The Ink-Pot and the Palette

It's now three years since I started riding a bike. At first, every day brought new developments: I got a little faster, a little stronger, a little steadier. I expanded my remit to include almost all my transportation.

But there's only so much transportation a gal needs, and I had no interest in adding hours or miles just for exercise. Boring! So the curve leveled off and improvements stopped coming.

Then a few weeks ago I bought Adam Lambert's Trespassing after hearing "Better Than I Know Myself", and I liked it so much that I started listening to it on my way to work. (I have a lot to say about Adam Lambert's music, but for now let it suffice that it's waking-up music for me, and represents everything that's newly fun and interesting in my life after a long, long climb out of a music-less depression.)

And then I just started pedaling to the beat.

Now, Adam Lambert's music has a lot of "Okay, go!" moments in it, where it backs off, cranks up, and then bombs forward with a driving beat. It's inherently engaging and exciting. And when I'm stopped at a red light and it turns green right when one of those moments comes along, I'm all, "Okay, go!" and, being kind of a perfectionist, I want to hit that downbeat, and to hit that downbeat I have to pedal harder, and to keep the beat I have to gear up, and pretty soon I'm really putting my ass into it and...

...holy moley, it's an improvement. Once again, faster, stronger, and a ton of previously-unexploited cardio, plus BUTT MUSCLES.

So, Adam, bless you and your stunning voice. You made me wanna listen to music again. And pedal my ass off.

I'm very old in internet years, and while I don't always love being over 50, I can claim this:



I was born the same year as rock and roll.

I need suggestions.

Apparently I have an auditory information processing style. This has a couple of ramifications that are at odds with each other in a crowded workplace like mine:

First, it's really noisy in here, and I'm surrounded by a) a guy with the droningest voice in the Pacific Northwest; b) a woman with a very, very bad chronic cough; and c) three harrassed and stressed individuals who, in order to ease their workday burdens a little, speak to each other in what I think is Tagalog--which is a very clipped and bouncy language that's hard for me to ignore.

Second, I can't drown these distractions out with music because I can't work with music playing either. Music: requires most of my CPU to process. And of course, audiobooks are right out.

I have this meditation-type CD--rain and some gongs and stuff--but I'm getting really, really sick of it. I need non-cognitive, non-rhythmic, non-musical blocker-outers for my ears.

So, any suggestions?

We vastly exceeded expectations and timelines during this first pressure-cooker week of integration testing. Go team.

So, a couple two-three hours early, I came home in the three-digit heat, took off my shoes, made myself a lime slushy, and put on the Ramones.

The only thing I knew about the Ramones yesterday was that my favorite Lone Gunman worshipped them, and that Joey was dead. But then yesterday I saw two different people in different parts of town wearing different Ramones t-shirts. So I thought, "Hey, sign!"

Only by such emphemera does my life branch out at all. It seems like a good idea to do as I'm prompted.

So now I've got a Ramones greatest hits compilation. You just never know what's going to appeal to you at 50-something that probably should have appealed to you a whole lot earlier in life if you'd, you know, had a life.

At 25, I totally would have appreciated "I'm just gonna have to tell 'em that I've got no cerebellum...LOBOTOMY! LOBOTOMY! LOBOTOMY!"

Oh well, I'm appreciating it now.

ba-ba-buh-ba, buh-ba-ba-buh-ba, I wanna be sedated

*has fun*