Blog
January 2010
Call out the National Guard!
It’s going to be below freezing in Houston! For a day! Maybe two days! Maybe two and a half days! Maybe it’ll break the record 53-hour freeze!
There may be sleet!
Run! Run for your liiiiiiiiiives!
(Actually, the last is not bad advice. Whatever you do, don’t drive. There is a reason every person I know who has lived in a Northern climate and cut their teeth driving in real winter conditions is already calling in sick Friday. We can drive on ice; that’s not the problem. It’s everyone else. They’re idiots. The first thing you learn when driving on ice? Don’t drive when the idiots are out.)
(And yes, you heard that right. The record fifty-three hour freeze. Ha! I knew I moved here for a reason! Fifty-three hours of twenty-degree weather? I once suffered through six weeks of sub-zero temps. Fifty-three hours! I could kiss this Arctic cold front!)
Feeling irresolute? There’s an app for that.
It’s that time of year again: we all get peer-pressured into making resolutions we know we won’t keep.
“I am,” we say, standing on the living room couch and waving a pretzel in the air like a scepter, “going to lose weight this year!” And our friends bench-press their champagne glasses and shout, “You go, girl! You’re awesome! We’re going to exercise more!”
And then we wake up the next morning, hungover and uncertain where our keys are. “Did I say I was going to do something this year?” we ask. “Yes,” someone mutters from across the room. “Drink less.”
My family has figured this out. They’ve resorted to bribery. And competition. Apparently, it works really well.
The family’s current round (they’ve done two or three before) is a three month challenge. This is the first round I’m joining, so I’m not entirely sure what the rules are (although it has been clarified that eating a bag of cheetos does not count as exercise), but from what I understand the general idea is that we all throw money into a pot and participate in the exercise challenge (exercise at least 30 min every day) and/or the weight challenge (being done as a percentage of body weight, which tells me someone who likes math made up the rules, because that sounds far more complicated than it needs to be). In addition, it appears that people are setting some other individual goals (lose a particular amount of weight, get back into certain activities, etc.). I’m not sure what their prize is. A gold star, maybe.
At the end of the three months, the pot gets split out between the winner(s) of the exercise and weight loss groups.
So here’s my challenge to anyone who is interested: let’s adapt this for the blog sphere.
You can join in on the exercise group, the weight loss group, or just join in to meet some other goal (for moral support, of course. Or immoral support, as you like).
* Check in every week. On Wednesday. No one wants to check in Monday morning.
* Report how much weight you lost. You do NOT have to say what your starting or ending weight is—just what you lose each week (half a pound, one pound, whatever it is).
* Report how much non-riding(!) exercise you did for the week. One point per half hour.
* Report how you’re doing with your goals.
If you don’t check in, we’ll come hound you. I mean, encourage you to get back on track.
I don’t really want to coordinate money to try to do a pot like my family is doing, but conceivably we could all pick a favorite equine charity and agree to donate $5 or $10 to the winner’s choice. We could all just donate directly and then not be sending money through a middle-man.
There’s a couple ways we can do this—I can set up something on this site pretty quickly to make it easy to report in and give us a sort of mini-forum where we can encourage each other, or we can set up an email chain. The family is doing it via email, but if people would like to keep their email addresses private, I’ll throw something together on this site that will allow everyone to do that.
Let me know if you’re interested. From what I’ve heard, this has worked really well for some of the family members doing it—the whole group effort/accountability/competition/bribery thing is apparently pretty motivating. This way, if we slack off for a week or two, we’ll have at least a virtual group pulling for us to get back on track.
I apparently need two virtual groups, because I fell off my whole weight loss plan hard at Thanksgiving and am dreading getting back into it.
Jumping into the new year
As you know, I’ve been dealing with a crippling—can’t-ride-over-poles-on-the-ground crippling—fear of jumping. I kept trying to tell myself I was resigned to it, but as everyone but me realized (I’m sure), I really wasn’t.
The thing is, I liked jumping. A lot. And I don’t like giving in to fear.
A few weeks ago, I was watching a rider school over a vertical and I realized something very important: when the horse jumps, they go higher over the pole than when you ride over it on the ground. More air space = less chance of the trolls that live under the poles eating you. I thought about it for a while, then emailed the trainers at my barn at home. I’m coming home for Christmas and I want to jump, I said.
After they got over their shock, they asked me if I’d prefer a kick-quiet mare or a gelding who could be quick but had a flatter jump. I decided that, in the event that I froze in front of the jump and stopped riding, I’d prefer a horse with his own momentum. That he wouldn’t jump me out of the tack was just a bonus.
The gelding was a super cute little Morgan cross. We did a few trot cross rails and then my trainer set up a 5/6 trot in / canter out line. The gelding had a stellar sense of humor, because the first time we cantered the 2’ vertical, I did indeed freeze and stop riding. He jumped anyway.
By the end of the lesson, I was getting through the line calmly and even adjusting the ride to get both the 5 and the 6. And that—the ability to make a decision in the middle of the line—was a huge boost to my confidence. I was as excited about making it through that line as I was going over my first 3’3” eq course as a teenager. You have to get the job done first, and then you can start making it pretty. We got the job done.
I had fun doing it.
The second lesson my trainer wanted to do grid work so we could focus on my position. I agreed, as long as the grid didn’t have a one stride in it. I fell off at a one stride in a combination. She grinned and said, “Good, we’ll do that then.” I stared at her in dismay, reminded myself that the reason I was jumping for the first time at home is that she knows me and my riding very, very well, and told her I’d do it, but she better not kill me.
We started out with a four stride. No problem. That was like the last lesson. As we went along, she kept adjusting the line—moving it to a three, moving it out to a four and putting poles in the middle, etc. The last time through, we did the one to a one. The jumps were all of 18”, and cross rails at that. I honestly think the horse just cantered over them. That’s not important. The important point here is that I cantered over them with the horse.
And was alive on the other end. Breathing. Grinning.
It was fun.
I’ve really missed jumping. I think I’m finally ready to get back into it. Here’s to a new year and new beginnings for all of us.
December 2009
In Memorium
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum.
Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
Catullus 101. It’s a deceptively simple memorial poem for his brother. For a poem by Catullus, it’s almost uncharacteristically straightforward. Latin has the distinct advantage of being a language that allows for very flexible word order, and the first two lines of this poem take full advantage of that, carrying the reader first through the journey Catullus takes and then, finally, to the reason: many through lands and many through seas having traveled / I come these miserable, brother, to the rites. More coherently translated: Through many lands and over many seas, I come to these miserable rites, brother.
More fully expressed in the fourth line: and to the mute in vain I may speak ashes. Translated: And I may speak in vain to the silent ashes. Note that the line is wrapped by “silent… ashes” (ok, except the conjunction, but what do conjunctions matter?) and the apposition of “silence… that I may speak” across “in vain.”
The poem begins to fall apart in the next two lines as he comes to terms with the loss of his brother and then regroups (nunc tamen interea haec, now, however, meanwhile, these things). Ancestral rites—a sense of tradition and continuity—carry the poem to the end and its final line, in which he addresses his brother for the last time: And so for all eternity, brother, hail and farewell. If you scan the Latin, ave atque vale (hail and farewell) actually gets elided. It’s been years since I scanned, so I’m not sure off the top of my head which syllables get dropped, but after all his journey to reach his brother’s grave, and after performing all the duties owed to his brother, these last, final words come and go in a breath, incompletely spoken.
You can find poems out there with more complex imagery and more extravagant expressions of mourning—I mean, if you want a poem that takes mourning to the extreme, you only have to look at Catullus 3, which starts “Mourn, all you Venuses and Cupids, / and all mannered men / the sparrow of my darling has died / the sparrow, the delight of my delight” and continues on to include mock-epic references to journeys to the Underworld. And if you think this is over the top for a dead bird, you should realize he’s actually talking about his own impotence.
Part of the success of Catullus 3 is that he is a poet who is extremely well-versed in poetic conventions and he has a host of literary knowledge and images he can draw upon. You can’t successfully mock and satirize tradition without fully understanding how it is traditionally employed. And so part of the appeal of 101, for me, is that in the face of all he could have done, the memorial poem he ultimately writes for his brother is deceptively simple, but, when you begin to really look at it, beautifully wrought.
* * * * *
My grandmother, who celebrated her 90th birthday yesterday, passed away today. It had been a difficult year for her, and a difficult one for the family as we watched her going, and there is some relief knowing that she is at peace.
Some relief. Not entirely. I’ve been clawing my way through Latin texts all day, looking for some sort of magic nunc tamen interea haec solution to get me through today and the rest of the week. The holidays were already going to be difficult—this has been an exceptionally difficult year for my family—and this is just an escape. Focusing on how grief is expressed by others is just holding off that last farewell, the one that is never truly expressed.
Through many lands and many seas
I have come, brother, to these miserable last offerings,
that, finally, I may give you this last gift for the dead
and speak in vain to your silent ashes.
Since fortune has stolen you—you—from me—
Woe, poor brother cruelly snatched from me—
Now, however, for the moment, these, which by ancient custom
have been handed over, a sad gift for the last offerings,
accept them, wet from a brother’s weeping,
and for all eternity, brother, hail and farewell.
This is the world we live in
I just… I… you know… I…
It’s not that there’s a blog collecting all these signs, it’s that these signs were necessary in the first place. I’m a little worried about the future of humanity.