The other kind of climbing

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Notable firsts:

  • First time riding on Highway 101
  • First time getting a flat on the road. Thank god for a pal’s extra inner-tube.
  • First time climbing over 3,000 ft. Agony!
  • First time getting off the bike to walk. For maybe 10 ft.
  • First time seeing so much road kill: skunk, birds, cat
  • First time recording to Strava

Two-thousand-and-heaven

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On the last day of the year, I found myself at the barre. I had hurried down the 405, pushing the speed limit yet again (though no tickets, thankfully), arrived to the calm but crowded studio.

“Make a goal for this hour. A tiny one. Or a big one. Anything. Visualize it in your mind.”

I’m struggling to relevé. My left leg is already in the air, in arabesque. You only know you’re in the right position when it hurts. Inhale. Plié. Exhale.
“If you’re not pushing yourself out of the comfort zone — it’s not exercise.”

Twenty more. Then the right left. Thirty more.

I’m in a small classroom with twenty, thirty women on Sawtelle and Le Grange, between the YMCA and the 405. I’m standing on one leg, on the balls of my foot, making the smallest movements, again and again.

“When we work outside our comfort zone, then we can change. We change.”

My mind is somewhere between ignoring all pain and monitoring every muscle. It’s not in tomorrow or yesterday, or three hours from now or tonight’s plans. Just here and now and me.

This is not my comfort zone.

Neither is moving to a small farm town where I know no one, living in an apartment without internet, shooting tape on deadline. Neither is climbing fifty feet into the air, biking on Pacific Coast Highway. And so many things. And I hope to stay here, always out of my comfort zone.

Link

If such illustrations [in digital textbooks] provide a better understanding of terms like “binarize” or “double pendulum,” they’ve done their work — and maybe we’ll soon see more of them in electronic textbooks, papers and company reports.

Anne Eisenberg — The New York Times

A step towards better e-texts? There’s no reason why non-fiction books can’t also be published like this.

On the library

Aside

Thanks to the Otlet’s Shelf Tumblr theme by Andrew LeClair & Rob Giampietro, I’ve been able to track the books I’ve been reading online. Most books I read are borrowed from the library, so in a sense, this, is the only shelf I have.

The theme is powered by a bookmarklet, easy enough. I’ve been testing the Tumblr export function of WordPress 3.3 to get all the short review posts from the Tumblr shelf onto this page as status posts. I’m manually editing formats and headlines, but otherwise, I’m liking it so far.