Okay, so it wasn't much of a guessing game. That's okay. Ding ding ding! Everybody wins!

Hey, that's my bike. It's silver and shiny. It reminds me of how much I used to love riding my bike when I was a kid. I got it at this great bike shop in Alameda, and the sales guy was totally low pressure; he helped me pick out a bike that was comfortable but not wildly expensive. Plus we got all the accoutrements: helmet, odometer, gloves, water bottle holder, headlight. It's fancy.

I bought it for a very specific reason, the one I was hinting around at in my last entry. This summer, Bruce and I want to do the California AIDS Ride. It goes from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a week. Altogether, that's 575 miles. That's a lot of damn miles.

Okay, the thing is, the gods of physical fitness are not particularly close friends of mine. But I figured, hey, I've got four months to train and get in shape; the exercise bike at the gym is easy; I can do it. I can do whatever I set my mind to, right? Uuuh, right.

I took the bike out today, all excited and everything. But the thing is, I live on the very top of a hill. A substantive hill. Walking up it is a pain in the ass, and biking up it is, as it turns out, improbable. I rode around my neighborhood for a little while, and in theory, I was practicing techniques like braking and shifting gears. The techniques I was actually practicing were hyperventilation and heart arrhythmia. I kept having to stop in the middle of all these hills. Damned embarrassing.

I walked my bike up the last hill to my house, panting and red in the face, and then I looked down at my odometer to discover that I had gone the princely distance of a mile. One. Mile.

How am I going to go 80 miles a day if one mile this morning nearly killed me? It's enough to put a serious damper on my confidence.

Tomorrow, I'm going to take a different approach. I will place the bike in my car, drive to an area that is FLAT, and then ride my bike for a while without feeling like I am on the brink of death.

It's kind of sad that I can't bike up these damn hills, but I think I can handle a mile of flat road without hyperventilating. And I gotta start somewhere, right? I bet I might even go a mile and a half!

I'm a little less confident about the AIDS Ride, though. Is four months really going to be enough time to transform me from zero to hero? I know there are some bicycle enthusiasts out there who might be able to give me some advice, and I'd welcome it. I'm going to try my best, but I could use all the help I can get.

I do love my bike, though. Instrument of torture or not.

I might drop one of my classes. This is the one on Friday mornings, the context course for the Elizabethan/Renaissance/whatever-age-it's-called that we're studying.

You see, as it turns out, I don't need another context course. I've already taken three of them. If I stay in the class, it will count as an elective reading course. If I drop the class, I will replace it with either MA thesis prep or an independent study of some type.

The cons are that the class is with Professor P and therefore is probably going to be really great. (My other context courses haven't been all that fabulous-- I never felt like I learned a lot.) It involves intensive reading and lectures on this era in history, which I'm unfamiliar with at best. History: not my best subject. And Professor P is extremely demanding, but I love the feeling that I've really worked hard, earned my grade, and learned something.

On the other hand. I took a look at the syllabus. Holy christ. There are two readers, plus a textbook It's a lot of reading, possibly more than in any other class I've taken. And I missed the first class, and the second one is rapidly approaching, and I don't have the texts, the notes, the book, the reader or the syllabus. So I'm starting out behind, and with a class this intensive, it's not going to be easy to catch up.

And while we're on the subjects of reasons that sound like excuses, the class is on Friday morning. It would be very nice not to have to drive into the city on Fridays. It would be my only day off-- I currently have class on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; I work on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays; I have my workshop on Tuesdays.

Then there's biking, although that's less of a consideration. I already scheduled training rides four days a week (Tuesday-Friday, if you care) even if I take class Friday mornings. Those big one mile rides, you know.

A good reason for dropping the class is so I can follow the correct schedule for the MFA/MA dual degree track and begin my MA thesis prep. Well, it would be a good reason if I had the foggiest clue what my MA thesis is going to be about.

But the best reason for dropping the class is that I'm already getting a lot of the history in my other classes-- Professor P also teaches Shakespeare, and the first two lectures have been on the history of the time. He admits that his lectures for the two classes have been overlapping, and the people who are taking both the classes told me the first lecture was very similar to the first Shakespeare lecture.

Sure, the classes are going to diverge. But I can still get the knowledge via outside reading-- and save myself having to write a ton of papers, etc. The only problem is, I won't be nearly as disciplined on doing outside reading; I do much better with the structure of a class situation... and if I'm paying for a class, I might as well learn something.

I'm sure the minutia of my academic career is interesting to exactly nobody. But I need to make this decision tomorrow so I'm kinda just working through it. I think I'll just lay it out in front of Professor P and see what he thinks I should do.

In conclusion, here are a couple of pictures from my vacation.

With my sister in front of the Christmas tree.

My uncanny impression of a freaky little dog.

"So every time I do my yoga, I try to go to this relaxed mental space, where the effort of doing the Upside-Down-Triple-Tipi-Torture Pose won't bother me, and she starts talking about my inner organs. My toxic inner organs, releasing their poison into my bloodstream. Is this supposed to be good for me? To have toxins released from their little prisons and running amuck in my body?"