Running on Empty

It doesn’t usually take this long for me to decide what to write. Well, I guess some relatively interesting things happened today. My mother’s birthday is tomorrow, so today we had a little family gathering. My cousins, aunt, uncle, and grandparents all came by and I picked up my brother who took the bus down from Dartmouth for the day. To be perfectly honest, it was pretty awkward. My cousins and I don’t really have a lot in common. They’re perfectly fine kids, I just feel like they see me and my family as a bunch of spoiled rich people (which arguably we may or may not be) and we see them as relative ludites.

But it was okay. Picking up Brett from the subway station actually saved me a lot of the socializing time and since the Olympics were on, it provided at least one source of common entertainment. My one cousin, Brian, who’s a year or two older than me just got his second several-hundred-dollar tattoo on his other bicep. The first is, in gothic letter, “To Thine Own Self, Be True.” The second is a large cross with the image of Jesus sort of super imposed into it. One wonders, though, if he’s simply going for irony. In the same conversation in which he showed us his cross, he mentioned how he tried to get out of going to church every week. And I never once have heard him mention Shakespeare.

The grand parents and cousins and co left mid-afternoon. After a little bit of cleanup and argument about plans for the evening, we headed out to dinner at Myers and Chang, an Asian-fusion joint in the city. It was all well and good and we then dropped Brett back off at the bus and headed home. The car ride was only worth mentioning because of the re-broadcasting of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” and some remarkable thunderstorms.

I finally got to see Annie. She got back from Maine with her sister about the same time that I returned home with my parents. She came over and we watched a few pint-sized Chinese girls swing themselves around bars and fly across mats (gymnastics). It makes me really depressed to think that all of these 16-20 year old athletes are already Olympians (many Olympic medalists) and here I am sitting in my room at home, naked, typing out my boring thoughts for no one to read. Sure, I have dreams and aspirations, but I haven’t gotten anywhere. I have a few things at which I’ve become decent, but nothing I can really say “Yeah, I’m world-class at that.”

I would love to run in the Olympics some day. I wish I had the confidence of a Steve Prefontaine type to simply proclaim it to be true while watching TV with my family, but I guess my Jewish sentiments make a little more pessimistic than Steve. There are 300 million people in the United States and three people on the Olympic marathon team. That means I’m basing my dreams on a roughly one in three-hundred-million chance. Now, whenever I hear someone say “Oh, it’s only a one in a million chance that such and such will happen,” I think of that thing happening a hundred times and that’s the likelihood of my dream coming true.

The speed workout this morning went okay. Like last week, the shorter repeats went pretty well with the longer ones not quite up to snuff. This week, though, the short repeats were quarters and the longer ones were 800s. All in all, I wasn’t thrilled, but it was okay, especially since I had to basically roll out of bed and go run. I didn’t even have time for breakfast! Oh no!

Two weeks from today, Annie leaves for Amherst. I try not to count down days but it’s really hard not to. I just want them to be special.

I always try to think of something witty to say to end these ramblings, but sometimes I got nothing.