stevengharms.com

Nearly four years ago I wrote a post titled the same.

I look back at that and think “Gosh, 2006.” The world was so different then. Lauren and I were in the earliest, most tentative parts of our relationship. We were going to test the strength of our relationship in the crucible of relocation, confusion, and new things.

And I was weary of the Bay Area. I was so tired of the traffic, of the dumpy airport, of vast fields of nothing to do. I was tired of the weight I was gaining, I was tired of the rain, tired of the struggle to make ends meet, just plain old tired. I needed to get away a while.

And I did. I ran back to the place that’s my healing place: Austin. Austin worked its magic, its lazy river heart washed out the toxic bits of mean and hard that had become embedded in me. Yoga, distance, Ruby, quiet, and the steady growing bond between Lauren and I changed me.

And then came schooling again, I reconnected with the learning, growing heart of me. I know this is not a part that I can ever leave to languish ever again. I re-learned mathematics and computer science. I learned new programming lanugages and then came Latin.

And I met wonderful people, from Ryan and Jamie, Matt and Nicole, Alfredo and Nicole, Marcus, Juan and Letty, my sister and brother-in-law and their sweet dog, the programmers of Sodade coffee house, my office mates…all of you animate the days of events and in giving yourself to my life gave my life color and flourish. I saw my sister wed, the gentlest-minded man I knew as a student wed and bring forth a sweet little girl, my best friend married and now has a young son. The sister of a friend I lost and I found each other again, and her life seems to be blossoming beautifully, a marriage looming next year. It’s been wonderful to be close to you all to see these events and positive unfoldings.

And I finished years-long work at my job. Things that were impossible, and unthinkable, slowly stones were broken by the slow dropping of water.

And adversities came: lung infections and appendicitis, but Lauren and I nursed each other, and those great friends mentioned above were there too.

Ultimately my animus returned back to the way it was in 2000 when I left Austin.

And in my world came new friends. We danced the nights away to the pulse of swing, we even dared Karaoke, I ran a 5K. I grew back into the healthy person I had let myself slip from. OK, well, I admit I still love the Chik-Fil-A too much and the Tex-Mex as well.

But this healing place, as big as it is, as tender and loving as it is — it and I need to separate for a while. I need to leave the summer heat and I want to go back to the bigness of a city, the biggest city I’ve ever loved: San Francisco.

When I was in 6th grade my Dad took my family there. The diners, the air, the bay, the tall buildings. I’ve loved the city on the Golden Gate since I before I was a teenager. It feels like going back is just giving into a fate that I’ve been fighting for a decade or two.

As I look back and consider going back to the place I’d lived before, I have to ask “Who was I then when I lived there?” My old romomate is now a father with a beautiful family. My haunts are not for he nocturnal eyeing and trading of phone numbers any more. I feel a break from my amor fati, my sickness unto death, my existentialist metaphor. So many of the things I sought there once I seek no more.

It’s a new day, a new time in this unknown but familiar city. I see something new this time, I see a place of boundless opportunity. It’s to that San Francisco I go. It’s there I go with the most loving girl I’ve ever known, it’s there I go to make, what I hope will be, our home.

And it’s scary there, the stakes high, the competition fierce. But I know that I can’t stay in my beloved Austin forever, I need the bigger confluence of this far-away place.

To the city I must say farewell, to the friends we have here, you are the best part of the friendly heart of my native state. You come with us in photos and memories and cards. I suspect my next post will be written with the Pacific to my left. Merry Christmas to all and Happy New Year as well.

Let me close with the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a work I studied this year whose beauty and wisdom is only matched by its silliness and brutality.

My mind moves me to speak of changed forms in new bodies

Ego ipse quoque mutabo

Lauren and I portray “Don” and “Joan” from the brilliant series.

• Sources

• Homage

Thanks to Julia for the footage…

I passed 2 months on the 10th of this month, but with Lauren’s birthday, work, school, etc. I didn’t share that I am now 9 pounds lighter than when I started. The upshot of all this is that I can again fit in size 36 jeans.

I even got an unsolicited Facebook message saying “Are you losing weight?.” Music, pure music, to my fatty, fat, fat ears.

So here’s where I am in the scaling up from Couch to 5K: I now do 3 pairs of run-5/walk-2. This was going along swimmingly until last week when SHIN SPLITS OH MY FREAKING GOOAAAGGUUH THIS HURTS entered my life. With that extra minute of running (time three), something really started bugging my shins. So I had to take last week off.

I was worried about getting back on the bandwagon but I got some great advice and found a real-deal, rubbery-bouncy track to run on here in North Austin. So, today I headed over to the middle school and did the afore-described program without incident.

Good motivators also came last week during Lauren’s birthday festivities.

I reached into my closet and put on my size 36 jeans — I put them on and it wasn’t pinchy at all when I wore them. I then tried on a pair of size 36 slacks and — again — I was able to wear them. So for Lauren’s birthday I ate steak and cheesecake (uh, not a highlight in a fitness régime) in size 36 pants.

This puts me about 205-6 down from 214. I hope to break the 200 barrier before Thanksgiving.

I’ve not posted about this because, well, I didn’t want to flame-out in public.

Not gonna D-O-R

1 month ago I started my quest to relieve my midsection of an amorphousness that had surfaced there over the last decade or so. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel freakish about it. To the contrary, I feel incredibly average about it.

I hate averageness.

So, in a putting my foot down against a slide in a very wrong direction, I bought the hideous red shoes and have now completed 1 month of training to make some small, regular changes that will hopefully return me to better health.

(more…)

New running shoes, powered by "loud"
Originally uploaded by sgharms

As mentioned previously, I bought some running shoes in an effort to get in better shape for my 32^nd year.

These are they.

I went to Run-Tex here in the Arboretum area and when I saw them I thought: “Please don’t let those be the ones that feel the best…” But they are, they feel great. They’re light, with a lot of cushion, and I really like wearing them.

So, it’s become a bit of a joke for me that they run so fast because the Earth hates having them on its surface.

A very nice young man from Israel took this of us.

For those not following me on Twitter or Facebook…

Lauren was sick this past Saturday morning and told me to go to VoCamp Austin without her. She e-mailed about 3pm and asked that I take her to after-hours care. This started a chain of events that leads me to this moment, some 3 days later.

• Got home
• To after-hours care
• High T-Cells, abdominal pain, referred to ER
• Seton NW Hospital ER
• CT scan
• HUGE appendix
• Appendix isn’t ruptured, you need surgery now
• Surgery scheduled at 0230 Sunday morning
• 0300 surgery: Appendix was ruptured, longer hospital stay needed
• Beds, nurses, sleeping in chairs, etc. Repeat.
• Release

Lauren is now resting, courtesy of hydrocodone, healing, and eating Jell-O at home. I’ll be AWOL for a while. If you’re able, she’d love to hear from you via e-mail or phone, Facebook or Twitter.

It’s rare that this happens, but I’m at inbox zero.

A tiny bit of progress.

I started the pursuit of graduate education about a year ago.

Through the intervening 9 months I’ve learned a lot about myself, about what interests me, about what things have animated my intellectual development my entire life long, about the unique and coherent thread winding through my educational history, and yes, my friends, even a little bit about human nature.

I spent most of last Spring and the summer preparing for the GRE. In the fall I wrote the LatinVerb library and re-drafted a paper “Against the Anthropic Principle” in an effort to impress those with sway over my admissions process.

Ancillary thereto, I became involved with the Austin Ruby and Rails communities. I met the across-from-me-sitting Mr. Clinkscales, got a Twitter account, became active on Facebook and spent many hours at Sodade.

As winter closed in, I went through scores of drafts with my lovely editor trying to assemble a compelling presentation of my educational history and future plans all within a terse, LaTeX-formatted, 2-page bundle.

I asked people I respect to take time out of their busy days to put ink to paper describing me and commending me for graduate work.

But, like a wedding, it all came down to one moment, when you lock in the fruits of months, or years, of effort.

This was it:

I admit, I’m a bit cagey about admitting and showing this because, there’s the “what if:” “What if you don’t get accepted?” This is a very real possibility, though all my kindly-minded friends try to encourage me with “you’re smart” or “that’s just so you.” Well, let’s be honest, the school in question has quite a reputation, and while I may be devoted to learning, “wanting it bad enough” doesn’t have a field on the application, I’m sorry to say.

But I want those who read this to know my results: come Hell or high water. I also want to officially absolve you from saying “that’s too bad,” or “you can just try again,” etc. If I get rejected, I’ll take my lumps, I may appreciate offers of alcohol or Mexican food, but I’ll take my lumps. And do you know why?

Because I am proud of my application. It is absolutely, 100% me. It’s me through and through. If they don’t think that person is a fit, if the story I told of my intellectual development doesn’t jibe — well, then we were not meant for one another. It’s only by this act of radical honesty that I can truly feel comfortable facing the possibility that they may reject me. I advise this same approach to anyone seeking dates online as well.

Obviously, I hope they don’t reject me. I hope they can see my passion and my love for the material, I hope they can see that twisting path as adding up to someone chomping at the bit. I’ll confess I have fantasies about the fat envelope, I admit I dream of walking among the Rodin sculptures. I allow that “Pizza My Heart” and that special expanse of the Bay Area call to me…

But if I live in the maybe-yes / maybe-no zone I’ll go cuckoo as I await the verdict. At this point, though, it’s out of my hands.

So for those friends who’ve not seen me since before Thanksgiving or for those people I didn’t call back or email back, I am now coming out of my retreat and am trying to get me life back into order. First order of business, Thursday night dance at The Fed.

With Spring coming, I propose a picnic day out, where the various circles of my friends might mingle. Big park, blankets, picnic, mild Austin, Spring. I know some of you have new children whom I’d love to see in a sunny setting.

Any ideas?

Saturday I woke up early and headed to Sodade Coffee’s one-year anniversary. It was great to stop by and see all the regulars I usually see there come by in a different context: instead of the laptop and cell-phone activities I normally see it was the hackers with families on parade.

My congratulations go out to Kim and Genaro at this marker. Their seats have borne my studying, typing, researching self since this summer, so this place for retreat has been a welcome addition to North Austin.

During this visit, Kim gave me a sweet T-shirt and I had a chance to work on my statement of purpose outline. I don’t really want to write any more about the whole grad school application process because writing the applications is exhausting enough. A real treat were the amazing jalapeño kolaches prepared by Kim’s mom as a special treat on the occasion. Soft and doughy with a pepper bite, they were sublime.

I returned home around 2:30 and Lauren and I were going to try to see “Revolutionary Road.” It was sold out, so we headed down to the Westgate area and had a great dinner of Tiger Cry at Madam Mam’s. Thereafter we went to Tapestry dance studio and participated in a “dance party” for learning two-step.

Being far too cool for C&W in my younger years, I never got a hang of two-step. My opinions moved slightly when I matriculated and became exposed to “real” C&W: Dale Watson, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Kelly Willis and the rest of the Austin sound, but I never thought that a class would be something I did.

Well, my friends, let life surprise you.

It also turned out that The Derailers, who we had seen shortly after New Year’s at The Continental Club were playing at 9 at The Broken Spoke so, freshly imbued with two-step, waltz, and our swing background, we were ready to have a great old time on the hallowed boards.

It was a great night out: friendly folk, Walker red label and Shiner and great music from the guys: their sound has a beautiful reverb-y Roy Orbison kind of majesty with a great Texas swing to it (thinking a bit of Asleep at the Wheel here). I think they’re a great show and a great time.

Afterwards we head up congress to Magnolia South and closed out the night with eggs and queso.

It was a beautiful night, and a great night to remember the best reasons to live in Waterloo.