of a new era, and the time had come to reach out to a group recently rejected, the great karma rebound if you will.

I decided to ask out a Republican.

She was an Ann Coulter type blond with pearly white teeth that are rather sharp. For Halloween last year she dressed as Sarbanes Oxley, because she figured that would really scare people. She is now a banker in between investments, a growing group that threatens to bring the rest of the country into its vortex. My hope was that in her season of waiting for the return of the capital markets she would let love trickle down.

Even though she is much younger than I (a weakness of mine), I knew I had to study to talk to her. Krugman was quite good for economic counterbalance and the words of Andrew Sullivan helped expand my notion of conservatism. During our dinner as I did my best to ignore her racially inappropriate jests, I thought about her at pillow side and whether in the morning she would read the Wall Street Journal in bed. It was a personal stimulus package.

We wandered back to my apartment to watch John Stewart. He made fun of the democrats which she, loved and I enjoyed sharing the warmth of the couch. When the show was over she got up to leave, and we paused for a moment in the hallway.

There is currently a lawsuit about whether a photograph of Obama is art, but I think that misses that his true muse is being a writer. In that quiet moment I wanted to whisper to her his words:

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change. We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come.

We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.

And when I looked at her I wanted to go on that we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in America's story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea.

And it was that moment in the hallway as I stood full of hope and promise that I heard her own three words that have been told for centuries on dates from around the world:

“Let’s be friends.”

A Mermaid and Turtles

There are fast things in the sea, and I tried to date one once in a relationship that in the end felt no longer than an ocean wave hurling through space until it reached the first obstacle then crashed in on itself. I met her a year ago on the flight to the Maui Channel Swim, and guessed correctly that she was also a swimmer. Having done the race before that (this is my third time) I explained to her about the sea between Maui and Lanai, how the boats cluster at the start while the first group of swimmers huddle on the beach for a swim prayer, how to site off of the second peak of the west Maui mountains at the start and then eventually aim for a series of hotels just north of Lahaina, and how my band of six swimmers had a pleasant day in the sea. I told her not to worry, that she looked like a pretty strong swimmer, and if she had any concerns or wanted to chat she could contact me, the proud champion of the slow lane at the local ymca masters class.

She waited through all of this with only the occasional sigh and did her best to be polite as I explained (incorrectly again) how to do the halfway to Hawaii game on the airplane flight. She looked over at her friend who had another seat and then rolled her eyes as she came back to me. She wanted to be as gentle as possible and she quietly said that she had soloed the 9.5 mile swim the year before. That was even modest: she had actually won as the first female swimmer with a time faster than our group of six swimmers combined and had earlier that year swum the 28 miles around Manhattan. She was an ex pro triathlete and probably didn't need advice from a guy who still has problems with flip turns.

Sometimes I think that the reason that backstroke is my relative strongest is that I have spent a lifetime practicing backing out of conversational holes.

There are fast things in the sea, and I kicked one the day before the race. Along the Sheraton side of Black Rock I saw a medium size turtle weave through the crowds of parents and their small children, and a high school football team that was spending its preseason getting tanned. Normally the turtles never go to that side (they stay about a third of the way in on the other side of the rock) and I worried that they have run out of food near their home, that the new time share complex had pushed it away, the same way it squeezed the locals off the beach so that they have to do their lulas elsewhere.

I watched this turtle swooped past me with the elegant grace and the occasional paddle. It was meant for the sea and spent its time chewing on things near the reef. I followed the turtle for a while (keeping what I thought was good distance) when all of sudden what felt like a battle cruiser passed by, More of a mythological beast with barnacles attached on its shell and near its eye. the head turtle was bigger than a four person dinner table, and the water rushed around his flapping as if he could almost control the currents. As I turned to get out of the monsters way I gave a quick kick behind me accidentally on the top of the other smaller turtle’s shell. I felt my race karma draining and wasn't sure if the proper penance was once again swimming backstroke to the shore.

To go back to a race that you have done before is a bit like visiting an ex girlfriend. There are the moments of familiar joy followed by the reasons it fell apart. The 2007 Maui Channel swim felt like an unstirred mai tai with the first 2/3 of the race in the gentlest sweet water in the world followed by an undiluted shot of reality. The organizer kindly waited until the last of the 73 boats had made its way to Lanai then waved the green shirt for the minute warning followed by the horn to start the race.

Our first swimmer had a long cadence, and the rest of of the male portion of our team was quite pleased that he had decided to swim next to an all women's team boat. The participants during the race are spaced out far enough that you can't get the voyeuristic glimpse you get from sessions in swim lanes, but instead start to think of the personalities of the other teams based upon the shapes of their boats. There are the fishermen, the pirates, the pluggers, the catamarans, and the smaller dinghy (used to support the solo swimmers). The other boats serve as benchmarks, because out in the middle of the channel you can’t see the progress compared to the distant islands but can grasp how you have gained or lost relative to the USS Minnow.

The women’s team dropped us during the second leg, and we would spend most of our day battling a boat we dubbed the pirates.

Though sea was smooth for the first two rotations, one of the swimmer’s stomach decided to make its own choppiness. She rallied in her times in the water then lay fully drained of fluids in the cabin as the rest of us battled the sea.

For most of the way the water was gentle, and it rocked us with the slight touch that a mother cradles her child to sleep. Our biggest disaster (tiny compared to the year before when our first boat’s engine broke) was that we had left the beer back in the house. The other veteran on the team and I joked that it we would be an hour faster, but the truth was with the much kinder sea we improved by two.

The chop came when we made it past the lee of Molokai, and the slapping did its best to disrupt our rhythm. We had to go back to breathing on the right side, because to use bilateral technique was to taste salt.

We made it back to Ka'anapali, but not before our nemesis pirate ship separated themselves from our competition. To make it easier for our captains return we swam with food and extra clothes in white plastic bags towards the beach and pushed our goods like castaways onto a desert isle. Some of the people on the beach saw us arrive, and after all that sun and sea I didn’t quite have the wit to tell them that we were shooting a scene for “Lost.”

There are faster things than me in the sea, and I saw her again a couple of days later at the local 2.4 mile swim. It was just before the prayer, and she didn’t realize that she was standing next to me. I said hello, and asked her how her team swim did.

“Well,” she replied. “You know, it is the Maui Channel.” We then drifted apart to head towards the starting line. I know I won’t return for her, that we are from two separate worlds and only in a few months in one particular autumn did the ocean hold us together. But I will come back to the channel perhaps to see the whales as they migrate or to apologize to a turtle. There are things faster than me, and I must come back to appreciate the struggle of swimming in their world, that the days spent under starry skies and with good friends are some of my best of the year.

The Simmer

Yesterday was the first dinner date with S_, a wonderful blind date set-up who is intelligent, sporty, and cute. I went home at my early time. In a large bit of optimism I wanted to make my apartment smell nice and the best way to do this is to slowly simmer soup. I chopped up the usual assortment of cauliflower, potatoes, and mushrooms, added both apples and brussel sprouts for a bit of oomph, and let the concoction simmer in chicken stock. The smells of a healthy lifestyle wafted through to my living room that the house cleaners had just attended.

With the soup slowly reducing and feeling the need to relax a little before the date I decided to a small workout at the 24-hour Fitness down the street. There were a couple of exercise bikes available and I picked the one farthest from the window. The pedals had the straps that go across the top of a foot and let you pull up as well as push down. About a minute into my routine the strap on my right side became down and I reached down to buckle it back. This was a bad idea.

The buckle had a metal hook that attached it to the strap, and this spike went deep into my right thumb. I tried to pull up but the metal had been clamped in by the plastic part of the buckle and pulling sideways was going to take off most of the flesh. I politely asked the head trainer a few machines over "Could you please help?"

He came over and looked incredulous about how I did that. He and the other trainer quickly removed the entire strap from the exercise bike and equally quickly came to the same conclusion that the spike was hooked in deeply. It was 6:15, the date was an hour and fifteen minutes away, and while I think it is important to show that you exercise I don’t think you should show up to a dinner with actual equipment still lodged inside yourself.

I went to the emergency room. Normally there is a quite a wait to be seen, but if you are bleeding with a hook in your finger they don’t make you fill out as much paper work. I was quickly given a tetanus shot, but had to wait a bit to get x-rays. The technician was a bit of an artist and constantly wanted to shift the angle of my hand for the perfect exposure, but the movement caused the spike to shift around my thumb and the pain chilled me. Thankfully a few minutes later I finally got a local anesthetic. A few minutes later a doctor using a clamp unlodged my thumb. It was 7:15. All I needed was the nurse, Ian, to come over to clean and dress the wound.

I waited and kept watching the clock.

7:20 Nurse Ian goes down the hall.

7:25 Nurse Ian chats with the front desk.

7:30 S_ is probably at the restaurant.

7:35 Nurse Ian goes down the hall again.

7:40 S_ is probably a little upset that I haven’t shown.

7:42 Nurse Ian comes into dress the wound. He tells me that he would rather take his time and be thorough rather than patch me quickly. Since infection is a real risk with a puncture would I am not in a real position to argue, but it is slowly becoming

7:44 ...

7:46 Nurse Ian is finished and I run to the restaurant

7:51 I arrive at Chez Nous, but S_ has left. There would be no date.

I lumbered the few blocks home and realized I missed my opportunity. It took two weeks to get a day that S_ was available, and she is not unusual for people in this city. We are perpetually burdened by work or hobbies. The scant openings in schedules occur less often than rainstorms. The city is not a place where relationships build slowly with continuous stirring; there isn't enough time to let things simmer and instead we have microwave dating, the brief intense meetings arranged by the radiation of cell phones or email messages. The city is hooked on speed.

I made it home and rushed to the phone to apologize to S_. I promise if we go out again I will spend the entire day beforehand away from sharp pointy objects. She might be available sometime next week, but I can feel the hesitancy in her voice. I am sure that when she dreams of her ideal man, the word "klutz" isn’t mentioned much.

We chatted briefly about her Minnesota thanksgiving, and then said goodbye. I am left in my cold apartment and I realize that the burnt smell coming from my kitchen is what happens when things don't correctly simmer.

Someone Like You

Normally during my lazy Saturday morning breakfast I stick to the sports section to learn how our local teams are either heading south in the standings or location, but this last time while nursing my mocha I stumbled across in the entertainment section a particular event, Couples, Computers, and Gaming day. I almost spilt my mocha. For a late thirties single guy, hearing that there would be an all day event at the Ruby Skye featuring among other things a female Swedish Quake team who all lived in the same house, was a discovery somewhere between finding money that it made through the laundry and stumbling across that the cable company had accidentally unscrambled the Spice Channel. Ruby Skye is one of the hippest nightclubs in San Francisco, a place known for its DJ's pulsating out techno music into a room filled with epilepsy inducing strobe lights, a place where the acid trips of the sixties morphed into the ecstasy raves of the nineties, a place where just perhaps a group of Swedish women would be for an afternoon of coupling and computers.

This could have been the best day ever.

I arrived anxious. The club had the velvet ropes out in front, the traditional barrier separating the cool from the unworthy, and a larger bouncer worked the door. I tried my best to work the nonchalant geeky chic, the kind of confidence that comes from having the finest wireless devices stashed in one's pockets. Granted I didn't have the latest technology, but I doubt this mountain of a man was going to know.

The ticket booth was harder to pass. Two women worked the counter, and when I started to buy the ticket they asked the tough question: "Only one?"

"Yes, only one," I muttered feeling the same way I do when my parents ask if there was anyone special I want to bring to a holiday dinner. I hadn't realized that the event was BYOP (bring your own partner), and had sort of hoped that it would have more of a Burning Man kind of vibe, a day where cables weren't the only thing being hook up. With my palm pilot turned off and my cell phone set to vibrate I quickly went into the main dance area. There I saw something completely unexpected - a panel discussion.

It was a talk about games.

On the stage four women sat in folding chairs as a moderator passed a microphone between them. In front of them on the floor a crowd that was at least 90% male if not also 90% wearing sweatshirts watched the discussion. I felt I was not the only person there who wore a Star Trek uniform for Halloween.

The eldest of the panelists began by telling how great it was that Laura Croft had a breast reduction in the new version of the game, Tomb Raider. She added that if publishers wanted to attract female gamers that they should have a way to skip the combat sequences and to have options where there isn't as much score keeping. I think she was going to continue about how there should be more cuddling after game play, but the next panelist started her session.

She was the publisher for the Desperate Housewives game that mimics the television show and allows the gamers to redecorate there own suburban home, gossip with characters from the show, or hook up with the pizza guy (tastefully off screen). Apparently there wasn't an option that lets the self-absorbed yuppies get crushed by a bad mortgage (or preferably space aliens), but there is always hope for the sequel. She talked about how she met her husband through gaming and that every week they host a Halo party. So far only guys attend the parties.

The next panelist began that she met her ex-boyfriend through gaming. The use of the "ex" couldn't have made the crowd more excited unless it was followed by the word "box". The bliss was short lived; the speaker lost 80 pounds by playing Dance Dance Revolution and then dumped the guy for an upgrade. She now hosts Star Wars fashion shows on the massively multiplayer version of the game where Wookies compete in the best evening gown or swimsuit. This to me seemed to be a complete waste of the furry creatures, because I thought their perfect use would be gunning down the Desperate Housewives, and I am deeply hoping for some conference synergy.

The last speaker was the Swedish Quake player, and the crowd had long given up that she might be single. She talked about the house and how she and her friends crush guys in tournaments. She went into the training that sounded triathlon-like in terms of commitment. Her wrist has been injured, and she wore a leather brace that Billy Idol would have if he ever got carpal tunnel syndrome. I have no doubt her team destroys everyone.

The panel was then open up to questions. I missed the first one, but the first panelist answered with how sexy a plain white shirt could be and repeated how great it was that Laura Croft had a breast reduction. The moderator then went out into the audience to the mid-thirties guy seated a few rows ahead of me. As he stood, he wiped the top of his balding head. After a quick "test" into the microphone, he began his question in a soft voice to the Swede.

"Where can I find someone like you?"

What Fools These Mortals be

We have now entered midsummer and I thought I would pass on some of the expertise of Shakespeare's play about the dream. Granted this could be a bit off topic; I don't know if he was a runner. Trotting the boards isn't the same as running trails; cloaks and codpieces weren't made of spandex. But if there isn't a quote "Methinks I did boink at mile twice a dozen", he did offer the following:

Over hill, over dale,
Through bush, through briar,
Over park, over pale,
Through blood, through fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moone’s sphere;

This is about as good a race report as it gets.

The larger play at hand, however, is about mistaking your lover - someone literally falls for an ass. This notion of confused identity is an entire Shakespearean motif and I am sure help paid the bills for some of his more artistic work - he alternated styles like George Clooney. (There is an easy way to classify Shakespeare - following in love with someone who is dressed as a guy is a comedy; your uncle hooking up with your mom is a tragedy; defending against a large opposing army is priceless.)

Mistaken identity also can happen with Team in Training. The hard part for our world is that as you spend more time training you are more likely to accidentally start dating an endurance athlete. This is usually quite troubling and like everything early detection is the key. Check these conditions to discover if you might be a dating an endurance athlete:

1) They talk more about their it-band injury than they do about their job.
2) For them "LT threshold" does not refer to how little bacon they put on a sandwich.
3) Semi-formal is wearing a race t-shirt that they pr'd.
4) They call your time together as "Rest Days."
5) You met them at a race expo.
6) They never ask whether cloths make them look large, but always wonder if it makes them aerodynamic.
7) They call getting dressed in the morning "T-1."
8) They called their last breakup “a taper."
9) They wear body glide with dress shoes.
10) They need fill the need to hydrate and want a snack 20 minutes after *ahem* workouts.

If these conditions persist take them to a park and show them it is possible just to stay in one spot for a while. Tell them that this is called "picnicking". They might get confused at first and think they are suppose to do ab crunches or hold plank pose, but if you put out sandwiches and fresh fruit then perhaps they will get the idea. Sunsets are a good time and so is resting during the noon day sun. But perhaps the best time in the park are those lazy afternoons when you also catch a production of Shakespeare on a shared blanket and wonder if the true course of marathoning ever did run smooth.

Click to see map.

Toaster Oven

You don't want to be that guy.

Your last break up occurred two weeks after you joined the Team in Training cross country ski season to train for skiing fifty kilometers in Alaska. She dumped you after a hike in the headlands just north of San Francisco. Her parting reason, "We just don't have chemistry," haunts you through Thanksgiving luncheon and the early rounds of Christmas parties.

You think you have what it takes for making through the winter. You went to a college were winter was almost a major. Karl Swenson, the Olympian who graduated the year behind you, is gifted cross country skier. And even though you didn’t know him at the time, you must have ate at the same dining halls, gone to the same parties, and trudged across the snow covered green at some point. Granted he was probably much faster.

You rally. There is a girl a track practice you notice when she bends her left hamstring. You start to forget about the breakup. She is cute in a way that youth forgives mistakes. There is an attractiveness to potential that most men cherish over mileage however interesting. She is young enough to be a snowboarder instead of a skier and has grown up post grunge era instead of the post new wave one. And if there was ever were anyone who could help with not having enough chemistry, it should be the girl with the chemical engineering degree from M.I.T.

You ask her is she wants to go running along Crissy fields with ski poles. She is occupied that weekend.

She isn't beautiful in a magazine cover sense unless the magazine was "Outside." But there is something about a woman who is up for adventurous weekends, someone who perhaps never looks brilliant by the stern light of a cocktail party but is wondrous in the soft haze of a ski cabin mornings. You believe the best pheromones for the human race is enthusiasm for women and confidence for men. She has such joy.
Your friends set up you on a couple of blind dates but fail each time to mention that both of your dates are five years older than you and nice in a non-conversional sense. One just lost eighty pounds. The other really loved Ronald Reagan. You miss the chemist snowboarder.

You go up to the Sierra's to train with the cross-country ski team. You try to figure out how to ride up with her, but wind up getting stuck with someone who spends a lot time with her grandmother and is starting to merge into her the way that owners start to look like their pets.

You are in the same ski pace group as the chemist and when you see her in the first post Christmas practice she apologizes for being busy during the holidays. "Don't worry about it," you tell her. You do a loop together on the flat stretch called runway. Her natural artic grace came from a childhood in Maine. She glides when she skate skies. It looks effortless, but when you try to the same side to side motion you almost fall.

You ask her out to dinner on voice mail and she never gets back to you. She misses dry land training the next week.

You don’t want to be the guy who keeps calling all the time.

Your mother gives you the email address of someone you should contact for a date. She was widowed a year ago, and your mom is a friend with her ex in-laws. You spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how to write "the ask out" letter that doesn’t contain the phrases "my mother thinks" or “your dead husband" You come up with something about adventures, but the widow never writes back.

The chemist lost her two front teeth in a kayak accident just over a year ago and wears braces as she goes through months of reconstructive dental surgery. It is the flaw that makes her seem plausible, that she really could go out with someone like you.

You want to cheer Karl Swenson when he races in Italy. You are enraptured by the idea that someone your age could still be an Olympian. You know that the US cross-country team is doomed; in the history of the Olympics the United States has one silver medal, but you want to believe in the underdog. That just perhaps on a frozen day across thirty miles in the Italian Alps, something amazing could happen. It is the same distance that you are training for in Alaska, and you know that even though the television will focus on ice skating the motto of the games is "stronger, higher, faster" and not "theme music, teddy bears, and sequins." Skiing is the winter sport and you want to believe that there are still miracles left in the Olympics. There must be miracles someplace.

The chemist had the flu and returned to the dry land training sessions. You do "F is for Fireman", "Mr. Incredible," and "Angry Cowboy" drills to work abductor muscles. You are a naturally faster runner than she is and when it comes times to do 800 meter repeats around the track, she does her laps with a tall, lumbering guy.

He sold his company a few years ago and now has an assistant to help him figure out how to spend his idle time. After ski season he wants to buy a plane and learn how to fly. They run side by side up the stairs. She must have learnt about how he wants to make a statue. He has a group in India that will do the carving for him. Nice in a bear like fashion, he organizes the rental cabins. She gives him the nickname "Crater" after a mark he left in snow.

She gave you the nickname "Animal" for your Muppet approach to attacking hills. What you lack in form you gain in fury. Distance skiing is about timing the rage. Hills are a safe place to let things go, but you still need to keep your passions on a leash or you have nothing left for later hills.

You send her a valentine email with ASCII characters in the form of a snow boarder. She compliments you at track practice and then runs with other guy. He invited her to the symphony, and they will drive up late Friday to a house he has rented for the group. He has season tickets and loves the opera. His assistant has been arranging things.

You learn that Karl Swenson dropped out of the 50k race. He has a head cold, and there won’t be that many miracles this winter.

You see Crater and the chemist together for the last trip to Tahoe before the race. He wears a retainer and somehow everything makes sense in a dental hygiene perspective. They have a place with a hot tub with a few other friends, and they ask you stay.

You can almost see the future now. You can see them dining well together for a year and then sometime after the next winter is over, maybe in the Alps or maybe in the Andes he will ask. You will be the common friend, the one that can sit on either side of the chapel. You will buy them a new toaster oven as a gift.

It is just that you don’t really want to be the toaster oven guy.

You say thanks, but you need to take care of things at sea level for a while.

The race in Alaska is a week away. The current weather is minus one with a strong possibility of a snowstorm, an Alaskan snowstorm. You remember that at less than zero your nose freezes when you breathe in. You lay out your gear from the race but still make one last panic trip to REI. You want to be a brave winter warrior. You want to be that guy.

Jive an' Wail

The coolest I might ever have been as an adult was in the summer of 1998. It was the waning years of the nineties when the papers rambled about Monica and the markets raged with online drug stores and supermarkets, a distant time of peace and dizzying motion when the word network became a verb and mindshare became the goal. If we were to experience the roar of the twenties then we had to steal its anthem. Swing was back in style.

I am not really sure how I convinced Amy Chamberlain to take swing dance classes with me. I think it was at a Christmas party when we got into a conversation about whether the animated character, Arthur, was really an Aardvark or a mouse. I was sticking to the mouse concept, but the early work proved that he once had a far less kid friendly proboscis. Somehow after this discussion, six months later we were swing dancing.

We found a small dancehall for classes in a neighborhood that is now called South Beach, but was then the China Basin. (I still don't understand the new name because it is neither south (it is on the east) nor a beach). The place had an appropriate seediness to remind us that swing came out of prohibition, but across the road the new ballpark was being built whose fans would be beautiful yuppies rather than the cold, bitter ones of the Candlestick. It was the last time for us to have edginess and we could dance like we didn't care.

Mercury, the Roman god, is a male, but in my own mythology the goddess for being everywhere at once is Amy. She had the ability to be both flakey and sincere. When you spent time with her you felt like you were in the center of the world, but you were never really sure when she would show up. I like to think that she believed that she could help everyone and almost had enough energy to pull it off.

And she did have such enthusiasm. I had no idea that this petite curly blond was an athletic dynamo. I was about a year from getting into any kind of shape having spent what it seemed like the decade eating at Taco Bell, and did my best just to try to keep up.

We twirled, cherry dipped and pretzel'd. But mostly we laughed.

Shakespeare wrote a sonnet comparing a woman to a summer's day, and if I had to pick a handful of days to be compared to (rather than the usual foggy ones), those four classes would be right in the mix. I wish I had the common sense then to realize that. There are the large moments like family reunions, weddings, and graduations that everyone knows to bring cameras to, but there are also those smaller ones that you wish you could capture and hold onto by something more reliable than fading memories.

We were wonders at turning and much better at dips than lifts. I never got down an over the back maneuver, but when we got caught halfway through a pose and wound up stuck like the board game twister we would just giggle to the dismay of our colleagues who seriously thought they could audition for the next Gap commercial.

The hard thing is that dances are fleeting and so are summer days.

I saw Amy only occasionally after that. A couple of years later we ran into each other at Portland Marathon. I think she had finished, showered, written a children's story, and come back to transition area, by the time I crossed the line. She could do it all.

And that is why it is so hard to find out that she has past. I mean how does someone like that drown? I got the news abroad and the reality of it still seems so distant.

I want to believe that she is out there way ahead – it could be another marathon, it could be Africa, it could be at a friend's wedding dancing – that she is just over the horizon giggling at the wonder of trying to do it all.

Spiderman, Too

The first time I asked a girl, Natalie, to marry me, she immediately said, “Yes.” Then again she might have been the one who proposed. I can’t remember exactly whose idea it was and have forgotten several other major details like the time of year. I want to pretend that it must have been summertime, the lush season with plums, nectarines and blueberries, and the long day’s light that gives everything such warmth that the universe seems endlessly ripe and tender even if it is tempered with the reality of sun burns and insect bites.

I do remember the place. We were at my parents’ weekend home in a hammock underneath the redwood deck. From the deck you could see patches of Tomales Bay through scraggly oak trees, but underneath there was just our own little world in a section that my mom decided that she did not need to garden, and the deer tended to avoid.

We were wise enough then to know that there would be difficulties. All relationships have those obstacles, not so much of late night shared insomnia but the questioning on the ride home on a Tuesday "is this really the right thing" as if it there could be an answer for something like that in the back of a teacher edition of life’s little handbook. Still we knew we could handle these things because we had such bravery then, and we would face together the major dilemma that we were eight years old.

She must have been the one to propose as a way of getting me to place some kind of ultimate version of the game of house. It might be fine to have little teas with stuff animals, but if you really wanted the ultimate domestic experience hold out for an actual boy.

Most change when wandering into a relationship, but there is a part of you that you want to hold onto. Not so much your soul because that is the first thing that love takes, but your desires and sometimes your toys. A friend of mine was upset that in order to get her boyfriend to move in she had to agree to DSL, a plasma screen TV, and a leather recliner. I wish that I had told her that soon after he moved in that they would start to use the “we” word consistently and spend more weekends together going to Beds, Bath and Beyond than he would get to go surfing. However, I also knew the ability to watch Sports Center is a right that we, men, are not going to relinquish whatever the odds.

On the hammock the deal that I ultimately pitched to Natalie for our great future is that if we were to be married then I got to be Spiderman.

She thought that this was a fair trade and said okay. She also wanted superpowers and I think we came up with the name Queen Spider for her. This was all before we had gone to the class where we learned that from a guy’s perspective the spider marriage is not really a great idea. But we were strong enough then to hold off on any biological urges. It would be years later before I had my first kiss.

She said we would have two kids - first a girl and then a boy.

I thought that was fantastic as long as they both were radioactive.

Of course, she insisted and we wandered off to tell our parents the good news. Mine gave me the same look that they had when I kept on insisting that we did science projects like baking mud in the oven just to see what would happen. Unfortunately, I lost interest in that after a while and the great field of microwave geology was never created.

Natalie’s parents, I think, were friends of my mom, and they were visiting from someplace like Kansas. I know that it was distant and had to be in some far off exotic world like one of those planets in Star Wars. Perhaps Nebraska or the East Bay. I never saw her again after that day.

A few years ago my mom softly told me, in the way that I learned that our goldfish were gone, that Natalie had married somebody else. I still remembered her, but less of an actual being and more as a concept of that one great afternoon when you really made a wonderful discovery even if it did not involve a nuclear reactor.

Spiderman Two is opening up across the country right now and I think of all of those children going see it. I hope it catches them in that twilight time before the reality of fractions enters in when they can believe for just a few years that the best thing in the world is to have a girl look longingly at you when you tell her your hopes for super powers.

Just Maybe, She

I met her at my birthday party as a friend of friend, which was the perfect gift for someone wandering into their mid thirties alone. I wish I could describe her better - how do you capture the way someone walks into a room or a small smile? I need something better than "a total hottie with brains."

Perhaps she has faded from memory a bit because I haven't seen her since. A pediatrician, she lives in San Diego. I boldly got her email address at the end of my party and wrote a few times. She replied once, but I haven't heard back after the last couple of letters. Just maybe, she might simply be too busy with the monster schedule of being a doctor. Just maybe.

Not long after getting that lone letter, our mutual friend asked if she could borrow my parents' place at Inverness for her birthday with the pediatrician coming up for the weekend. This once sounded like a brilliant idea in the same category of getting the cute girl in geometry class to study together. But that wound up being only about side angle side congruent triangles instead of love ones

Our friend is a swimmer on the same tri team as me. I have roped her into doing a few more runs and she lets me know about swims and openings at her boyfriend's art gallery.

She decided she wanted across Tomales Bay and back, which should be slightly less than two miles. I have heard that falling in love is taking a plunge, but I really don't think they mean that literally. I mean two miles in shark-invested, November water is something out the "Princess Bride" not "Love, Actually".

Most of falling love has changed since junior high. Its feel has gone from the instant fluff of wine coolers to the deeper passion of Guinness and the girls aren't half a foot taller than the boys. I still hold on two principles that remain - a) Rock Lobster is a great song to dance to b) the hardest voyage you will ever have to do is to cross the gym and ask someone to dance

Perhaps it was this danger that led to my odd statistic of the summer that I swam from Alcatraz more than I went on dates. But I thought she was worth it. There are people who move you deeply. They are the catalysts of both wars and art, and central to what makes us both inspired and humbled. If only she had written more than once. But maybe, just maybe her computer crashed and she couldn't email.

This is where I insert the training montage. For a few weeks the alarm clock would go off at 5:20 am and I would wonder down the hill for swim classes at the YMCA. These were taught by a nice Russian who would keep barking at me "Grab beach ball. Grab beach ball." as I stroked through the hour session. I still have no idea what this means, but I do know the perfect Christmas gift for him

I dropped eight pounds and shopped for new coats at the Republic of Banana.

I watched reality TV shows for lessons and learned that a) Never trust a shaggy blond hippie called Johnny Fairplay b) Make sure that you get the hot tub moment for your alone time, and c) Life would be much better if you had five people coordinating things for you.

I booked spa treatments for both the swimmer and the pediatrician for this afternoon. Tomorrow the swimmer is bringing up oysters for her birthday and I will take up red wine. I will do my best to keep my shirt tucked in and to try not to laugh through my nose

Ultimately there is a difference between Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho. Don Quixote truly believes that the windmills he charges are dragons. Sancho knows that they are just windmills and it is a lost cause, but figures it would be an adventure anyway. I know that after this weekend I won't have much except a couple of new coats and a little less weight. But on Sunday morning a couple of hours after dawn as I swim across the bay wondering how many other fish there are in the sea, I will think "maybe, just maybe."

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day

I had no plans for Saturday evening, but I got a last minute invite to go to an art gallery opening by my yoga instructor and her boyfriend. It sounds like urban life channeled through "Sex and the City", but the reality is far more facial hair in strange parts, patches of tattoos on the border of shirts, and cranberry juice for beverages than the HBO show has. If you aren't wearing a black t shirt then at least you have to have dark rim glasses that if Clark Kent owned he would never take off to lose his cool - speeding train be damned. The art is closer to the "heavy metal" school of design - girls with boobs spray painted on felt - than the renaissance and would be more appropriate on the ceiling than the walls. Then again Michelangelo did do the Sistine chapel.

My friends picked me up in an SUV battleship and told me that they have to make a quick stop to pick up the yoga instructors friend, Jessie. It feels like a set up. I have nothing really against these (I do need help at some level), but it is always a little disheartening to find out where your friends place you.

I *always* get the perky side kick (a bat girl to somebody's cat woman). And when Jessie hops in the car she seems just the type. She is a little larger than average from a clear lack of exercise, but at least is busty. She is a few years younger (which is a huge plus), but is powered only by cigarettes. Normally this is a deal breaker, but I have gone sort of past absolute eliminations at 34.9 and am left with tough compromises. Great girl when medicated - that kind of thing. I would love to find a girl who was born in the 70's, laughs occasionally at my jokes, and is basically normal. Where can I find a woman like that?

She bounced with the conversation and I played along with the charade. The four of us wandered through the art exhibit and then go look for a place to eat. At the restaurant which only serves warm Portuguese beer the talk drifted to how I should where tighter clothes at yoga class. I explained that might help with the yoga, but with my little belly it would not help with the fashion department. Somehow the conversation drifted how the yoga instructor could excite gay men and I babbled about how much fun it was to talk to lesbians.

This is when Jessie chimed in "Well you are talking to one right now." Either this is a great date cut off maneuver, or Jessie has a girl. And like most guys I would want to make her mine. You, know I feel so dirty when they start talking cute. I want to say "try a nice guy", but the point is probably mute. No point going through life chasing Amy.

I guess love is more like Shakespeare than hallmark cards - not the part where everyone dies in act five in Romeo and Juliet, but more like when girls are pretending to be men pretending to be interested in the duke. My whole set up bias was much ado about nothing.

If I were to compare love to a summer's day, I would have to pick a San Francisco one.

Themes and Variations

My improv class ended a few weeks ago, and I am now attending a Saturday afternoon workshop perhaps mostly because that there is a very cute blond women that I have a inkling for (I am not the world's most passionate guy - I think I am too old for crushes, but too young for total apathy). Forty or so people show up for these things, and there is a break in the middle in which we mingle and chat about pennant races and quality burritos.

Unfortunately on this Saturday Tara, the funny blond Cornell graduate in the aforementioned inkling, was already surrounded by a pack of testosterone vultures. I always feel stupid in these situations - it is as if I am playing bachelor number three and the other two guys have picked the cool ice creams answers to the question and all I am left with is "vanilla."

With shoelaces in the usual somewhat untied fashion I stumbled towards Tara but as I get closer I overheard her mention something about her boyfriend. I figured that this was a good time to come up with another strategy. I have 11 months until I smack into that 30's barrier and I think it is time to lower my standards.

I noticed that there was a guy talking to this somewhat-but-not-really-very attractive women. I decide to sneak into this conversation. The three of us get to talking. Her name was Berta not Roberta and she had only tried doing improv for a few months. The guy, a future Hollywood star but now a waiter at Chevy's, was rapping quite well with her about coffee shops in San Francisco and the importance of the San Francisco Chronicle's little man theater reviews. About three minutes into the discussion she turns to him and says "Of course you realize that I am a transvestite."

This is what I call a conversation stopper.

I really don't know if my life has some weird built up karma - that it is supposed to have a soundtrack by the Kinks (the flip side is that he might not have told and I would have wound up in the Crying Game). For the second time in four months I have run across a trans something or other. The first being my sophomore neighbor from boarding school at our reunion. I think twice in a summer time is a fairly bizarre theme.

I mean what ever happened to the WYSIWYG interface? Shouldn't Microsoft release a product like Dating 97? Aren't there protocols out there? Is it really supposed to be this tough? (There is also a strange disappointment about the transvestite liking the other guy more.)

Anyway next week I am going back being one of the many vultures around Tara, the blond with the main feature of not being a trans-something. And when that ice cream question of love gets to my turn I am saying "Rocky Road."

Side Routes

There is no non stop between Hangzhou and San Francisco - you either go to Hong Kong or the Shanghai to Tokyo and then SF. Twelve hours of flying, but only two movies not including the animated fasten your seat-belt videos which I think had the same cast as Gobots (I kept waiting for Ultra Man to jump out when the overhead oxygen supply fell). I did the Shanghai route which meant I spent the night in Shanghai and then flew out the next morning. The hotel which was booked here in California was across the street from the baggage claim. I made my way there despite a Chinese roper who was determined to get me to his hotel at a much better price.

As I checked in and went to my room on the third floor, I noticed that there was a bar at the end of the hall. A little tired from my trip I went to the bar for a good night drink. The staff quickly sat me down in a booth. A waitress came into the booth lit a candle and looked up at me from waist level"

"Do you want something to drink?"

I quickly looked at the drink menu and feeling a little patriotic ( or possible to get rid of the smelly tofu, a food that violates some primal taboo) I said "I will have a Budweiser".

The waitress smiled and then asked the second question "Do you want a girl?"

Now this was a little tougher question. I know my company has a lousy 401k program, but I did not think this was part of the overall compensation plan. I was not really in a hurry to join the viral frequent flyer club. I said "no."

I did finish my beer in the place and was impressed with its mood. I could see a little into other booths where business men had two girls a piece. Cigarette smoke poured over the top of the paper walled booths and sank into the carpet. A Mandarin version of "House of the Rising Sun." played on the stereo. It was hypnotic. After settling up for my beer I went down the hall smiling, and wondering about the house in New Orleans.

When I told a few people after I got back to San Francisco, they mentioned that I should have at least gotten a price check. Asked about group rates. Dollars to RMB currency conversion. Perhaps it was a moment that I will look back to and pause. But that was the point of the following weekend.

After getting back to San Francisco and spending just enough time to mess with my body clock, I got on a plane to Philadelphia for the wedding of a girl who got away. Equal parts plump and perky, she was a fellow intern at Bellcore specializing in the psychology of user interfaces. At her heart she is a conversational babbler (a property I also hold) which follows the principle that if you say enough eventual you will stumble into the truth.

I blew it.

That hot New Jersey summer she was dating a cartoonist who she left behind at Carleton. I didn't feel that I should have made my "move" which usually comes across as slightly less subtle than the inflated male frigate bird. There is a point when looking back at the horizon where nobility collides with stupidity.

Halfway through that summer, she struck a conversation with some one waiting for the bus. A graduate student a Rutgers specializing in molecular biology. He was on the periphery - only occasionally joining the intern pack for important discussions on whether "Batman" was a better movie than "Dick Tracy" - nowhere to be seen into our trips to Harlem and the Jersey shore.

The summer eventually ended. She went back to the cartoonist. I went to New Hampshire. The cartoonist wanted to draw someone else. The grad student didn't like grad school and went to Minnesota (where she was) to probably get as far as away from mitochondria as he could. It was their wedding.

There were five interns in our mini group, but she was the only one with whom I have kept in touch. As a group we all tried to guess where we would be in ten years - the cotton candy dreams of youth. So many possibilities. I was going to be a work-a-holic computer programmer. She was not going to get married until she was 35.

The wedding lasted an hour. The reception had a good music battle between her mom's music (see Chill, Big) and the Greatest Hits of the Eighties. And even though I loved dancing once again to "Come on Aileen", the whole thing stung just a little.

Perhaps both things (the hotel and the wedding) feel like the missed exit signs that in the rear view mirror - slightly larger than they appear. Frost's little side routes. I too will wonder.