bike rides

I haven't gone on a ride longer than 30 or 40 miles in a couple of months, and my weekday rides are under 15 miles. But I can get caught up looking at century rides I would like to do:

• Assault on the Carolinas
• Muscle Mountain Mania
• Jubilee Joy Ride
• Aiken to Ride Century
• Issaqueena's Last Ride
• Hunt for the Hills
• Lollapaloosa Loop
• Low Country Challenge (2 days 150 miles)
• The Fletcher Flyer

The weather is getting a little warmer--my last few rides have been in bike shorts and wool knee socks. Though it was 27 degrees when I went out running this morning.

ashes

I didn't see another person with ashes yesterday. I did have someone ask me for an explanation of the ashes. I said Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the period of preparing for Easter. She said "I'm of a different faith." As she looked Anglo and was working in K Mart in Brevard NC, I suspected she was an evangelical christian who saw Catholics as a different faith. So I said I wasn't Catholic, I was an Episcopalian, and told her that some Protestant churches follow the same calendar.

Ash Wednesday

I got up around 5 this morning so I could run and still get to church at 7 am. I wish I had the same persistance for other tasks.

It was nice to have a homily that dealt with the contradiction of hearing a text about doing good deeds in secret (Matthew 6: 1-6, 16-21) and then going out into the world with ashes on our foreheads. The priest took the line that in this world public display isn't about bragging that we are more pious than someone else but being willing to be identified as a Christian in a world where that is laughed at. I'm not sure that fits here in South Carolina where most people do identify as Christians and go to church, they just don't go to churches with Ash Wednesday services with the imposition of ashes. If there is a social risk it is that ashes make us Episcopalians look like Catholics, against whom there is definitely prejudice.

I liked better what Ruth said, that it is interesting to walk around with a visible mark that says I am a sinner (or at least I am dust and to dust I shall return). It is one of the few situations in which it is socially acceptable to have the mark of our woundedness be visible.

epiphany

From an obituary in The Economist of Dame Miriam Rothschild, a scientist who studied fleas and published more than 300 scientific papers:

A lifelong atheist, she admitted that she had been tempted to believe in a creator when she discovered that the flea had a penis.

routine

I'm settling into a routine with my training. For swimming, there are the masters practices. I'm in the pool 5:50-7 am Tuesday and Thursday. If I have a chance I swim once on the weekend. I run MWF morning around 6 am, currently a mile and a quarter with 15 minutes walking before and after. I will add another lap next week. I try to bicycle for an hour to an hour and a half Monday and Tuesday to work through the stress in my schedule those particular days. Other days depend on weather and my schedule but with any luck I can get a long ride in each weekend. Yesterday I rode about 2 1/2 hours. Today I have only a couple of hours before a church meeting and plan to swim instead.

administrivia

I have spent a ridiculous amount of time this week organizing things related to the new Science and Technology in Society requirement. I realized the problem is that I am in effect chairing three committees: an ad hoc committee from last fall to organize faculty development activities, a subcommittee of the university curriculum committee to recommend to that committee whether courses meet the STS requirement, and a curriculum committee to approve courses that have STS numbers before they go to the university curriculum committee. I'm not officially the chair of that last one, but I've taken on the work of getting it organized and expect to be made the chair at the first meeting.

I have said to the provost and the dean of undergraduate studies that I can't continue to do so much to coordinate STS unless I get an offical title, release time, and hopefully a pay supplement. The dean of undergraduate studies said in a recent email that she thinks the provost is going to go for making me coordinator of STS.

Why am I doing this? Because it expresses the reason I got into this field in the first place: to improve democratic decisionmaking for science and technology. Because I believe the new requirement is a good thing and I wouldn't want to see it fail. Because I'm the only one on campus with broad expertise in this area. I had other plans for the next few years, but I believe in this. I felt good about it today when a civil engineering professor said he enjoyed the meetings last fall, particularly having faculty from different departments talking together about big issues. He said it was like being at a real university (and he's British).

emotional healing

I increasingly think that what it takes for me to do the emotional healing work is most of all to work with someone who I can count on to comfort me after bad stuff has come out. The balance I was lucky enough to find, which has guided my journey ever since, was ways to go into the old pain without just being retraumatized by it. I don't think that balance is easy to achieve. And it isn't easy either to find someone willing to give the needed support or to feel one deserves it.