White People Be Crazy

After Mass this morning I went for a run. There was something ironic about that fact, in and of itself, at least to my mind. The priest who said Mass was a short, heavy Filipino man with a crutch and a cane. He walked as if his left knee had been fused, or maybe his left leg was a prosthetic, and he had a large, heavy gut, and a cheerful, pleasant smile. I watched him laboriously make his way down the steps behind the church from the rectory, and then process down the aisle, step, thump, peg, step, thump, peg, step, thump, peg.

Now I have a chronic case of what my younger brother calls, "Lone Survivor Guilt," meaning if I see someone else worse off than I am in any way, I immediately feel bad that I have what they do not. I immediately and irrationally felt bad for having two good legs. God is patient with me though, and through the course of the Mass He slowly drew me instead to thankfulness of the courage and determination that made that man climb steps and walk up aisles and do other things that I take completely for granted, to bring me the Holy Sacrifice. To reproach myself for what I feel like I am not doing is to make it all about me. To thank God for what he is doing, is to make it all about God. One leads to depression, selfishness, fear, and lack of confidence. The other leads to peace, joy, gratefulness and trust.

So I went for a run after Mass, as I had planned. I was much slower than I would like to be, and I ran a hot spot into the crease of each big toe, which I am happy for, since I can offer it up for people who don't have feet! Is it anything on the same or equivalent level to their sufferings? No. It is what God has given me, though.

On the way back I ran past this guy:

 The sign painted on the back of his garbage cart caught my eye. When I asked him if I could take a picture of it he smiled at me with a big, peaceful smile, like: "This crazy white guy!"

"Thank you Lord God for the life & grace, the love & peace, the health & strength, THE NAME of Our Lord Jesus."
Sometimes God gets obvious.

After my run I did some yoga in the hotel gym. There were some other guests there, including one middle aged gentleman trying to get a workout, but his little girl kept running in from the pool to talk to him. She was staring at me like I was the circus!

I can understand that, though. I am big, very hairy, and when I workout I am very sweaty. I am not particularly flexible or coordinated, although not bad for my size. All in all, I look pretty odd doing yoga. When I do yoga in white people gyms I always kick the heavy bag a few times afterwards as a way of forestalling any comments.

This little girl was watching me like saturday morning cartoons and talking with her daddy in Visayas. I imagine the conversation was something like, "Daddy, look at the big sweaty white guy! What is he doing?"

"I don't know, honey. White people be crazy."

God bless you all, this fine day. Remember to be grateful.

It's All Obama's Fault

Thursday morning I went for a run. It was still dark out, but my plan was to do 50 minutes total along the sidewalk. Now that the snow has melted I’ve discovered that the sidewalk runs straight north almost to the Puget Sound. It’s mostly downhill on the way out, and then, of course, uphill on the way back. I ended up running only about 48 minutes because of it. I turned around at 24 minutes, expecting it to take me longer to get back since I would be running uphill most of the way. Instead, to my delighted surprise, I actually ran almost exactly the same speed on the way back making it in at 48 minutes. Close enough. I let myself off the extra two minutes for good behavior. Someday I’ll have to drive the route to see how far it was.


However, this blog concerns something that happened in the first ten minutes of the run. As I said, it was still dark out, and although the sidewalk is pretty good, there was one place where one of the segments had heaved up out of the ground, probably from a tree root, and it was sticking up about three inches higher than its neighbor. My left toe caught that lip in the dark and down I went, knees, heal of the hand, forearm and shoulders, a very awkward looking shoulder roll back to my feet and I kept moving. I was cranking under my breath, but I was still going. The heels of my hands were the most painful parts at the time, but I could tell my knees had been pretty banged up. At any rate, it was too dark to examine them, and I didn’t want to slow down so I pushed on and forgot all about it until I got back to my apartment. Unlocking my door, standing on the well-lit landing, I finally looked down at my legs and saw this:

It turns out I did take some skin off.

Of course it’s always a mistake to judge the severity of a wound by the amount of blood (and that isn’t even a lot of blood). If there is a lot of sweat, it dilutes the blood and makes it flow further and faster than it otherwise would, so even a little bit of blood can cover a lot of area. I washed these and the other abrasions off pretty thoroughly when I showered, and then ignored them.

But I realized, it’s all Obama’s fault.

Well, not Obama exactly, but it is the government’s fault, and he is the head of the government so we’ll blame him. Does Washington (D.C.) not care about its people? They should know that sidewalks with cracks in them are hazardous. They should know that running is hazardous. People get injured like that in countless numbers every year. Why isn’t Congress doing something to mitigate that? Like mandating knee and elbow pads for runners, or providing everyone with free head lamps, or outlawing running during hours of darkness?

I mean, if this administration can’t protect me from the consequences of my own choices, what good is it?