Note: the filling works really, really well as a side dish. You can also toss some sweet potato in if you like.
Second note: this takes some time, so either do it in two parts (filling one night, ravioli the next), or make it a group activity.
And now: the food.
Last year, I cracked open Joel Friel’s Cyclist’s Training Bible to design a training schedule. The first step was to define goals for the season. They had to reasonable and reachable. I chose finishing mid-pack at Brentwood and the CBR finals and doing the state ITT in 1:05.
Yesterday was the CBR finals, and I got dropped like a bad habit on the second lap. I was in the front with the mighty Ian Grimstad and tried to get a few wheels back, and I just couldn’t muscle my way into a gap. I wasn’t dead last, but I certainly wasn’t in the middle of the pack. Same thing happened at Brentwood, and my ITT time was 1:06.
On the other hand, I now have enough starts to upgrade to category 4, which is supposed to be smoother sailing. And I’ve got all winter to train.
Right now, I feel completely shagged out from this morning’s ride (and still a little squicked out by the elderly Irish gentleman who sat near us; he started out by talking about cycling and Oscar Wilde, and then began downloading his life story of travel, illness, and celibacy, including his longing “to hold a nude woman to my penis,” which he pronounced pennis. There are some things man was not meant to deal with before nine in the morning when the coffee hasn’t had a chance to kick in), and I’ve got a mountain of work to climb (starting with editing Windswept; now that it’s time to wade into it, I’m a wee bit frightened). The tomatoes have given their last fruit, and the weeds are threatening to make inroads in the roses, and I still have no goddamn idea what kind of creature is laying these monster turds by the composter…
And that’s a season. And this is a life. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Except a morning free of that Irish dude. shudder
…it is my policy to correct spelling, punctuation and grammar. In this day and age of instant messaging, sending Tweets and cranking out notes with T9 predictive text, I think it’s important that we all strive to be as clear and concise as possible. I know that when I get an indecipherable email from someone whom I know to be a) educated and b) not dyslexic, I immediately think, “This person is a lazy dumbass.”
I’m not perfect. I don’t always edit, and I let the occasional comma or capital letter slip away, and I feel like a lazy dumbass after I catch my mistake. However, I am still fully qualified to write the following to the person who left me a drive-by trolling last night:
Dear Adam Smith-
Thank you for your email and congratulations on your nom de web. I’m assuming you’re writing me in regards to my various Tweets and Facebook messages about my personal boycott of Whole Foods in light of John Mackey’s editorial about health care in the Wall Street Journal. Using the name of the father of economic theory in a drive-by flaming about economics? Well done!
However, my joy was short-lived when I saw the various grammatical mistakes in your email. I write, so words and the way they’re used is very important to me. I wanted to give you some corrections so you’d be able to express yourself clearer in the future.
First, it should be “cock-breathed liberals.” Note the dash between “cock” and “breathed”; it turns those words into a compound adjective, which is what you intended to do.
Second, you meant to say “You are such losing cock breaths,” not “cock breathes.” Since your implication is since that liberals engage in fellatio on a regular basis, the whiff of one’s partner’s penis is always on one’s exhalations (see the first correction above). What you wrote here implies that the penis is a respiratory organ, which would be a neat trick. My backstroke would greatly improve if I could use my cock for a snorkel.
So, if we put those corrections in, plus a few more for punctuation, capitalization and missing words, your email should have read like this:
Dear Cock-Breathed Liberals,
Stop feeding off of hardworking union members and successful business owners. Move to wherever your fucking paradise is (ie Canada or France).
You are such losing cock breaths. Take your ass out of the USA.
Fuck off!
Adam Smith
See? Clear, concise language. Granted, it still doesn’t make any sense, because my understanding of the Great Liberal Conspiracy was that liberals worked hand-in-hand with unions to bring down said successful business owners. But, hey, baby steps. We’ll work on thesis statements and backing them up next week. Good luck!
Love and kisses,
Adam Rakunas
Wednesday
1020 Arrive Montreal-Trudeau Airport
1025 Find first Montreal bagel and inhale it
1200 Arrive Palais de Congres
1205 Find first Montreal smoked meat sandwich and inhale it
1300-Onward Engage in wild orgy of meals at Au Pied de Cochon, pints of Fin du Monde with old friends, maybe attend a few panels.
(I do very much want to see Melissa Auf Der Maur’s Out Of Our Minds on Friday night, and I know Jetse de Vries and Daryl Gregory will be holding forth on some Very Cool Stuff. But otherwise, I’m going to try and soak in as much of Montreal as I can while making sure Andrew Tisbert doesn’t destroy my liver.)
Saturday
1500 Leave Montreal-Trudeau
2100 Arrive LAX
Sunday
0745 Rock the Brentwood Grand Prix with the Triathletix 4/5s
0830 Collapse
There comes a point in any endeavor where you bump up against the upper limits of your abilities. It’s the last math class that’s easy, the last stack of weights that doesn’t crush you, the last time you can do that thing easily. There’s still room for improvement, of course, but it will take work, and that takes a decision: is it worth the leap?
A few weeks ago, I finished my first novel. The other day, I finally got Bach’s Minuet in G. Yesterday, with Ian pushing and Jamie and Paul pulling, I stuck with the main pack of the Riviera Ride for two out of three laps*.
All three of these things were right at the edge of my current upper limits. The first draft was about twice as long as anything I’d written before. The Minuet only has one little position shift**. I needed Ian literally pushing me up Amalfi, one hand on my back as I pedaled like hell to keep up. These are things I can do, and I can probably do them well at this level of intensity and focus.
But I want to do more.
I want to lead the Riviera Ride for a lap. I want to play Bach’s cello suites (and Piazzolla’s tangos and Paganini’s Caprice and Zappa’s symphonies and whatever else there is). I want to write novels that entertain and sing. And all of these things will take work, a kind of work that I’ve never thought I could (or would want to) do before.
Here’s a secret: college was the first time I bumped up against my natural limits, and I wasn’t willing to do the work, which is the reason my diploma is from Cal Poly and not Harvey Mudd. I never got promoted at any of my video game gigs because I didn’t want to spend my off-hours learning how to crunch vectors in my head. These aren’t things to be ashamed of; they’re just facts (and, to be honest, I don’t regret the vectors-in-the-head thing. When you get down to it, learning how to Lindy hop and talk to girls are much more fulfilling).
It’s not the risk of failing that’s kept me away. It’s inertia. It takes energy to overcome, to build, to surpass those limits and build new ones. Yes, there’s going to be a point where I hit a hard wall (ie, I’m not going to ride like Contador, write like Moore, or play like Casals), but that doesn’t mean I can’t do my damnedest to find out where those walls are or how well they’re built. Before yesterday’s ride, I really thought I was giving it my all, but, no, I found I could dig a little deeper. I’d never written as much as I did on Windswept. And I was pretty sure I’d never get that tricky bit with the triplet and the hand shift. I bloody well got them, and I want to get more.
You do something, and then you stand on the edge of a cliff. Sometimes you fall, sometimes you die. And sometimes, you fly. So what else can you do but jump?
Today, that’s what I’m going to do.
* The Riviera Ride is three laps down San Vicente Boulevard to the bottom of Amalfi, then up through the canyons to Sunset and back to 26th and SV. You do this three times, and you do it fast.
** Actually, this is pretty self-explanatory: your fingering hand has to move up and down the finger board to get all sorts of higher and lower notes.
Jeff Urban, when he’s not racing with us, takes very cool photos. When he is racing with us, his wife Jen takes very cool photos. One of them took this one of me climbing to the top at Ojai last week.
Please note: by the time this photo was taken, I was about a zillion miles behind the field. I was not working this hard to catch up; I was working this hard just to finish.
I am closing in on finishing this first draft of my first novel, and I am fucking terrified.
This is the biggest thing I’ve ever written, and the end is barreling down on me like a freight train packed with high explosives, saxophone-playing ninjas and intelligence-enhanced dinosaurs (none of which are in this novel, but, dude, wouldn’t that rock?). It’s going to be a bit of a relief to knock this whole thing out and let it mellow, and…oh my God, it’s going to suck.
I know that I’ll be ironing out all the creases and puttying over the cracks in the second (and third, and fourth, and on and on until the nth-until-accepted) draft, but this is still scary, man. I’ve been working on this thing since July of 2007, though, really, I haven’t put my ass in the chair with regularity until April (yay, underemployment!). It’s been good and hard and frustrating and fun getting these words out and driving this train to the end of the exploding, musical, dinosaur-laden line.
But what if what I’ve written sucks? What if I can’t save it? What if I’ve been wasting my time?
The only saving grace is that I’m pretty sure everyone who’s ever written anything has felt the same way. I can’t be the only one who looks at a draft and gets the pants scared off him. I know not to put the cart before the horse. I know, I know, I know.
That doesn’t make it any easier. Fortunately, that’s why God invented pie.
