I'm not dead! (sorry, anyone who was shining up their dancing shoes)

Phew. It's been a long time, Internet. I'm sure you've been fine in my absence. As for myself, I've been in a state of business so profound it makes you forget that other people and things exist. I'm getting to the point in my Econ classes where the fact that I have a very weak math background is getting to be a huge obstacle as opposed to just inconvenient. To combat this externality, I've been trying to teach myself calculus in my spare time (ha, spare time!) and it's going about as well as you'd expect being taught calculus by a burned-out ex-English major would go. Add some final exams into that mix, a search for a job and a new apartment, and travel to some meets, and you've got yourself a long-winded way of saying "I haven't blogged because I've been really busy."

I'll provide a more comprehensive update/summary in the next few days, but a short summary of my outdoor season goes like this: my allergies have been terrible, which means my asthma has been terrible, which means I'm about as athletically useful as Piggy from Lord of the Flies. I ran 3 1500s outdoors, each slower than the last. It's always upsetting to have an absolute, balls-to-the-wall, maximum effort yield times I used to hit on my third race at some rinky-dinky 2nd-rate track meet. Such is life- I'm still getting a handle on the allergies/asthma thing and my expectation is that I'll do better next time. No sense in getting overly worked up some abysmal 1500s when all I can change is how I run in the future.

I will post my training the past couple weeks (summary: ran X, allergies bad, felt shitty, couldn't breathe well) but probably not until my final exams are over. In a couple hours yo tengo una prueba en Espanol and tonight I have a macroeconomic analysis final (blech). In my manic, caffeine-fueled study rampage, I came across a joke that I found funny and will post:

A chemist, a physicist, and an economist, all with phds, get marooned on a desert island. Luckily for them, half the ships rations washed up on shore with them. The bad news is that the food is all in cans. "Let's make a fire and heat the can until the food explodes out of it," the chemist suggests.

"No! We should drop it from one of those palm trees onto the rocks blow; it should accelerate enough to break when it hits!" the physicist says.

"Guys, guys, there's a much simpler solution here," says the economist. "First, let's assume we have a can opener. . ."

Maybe no one else will laugh, but as I'm struggling with all kinds of bullshit functions and assumptions and models, I howled like a coyote last night at about 3am.

Ok, study break over. Gotta squeeze in a run before my Spanish exam (which, due to more pressing exams, I'm only just realizing I have barely studied for, damn). Here's a fun song I was just listening to on the youtube machine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HHgedNNQco