AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Two miles, 2°, coffee and a banana, shower, Morning Prayer, home for another cup of coffee and toast, then gnawing away at parish email-paperwork and some leftover marking. The excitement never abates….

I joked a couple of days ago about the temperature seeming balmy because it had risen all the way to 2°, but today it was 7° when I ran. Since I was mildly jubilant about the rise from -5° to 2°, you might think I would be even more exhilarated at this morning’s temperature. You’d miss your guess, though; the cold mist soaked into my bones and made the air feel even colder than 2°. So, and adequate run, but nothing special. Then I made a hot breakfast for myself, coffee (lots), Morning Prayer, home to make lunch, then staff meeting, ‘Preachers’ Group’, and now home for the afternoon.

I should mention that over the past three weeks, the plantar fasciitis that has beset me on and off over fifteen years has ebbed again, for the time being. My experience of fasciitis has been that its onset and alleviation have been quite random. I wear the same shoes, with the same insoles, for months, and one day my plantar fascia flares up and hobbles me. For months after, my foot feels more or less the same — generally sensitive when I overdo, susceptible to flares if I wear dress shoes for too long. Then after a while, usually after a long while, I notice that my foot felt normal all day, and the day after, and the weeks after that. Nothing I do by way of exercise seems to make a positive or negative difference beyond the time I spend stretching, or resting, or rolling on a ridged roller, or any other tactic. ‘Walk it off’, as my Little League coach used to say.

Not that warm, of course, but the difference between running in -5° and running in 2° is striking. A good run, coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, some paperwork at church, then home to work on various odds and ends, some ecclesiastical and some academic.

Ran my miles (-1°), fruit and coffee, shower and dressed, did some last-minute preparation for today’s service, went to church early to prepare for our big Bishop’s Visit Baptism, Confirmation, and Reception into the CoE liturgy-palooza. We joined a hearty baptismal lunch, then tottered home with our little remaining energy reserves.

No revenge this morning, just an even colder run than yesterday would have been if I’d run. I walked a short while in order to get my fingers into a position that afforded them a bit more protection, as they had gone from prickly to full-on painful. Ran the rest of the way home, then, and said Morning Prayer, prepared my hot breakfast, showered, dressed, walked through tomorrow’s Baptism/Confirmation/Reception in the Church of England service with our prospective baptisands, confirmands, and… receptand? Came home, reorganised some emails and answered others.

Today’s twelve years since Aaron Swartz died. That’s on MIT and Carmen Ortiz.

Four below zero, and the pavements look frosty and slippery. I hate to miss a morning run, but this just doesn’t look a safe condition for running. I’ll have a cup of coffee, finish the grapes in the fridge, shower, and make my cautious and hesitant way to St Helen’s for Morning Prayer.

Two miles this morning, but this was much less a ‘pace’ morning and more a ‘survival’ morning, as in ‘not slipping on frosted pavement and falling into the path of an oncoming vehicle’. I didn’t actually fall at any point, though I lost my balance once, but I went extremely slowly throughout the run and slowed to a walk when pedestrian traffic became especially heavy. (I saw more runners out this morning than I have in a very long time, despite the hour being early and the temperature -2°. I cannot account for this.)

Rather, two miles in zero degrees (-6° ‘real feel’, which is a label I would not use in this more safeguarding-alert world). It was a pretty satisfactory run, a necessary run since I missed the preceding two days. But cold, yes. Coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, then back home to work on the newsletter front page. Under the circumstances, I keep saying to myself, under my breath, ‘Tuesday isn’t a church work day.’

…so I didn’t run. Coffee, shower, Morning Prayer, office hour at Throwing Buns (explainer), and home to work there.

Last night, before I went to sleep, snow covered the roads and pavements, so I was planning not to run. This morning, rain was washing the snow away and rendering the pavements slippery, so I confirmed my plan to not run. All the more, since I was unexpectedly asked — while we had a friend over for the afternoon/evening — to take the 8:00 service at St Nic’s this morning. So instead of running, I sipped a cup of coffee, dashed off a quick homily, and tried in vain to persuade the dogs to venture outdoors to relieve themselves.

Service went well, came home to the dogs, and now I’ll take the afternoon easy.

This morning sees the convergence of two worthwhile, if imprecise, online voices.

On one hand the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic quotes Diogenes Laertius as saying,

Mem?nasi d’ ho?toi
‘But these critics are all crazy…’

My own critical instincts were piqued to know more about what Diogenes referred to; I read the Greek as ‘[and] these are raving’, pretty close to what Weinersmith says, but I was curious. He adds ‘critics’, plausibly, since the context concerns a catalogue of contemporaries who found fault with Epicurus. The exact spin one applies to the perfect active indicate, third plural of mainomai could vary, but ‘they are raving’ is more or less equivalent to ‘they are crazy’. Hicks gives ‘But these people are stark mad’ in the Loeb (it’s L185, and the specific reference is to Lives of Eminent Philosophers X.9). In the comic’s context — ‘In ancient lterature, I found the perfect opening quotation for any rebuttal’ — it sounds as though Diogenes is defending himself, rather than Epicurus. But it’s great to see another popular-culture engagement with classical literature (apart from The Discourse over Emily Wilson’s Odyssey).

On the same morning, Greg Ross of the Futility Closet (based in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, bravo!) cites John Alexander Smith, who began his lectures:

“Gentlemen — you are now about to embark upon a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Some of you, when you go down from the University, will go into the Church, or to the Bar, or to the House of Commons, to the Home Civil Service, to the Indian and Colonial Services, or into various professions. Some may go into the Army, some into industry and commerce; some may become country gentlemen. A few — I hope a very few — will become teachers or dons. Let me make this clear to you. Except for the last category, nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life — save only this — that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.”

Mornings such as this make one proud to be a humanist.