The Fire of Scorching Wind

Whazzup. This week had some good parts and some bad parts, but mostly it had average parts, like all weeks do. We cans start with a good part. It's first chronologically anyway.

Last Saturday I raced at the Vermont State Meet, the location of which rotates every year to a different little tiny college in the same little tiny state. This year, Lyndon State hosted the meet, and as a result of the rotating nature of the meet's location, nobody on our team had ever raced there before, so we weren't sure what to expect for a course. Many of the more adventurous among us were pleased to find out that Lyndon's course was nothing like any XC course that has any right to exist in the civilized 21st century. By that I mean this course was nothing less than a gauntlet, a five-mile gauntlet throughout which nature did everything in her power to prevent you from coming out alive.
As you would expect, most courses are fairly wide, wide enough for several people to run abreast. This one was an exception.
As you would expect, most courses only change elevation in the beginning to end dimension, not in the left side of the trail to right side of the trail dimension.
This one was an exception.
As you would expect, most courses are set up in such a way that, when you re-loop, you are running in the same direction that you did the first time you ran that section, which means you will never have a head-on collision with someone who is either much faster than you or much slower.
This one was an exception.
A simpler explanation: Lyndon's course was a single-track dirt trail that looped in and out of the forest with more sudden and frequent hills than you could keep up with, that just so happened to loop back on itself, backwards. So for the last mile of the race, you are literally running against traffic, and by traffic I mean the slow kids. And don't forget that this trail is really, really narrow, with many a blind corner. Unsurprisingly, I saw one collision occur right ahead of me. Two guys, one of whom was kicking as fast as he could because he had only 50 meters to go, ran straight into each other. So much fun.
Also, it was raining. One of my teammates wiped out in a mudbath right next to me. I felt like Spongebob in this clip:

Here's the short version: This course was awesome, and I wish we could run it more often. The fact that everyone's times were about three minutes worse than they normally are is not concerning to me, for the simple reason that, as I said, everyone's times were worse.

And then, on the bus ride home, I started getting the chills. By the time I had carried myself to my room, I realized I had a fever. Enter the bad part of the week.
Actually, this really doesn't need any explaining. Having a fever sucks. As of this writing, I have been over it for a few days, but I still have a slight sore throat in the mornings and my nose runs faster than I do. And that's fucking fast.

“Check out that one at the end. He's taken the form of a footstool.
Weird...but somehow I like his style." "That is a footstool."

A word about some of my classes.
In about an hour, I am going to turn in a short paper that I started at 9:30 and finished at 11:30 last night titled "The Treatment of Jinn in the Qur'an". I won't bore you with the boring details, which means that I must tell you only two things: A) The Qur'an mentions an afrit as being a high-level jinn. B) The only human known to have an army of jinn at his command was Solomon.
Yeah, that's right. You know what I'm talking about. Unless you're Nicole, who has my copy of that book somewhere in her house, and yet has never read it. Fool of a Took.

Geography has also been treating me well. On Monday, I turned in a project I had been working on for a couple of weeks in which I had created two maps and written a paper explaining their respective effectivenesses vis-a-vis the principles of cartographic design. My first map was one of Newport Beach, created using Adobe Illustrator, showing the locations of things that matter to me. It includes things like CdM, Mason Park, Panera, my house and most of yours, and all of the running trails I know of in the area. I'm not going to put it up on the blog because, well, it's got all of our houses on it, and this is still the internet.
The assignment for the second map was different: create an advertisement for a real or fictional product that uses a map to sell itself. So I decided to sell a fictional ski resort.

Definitely far from my best ski resort, but when you've got a due date you've got a due date.

I finished reading Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time earlier this week, and I must say that it is really, really, really, really, really, really good. I think I said that last week, but now that I've finished it, I can say it without reservation. The stuff we've since moved on to in Russian lit, however, is a little . . . stranger. We're reading Nickolai Gogol, and unless I'm very much mistaken that is not the name of an actual Russian writer, but rather the pen name Robert Mai took when he traveled back in time to the 1830s and 40s to write strange things in an era that didn't see many strange things in writing. I say this because Gogol's stuff is Not Normal. He wrote a story called "The Nose" in which the main character wakes up one day and discovers that he no longer has a nose. He later sees his nose walking around town dressed like a high-ranking official. Yeah. That's about all I have to say about Gogol. He's just . . . y'know . . . let's just leave it at that.

I watched the debate a few days ago. I'm still undecided. I go back and forth. Maybe I'll explain my thinking on this at some point. Because I am undecided, by the way, I would be more than willing to read anything any of you send me, as long as it A) tells me something I don't already know, and B) isn't stupidly partisan. The latter condition will be much more difficult to uphold than the former.

Later today I'm going to hop on a bus and spend the night in a hotel somewhere in western Massachusetts, and tomorrow I'm going to run a little race somewhere in western Massachusetts. Seven days from now, my parents will be in Vermont to visit and watch me race. More on that in seven days.