Matthew Zimmerman

God, I hate pollen.

I bought a new pair of running shoes today. There's a specialty running shop here in Charlottesville, Ragged Mountain, staffed by a crew of young, fit people with disgustingly good abs. The guy in his early 30's that helped me find something for my freakishly misshapen feet, kept 'analyzing my stride' and talking about 'pronation' and 'support' and 'motion control'. It's weird; I've heard all of those words before, but in the running world, they all mean something really different than they do in the rest of reality.

I tried on about 20 different pairs, and the guy kept trying to tell me how each shoe would solve this problem or that; problems I never even knew I had. I couldn't even kept track of which shoe fixed what problem. Or what the problems were. My only major concern, personally, was that a big guy like me would get enough cushioning underfoot.[1] Like, say, floor pillows. Or queen-size mattresses, maybe.

Clearly this guy was used to selling shoes to people who run marathons every other weekend, who have very complex footwear needs. My needs are much, much simpler. I need a pair of shoes I can walk in for a few weeks, then jog in for a month or two, then set in my closet for six months until the whole cycle starts all over. I didn't have the heart to tell him this. He seemed like he was having fun.

[1] Are you one of those fit, trim running-type people? Let's try a little thought experiment. Imagine yourself running. You're running along, making good time. Now imagine a clone of yourself, sitting on your shoulders. Not running so fast now, are you? Now you know why we big folks keeping talking about cushioning, okay?

I'm listening to Norah Jones:

Like a flower waiting to bloom
Like a lightbulb in a dark room
I'm just sitting here waiting for you
To come home and turn me on

For the love of all that's good in this world, won't somebody please turn her on?

(I'm willing to volunteer...)

As I lay in bed listening to the radio this morning, unsuccessfully willing myself to get up, the host of Morning Edition said they were about to play a traditional Christmas carol in Latin, performed by a choir in New York City. I, of course, expected "Ave Maria", or perhaps a version of the Magnificat, only to realize after a second that the choir was singing, in six-part harmony, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer".

In Latin.

When I got an email account for the first time in college, back in the mid-nineties, one of the first mail forwards I got was entitled "Useful everyday Latin phrases", which included, amongst others, the translation of the very useful phrase, "Hi. I'm here to pick up the Pope's Superbowl tickets." I thought I was going to have an aneurysm right there in the computer lab, I was laughing so hard.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Bloom's Day, the date of the events of James Joyce's book Ulysses (which was once picked as the greatest novel in the English language). English majors in Dublin and elsewhere will celebrate by wandering about aimlessly, muttering incomprehensibly and gradually forgetting how to use punctuation. The rest of us will try to celebrate but will give up after about 20 minutes.