Shaking It Off

Yesterday was my favorite kind of day, October weather when everything smells earthy, the sky is dark, the wind is howling, tree limbs scratch the siding on the house, leaves are flying off the trees and landing in bright colorful displays on backdrops of green grass and gray concrete.

When I started the day I didn't feel so great, it was a work hangover morning. I woke up at 7:30 am, late for me, and missed the best opportunity to get over to the pool. I decided to put that off until Tuesday. I worked 10 hours Saturday and 8 on Sunday but it was still tiring.

I like the people I work with on the weekends, that always helps. No matter how busy it gets, it seems like we work well together. And of course I always hear the latest news, as if this would be any surprise by now, I found out two more nurses I used to work with are leaving. There must be a reverse polarity magnet around here...

So yesterday morning in my brain fog, I got out for a walk with Iris and then a run in the afternoon, and both times I brought my phone so I could take pictures.

When we started on the walk, my neighbor was on her way to work, she pulled over and put her window down and we talked. Her work hours have been cut and her husband is furloughed from his federal job, and they are struggling.

She asked me how my change at work is going, and I told her I can't tell the difference yet. One more week like that and then I have 2 1/2 weeks away from there, which will give me time to reclaim myself again and get back to my own stuff.

I purposely didn't give myself a lot to do since I knew I could feel like that. I did get some work done and then it was afternoon, so I went out to run for an hour. I wanted to go down by Warren Lake and the neighborhood south of there, so many trees with beautiful colors in the fall. It was perfect timing. I'm glad I did it then since it could snow later this week and the leaves will be gone soon.

At lunch on Sunday I sat outside on the patio and there was a table full of people talking. I sat at another table by myself and listened. It's funny to see how some people stuff their feelings, and you know they're seething inside, but they try so hard to make things look pretty on the outside, even though nobody's life is as smooth and unflawed as they try to make it seem. It was interesting that at one table of five people, some people had every excuse and apology in the book for the same things that other people found completely unacceptable.

I prefer to express myself honestly. I'd rather be true to myself, and keep my sanity and self-respect. Holding things in is too stressful. Stress does all kinds of horrible things to your body and I'm now paying for that. Of course I'm still having to hold some of it in, because I can't name it, but it's coming out in other ways.

For nearly five years I volunteered a huge amount of my energy, effort, and time into some projects, that were very important to me, personally and professionally. I spoke face to face with the people who were making it happen, multiple times, and made no secret of my interest and willingness to lend my knowledge and skills, which were a great fit for the project. I naively expected that I would get the courtesy of a return email or face-to-face conversation when about a year ago I reiterated my interest and offered even more of my time and energy in making one particular project go forward.

You would think you'd be able to get an answer without having to chase people down for months. You would think that you could be in the same room with someone and they could speak to you one-on-one instead of avoiding you and running away at every opportunity.

After putting four or five years of your life into something you'd think you'd get that much. As I said, I guess that was naïve of me to expect that professional courtesy. Anyway, for a while I was devastated and hurt, and then I got angry, and then I realized that I could wait the rest of my life but the decision was out of my hands from the very beginning and I have been used. I was too trusting and then later found out that this is not the first time this chain of events has occurred, and I'm not the first person who has experienced this.

I suppose when you give so much of yourself you are at risk for being taken advantage of by people who think they can just take and take and take, and they certainly did. I still hope that whatever I gave will serve a good purpose for someone, someday.

Another situation came to light today, the stadium deal for CSU is looking worse all the time. Still, you know that those holding the power will push for this, it doesn't matter if it's a bad idea for the people of Fort Collins or for the students at the university.

I wonder when people are going to have enough. I'm not very old, but maybe I am showing my age, that I get outraged by things that seem so unjust and unethical. Maybe I'm just a hopeless idealist. Maybe I'm a dinosaur. Maybe I'm just naïve as hell in thinking that there's some injustice in squeezing the life out of the little guys so the big guys can enrich themselves. Maybe I'm just clinging to a utopian fantasy!

It's sad when politics, favoritism, shortsightedness, insecurity, and incompetence get in the way of things, but that is the way of the corporate world on corporate money-tainted legislation-enabled steroids. Big entities can abuse their power in so many ways these days. It's gotten to the point where people, human beings, are being squeezed to death, there's so much abuse of power, exemplified in the current government shutdown.

Before this post gets too morose, I have to interject this bit of hilarity. I don't have TV and I tend to avoid pop culture, but the uproar over Miley Cyrus and her performance at the VMA barely caught my awareness when it happened. I read the outraged comments of so many people who thought she should have been less or more...whatever. I really didn't care. But then I saw this clip from her performance on Saturday Night Live and I became somewhat of a Miley Cyrus fan. This is about the funniest thing I've seen in a long time.

So I'm slowly and still a little painfully moving on to smaller things. I don't need the reminders of the big power-wielding entities and they are everywhere. But eventually I will be better off following my own path.

I know my own path, as hard as it will be, will ultimately be much more colorful and unique, more satisfying to me. But most of all, I know it will be effective and do what I value most in serving other people as human beings.

As a utopian dinosaur, I still believe that beating people down in the name of powerful interests is morally wrong.

Mother Teresa said, "If we have no peace, it's because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."

WTF, CSU?

So it's a day later and I have to look at the bright side of things, I've done 22 miles since my last blogpost despite my frequent but judicious use of the F bomb over the past 24 hours.

This morning I felt okay for the first 7 miles or so of my 12 mile run, but the last 5 were slow torture again, and I can't even count how many times I was dragging the soles of my shoes on the pavement. I'm surprised I didn't do a face plant.

Last night Shannon and I went out for our tempo run, we usually do 10 miles or so together, but we only did about 9 and a half this time. I cut it short, my whole body has been hurting on the left side for over a week now. My left hip, left hamstring, left IT band, left ankle, I can feel everything.

I'm sure it's due to my spill on the bike the week before last. I was riding and came to a concrete barrier across the path and was stopped, turned around briefly to say something to Troy who was right behind me, and I tipped over on the bike before I could pull my cleats off the pedals. I wasn't moving when I crashed, and nothing hurt at the time, but now I'm feeling a lot of stuff on the side I crashed on, and it all makes sense. The bruises are gone but I think I'm all out of alignment.

When Shannon and I ran, we both were feeling like crap. He's at the tail end of his Wasatch training, I know he's ready to taper now, and he's tired. I felt like crap even though I took a nap in the afternoon. It was 93 degrees when we left on our run, not exactly ideal conditions for a hard effort. Lots of F-bomb dropping on our run. We both were in the same place. The brain wants to go, but the legs won't respond.

So we took it easy and stayed around 9 minute pace and that was challenging enough. Plus we almost got smacked with a golf ball running by the Southridge golf course down there off the Power Trail. We heard it whiz by and over our heads by maybe a foot. It hit hard in the bushes off the bike path.

WTF?!!!

We were lucky. That was one of the closest calls I've had with a golf ball, and I run near a lot of golf courses. It would have been bad if one of us got hit. I told Shannon those guys better lay off the bloody marys before they go out golfing, they better get moving or they'll have to contend with this RPB.

As we ran by, they apologized, but I put my thumb and finger up to show them how close it was. No, not that finger. I wanted to, but I held myself back.

So I've put in 22 miles over the past 24 hours and I feel a bit tired. I guess that's okay. I just need to figure out how to re-align myself so everything won't hurt. I still feel cranky. Time for a rant or two.

Reading the local paper this morning was cause for another WTF. The ongoing local controversy over the building of a new on-campus football stadium for Colorado State University. (We already have a stadium 3 miles off campus.)

I love how these administrators talk so nonchalantly over taking on several hundred million more dollars in debt, since the interest rates are so low and they're only already $616 million in the hole. When the football program hasn't even proven itself, we have a new coach Jim McElwain from Alabama, a new athletic director Jack Graham, and University President Tony Frank hasn't even been in his position all that long.

The thing is, these guys are already all overcompensated compared to most people and have their comfortable salary contracts which will sustain them even if they fail. And any debt they leave behind will be on the shoulders of future generations of students, parents, taxpayers, and the community long after they have all retired and croaked. Somebody will have to pay for it. The estimated cost of the stadium is 246 million dollars.

Oh, is that all?

And I just about puked when they quoted Jack Graham as saying he doesn't want to have anything to do with debt incurred by the athletic department falling back onto the university. "I will do everything in my power to ensure that doesn't happen", he says.

And monkeys might fly out of my butt! Maybe you should try a career in politics, Jack. I heard there's a job opening in the White House in 2016.

They have $700,000 raised so far and they say that is enough to start what they call Phase I, or the feasibility part of the work- just preliminary design. Excuse me, but according to my calculations that is only 1/351 or 0.0028 of the amount it will cost to build this stadium. And that's only the building part. They really think that people are going to buy into this to the tune of a quarter billion dollars? They must have a reason to believe that.

They also have excuses for everything, we've heard it all, from big football programs attracting alumni dollars and research dollars and students, whining that the alumni who don't pay into the alumni funds shouldn't have a say in the decision to build a stadium, that student tuition and costs won't be affected by the cost of the stadium, to whining that lack of a stadium keeps them forever mediocre?

Mediocre in what? Athletics? Academics? Research? Costs? Debt? You're admitting to some sort of mediocrity. What defines mediocrity? And you need $246 million dollars to buy your way out of it?

WTF!

Is football worth it? Do we really need to perpetuate the culture of overspending and overvaluing sports at this level? Don't we have things that are a bit more important on which to spend that kind of money? (Yeah, like election campaigns!) Do we always have to incur more debt?

Meanwhile faculty members don't get raises, more and more adjunct faculty are hired to teach courses because they are cheap labor, and the costs of school keep going up and up and students have to take on more debt.

I don't buy any of their bullshit. I've long since been fed and digested it. Don't even get me started on the whole athletics and academics discussion, we'll be here for a long time.

Furthermore, a new on-campus stadium is certainly not going to influence my spending practices with regards to my CSU alumni status. It took me bloody forever to pay off my student loans from that institution, I think I've contributed enough of my hide.

And I get the feeling that a lot of future alumni will feel the same way once they graduate and those monthly student loan statements start arriving. Unless they get nice jobs like Tony Frank and Jack Graham have. But Jack, how long do you think Jim McElwain will stay in his job?

University Presidents and head coaches don't usually stick around in their positions too long. I don't know about athletic director tenure. I do know that $300,000 or so a year as an athletic director is a bit more than the average CSU grad makes. Assuming I'm just average. Mediocre, that is.

Not everyone has the privilege of having a job like that, which of course gives them the right to be this arrogant in their decisions that will affect everyone else in the community for years after they have moved on...

WTF, CSU?