07/27/2008
Realizing some important things
This past week, I think I've started homing in on what has been missing out of my life, namely a mission. So I'm happy to announce, I think I'm starting to figure it out. And no, I don't think I have to run away with the circus to do it, however fun that would be.
Sometimes, you just have to pay attention to what naturally draws you in. When I was in electrical engineering, what did I most enjoy? The time spent sitting by the river wishing I didn't have to go back inside to do circuit analysis homework. When I was in mechanical engineering, what did I do for fun? Take out books on passive solar energy and cradle to cradle design. Now that I'm working at a medical device firm, what books do I enjoy reading the most? The ones on sustainable practices, human-scale living, and indigenous wisdom. I'm spotting a trend here. I think my calling is finally calling out to me loudly enough to be heard through my thick skull.
Back when I was finishing up my master's (i.e., back when I had a lot more time on my hands), I would come home from school, sit on my bed next to my teetering stack of library books that had nothing to do with my thesis (and more to do with sustainable living), and stare at a blank sheet of paper. I'd be frustrated, because I felt I had something big to say, something important to say, something screaming to get out of my subconscious and into the world. Problem was, I just didn't know what that "something important" was; all I knew was that it was important and that it was stuck inside of me. I also knew it wasn't something like, "all houses should have solar hot water heaters," because it just seemed a lot bigger than that.
This weekend, I've been reading 2 books: one is on biomimicry, and the other is on authenticity. It must've been a good combination, because all of a sudden, I look at everything around me and think, we're kidding ourselves if we can go on like this, as a society. What also caught my attention is a small newspaper article talking about the discovery of large quantities of oil in the Arctic, in territory disputed between Canada, USA, Denmark, Norway, and Russia. All the world needs is another conflict... and not only that, but to imagine a fragile ecosystem like that disturbed for something we shouldn't be digging up in the first place.
But the question becomes, how do we, with the current economic system and current energy system, get out of this situation? It's fascinating (and sometimes scary) to think about, and I don't have a solution, but I'd really like to be part of the effort to get to one. Time is ticking, and I have a lot of books to read and people to listen to!
15:35 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
07/06/2008
5K Baby!!
It's been a month since I started jogging, and today, I actually ran 5K continuously, i.e., with no walking breaks. It took 39 minutes, which is geriatrically slow, but that's 39 minutes of continuous running! Actually that in itself is another first. I don't think I've ever run for 39 minutes straight before in my entire life. I actually felt surprisingly good for most of it. I had a giant stitch in my side for the last 10 minutes or so of that, but I'm quite proud of myself for pushing through it and making it to the 5k mark.
I can hardly believe it, actually! I can now lay to rest the notion I developed as an 11-year-old that 3K was the max I could do, and that it takes half an hour and a lot of pain to go that distance. And to think that a month ago, it was all I could do to run a whole minute before I would need to stop and take a 2-minute walking break.
So 2 birds with one stone today. My first 5k, and my longest-ever continuous run, at 39 minutes. Yay!!!
I thought it was going to take two months to get to this point, but it only took one. This PR should also be quite easy to beat with a bit more practice. (Can you believe that the really good runners can do a 5K twice as fast?) Anyway, now it's time to set a new goal. I think a far-off goal would be to complete the Torshavn Marathon in 2009 (don't ask why Torshavn, of all places, bit of a long story), but I'm pretty sure I need an in-between goal, so I'll have to think about that for a bit. Off the top of my head, I would like to run a sub-30 minute 5K, and I would also like to start thinking about a 10K somehow, but I'm not sure about the timeframe.
In the meantime, I'm going to spend the day being proud of myself for getting my sedentary, allergic-to-running self this far, and for proving to myself that I can overcome limits I put on myself if I just get myself into a new "I can do it" frame of mind.
Woohoo! Time to take on the world!
19:15 Posted in Sports | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
07/01/2008
Top 100 Books
So I got this from my friend's blog...
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them
[Louise: I had to add another category, i.e., books I have partially read, but have not finished or have only read in parts; I've put these in square brackets.]
Wait, added another markup: (M) if I've seen a movie adaptation. I also didn't bother to mark books I hadn't heard of with "??", since there would be a lot of them!
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (M)
2 [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien] (M)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (M)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (M)
6 [The Bible]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Golden Compass
Subtle Knife
Amber Spyglass
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (M)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (M)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 [Middlemarch - George Eliot]
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen (M)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (um, doesn't #36 belong within #33??)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (M)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (M)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 [Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas]
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (M)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 [Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (M)
So, I'm doing slightly better than average; 8 books! There are a lot of interesting books in this list, but I don't think I'll ever have enough time to make it through them all. Not that I'd really want to, anyway. There are some I have no intention of ever reading.
It was fun to go through this list though!
19:40 Posted in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this