Why I Am In Such a Good Mood...September 27, 2000

1. I won first place in my age division at the Bartlett Celebration 4-mile Twilight Run.

2. I got to spend some quality time with Jamie and Melissa.

3. I got to see James Marsters (a.k.a. Spike) in the independent film Winding Roads, which played, like, nowhere except Missouri.

4. I saw Davy Jones in concert.

5. I was in the fourth row to see Davy Jones in concert.

6. I swear I made eye contact with Davy Jones at the concert.

7. I promise Davy Jones blew a kiss right to me at the concert.

8. I got Davy Jones’ autograph.

9. I got my picture taken with Davy Jones.



10. Davy Jones put his arm around me.

11. I stayed in the same hotel as Davy Jones.

12. Melissa’s mom put her arm around Davy Jones as we walked into the hotel.

13. Melissa’s mom opened the door for Davy Jones.

14. As he was walking through the open door, Davy Jones turned around and smiled right at me.

15. One of Davy Jones’ band members walked with us through the hotel.

16. I waited for an hour for Davy Jones to come down to the lobby and have a drink like he promised he would (even though he never came).

17. I went to the fair with Mom, Dad, and John.

18. Buffy the Vampire Slayer started its fifth season (and Angel its second).

19. Dracula!

20. Angel sang!

***************

I was 18 when I wrote the above list.  It was my first semester at Rhodes, and nothing on this Earth could have been cooler than going up to Cape Girardeau, MO for the weekend to visit my friend Melissa (accompanied by our friend Jamie and Melissa's parents) and see Davy Jones play the SEMO Homecoming halftime show. 

Oh, the days when all it took was a Monkee and a new television season to put me on a high... :)

To Davy Jones, my favorite Monkee, who was kind to a starstruck teenager, who saved Marcia Brady's prom, and who made it alright to be a daydream believer.  Thank you for the happy memories.

Progress

I've been pretty hard on myself recently in terms of running (alright, I'm hard on myself over everything, but whatever).  I actually got so fed up with the endless monotony of getting up every Saturday for a long run that I decided to do something that I've never, ever done before:  I decided not to run a race that I signed up for.  Post-marathon, when I was struggling with enthusiasm after (what I considered) a truly lackluster performance in my inaugural 26.2, I signed up for the Germantown Half as a way to force myself to keep going.

Weeeelllll, here's a little something about Becky Heineke:  you can't force her to do anything.  You'd think I'd know this, seeing as how I happen to be Becky Heineke, but I thought that if anyone had the power to force me to do something, it'd be me.  And I was WRONG.  Even Becky Heineke can't make Becky Heineke do something she doesn't want to do, and Becky Heineke does not want to train for the damn Germantown Half.

(Although Becky Heineke is a little peeved that she already paid for it.  But she's trying to get over that.)

So instead of focusing on long runs, I started getting back into my pre-marathon routine of going to track workouts on Tuesday nights.  When I originally started going, I was overwhelmingly intimidated, what with many times being the absolute slowest person there, and seemingly not improving at all, ever, despite weeks of effort.  But what I love about the track workouts, and always have, is that they're about running.  These other group runs that I show up to during the week are as focused (if not more focused) on the social aspect afterward as the exercise part.  But at track, you just run.  Hard.  And at the end of it, there's very little standing around and talking because all you want to do is go home and lie on the couch.

Apparently, this shift from long runs to sprint work was the right choice because I've set three personal records for speed in the last two and a half weeks.  True, nothing that I'm about to share is anything to write home about, BUT, considering where I started, they definitely show progress.

I already mentioned my first PR, for my 4-mile time.

I also ran a 7:53 mile last week at track, the first time I've ever broken the 8-minute barrier running a mile.

And two nights ago, I ran a 3:30 800.  Granted, someone very generously paced me (I respond remarkably well to positive reinforcement from a few feet in front of me), but my other (solo) 800s that night were all in the vicinity of 3:42/3:43, which is the type of time I only ran once last year, and that was only because I was angry enough at three people that I could have punched them all in the face, and two of them had the audacity to show up to the track workout that night.  (I also respond well to generalized rage directed at people who annoy me.)

And the thing about each of these milestones is that the sense of achievement has been shadowed by a lingering sense that maybe I could do even better.  I don't mean that in an unhealthy I'll-never-be-satisfied way, but in an I'm-starting-to-sense-that-things-are-possible-that-I-didn't-think-were-possible-before way.

And if I can do that with running, I wonder what other areas of my life I can do that with...  I don't know if it's the impending onset of spring, or the fact that I just switched decades, or a general product boredom, but I've felt like "working on myself" lately.  And it's nice that in one area, at least, where I thought I needed improvement, I am, indeed, making progress.

That Race I Didn't Run

I was supposed to run an 8k in Barlett at 2 PM this afternoon.

My radiator sprung a leak, however, and on my drive to the race, I found myself temporarily stranded in a church parking lot on Summer Avenue with an overheated engine.

The Lord, perhaps taking pity on me for being if not in his house, then at least in his backyard, bestowed my vehicle with just enough staying power to roll into my mechanic's parking lot, but did not see fit to grant me the extra mile it would have taken to get to the race.

I accepted the Lord's judgment, and also accepted my father's car for my drive to work in the morning, and came home.

A beer seemed more than appropriate...and yet instead, I found myself sitting outside in the sun, reading a book. 

When I came indoors, I was hungry, so I ate half a grapefruit.  Then I lit a couple of candles, turned on some Enya, and looked at things under a microscope.

Megan called, and after we chatted, I looked in my cupboard and contemplated whether I should make myself chamomile or lemon zinger tea to drink during Downton Abbey later tonight...

HOLY SHIT. 

I've turned into the thirty-year-old version of myself.

Crazily enough...

...I have always hated the way this blog looked.  Hated it!  I just threw it all together last minute in a generic Blogger template and BLAH that was a terrible idea.

I was trying to think up a fun theme so that I could redo the whole blog, but despite the fact that I put far more thought into it than anyone should ever put into a blog template, I came up empty.  (I was probably thinking about it too hard.)

For the time being, then, we are switching to whatever this look is (just for a change), and when the day strikes (and OH, I HAVE FAITH IT WILL) that I am again bestowed with the gift of inspiration, I'll give this blog the facelift it truly deserves.

Until then, keep calm and carry on and all that...

Regarding the Six Friends at the Top of Your Timeline

11/12/2013 UPDATE:  If you are looking for information on the box of nine friends on the new Timeline, please see this post.

(I almost wrote this in the comments of the previous post and then thought, hell, I might as well just make this its own entry.)

There was an interesting little rumor going around the internet a while back that the twenty friends listed on the side of your (pre-Timeline) Facebook profile were the twenty people who had most recently looked at your page.

Facebook quickly asserted that this wasn't true, and that the friends listed were chosen via an algorithm that reflected which friends you most often interacted with.  This made sense to most people, although there seemed to be a public consensus that Facebook threw in a few randoms just for the hell of it, to throw everyone off.

And then Timeline happened, and things got a bit more complicated...

Zuck smirks at the thought of all the minutes I've wasted thinking about this.

Timeline replaced the list of twenty with three separate views of your friends:  a small box of six at the top, a larger box of six on the upper right of your wall, and a full non-alphabetized list that's available on a screen separate from your profile.  Though I have a few (hazy) thoughts on the latter two, we're only going to focus on those friends at the top today.

At first glance, it may seem as if these six friends are random.  If you refresh your page, you will get a different six.  But keep refreshing and you'll notice that some of the same people show up time and time again.  In fact, if you were to make a list, you would find that once you reached somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-five, you would no longer be seeing any new people.  (It may be twenty-four for you, or twenty-six, but generally, twenty-five seems to be the number.)

These twenty-five are (allegedly) your current "top friends" as ranked by Facebook.  This list can and does change (quite a bit) and what's interesting about it is that you are the only person who can see it.  When someone else goes to your profile, what they see in that box is mutual friends (and a truly random sampling of other friends, should you share fewer than six mutual friends).

So you have these twenty-five friends, and you're going through them and yeah, okay, there are some people on there that you stalk relentlessly, so it makes sense they show up, and sure enough there are some good friends whom you always leave comments or "likes" for, and then WHAT THE HALE.  There are also random people whose profiles you never look at, whom you never talk to, and whom you had forgotten existed, actually, until they showed up on this list.  What's up with THAT?

It's easy enough to assume that the wild cards are the people who stalk you (why else would they be showing up?).  But before you freak out thinking about all those people you, yourself, stalk who are going to realize what you're up to, let me explain why this theory is nowhere near soundproof.  I call it the Kara Paradox.

Kara, my BFF, has been on my top twenty-five list for as long as I've had Timeline.  I very, very rarely go to Kara's profile and Kara, who died sixteen months ago, obviously isn't looking at my profile, nor are we leaving each other comments or ever, in any way, interacting on Facebook...so why is she on my list?

Random refresh (with a few identities removed).

No, really.  Why the hell is Kara on my list?

Well, it turns out that you can manipulate your top friends list without realizing it.  If you've listed anyone under the "Close Friends" category, they will automatically be slotted into your top friends list.  Conversely, anyone whom you list as an "Acquaintance" will never show up on your top friends list.  I had listed Kara under my "Close Friends."

Mystery solved.

Or was it?

Interested to see what would changes it would elicit, I emptied out my "Close Friends" and "Acquaintances" lists.  And guess what happened to my list of twenty-five?

A hell of a lot less than you might think.  For one, Kara was still there.

And then there were the wild cards (i.e., people I don't interact with or stalk) on the list who claim to "never log in to Facebook."

And then there was the curious fact that the frequency with which certain friends showed up each time I refreshed changed depending on the time of day and the day of the week...leading me to believe that a person being currently online (even when not signed into chat) was having an effect on who was displayed.

In conclusion?  It's a lot more complicated than anything I'm able to figure out.  And while I do see some recognizable patterns in my friends list, I have to begrudgingly admit that what's being revealed isn't quite as informative as I originally thought.

Can you really tell who's stalking your profile?  Not with anything resembling certainty.  And for me - and I'm sure for a lot of you, too - that's somewhat reassuring.

"What happened with that?" (Update Time!)

It was a little over a year ago that I started this blog, and I did so with every intention of keeping up with a series of “regular” features.  WELL, THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN, DID IT.  Or at least not the way I envisioned.  So today I thought I’d offer a quick survey of the “regulars” of this blog and where they stand right now…

What the fuck happened to these people?

ACTUAL AARON CARTER NEWS:  Actually, considering the subject at hand, I probably cover this particular topic as often as it needs to be covered.

CHEAP BEER OF THE MONTH CLUB:  Um, why did I think it was a good idea to start a blog feature that required me to spend money?  The problem was that if I bought a crappy beer that month (and I often did), I was stuck drinking it, and even the crappiest of beers still put me back ten bucks or so.  But because I will always have a soft spot for really shitty beer, I envision this one making a comeback, albeit in a less structured (scheduled) fashion.

HATIN’ ON ZUCK:  I try to restrain myself by saving my entries about Facebook as drafts and never publishing them…and somehow I STILL wound up with a blog that was full of Facebook complaints.  My issue here is twofold, starting with the fact that when I was unemployed, a five-minute break meant walking outside or something.  Now that I’m in an office job, my five-minute break has morphed into logging into Facebook. 

Stop updating your damn statuses, runners.

Secondly, once I started running with a bunch of people who are on Facebook ALL THE FREAKING TIME, SERIOUSLY, YOU PEOPLE NEVER GET OFF, I developed a moderately disturbing compulsion to keep up with everything everybody was posting, even though there was absolutely no tangible benefit to (or reason for) this.  So I was on quite a bit and anything that takes up that much of my time is going to be something I write about...  Often...

And see, I thought at least I was doing well in keeping my Facebook activity on the down low, but a couple of months ago, someone said to me, “You’re on there all the time!” and I was mortified and have since tried to never write blog entries about Facebook (although sometimes I still do). 

But OOOOH, I have so much I could say about my theories about friend ranking in Timeline! 

(“Hatin’ on Zuck” could be its own blog.)

LIVING CHEAP:  This one I abandoned on purpose because no one liked any of my suggestions for saving money (which mostly involved just never spending any money…on anything…ever).  And then last week I went to the eye doctor and discovered my tactic of stretching out six months’ worth of contacts over three years had me risking partial blindness in my left eye (er, oops).  Therefore perhaps I am not the best person to be imparting money-saving tips.

RUNNING W/ BECKY:  I’ve had countless requests to publish Breakaway drama on this blog and while I have been extremely tempted (OH, the drafts I have saved on this particular topic!), I haven’t yet for a couple of reasons.

First, changing names would help in terms of protecting people’s identities, but in a group that tight and incestuous, it probably wouldn’t help as much as it should; I can’t envision a way of using this blog to divulge the very details that make this group so fascinating without someone (myself included) getting hurt. 

How athletic I am!

Also, the last six months of 2011 fucking outdid themselves (boy drama, man drama, boy-man drama, catty girl drama) and I let myself get sucked under by it all.  And I didn’t come out the other end with anything good to show for it, either.  In fact, it’s taken a conscientious effort on my part to step back and recognize that for being the healthiest group of people I’ve ever known, some of my running pals were having some decidedly unhealthy side effects on me.  (I think I cried in the Breakaway store at least once for every month in the last half of 2011.  And just WHAT THE HELL.)

At the moment, my personal drama level is down, my interest in other people’s drama is also down, and thusly I’ll (mostly) continue to stick to writing about the actual running part of it all.

(Not that any of this has had any effect whatsoever on my intention to write that salacious book, mind you…)

STORIES ABOUT ELEVATOR PEOPLE:  What in the name of holy hell happened to Abercrombie & Fitch Boy?  He was the sole reason it was worth getting on the elevator in the morning, but after the Justin Bieber paternity scandal, he vanished from my life.  Goddamn him.  And no one interesting has gotten into an elevator with me since…

MYSTERIOUS DRAWER FIND.

TEXTS FROM LAST NIGHT/WRONG NUMBER (I didn't title this one very consistently):  One should never announce to the internet something like, “Hey, I get wrong texts and voicemails ALL THE DAMN TIME and I’m going to start writing about them,” because as soon as one does, even if one HAS been getting wrong texts and voicemails for MONTHS, one will stop getting them altogether and suddenly have nothing to write about. :(

THINGS I’VE FOUND IN DRAWERS:  I have, like, ten things scanned in for this, but none of them make any sense and I kinda think you don’t care.

And there are some other regular features but those are the highlights and let’s not get carried away going through the whole damn list, AMIRITE?

YAY, it’s been over a year and I still care enough to post reasonably often about a myriad of selfish topics.  I DO LOVE THIS BLOGGING THING (even on the ninth [?] try). :D

"I'm thirty. I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."

I periodically experience bouts of wanting to "better" myself, and a curious byproduct of that is my infrequent desire to read classic literature.

The quote in the headline comes from The Great Gatsby, which I recently re-read for the first time since eleventh grade, just for the hell of it, and...a couple of things...

1.  I cannot imagine why seventeen-year-olds are required to read this book.  This book is way too old for seventeen-year-olds.  (I'm not convinced that I'm yet old enough for this book.)

2.  THIS IS AWESOME.  It was well worth the re-read just to appreciate the hilarity of the book being recreated in the style of an old school Nintendo game.

Too bad I can't seem to get past the first boss. 

(I'm pretty sure there's a deep and clarifying point in here about a ricocheting generational divide, reflecting on both the events of The Great Gatsby and the use of the original NES platform - as each, it could be argued, is equally outdated and timeless at this point - and how they have been combined here in a medium unseen at the time of either's inception...

But I believe that that particular thought process is above my reading level.  And that, my friends, is why I never could have cut it as an English major.  [Refer back to headline.])

The running gods giveth, and the running gods taketh away...

Four weeks ago, I made my return to the Tuesday night track workouts at the University of Memphis.  I had three weeks of good running, followed by last weekend's stellar race.  So you can imagine how pumped I was to go tonight and continue my quest toward baseline-mediocre fastness...

Instead...

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT, BECKY.  Ugh.  I don't even want to talk about what my body was doing tonight, because it sure as fuck wasn't doing good running.  I'm very disappointed.

Also, I went to the dentist earlier today, and I have two freaking cavities.  I take such good care of my teeth!  I floss every day!  Yeah, I'm That Person.  You didn't think there were people out there anal enough to floss their teeth every damn day, but let me tell you, I am that anal and I floss my teeth every damn day.

This day has not been a day in which the best of me was apparent.  Body, you have failed me.

Flashback: Boston 2008

From MySpace, April 21, 2008:

The Boston Marathon is today.  When I heard it mentioned on NPR this morning, I turned up the volume and risked being a little late to work so I could sit in my car and listen to the blurb.

Not that I have any ties to the Boston Marathon (or likely ever will), but it's an incredibly big deal in the running world and I feel a weird (unearned) sense of camaraderie with the tens of thousands of people who are running as I write this.

Yes, I am excited that today is the Boston Marathon for no other reason than it is happening and I am aware of it.  I'm turning into a running nerd.

In related news, Megan and I ran the Youth Villages 5k on Saturday and finished in just over 35 minutes (Megan slightly faster than me), putting us at a pace under 11:30 per mile.  11:30 per mile wouldn't exactly qualify us for Boston, but I think any time a person runs for 35 minutes straight without stopping, it's an accomplishment.  At least it is if that person is me. 

I can't believe that this time last year we were so into walking.

****

Never say never.

Here in 2012, I'm pretty sure I know at least a handful of people who were running the Boston Marathon that day.

I ran another race this weekend, and I did it in 35 minutes.  It wasn't a 5k, though.  It was a 4-miler.

I've never run a sub-9-minute pace in a race before, but Saturday, I ran four 8:45 miles.  Let me tell you...the person who wrote, with pride, above about her 11:30 pace, would never, ever have even dared to imagine she could run an 8:45 mile.

And you know what?  Someone kind of mocked me for being slow after the race.  And even though I kind of wanted to slug him in his smug face, I understand - deeply - that for a hell of a lot of people, 8:45 is still really fucking slow.

But I am not one of those people, and it was an accomplishment for me.  And every once in a while, it is extraordinarily nice to be given the reminder that you are capable of more than you give yourself credit for...

AND it was raining!  God, I'm hardcore...