Continuing my search through my earliest blog posts, I found this one from November, 2012, and it tickled my funny bone. In the intervening 9 years, the kids who wore me out have grown into wonderful adults who will carry some of my stuff if we are backpacking, but the issues with gravity have grown more troublesome.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Random Absurd Theories
Revisions are on track! I've finished the first rewrite, aside from some typing. Bouncing between that and my activities aimed at getting a bond measure passed for our suffering local schools has me exhausted but feeling like I'm at least doing something.
So, for amusement, I'll offer some of the random thoughts that occupy my brain at off moments. Sometimes, just for fun, I like to invent absurd theories to explain things. Here we find a few:
Pay the Gravity Bill There's an old Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in which Calvin discovers his Dad didn't pay the gravity bill, and he floats away. Well, it turns out that after a certain age, if you forget to pay the gravity bill. . . they turn UP the gravity. Way up. This explains those days when working out is just torture. You didn't pay the bill, you get to suffer.
Too Many Athletes in Colorado The reason there isn't enough oxygen for a good run in Colorado is that there are too many athletes and they have sucked all the oxygen out of the air.
Kids' energy supplies We figured this one out well over a decade back. Kids have separate stores of energy for different things. For hiking, one source, and not a very big one. For playing: some other, nearly infinite, source. You arrive in camp after a three-mile hike with your 8-year-old so exhausted he can't even set his pack down, has to drop it with a crash in the dirt. Two minutes later he's running up a mountain in pursuit of whatever it is that kids run up mountains to pursue, and doesn't stop until you force him to.
Corollary: Kids get their energy by sapping it directly from their parents. Ask any mother of toddlers.
Today you're a dophin, tomorrow a sea slug Okay, this one isn't a theory. More of an observation. It's based on my swimming workouts, but the same thing is true for any kind of workout. When a swim goes really well, I say I'm a dolphin--swimming smoothly and easily and could go on forever (or at least for a mile). But other days, I'm lucky if I'm a sea cow, ponderous but not ungraceful. I'm just as apt to end up a developmentally-disabled sea slug, whose limbs (do sea slugs have limbs? Never mind) pay no attention to commands from the brain (I don't think sea slugs have brains, either. This may be the problem). Anyway, it's generally true that if on Wednesday I'm a dolphin, on Friday I'm nearly certain to be. . . something less desirable.
For biking, I guess you could say that if on one ride I feel like the winner of the Tour (ha!), the next ride I could be ridden into the ground by an Edwardian spinster on a one-speed with a wicker basket and a giant hat.
All of this may be related to theory #1 about not paying the Gravity bill.
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