Omega Point

In which Catherine is even more conspicuous than usual

“Wow, Cather­ine! You’re wear­ing a sling and everything!”

Yeah! I tore my rota­tor cuff¹ doing extreme sports.

“It’s a good thing you wore your loos­est pos­si­ble jeans to work then, isn’t it? Really tight ones would make going to the bath­room really, really dif­fi­cult.”

It sure would. Dammit.

1. Yes, again. [↩]

Blogathon 2009: In which The Weather stymies Catherine’s plans

So I delib­er­ately brought my bike to Work­space this morn­ing, know­ing that if I was lag­ging this evening, I could go for a nice endorphin-boosting ride up and down Water­front Road, across the tracks from Gastown.

I really can’t say that I was expect­ing a mas­sive thun­der­storm instead.

In ret­ro­spect, I wish I’d taken the bus, let­ting me get in another post about how the #8 bus is crazy and how it was much bet­ter when my MLA drove me to work every day. Sadly, it was not to be.

I have to say, I’ve never seen a thun­der­storm like this in Van­cou­ver. From the streams com­ing up on Twit­ter, it doesn’t appear to be stop­ping the fire­works in Eng­lish Bay though, so if they can press on, so can we!

Blogathon 2009: In which Catherine is now a cyclist for some reason

So I’ve men­tioned this here a few times, but haven’t gone into huge amounts of detail: I have a bicy­cle again!

It’s a Kuwahara-built Apollo road bike, with a 62cm frame with double-butted Tange 900 chro­moly steel tubes. From 1984, if the ser­ial num­ber is accu­rate at all. I bought the frame sep­a­rately, though it came with the orig­i­nal seat, stem and a pair of ter­ri­ble, out-of-true wheels that were still good enough to walk it home from Rich­mond.^[1]

It had orig­i­nally been intended to be con­verted into a fixie, which is why a lot of the other orig­i­nal parts were absent. As it turned out, the rider for which it had orig­i­nally been intended was way too short for it. (Read: under 6 feet tall.)

Because of this, the woman I bought it from was extremely care­ful to be clear just what I was buy­ing when I talked to her on the phone.

“You know this is just the frame, right?“
“Yeah, it’s cool.“
“And you get how big it is, right?”

Just right, as it turns out!

I assem­bled it myself with help from the folks at Our Com­mu­nity Bikes on Main Street a few weeks ago. It’s a 62cm frame with double-butted Tange 900 chro­moly steel tubes.^[2] From 1984, if the ser­ial num­ber is accu­rate at all.

I opted for a some­what lamer braking/gears arrange­ment than is tra­di­tional in Mount Pleas­ant. In short: I actu­ally have them. And it’s a good thing too; I may be stronger now than I’ve ever been, but there’s no way I’m mak­ing it up Vancouver’s hills on a fixed-gear bike. ^[3]

It’s got a Shi­mano 105 crank, with func­tional but bor­ing brakes and Sun­tour shifters and derailleurs. So it’s kind of a beast, but the orig­i­nal parts it still has are in great shape.

Sadly, jog­ging seems to be just too hard on my knees, but cycling 8-10km a day is work­ing out just fine. I mean, I made it here, right?

[1] On the way home with my new bike, I man­aged to find the sole Amer­i­can tourist cou­ple tak­ing the 98 B-line and tell them hor­ror sto­ries about the Down­town East­side and Lower Mainland’s lit­tle drug war. Maybe I should be send­ing my resume to Tourism BC.

[2] And I know what that means now!

[3] Still, I like it, even if I’m not allowed to go to Gene anymore.

Catherine Grows as a Person

Since attend­ing Media that Mat­ters 2009 at Hol­ly­hock this May, I’ve been feel­ing very introspective.

To say I was skep­ti­cal of some aspects of the con­fer­ence before­hand would be a ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble under­state­ment. On the ride up with for­mer coworker Jnet:
Her: “So are you recov­ered from your flu?” [Swine flu, I swear.]
Me: “I guess, yeah… I’m still not very hun­gry.“
Her: “Well, you’ll have lots of good veg­e­tar­ian cook­ing at Cortes.“
Me: “…Whaaah? Awwww.”

I know! For­tu­nately, said veg­e­tar­ian cook­ing turned out to be deli­cious and, con­trary to our hosts’ warn­ing, I didn’t totally fart the entire time. Upon leav­ing Cortes, Jnet and I imme­di­ately went to a Wendy’s in Camp­bell River, but that’s nei­ther here nor there. It was good, trust me.

Now, I’m not a super-huggy per­son, and there was a bit more hug­ging than I’m used to, which is hon­estly say­ing a lot, com­ing from the Van­cou­ver social media scene. There was also a sub­stan­tially greater-than-usual amount of talk­ing about ambi­tions and goals and feel­ings and things. On the other hand, there were parts I was really inter­ested in, such as answer­ing the ques­tion, “is it pos­si­ble to cre­ate a new medium and use it for artis­tic pur­poses with­out the first few years of its exis­tence being used expressly to dis­cuss that medium?” (See pho­tog­ra­phy, cave paint­ing, the web, Twit­ter, etc.) The answer: maybe?

Despite my skep­ti­cism, it turned out that there were parts that proved extremely valu­able to me. Incred­i­bly, these were the parts that involved tack­ling issues and feel­ings! And talk­ing about them! If the words “coach­ing cir­cle” make you wrin­kle your nose in pain, you’re expe­ri­enc­ing more or less the same sort of antic­i­pa­tion as I was beforehand.

And yet, the coach­ing cir­cle was extremely help­ful after all. Of course, there were still parts of Media that Mat­ters that I was per­haps a lit­tle too much of a cyn­i­cal prude to enjoy.

So I got back and decided I needed to make some changes. So I’m try­ing new things this sum­mer. First of all, as men­tioned in my last post, my knees have finally recov­ered enough for me to get places with my exer­cise reg­i­men. (I think my prob­lem with the sta­tion­ary bike is that I get bored and always have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that I’m accom­plish­ing less than I ought to be. I might end up buy­ing a trainer for my bike, since there’s plenty on Craigslist, but actu­ally using it with­out feel­ing like I’m just screw­ing around, that will be the challenge.)

So, exer­cise. What else?

• Writ­ing more. Theoretically.
• Actu­ally build­ing a bicy­cle instead of just buy­ing one.
• Knit­ting classes at Three Bags Full on Main Street. I’ve never knit before.
• Going to more art shows. More bar­be­ques. More events.
• Quit­ting my job and going to art school.

Oh yeah. That last one. I’m enter­ing Lan­gara College’s Fine Arts pro­gram in Sep­tem­ber, then trans­fer­ring to Emily Carr to fin­ish up my under­grad. So that’s new too.

In Which Catherine Is No Longer Lazy

So I recently started jog­ging. I know, I know, I’m ruin­ing my image as couch­bound layabout, but it’s true. (If, by chance, you were unfa­mil­iar with this image, let me take this oppor­tu­nity to spoil all chance of being thought of as in par­tic­u­larly good shape.)

I’m tall. Really, really tall. (Yes, taller than that one friend of yours. No, I don’t care if he’s sin­gle. A swim­mer, you say? Does he have a sister?)

Now, what you may not be aware of is that there tends to be a few down­sides to being tall.

On the plus side, I never get heart­burn and laugh heartily at the signs that read “please ask for assis­tance for items on this shelf” at the phar­macy. On the other hand, humans tend not to have joints built to han­dle a larger frame, and with much greater dis­tances to pump, our hearts don’t work as long.

One other issue tall peo­ple can face is actu­ally pretty dif­fi­cult to claim as a par­tic­u­larly bad thing, — though it is if you’re as unaware of it as I was. Dif­fer­ences in pro­por­tion and scale being what they are, I can gain 20 or 30 (or 60) pounds with­out any­one really notic­ing much dif­fer­ence.¹ Includ­ing me, unfor­tu­nately. (Yes, that’s right. I just com­plained about my appear­ance being too for­giv­ing. Stone me now.)

How­ever, as ridicu­lous a “prob­lem” as that is, it’s actu­ally not super for one’s health, par­tic­u­larly if you don’t real­ize it for a year. In late 2008, wracked with knee pain so severe that my doc­tors had been talk­ing about osteoarthri­tis and the pos­si­bil­ity that I might be unable to walk by the age of 40, it was dis­cov­ered that I was just in dis­as­trously poor shape. In fact, despite walk­ing fairly reg­u­larly and hav­ing a “healthy” BMI^[2], I’d man­aged to develop vir­tu­ally no mus­cle mass whatsoever.

On the one hand, this was a relief. On the other hand, it would have been nice to have had no cul­pa­bil­ity whatsoever.

So, back I went to phys­io­ther­apy. Again. Years ago, I tore the crap out of my rota­tor cuff while work­ing as a shop assis­tant in a giant ladies’ cloth­ing store. Car­ry­ing jeans, yes. You see, the thing about jeans for tall women is that they have to be much longer, con­tain more fab­ric, etc. The thing about bones for tall women is that they don’t just tend to be longer, they also tend to be big­ger. So we’re not talk­ing about car­ry­ing around Size 0 capris here, we’re talk­ing dozens of pairs of Size 16 and 22 jeans, each leg sev­eral inches longer than what a reg­u­lar store car­ries. It adds up, trust me.

Mes­sage­board tes­ti­mo­ni­als sug­gested Vancouver’s best phys­io­ther­a­pist was Kelvin Tam of Kelvin Phys­io­ther­apy Clinic. I am pleased to report that this appears to be highly accurate.

“So let me guess,” he said, look­ing at my chart. “You hurt your shoul­der play­ing volleyball?”

“No.”

“Bas­ket­ball? Soft­ball? Soccer?”

“…lift­ing pants?”

I think Kelvin still thinks I might be mak­ing that up. This would be much bet­ter if I hadn’t seen him a fur­ther time for my elbow, suf­fer­ing from both golfer’s and ten­nis elbow — from using the mouse too much. I had to make a sig­nif­i­cant lifestyle change there too as well.

Annoy­ingly, if I had injured my shoul­der or elbow play­ing sports, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have had this prob­lem with my knees. Of course, I likely wouldn’t have suf­fered those injuries either.

So, sev­eral months of phys­io­ther­apy and exer­cise later, I’m finally mov­ing up from walk­ing to jog­ging. So far, things seem to be work­ing out okay. I’m cur­rently in week two of the Couch-to-5K Run­ning Plan from Cool Run­ning. So far, so good, but it’s pretty exhaust­ing, I have to say. I sus­pect I’m still not quite in good enough shape, given my strug­gles last week, so I’ve inserted a sec­ond “week one” into my own exer­cise regimen.

I’ve also been eying the Nike+iPod gad­get for my iPhone — which is ridicu­lous, frankly. I don’t need that and I really don’t want to use any of their social media fea­tures like shar­ing how far I’ve run/limped about. Let’s all just assume that things are going really well for me, okay?

Any­way, deal­ing with sports bras and run­ning shoes is novel, but deal­ing with bikes is fun! Yes, I’m secretly an aspir­ing bike nerd, and I’m finally able to ride one again. Sadly, it turns out that Catherine-sized bikes are fairly dif­fi­cult to come by, but I’m pleased to report things are pro­gress­ing smoothly despite that. I will post details of the great bike-building project shortly!

[1] Case in point: as of the writ­ing of this post, the last time a close friend has called me a “skinny bitch” was approx­i­mately 36 hours ago.

[2] Seri­ously, Body-Mass Index is the worst pos­si­ble mea­sure of phys­i­cal fit­ness there is. Not only does it have trou­ble scal­ing at the top and bot­tom ends, but it doesn’t even account for what that mass con­sists of. Ouch.