Marathon training and coyotes

My marathon training started on Feb 1st. It's been an exhausting month with running distances increasing almost on daily basis. In the meantime I failed to register for Around the Bay race - 30 km in Hamilton on March 29. I waited too long and when I finally made up my mind to join in, the race was fully booked. It would have been a nice time test for the marathon.

The weather is also weird, it was +8 C today, it's going to be -17 tomorrow morning for my run. I am tired of snow and ice, slippery roads, slush and mud. I am tired of wearing ski mask during runs, of gloves, running nose and breath that ices on my eyebrows. I am so ready for Spring.

Occasionally, we see a coyote at night strolling through our sleepy street, hungry and tired of this long winter. Haven't heard of any cat or small dog missing in the neighborhood. In downtown Toronto people were leaving food for coyotes until they started killing pet cats and dogs. Now those same people who fed them want the cops to exterminate the beasts. Hope it won't go that far up here. Our community is next to a conservation area, that's where our coyotes come from. Hopefully they won't get too comfy going through our garbage. All I need is to have a fury predator chasing me around the neighborhood. Undoubtedly, that could improve my running time, but I'm not quite certain it's the preferred training method.

The Question of Religion

I'm listening to a BBC's podcast "From Our Own Correspondent". It's the last week's episode; I'm a little behind on my favorite audio-fix. One of the story is from Lebanon. Several couples there staged a fake civilian marriage ceremony as a demonstration against the religious-only marriage enforced in the country. Civilian marriage doesn't exist in Lebanon. Each religious entity creates rules for the marriages of its flock. That way the Muslims are married under the Islam laws and Muslim men can have up to four wives, while Christians and Jews are stuck with one. Christians complain that divorce is all but impossible to obtain from the church, and so on...

I grew up in a country called Yugoslavia. It doesn't exist anymore, gone up in the smoke of war. It was a peculiar mix, that Yugoslavia, made up of six different nations in the form of its six republics, spanning across three religions: Roman Catholic, Orthodox Christian and Islam. To make it all more interesting, the political order of the day was socialism. Growing up in that hodge-podge of cultures and religions, we boys from Zagreb (population about 700,000) were blessedly oblivious of the religious differences. Zagreb was on the Roman-Catholic side of the country, so we went to the midnight mass every Christmas, but our main goal was to install ourselves next to some cute girls so we can hold their hands when the time comes to "share peace with thy neighbor" and, if we're lucky, that could lead to a conversation afterward and possibly a date in a less pious environment. That was pretty much the extent of our religious zeal.

My closest friend at the time, Bruno, was marrying a girl he met at the university, and I was asked to be the best man. Since the bride was from a village near the border with Serbia, the wedding was being held in her village. It was going to be conducted in the church. Before we all lined up at the altar, the priest called the best man and the maid of honor to the little alcove behind the altar where we had to sign the papers as witnesses. I gave him my name, DOB and address; he then turned and asked what was my religion. And there my mind failed me. For the life of me I couldn't remember what we called our religion. We referred to the church only as "the church". I was so ignorant of the fine nuances that distinguished "our" church from the "Serbian church" that I wasn't even sure which one was the one the bride and the priest belonged to. My mind racing and still drawing blanks, the priest and the maid of honor looking at me patiently, I pull what I hoped to be a smug smile and said: "My religion? The TRUE one, of course." The priest smiled a satisfied smile. I peeked over his shoulder as he wrote "Roman Catholic" next to my name. Just like that. I could have declared myself an Orthodox and I don't think I'd care much. When it was the maid's turn to declare her religion, she looked at me, smiled and said "The TRUE one!"

When the war in Yugoslavia broke out few years later, the country ripped apart first at the seam which held together the catholics and the orthodox. The bride's village fell to Serbian hands and, since it was a predominantly catholic village, all the villagers were expelled, their farms taken by the orthodox neighbors. Only then I understood the smiles both the priest and the maid of honor gave me that day at the church. I declared myself as one of them in the divide I didn't even know that exists.

Feeling Spring(y)

The snow melted! Well, okay, not entirely, but it's significantly reduced to dirt-grey patches in all the shady corners of the city. We even had a couple of days last week with +7 C temperature, to remind us that there are seasons other than winter. Even now, when we're back to -10 at night, we still feel warm inside.

Snowed-in from skiing

Sounds ridiculous, I know, but it doesn't make it less true. We spent two full days on Mount St. Louis Moonstone, a 1.5 hrs north from Toronto. The plan was to drive there every day of the week and ski ourselves silly. That worked for the first two days, though we didn't plan the exhaustion. Skiing is a serious business, by the end of the day we are drained, sore and good for nothing save the bed.

Today we woke up to the thick snow carpet where you don't want it: on the roads to the ski slopes. Estimated 20 cm and still falling, snow plows can't clean the roads fast enough, accidents on all the highways around the town, including the ones we're supposed to drive on. We had a quick bedroom council and, counting in the soreness and the total exhaustion of the mind and body, we decided to wait out the snowfall at home. That means the whole day. Maggie is still catching up on her active dreaming (it's over 10 hours of sleep since last night and counting). She had an active dream, woke me up with her screams "I can't, I told you I can't!". I'm guessing she was screaming at me for taking too steep a slope in her dream, but she doesn't remember. In real life, she conquered some nice slopes and has nothing to scream about. Except when I try to wake her up.

Well, I better lean on the snow shovel and dig a hole through the fallen snow, so we can get out of the house tomorrow and continue our ski adventures.

Hairy surprise

Today Maggie went to the hair stylist. She doesn't do that often and it's always kind of funny when she returns; there are different variations of the same: her long, dark Asian hair looks, well--Asian. No matter if it's layered, or straight with bangs or not, it doesn't alter her good looks, just adds a detail here and there. Until today.

It took me a moment to recognize the woman who came out of the car parked in our garage. The very short hair with uneven edges spiking freely around her face, Maggie looks like someone else. And, a detail which concerns me a bit--she looks 16. I'll get in trouble for dating an underaged girl!

Obamaguration

Today the history was made. It is a cliche, but it is also true. A black man became the most powerful man on Earth. Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States. His inauguration was televised and watched around the globe. Here in Canada we're all smitten by him. Judging by the reactions everywhere else, he has awaken hope of global proportions. He spoke of hardship, promised crisis and struggle, and still everybody cheered. In the past I witnessed great demagogic speeches of Yugoslavia's Tito, sheer madness of Milosevic's utterances, I learned of the quiet wisdom of Gandhi's orations. But none of them, except maybe Nelson Mandela, managed to inspire the entire world the way Obama did today. It could be thanks to the fast and wholesome reach of the modern media, but I prefer to think it's because of his message of hope and change we all craved through eight long years of Bush.

Obama is a great speaker. If nothing else, we're up for four years of coherent and well delivered speeches. Although I still think he's a bit hip-hop for a president, now it's up to me to get used to it.

The only thing out of tune during the inaugural ceremony was Aretha Franklin. "The Queen of Soul" she may be, but now that's just an honorary title. She can't carry a tune any more! It was painful listening to her squealing before millions of people. For everybody's sake, and the sake of her reputation, I wish her irrecoverable voice loss.

Snow

It's almost like in Orhan Pamuk's dreadful novel "Snow"! We are suffocating in the white stuff. It makes everything muffled and slow, it envelops the mind like cotton and puts it to sleep. There's no space left to shovel the darn thing away. It's piled higher than the fence in the yard, almost higher than I can throw. And, it's still falling! Thinking about going to sleep until April.

The Dark Knight

Morning was frozen at -18 C, it turned my face purple during the run. As I thawed, my cheeks swelled into quite a grotesque: parts outside the laugh-lines puffed up, turning the laugh lines into deep crevices and my face into a caricature of itself. I thought the mirror was distorted, but it was my skin reacting to the cold. Snow started in the afternoon. We had no desire to go out to the polar conditions, so we rented a movie.

I admit, we fell for Hollywood's tragically deceased star Heath Ledger and the new Batman movie, "The Dark Knight." Ledger recently won the Golden Globe posthumously, for his role of Joker in the movie. There are also speculations that this role made him unstable enough to swallow the wrong dose of the wrong pills. So we thought when someone literally dies because of a movie, it has to be a good one. But, it wasn't. It was a pretty lame Batman. I guess we saw it all and the Batman franchise is running out of ideas. As for Heath, he is like the rest of the cast and the movie in whole--also lame. Jack Nicholson already gave us a Joker that fits the Batman, and gave the Joker a reason to be the psychotic killer he is. Heath, on the other hand, is just psycho, but gives no reason nor explanation. The whole character is bizarre. It would better fit into a "Friday the 13th" than a Batman. I guess Hollywood wisely exploits his death for the promotion of the movie. Maybe I expected too much of a Batman flick. It's quite disappointing.

Aging

Ever since I lost weight, my face and the rest of me went out of sync. The skin on my face hangs loose, lines crisscross each other in a fine mosaic. My face looks like a sheet of paper crumpled in anger and straightened hastily. I look every bit 44 I'll be in three months. But only down to my chin. South of there are some new muscles, new tone and shape. I haven't felt this good and this fit in a very long time. Now, if I could only iron the face, blacken the greys and grow some more hair... But then, maybe that's the price of wisdom that comes with age?

Reading marathon

Maggie and I spent the weekend wedged into the opposite corners of the sofa, hunched over books. We fell into a spontaneous reading frenzy, pausing only to feed; I can't call it eating, we barely noticed what we were taking in. On Friday we took a couple of newly-released books from the library, the ones that can be borrowed for 3 weeks only, no renewals. We started reading right away, joking there's not much time--only 3 weeks, and the books are voluminous! Soon, we were deeply immersed in stories; we were transferred into the fiction world, snapping back to reality only to satisfy the basic needs for food, bathroom breaks and occasionally to glance at each other with an embarrassed smile at our foolishness, only to delve back into the books a moment later. I sometimes lose myself in a book, but this was the first time both of us spent entire weekend doing so. We loved it.