I Want To Ride My Bicycle

When I was a kid, I remember marking the passing of the seasons with little interest, generally speaking. I mean, there was obviously a difference between the school part of the year (drudgery!) and summer (freedom!). I played baseball in a community league for about a decade, and so there was always the beginning of the season to be aware of, but I never really got excited about it, per se, because I was never really sure why I was actually playing (I was bad at batting and thus the whole rigamarole was terrifying). I always looked forward to our family's spring/summer vacation(s), but those happened sporadically and at different times each year.

Basically, my life (again, generally speaking), sort of all blended together into one big, long, agency-less Thing that I sort of just rode along whilst being mostly ambivalent. Now, I'm aware of the fact that I was a weird kid, and I'm sure that played a part in my perception of summer as mostly being warm winter and fall being cold spring, but I think not really having the ability, as a child, to choose to do and then actively do things that emerged from my own mind on my own meant that everything always sort of felt like it was happening to me more than that I was making it happen, and that made it hard to really value any experiences as "mine."

Of course, this totally makes sense: I should not have had the hypothetically endless, adult freedom I have now when I was a kid, for all of the obvious reasons. So I'm not complaining; instead, I'm taking a really roundabout route to saying that now that I'm (sort of) an adult and can do what I want when I want (at least when I'm not working), I've managed to successfully dig really deeply into establishing a lot of season-centered rituals that are my own and that, as a result of being something I've built of my own volition, imbue certain seasons with a layer of significance I never attributed to them before.

Okay, so, all of the above bullshit was just me saying "As I get older, I realize I'm making my own traditions, and that's exciting!" Sorry about that.

Do you really not have anything better to do than to keep reading?

April is now not only the time that school gets out for the summer (and the cruelest month), but the time when Playing Frisbee starts again. July is when it's safe enough at high altitudes to start climbing mountains. August is when it's time to go see Phish concerts. November is when it's time to strap on snowshoes or skis and play in the snow. And so on.

May is quickly becoming the time when the weather gets nice enough to start riding my road bike again, and that is awesome.

You may not have already realized this from the context clues earlier on in this post, but I was a kid once. And when I was, holy damn shit did I love riding my bike. I imagine I loved it for the same reason that most kids love their bikes: because having the agency to travel on your own is rare and valuable when you're eight years old, and because the feeling of going really fucking fast is awesome. But riding was also pretty dangerous where I lived, due to my neighborhood being a labyrinthine suburban construction that was nonetheless intersected by a few high-speed-limit streets (it was an older, 70s-style surburb, not one of these new-fangled, self-contained safety-bubbles). So, I wasn't allowed to ride much at home because there was always a chance that an errant turn would launch me into a 45 mile-per-hour traffic flow and end with my entire torso getting SHREDDED LIKE CARNITAS.

So I was only really allowed to ride in controlled environments, like within campgrounds and such when we were on vacation, and by the time I got old enough to be allowed to ride at home, I was fourteen or so, and thus less interested in being someone who STILL RODE A BIKE than I was in  eventually getting a car and DRIVING FAST and PICKING UP CHICKS or whatever people do in high school. But man, for awhile there I really loved bike riding on vacation and wished fervently that it was something I could have done more regularly.

When I moved to Kent to go to college, I sort of got back into bike riding again, but it was more practical than anything else. I rode to and from school so I didn't have to buy a campus parking pass and I rode to and from downtown and the grocery so that I didn't have to pay for gas. Kent was a very comprehensively sidewalked town, but there weren't a lot of wide-open stretches to ride on, and so while I preferred riding to driving and often to walking during those years, there wasn't much whimsy inherent in riding from intersection to intersection for miles at a time.

Pictured: Fascinating riding territory.

When I moved out to Pullman, I initially planned to ride my bike to and around campus in much the same way; however, the overall hilliness of the town and my then-massive-laziness combined to discourage me. Plus, most of WSU's campus is surrounded by house- and apartment-living assholes who have little to nothing to do each weekend but to smash a bunch of beer bottles in the streets (and I mean a lot of beer bottles), so that makes riding without extreme tire protection a gamble. Anyway, I got used to walking everywhere, I liked walking everywhere, and I never thought much else about it until Lindsey started expressing her enthusiasm for riding the Chipman Trail between Pullman and Moscow and, fortuitously, my friend Daniel chose to sell his old but snazzy road bike. That was almost two years ago now, and over that time, I've pretty slowly but surely reacclimated myself to the ways of brake adjustments, tire inflations, and chain repairs, in addition to learning to ride a road bike for the first time (which is really, really different than riding a mountain bike or hybrid bike, and really, really fun).

The first time I rode my Peugeot, the tires seemed irresponsibly thin and it the bike impossibly fast; it seemed inevitable that I would die riding a two mile loop around Lindsey's parents' suburban neighborhood. Maybe the old adage about remembering how to ride a bike is true, but clearly there are different kinds of bikes that require different processes of learning, and I was starting this particular process from scratch.

Anyway, eventually I got the hang of it, and the speed of the bike compared to a mountain bike and the ease of riding (supplemented by padded gloves and padded bike shorts) won me over. For much of last summer and fall (and a very little bit of winter), I worked up to riding the Chipman Trail from Pullman to Moscow, and then, eventually, rode the entire loop at least once a week just for fun. The Trail basically parallels the Moscow-Pullman Highway, the road that I've been taking back and forth between the cities for years in my car, and there's just something really fulfilling and self-sufficient about riding back and forth alongside that same road under your own power. Plus, unlike the bike routes I "explored" as a child, the Trail is free from motorized traffic, is well-paved, and yet takes you through some gorgeous, open Palouse country in its run between the cities. Basically, in rediscovering the joy of biking, I've gotten to ride like I'd always wanted to be able to ride as a kid: the Trail is aesthetically beautiful enough that I often find myself dismounting in order to snap a few pictures and yet travelling its length serves a practical purpose as well: transportation between cities.

The trail continues to run to the next-over city of Troy, and later this summer a few friends and I have a plan to ride that entire loop (Pullman > Moscow > Troy and back, about 50 miles) over the course of a Saturday or Sunday. It's the first bike ride I'll ever have been on that could rightly be considered an adventure, and I can't wait to see how my rediscovered excitement about biking stands up to the challenge of an entire day's worth of riding.

the return of the king

by "return" i mean "a return to this blog", and by "king" i mean "me".

i've decided to revamp this blog and start using it again, partly because i found an acceptably uncomplicated way to simplify my once oh-so-crowded template and partly because i just got a new android phone and so it just makes sense to migrate everything more firmly to google. plus, blogger integrates with google+ nicely now, so that's fun.

i've left links to ye olde tumblr (the shortest-lived of all my blogs to date!) and my old livejournal (which is still active for some reason) above, in case you discover that you prefer old me to current me (i don't, but you're entitled to your opinion, of course). otherwise, prepare for some more pontificating on meaningless topics, inane babbling about important topics, and probably a little hand-wringing and discussions of personal issues that will probably make you feel a little awkward for having read them on the internet. because that's what i do.

since i posted a bathory video to celebrate the end of my tumblr, i'll post a fila brazilla video to celebrate the beginning of this one. because that totally makes sense. to me, at least. and, as you'll quickly learn, that's all that really matters around here.

change

so, i made a rather impulsive and hasty decision (treebeard would be discomfited) yesterday to switch my blogging platform to tumblr.  the interface is great, it's way easier to set up twitter and facebook forwarding, and hooking it up to my lazyblazers.com domain was super easy.  all things that blogger made unnecessarily difficult.  plus, now that i'm in the habit of making many short posts rather than many long posts, tumblr appeals to me...not having to navigate all the (admittedly nice) options and menus on blogger will make things easier and faster.

nonetheless, i made something ridiculous like 1,250 posts on this blog over a few years, and a lot of those words  and the thoughts and comments generated by them helped get me through a lot of tough times, so it's a bit sad to close the doors on the ol' blogger.  then there's the madden 2003 playoff coverage, which was just, like, whoa.

anyway, i'll be on blog.lazyblazers.com still, it'll just point to my tumblr blog now.  it's also (amazingly simply) set up to cross-post to facebook and twitter.  so if you follow me there, get ready to get frustrated and stop.

also, i'll be leaving this blog open in case i want to come back to it someday, so my little emo corner of the internet here will still be open for business.

confucius once said "only the wisest and stupidest of men ever change".  huh.

DO NOT HOLD OVER PEOPLE

i just got a huge kick out of the warning on this coffeemaker, as i instinctively took "do not hold over people" in an emotional sense rather than a physical sense.  as in: "if you ever find yourself in a messy breakup argument with your ex-significant other, you CANNOT say 'how can you say i don't love you?!  i bought you that coffeemaker!'".

'twas funny to me at least.

test post!

pretend i'm saying something interesting!

or, just check out this photograph of a monkey playing football:

summer of the memes

so i had to explain the "double rainbow song" to a (disgustingly uncultured) friend of mine today, and it reminded me that i'd wanted to write this entry awhile back and then it slipped my mind when i got caught up in fistfighting bears and writing poetry.

this summer was memorable for a lot of reasons (many of which i will someday hopefully get around to writing about before i totally forget about any of them), and somehow the soundtrack to much of the adventure and action was (for some reason) based on three ridiculously addictive/bizarre internet memes.

1) the '60s-era IHOP theme song
this one was introduced on, i think, the first day that john was in pullman.  he innocently mentioned that there was some batshit insane video on youtube of an old IHOP commercial, and so, being the connoisseur of batshit insanity that i am, i had to check it out.  this is what i saw:

WHAT.  IS.  HAPPENING.
why the voice?  i mean, i understand that going to IHOP is an excuse for dressing up in your sunday best and fucking skipping across a field with a huge cloud of balloons clutched in your trembling fist because IHOP is awesome and if you are NOT caught up in a paroxysm of joy at the prospect of panqueques, there's something wrong with you.
however.  this is horrifying.  the singing seems to be slightly off-rhythm from the music, and both are insane.  also, nobody in this commercial GETS PANCAKES.  two people get vaguely italian dishes, one person gets a salad, and the fourth person gets what is obviously a now-extinct giant mollusk pulled from the depths of the sea off the shore of whatever dark, lovecraftian hamlet this IHOP is located in.  thanks, IHOP.  i not only never want to go to IHOP again now, i never want to go ANYWHERE again.

2) nanerpuss
this was introduced to me by lindsey, on the same day as the above commercial.  here's the original:

now that's crazy, but it also has this bizarre, catchy quality to it.  the kind of quality that makes you wake up in the middle of the night sweating, screaming that you are the nanerpuss, and - guess what?! - you like pancakes.  it gets worse:

are you dead yet?  here's my favorite:

this is the one that cracked my world in half.  for weeks afterwards i would literally halt in the middle of a busy word day, and unaware if what i myself was doing would shout "I'M WHAT'S KNOWN AS THE NANERPUSS!  I AM A BANANANANANANA!!!!"  for serious.  it was bad.

3) the double rainbow song
i'm not going to explain this one to you if you don't already know it.  the first video is the necessary context.  the second video is the song.  this song was my ringtone all summer because it is awesome, and surprisingly catchy and song-like and good and i like it.  you should listen.

  

ode to bryan tower (today at 5pm you played "somewhere over the rainbow")

o great cyclopean eye
you shiver the hot night air with your
burning red glare that throws

rust-colored shadows across the edges of my books like
spilled paint

even on kamiak butte you arrest my slumber
as your unblinking gaze penetrates dreams free of
literary aspirations

now that you are fixed, i once again have will
now that you are fixed, i once again have purpose
now that you are fixed, i once again seek to kindle the fire
of mordor in the hearts of my orc army

the world of men shall fall

OHCRAPITHINKITSTIMETOEATDINNER

why do i even have a twitter account anymore?!

i used to think twitter was stupid, then i thought it was totally awesome, and now i think it's stupid again.  does this mean that i'll eventually again think of it as the proverbial bee's knees (or as today's english students would say, the B's knee's)?  or is it dumb and stupid like a broken toy when you're two years old?  i haven't checked my twitter feed for eleven days and my life hasn't come to an end.  i find i learn a hell of a lot more reading actual articles read through my RSS feed, and if i want to talk to people, i just talk to them in real life.

am i getting old?

why is everything suddenly in sepia tones?

why am i an envelope?!

i'm like your mom's doorbell, everyone gets a turn

something went horribly wrong in that post title.

anyway, as a way to keep a tenuous hold on the sanity i described so incoherently in the previous post, i'm going to try to force myself to write at least one blog a day from now on.  sometimes they might be about things that happened during that specific day, but i'm hoping to actually write some Writey McWriterson things as well.  we'll see.  if i can set aside an hour every two days to exercise my body, i should be able to set aside the same amount of time to exercise my brains (and my fingers, and my brain's fingers), right?

WRONG.

oh god, my toaster's on fire quick someone throw water on it

crash

dim lights keep the hulk at bay

it's true.  i was reading a study the other day (which i can't link because i forgot to bookmark it and now i can't refind it) that basically showed how any light level that's actually brighter than sunlight (i.e. the interior lighting of pretty much any building in the United States at any given time) is so confusing for the brain that that light level is interpreted similarly to how our brains interpret night-light.  the shorter and less shittily-phrased version of that sentence is this: when it's really bright inside, humans' brains think that it's nighttime.  this explains a lot about the last 29 years of my life.  it also explains why i always fall asleep after turning the lights up real high to keep myself from falling asleep.  it ALSO explains why this is my favorite sight to come home to after a long day of work:

i've always liked keeping the lights down rather low, to the point that certain others tend to become exasperated upon entering my office to find that, for the tenth time in a row, it's too dark for them to navigate from one end of the room to the other.  in the middle of the afternoon.

of course maybe i'm just a vampire.  but not one of the sparkly, effeminate, super-hunky ones.  just one of the pale, effeminate, hilariously romantically inept ones.

that is one indolent sport coat!

so i was kicking around the idea of building a website for my professional, English-y stuff today (as it occurred to me that I probably wouldn't want to send potential future employers to lazyblazers.com to find my CV), and while checking the availability of benbunting.com, i decided to check the availability of lazyblazers.com as well, just to make sure that it would come up as unavailable.  it did, but i also got a list from google of similar domain names, in case i wanted to buy one.  here are some of the best they gave me:

slothfulblazers
lazysportcoat
indolentblazers

some intriguing music news coming shortly, but first: teaching awaits!

my smartphone's menus are hilariously intense.

it always makes me oddly sad when my mom calls when i'm in the middle of a meeting or class or something, because to reject the call, i have to hit this comically huge, bright red "REJECT" button right underneath this picture:

google chrome extensions are better than everything

so i started using chrome about six months ago, when my firefox became so bloated with (admittedly) awesome plugins that it took netscape-era amounts of time to load.  oddly enough, when i uninstalled all but like five plugins, firefox still insisted on sucking.  thus, enter chrome.  now i have a batmobile's worth of plugins for chrome, including some fiendishly awesome ones (shareaholic, rememberthemilk, gmail+, and chromedbird) and chrome's performance doesn't seem to be effected at all, even when i have like 10 tabs open (which is always).  seems that separate-process-for-each-tab was a great idea after all.

that said, i wouldn't recommend running a post-2006 FPS game with graphics maxed out while minimizing a 10-tab chrome window in the background.  shit goes down.

anyway, time to go eat thai food.  more lightning typing in the future!

speaking of the future: jetpacks?

introductions are in order

blog, meet ben.  ben, meet blog.  it's been awhile.  welcome back to the internet of opinions.

i had a lot of feelings this summer.  most of these feelings were had driving from pullman to canton to kent to nashville to canton to cambridge to sharon to kent to canton to pullman.  7000 more miles to my name.

i'm sort of implying through my tense use above that my summer is over.  not nearly; however, the part where i drive around in a car and do fucking awesome things is likely over.  and that's not necessarily a bad thing, because as usual, all the travelling was a great experience and gave me some always-necessary and valuable perspective on life that's just not possible to get when you're always in the same place, doing the same thing, even if that place is pullman (awesome!) and that thing is teaching and playing music at bars and eating thai food and having great friends (awesome!).

there have been so many great and noteworthy moments in the last month or two that to do my usual picture-posting-storytelling-thing would result in my absolutely leaving 95% of the coolness out.  so i won't.  in related news, as i've no doubt mentioned before, i now share almost all of my articles, photos, and videos and such via facebook.  i know it's not everyone's favorite platform, but the fact is that almost all my real-life friends are on there and i have the fuck-yeah-tastic shareaholic plugin for chrome which lets me share with everyone in one click.  so friend me if you haven't already, because facebook's going to be where the action is.  this blog is just going to be where the rambling, semi-coherent madness is.

and on that note, bye for five seconds!

wordles

if anyone else out there does wordles, you can check out mine thus far on this page.  they're all based around my various seminar papers except one, which if i remember correctly is based around some series of blog posts i made awhile back. 

checking in

i had thought (mistakenly, obviously) that i would have a lot more time to blog about random, potentially fun things over break.

somehow, i always envision winter break as this wonderful sort of "eye of the storm" moment where i get a chance to recharge before next semester starts and to catch up with everyone in ohio that i don't get to see most of the rest of the year.  in reality, it always (ever since WSU shifted their calendar back a week, anyway) ends up being this rush where i get back into town 2 days before christmas, then rush from about the 28th to new year's trying to see everyone that i know in the area outside of canton, then come back home to do all the work i didn't do between christmas and new year's before i fly back to pullman in my last 4-5 days in town. 

now, having said that, i've made it all sound much less pleasant than it actually is.  it's really great that i'm able to come back home for christmas every year and that i'm also often able to find a lot of time to visit with my friends in the area as well as my family.  it's just not what i'd consider a "break".  it is what it is, i guess, but it's just always a little disorienting when i get to this point in the break, three days before i fly back home, and realize that i'm really no more rested or calm or relaxed than i was rushing to the airport right before christmas right after turning my grades in. 

anyway, it's been a really great break.  got to see pretty much my entire extended family over christmas eve and christmas.  got to see Avatar again, this time with my parents and brother, and they seemed to like it.  i forgot how incredibly huge theaters are here - as in, it actually makes a difference whether you sit in the front or the back.  i was spoiled (as usual) by christmas: got a new digitech effects processor pedal, a good starter turntable (can't wait to start buying vinyl instead of CDs), and, mostly importantly, a GPS.  like an actual, legit, fancy GPS, not a phone with a GPS unit (though i also got a new phone for renewing my contract).  i haven't used it for anything geocache-wise yet; i downloaded a ton of geocache locations for the surrounding area, but then we got a billion inches of snow before i could get out and find any of them.  excited to go back and recheck the University of Death caches using it, and to start logging more caches around the pullman/moscow area.  there are a lot of 'em.

i didn't get to spend as much time up in kent this break as i normally like to, partially because of the weather and partially just because of what i mentioned before: namely, that i've just been so beat, having fun just hasn't sounded fun...if that makes sense.  had a great time over new year's, but after about two days of tromping around kent, it just sounded more fun to sleep in my bed for 12 hours than it did to do anything remotely adventurous.  with luck, i'll be able to spend some time up in kent this summer and have a chance to make up for my current lethargy.

i love "married to the sea"...

...and here's why.

oh my GOD, who left this blog laying here?

i just found this old thing and dusted it off.  seems to work okay.

it's thanksgiving break, which means instead of working 16 hours a day, i'm working like 8-10 hours a day.  which means i might get to blog a few times.  i spent the weekend in post falls at lindsey's parents house, which was really fun.  that place always makes me think of rivendell, for some reason.  maybe it's because every time i go there, it's on the heels of some sort of utter madness (the first time it was after the ohio-northwest crossing of 2009, the second time after an 8-day sinus infection).  it might also be because there's a sort of relaxingly predictable rhythm to life there, which goes something like this:

1. wake up earlier than usual and eat breakfast (actual breakfast, not just cereal)
2. sit around for a bit and work on my own work (usually grading or something)
3. go do something outside that involves strenuous physical activity
4. return from said activity and make a huge heaping dinner of some sort (eating dinner at actual dinner time)
5. continue working (alternating with watching the history channel) in front of the fireplace
6. at some point in the late evening, go scrounging for food because i ate dinner at actual dinner time
7. eventually fall asleep in front of the fire, wake up, drag self to bed.

it's pretty elven (or elfish, if you want to make tolkien spin in his grave).

other than that, i've been pretty much just working on grad school stuff all semester.  in the small breaks that i do have, i've been going out to dinner with people, or watching that 70s show in its entirety with lindsey, or playing some video game because i'm too exhausted to do anything smart.  which means i haven't made any progress on any outside interests such as book-writing or song-playing, but i'm willing to put that on the back burner for the moment, as the end of classes is in sight (i only have to take ONE class next semester and teach one, and while i'll be doing diss stuff as well, i certainly won't be as busy as i've been for the last 1 1/2 years).

i'm getting some next effects pedals and such for my tube amp, so i'm hoping that'll inspire me to write some more songs, once i finally have time to sit down and think straight.

in geek-hobby land, it has in fact been a pretty awesome semester though, as i've gotten the chance to play a lot of games i hadn't previously played, like KoToR 1 and 2, all three prince of persia games (minus the new one, which i don't yet), and all three homeworld games.  my new obsession is warcraft 3, which i somehow didn't play when it came out in 2002.  i'm just now at the point of finishing up the expansion campaign, and am looking forward to playing the whole thing over again on the higher difficulty setting once i decompress from RTS land for a month or two.  hanging high over my head also is the fact that i've still NEVER finished brood war, despite having played it for no doubt hundreds of hours in the last 10 years.  but i think the next thing on the time-wasting, fun-having plate is a run through final fantasy 4-6, and 9-12.  which will probably take the entirety of my whole life.  i'm skipping 7 and 8 out of principle because, although i love both games, i hate replaying them because there are WAY too many "stop and level up here for 5-10 hours" sections in both of them.  i've never played 10 or 12 before, so that should be a good time.

i'm teaching a (potentially) awesome class in the spring.  but more about that in a minute.

the return of the PC

around june or so, i decided to forego my usual TV-watching as my sole form of solo relaxation and to try to get back into playing video games. this is somewhat complicated as the fanciest console out there that i own is a PS2 (for which i have 2 games), and i have no money, and my computer is 5 years old. this is in addition to the fact that i currently have something like 11 shows on my "to check out" list. but anyway...

i spent most of the summer and now early fall wallowing in some serious gaming goodness. it's certainly more fun than watching TV, but unfortunately it also results on me staying up too late on work nights.

i started off with some serious platforming magic by playing through both lego star wars games and then the lego indy game (which was surprisingly good; i think i liked it better than the star wars ones). from there i revisited the first two prince of persia games, and FINALLY played through the third one for the first time. it was much better than i'd been led to believe, and did a good job of tying the stories of part one and part two together for a believable and satisfying ending (that's coming from one of the few who LOVED part two).

more recently, i tried to play dungeon siege, which i've never finished, only to find that it pretty much only runs on XP. this was part of the reason that i tried to roll my computers back to XP and eventually ended up destroying all my hard drives and having to upgrade to 7 (note: dungeon siege still doesn't work). so those two games are on the backburner.

then i was completely devoured by knights of the old republic 1 and 2. part one might well be the best game i've played in a few years, and while two expanded the first on a more epic scale (a la baldur's gate vs. baldur's gate 2), the rushed end and dropped subplots just sort of pissed me off and made me feel like i had just essentially played 60 hours of star wars RPG goodness, invested myself in the story and the characters, and then been treated to a conclusion that was thrown together in 25 minutes. i'd still recommend both games, though.

now it's on to 1999's homeworld and it's assorted sequels, and from there warcraft 3 (which i've also never played). i'm not sure after that. maybe back to TV. i also have final fantasy 9, 10, and 12 in a closet or box somewhere around here...though i'm sort of afraid to start in on those while i still have, you know, a job and a social life.

i done lost my food memory

i've been writing and thinking and teaching about (and eating) food a lot lately. so it keeps bringing to mind a conundrum i've pondered for a few years now: how the hell did i not starve to death in college?

i seriously do not remember how i fed myself on a day to day basis. i remember eating each of my meals in a fairly regular way before i left my parents house after high school, and ever since i moved into my first rental house in 2002, i've cooked, etc. a decent amount and otherwise bought my own groceries. however, during that middle period for about 3 years wherein i didn't have ready access to a grocery store or a kitchen...how the hell did i live?

i mean, sure, i remember pretty regularly getting breakfast or dinner or something with my friends. i remember my fair share of burrito runs, and pizza deliveries, and trying to turn midnight on-campus snack store food into a meal often enough, but not enough to account for EVERY SINGLE MEAL i ate for years. for some reason it just really unsettles me that i can't remember any of this.