sigh

Anyway, here’s a few pictures and some updates . . . bullet-point style!

• Last Saturday Lisa and I went to New York for the day to visit a few galleries. The “Calder 1941″ exhibit at Pace’s 57th gallery was amazing! And Nan Goldin’s “Scopophilia” show at Matthew Marks is worth a trip to Chelsea. Our day-trip occurred 52 weeks after the trip where we met Kim, Gina, Caroline, and Allison. Time flies!
• Sunday we traveled into Cambridge to see “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Lisa had been looking forward to it for months, and it didn’t disappoint. It was our second trip into Cambridge in as many weeks. The previous weekend we attended an alumni event there, and I got a shout-out from the new president of the college. Evidently, we engineers from liberal arts schools are rare beasts.
• I haven’t gone for a run since last Thursday, when I tested the waters with an easy three-mile treadmill workout. The next day my foot was a little cranky again, so I’m taking some more time off running. I’m still riding and swimming, but I miss my long runs and my speedwork sessions.
• Speaking of swimming, I got a bit depressed Monday and yesterday when I realized that the “really good” triathletes in my races cover the same distance in half the time it takes me. So I talked to my sports psychologist (Lisa) who helped me with some perspective: I’m not a super-fast swimmer—as long as Dara is at the pool, I’ll never be the fastest—but I shouldn’t worry so much as long as I’m still making progress. If I put too much pressure on myself, then I won’t have any fun. And, even though it’s really hard for me to seek assistance, I need to ask some of my of peeps and/or a coach to look at what I’m doing and give me some pointers. (I find it difficult to work at something for a long time and not be as good at it as I believe I can be. It’s good that it keeps me motivated, but I’m trying to work on managing frustration.)
• When I went to the pool this morning, I decided I was just going to swim without worrying about times or how much progress I am (not) making or other people’s abilities. Part of this involved changing the way that I talk to myself while swimming; if I can’t make the voices in my head say positive things, perhaps I can give them something else to talk about. My inner boatswain kept me going with this conversation: “We’re going to do three things today: stop dropping my glide arm so much after entry; roll from side to side better during the stroke; and pull through the whole stroke farther. Bup bup bup!” That seemed to work. Even though I wasn’t worrying about times, I was encouraged by the splits I saw. Turns out, I swam the fastest ever by almost a minute per mile. Yay!

What’s new with you?

As my fascination grew, going to see local cemeteries became something that Lisa and I could do together on a whim. As I walked around with my pen and paper looking for names, Lisa would look at dates and ages and try to piece together family relationships. It’s been a while since I posted any of the more interesting names or headstones here. That’s about to change.

This headstone has it all: death with his scythe, cherubs, devils, crossed bones, an hourglass, scroll-work, the sun, and a snake eating its own tail to signify the unending cycle of life and death. See below for many more headstones.

Through this new crop of photographs, you can see similarities within regions and times, the effects of mass production, differing regional concepts of piety and sense of style . . . not to mention the role of wealth, the presence of master craftsmen, the concept of personhood, and so many other things.

Many markers are memorial stones—not actual headstones—and are often very simple. Many of the dead only got initials on their marker, if they had a stone at all. Some markers were added decades (even centuries) later, usually in a moment of civic pride.

The earliest remaining headstones with names and dates tend to be very ornate and were for extremely important clergy. There are vastly more 18th century headstones remaining, and they tend to be more simple. Unfortunately, machine-carved and die-cast stones signaled an enormous change in the interestingness of grave markers. By the late 19th century, everyone had a headstone, but most of them had no pictures at all. Almost 150 years after mass-production changed them, it’s interesting to see machine-etched pictures starting to return to stones in the late 20th century.

By touring cemeteries, you can see the transition from early Puritan to Georgian and Federal styles and themes. The macabre and religious iconography gave way to the secular and harmonious. In later stones, you can see hints of Transcendentalist sentiments (such as practicality and comity, symbolized in shaking hands) as well as the Second Great Awakening’s self-satisfied piety in skyward-pointing fingers exhorting you to look for the buried in Heaven. You can even occasionally see Art Nouveau and Art Deco stylings in New England.

Throughout the entirety of American grave markers, Bible verses or short secular poems appear. These usual implore the living not to mourn the dead but to seek to follow them into heaven. Indeed for a long time after the English first appeared in America in the early 17th century, images on headstones were one of the few acceptable forms of public art. Despite Biblical exhortations against the graven image, you can see the shape of a body in some of the early headstones. There are the shoulders; there is the round head. Eventually the skull gave way to the cherub and then to the fleshy human face.

Numerous themes appear in New England grave artwork, often combined together onto one stone:

• Skulls with crossed bones
• Skulls with wings
• Cherubs (or faces with wings)
• Faces and the “memento mori”
• Urns with trees
• Drapery, columns, arches, “false tombs” (This is a form of 18th/19th c. landscape art.)
• Scrollwork, vines, leaves
• Flowers
• Hourglasses
• Heraldry (Though this is usually very limited, very aristocratic, and very Tory.)
• Crosses, Jesus, Mary (These are almost uniformly Catholic.)
• Hands pointing toward heaven or shaking hands (These appeared during the Second Great Awakening.)
• Finials

A tour through a single large cemetery is often a fascinating way to see the generational changes in American orthography, typography, diction, expression, language, and style.

• “ye” versus “the”
• The ligature “s” (as f)
• The change of year didn’t always happen on January 1st. For example, you’ll see 1691/2.
• In the mid-19th century there was the same crazy typographical mishmash that you might see in a typical newspaper.

You can also see the change in tooling and craftsmanship that made these markers.

• Hand cut on slate by a local craftsman, often with visible guidelines — Until about 1820.
• Hand cut on marble by someone on a more regional basis, probably by mail order — Starting in earnest around 1840, just in time for the Civil War and its massive carnage.
• Cast from moulds. If you tap them, you can tell they’re hollow, and you can see the seams where they’re joined — ca. 1840s-1850s.
• Mass produced by machine with automated cutting tools — from 1860 onward.

I hope you will look at these photographs and start to see some of what I’ve noticed over the years. And I hope that, as you encounter things I haven’t noticed, you’ll tell me what you see.

Click on any photograph to enlarge it. Click on the enlarged photograph to move to the next one in the series.

So I kinda knew where the conversation was headed just after I started it while we were making dinner this evening.

“I need to talk to you about how I can feel better about my time today.” I ran a 22:57 at the Mayor’s Cup 5K race in Franklin Park, Boston.

“Well, it’s only about a minute off your best, right?” It’s true. I set my (most recent ten years) PR of 21:48 in Holliston over Memorial Day.

“And you weren’t that far behind your most recent race.” It’s true, in September I did 22:26. Of course, it’s on local roads that I’ve covered (easily) a hundred times, where I know each crack in the sidewalk, not to mention every uphill and downhill. But . . .

“But I know you feel like your times are going the wrong way.” It’s true. That’s part of it for sure.

“Today was a cross-country race, right?” Yeah. There was grass and mud and short, steep uphills and downhills to bomb and tight turns. It was glorious! At one point, a runner started to squeeze me toward a mud hole to keep her feet dry; a little (I mean tiny) shove from my arm kept everybody where they needed to be. I had forgotten how much I love the click-click-click sound of running spikes as they cross a road or cart path. But all that grass, mud, uphill/downhill, and turning certainly counts for a little time.

“It’s the diabetes, huh?” Yes. I couldn’t seem to bring my blood glucose down below 200 mg/dL (11 mmol) overnight, and it totally messed up my race-day plan. The plan was to lower my basal when I left home, eat a banana when I started to warm up, and run with happy BGs during the race. Instead, I left the house in the low-200s, got to the event in the mid-200s, and started the race at 318 (17.6). I ended up eating and bolusing for something small just before the start, but I was hungry and also a bit dehydrated from all the peeing that I’m sure was related to the highs.

“It’s tough, but you’ll get it figured out soon.” That’s my goal for this off-season. I want to learn how to run while eating and shooting insulin, but (honestly) it scares the bejeezus out of me. But nothing ventured, nothing gained; I’m just going to have to suck it up, eat something like what I hope to eat before a race or triathlon, and then go for a run. If I can’t really race over the winter, I can pretend.

“You’re too hard on yourself.” It’s so true. We all are in our little house. Well, maybe not the cat. He thinks he’s perfect.

Here are some pictures from my race today. As always, there are captions that you can see by clicking on an image, which also makes the pictures bigger. So why not start by clicking on the first and going through ‘em?

(Click any photo for a larger version. But why not start at the first one and click your way through so that you can read all of the captions?)

There are a bunch of different ways that you can participate. Well, okay, I can think of three ways.

You can wear a diabetes-themed T-shirt that you got at an ADA, JDRF, or IDF event. Let your advocacy shine. You can also buy a shirt . . . online naturally. Some of these stores even donate the profits to organizations that do things for those of us with this little disease.

But the real fun is making your own. All it takes is an idea, a few craft supplies, and an hour or two. It’s good family fun, and when you’re done you can look at your creation with extra pride.

“Jeff, how do I make my own T-shirt?” I hear you asking. It’s easy, and it all starts at your local craft store. If your store is anything like the one in my town, you’ll find everything you need, from colorful, blank T-shirts to iron-on letters and patches to this special stuff that you can use to draw designs and write messages.

And, if you have a computer and inkjet printer, you can fire up Photoshop, make as fancy of a design as you can imagine, and print it out on iron-on transfer paper (also available at the craft store). One hot iron and a few minutes later, voilà! you’ve got your own fancy-pants DiabeTee. What? No printer? No worries; you can upload your design to a place like CafePress, which will print your design for you.

So are you ready? Great! You have 33 days left to make your shirt before November 14.

And don’t ever underestimate the power of a simple T-shirt.

p.s. — I have about a half-billion things on my mind that I want to write about. (For example, see the photos above.) Seems like it’s feast or famine around this here weblog. So I’m going to start with the most time-bound issues. I hope not to let y’all down and post the rest of everything here in the coming days.

After shopping for lunch, we rode to Éygalières, walked up a steep hill, and ate some of the food that we got at the market, while looking out on the ruins of a 13th century church and down on the countryside. After lunch, a few of us headed out for a twenty mile loop through the Alpilles mountains. It was a lot more laid-back than the group ride the day before after we climbed the mountain road to Les Baux, despite the fact that we put up a faster pace. That’s probably because there were just three of us who opted for the long ride, and we were able to keep the ride moving along with less of the waiting around that always occurs when you get a larger group ride going. Adele, one of the two group leaders, and I talked on the mostly car-free roads; it was great to have someone along who knew the routes by heart, so that we didn’t have to keep attending to the cue sheets. It was also nice seeing Pascal at the bottom of the long, winding descent to point out the “tricky turn” and to give me some really good French chocolate as a reward for the big climb.

Anyway, here are a bunch of pictures from the 21st:

After a couple of days of wandering all over Aix-en-Provence, making our way down every picturesque rue and past every sidewalk café, we thought it would be a good idea to see more of Provence than we would otherwise get on our tour. So we decided that Marseille—just an easy, inexpensive bus ride away—would be a good day trip.

But not a great “after dark” trip according to the friendly guy behind our hotel desk. “Marseille at night is not very safe.” And it feels quite a bit different than Aix. Actually walking from the Gare Saint-Charles train/bus station to the heart of the touristy section can feel downright ghetto. I half expected to run into the ghost of the reputed mobster-turned-bank-robber Jacques Mesrine or to see a “French Connection”-like drug bust go down. If Aix is trendy college students and farmers’ markets selling local produce and lavender, then Marseille is pensioners and grafitti and streets that frequently smell of urine.

If you can hold your nose and look past its faults (during the daytime, of course) then Marseille is actually quite enjoyable. We walked all around the vieux port, which has been in continuous use for 2,600 years—though I suspect in Roman times it had far fewer (if any) pleasure yachts and ferries to take day-trippers to secluded beaches along the rocky coast. Our trip took us to the commanding heights of the Fort Saint-Nicolas, whose guns are turned inward on the city for some reason or another; up to the top of the Panier district, which is now heavily Arab, to see a 17th century poorhouse; to the fantastic Cathédrale de la Major; and to the older, but still sumptuous, Église des Réformés.

At the last church we stumbled into a small wedding. Fortunately it was a big church, and no one really noticed us at the back. (Which is good, because I took some video, which I will post when I can remember my YouTube password.) We actually happened upon at least six weddings today. Brides are pretty conspicuous wherever you go, so it was certainly easy to find them, but I hadn’t expected to see so many. Let’s see, there was the one group walking away from the fish market. And then another on the ramparts of the old fort. And yet one more at the town hall as we walked into the cathedral and a different one as we left. And the one at the Église and one outside another church on our way to the bus. Most—all?—were Middle Eastern or North African. I’ve never heard so much ululating and car horn-honking before in my life.

After we got back to Aix, everything just seemed so . . . I dunno . . . sedate compared to Marseille.

Oh! and I bought Lisa the first of what will undoubtedly be several presents. But I’m not telling what it is now.

Anyway, here are some photos: