Bloomin'

It's Spring! Why aren't you out riding your bike???

Good Song: The Changes - When I Wake

Happy Birthday to me, I have the flu...

Today marks another year older for me, and I have decided to celebrate this occasion with a great case of Influenza. Mmm, the fever, the chest congestion, exhaustion, and headache all combine to say "HEY! Way to go, its your birthday!" Luckily, it hit on Friday and I started taking a wonderful prescription drug cocktail yesterday, so hopefully I'll be close enough to 100% to head into work on Monday. Maybe start training again by Tuesday??? Oh well, I guess next season I'll go in on that flu shot because this definitely sucks. Enjoy the rest of the weekend!

Good Song: Placebo - Every You Every Me

Times they are a-changing...

So, I'm in the market for a house to buy. Well, condo really since I can in no way afford a "house" in the D.C. market anytime soon. I can barely afford a 1 bedroom condo in the District...those that I can qualify for are mostly located in what people like to call "transitioning" neighborhoods. Or, by those who feel threatened, "gentrifying". I checked out one place this past weekend, and liked what I saw in the building. A couple pics:

The building was impressive, but the Petworth neighborhood still leaves something to be desired. We walked the neighborhood a bit, and headed to a tucked away Slovakian cafe a few block away known as W - Domku. A great atmosphere with tasty food, and a type of place I could see Petworth/Georgia Ave. need many more of!

So the questions I ask myself: Do I get in early, and hope that like many other neighborhoods close-by redevelopment takes hold? Am I prepared to go from the suburbs, to cookie-cutter (but safe) Arlington, to a potentially rougher, but more diverse part of D.C? How do I feel about being a gentrifier? Can I make a difference in this community? Many questions, and many more hot issues to think about. Much, much more to follow!

Stay well.

Good song: Rocky Votolato - She Was Only In It For The Rain

Hallmark Holiday

An Affair Of the Head
They Say Love Is All About Brain Chemistry. Will You Be Dopamine?

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 13, 2007; C01

It's all about dopamine, baby, this One Great True Love, this passionate thing we'd burn down the house and blow up the car and drive from Houston to Orlando just to taste on the tip of the tongue.

You crave it because your brain tells you to. Because if a wet kiss on the suprasternal notch -- while, say, your lover has you pinned against a wall in the corner of a dance club -- doesn't fire up the ventral tegmentum in the Motel 6 of your mind, well, he's not going to send you roses tomorrow.

Dopamine.

God's little neurotransmitter. Better known by its street name, romantic love.

Also, norepinephrine. Street name, infatuation.

These chemicals are natural stimulants. You fall in love, a growing amount of research shows, and these chemicals and their cousins start pole-dancing around the neurons of your brain, hopping around the limbic system, setting off craving, obsessive thoughts, focused attention, the desire to commit possibly immoral acts with your beloved while at a stoplight in the 2100 block of K Street during lunch hour, and so on.

"Love is a drug," says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love." "The ventral tegmental area is a clump of cells that make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and sends it out to many brain regions" when one is in love. "It's the same region affected when you feel the rush of cocaine."

Passion! Sex! Narcotics!

Why do we suspect this isn't going to end well?

Because these things are hard-wired not to last, all of them. Short shelf lives. The passion you fulfill is the passion you kill. The most wonderful, soaring feeling known to all mankind . . . amounts to no more than a narcotic high, a temporal state of mania.

"Being in love, having a crush on someone is wonderful . . . but our bodies can't be in that state all the time," says Pamela C. Regan, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, and author of "Mind Games: A Primer on Love, Sex and Marriage." "Your body would fizzle out. As a species, we'd die."

Some of these love chemicals in the brain, scientists measure by the picogram, which is a trillionth of a gram.

How fragile, this thing called love.

* * *

Just about all writing about love stinks, maybe because so much of it begins with something like "O!" or maybe because people are (a) in love when they write it, which makes for a lot of senseless mooning the rest of us couldn't care less about; or (b) they have just been Kicked to the Curb of Romance, in which case they would rather be pinned to an insect board and labeled than live another minute on this godawful Planet of Hate.

Sigh.

Stendhal was onto something in the 19th century when he observed that "The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears," because passionate love is also partly about terror. Bill Shakespeare had it down cold, when he had Friar Laurence warn young Romeo of the perils of passion: "These violent delights have violent ends."

And did Romeo listen?

Shucks, no! Wise counsel, patience, foresight, prune juice -- who wants that ? Is there one among us who, at least once in this life, does not want to throw everything out the door and sprint to the Disco Ball of the Brain, where there are big white piles of dopamine, where a hot and sweaty Barry White is always on stage, thumping out "You're My First! My Last! My Everything!" And there's that new girl in class! Scantily clad! She's on the floor, beckoning you! Yes, Bubba, you! Out you go, and she's saying your name and her hand slips to the small of your back, and this is going to last FOREVER AND EVER!

Here it goes, a long time ago, Abelard and Heloise, two of history's most famous lovers:

Abelard to Heloise: "So intense were the fires of lust which bound me to you that I set those wretched, obscene pleasures, which we blush even to name, above God as above myself."

She to he: "Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purest, lewd visions of the pleasures we shared take . . . a hold on my unhappy soul."

HONEY! BABY! SWEETIE! CALL ME!

Did we mention Abelard was castrated as a result of their affair? And Heloise went off to a convent for the rest of her life? That they named their child "Astrolabe"? What people! What passion! What the hell were they thinking?

Actually they weren't, and neither are you, not really, when you fall passionately in love.

In her most recent research, Fisher and colleagues gave 32 love-struck subjects an MRI scan while they viewed a picture of their beloved.

Boy, did their brains light up!

There are two shrimp-size things on either side of your brain called the caudate nuclei. This is the gear that operates bodily movements and the body's reward system: "the mind's network for general arousal, sensations of pleasure, and the motivation to acquire rewards," Fisher writes. And when the test subjects looked at their sweeties, these things started singing "Loosen Up My Buttons" with the Pussycat Dolls!

This, then, kicked the party over to the tiny ventral tegmental area, a little peapod-size thingy that sends dopamine bopping around your head.

This is what scientists call lots of fun.

A separate study by Italian researchers several years ago showed something else.

Serotonin, another neurotransmitter in the brain associated with obsession, depression and racing thoughts, was greatly affected -- right down to the molecular level -- by romance and surging dopamine. People newly in love and people with obsessive-compulsive disorder showed the same lowered levels of the "platelet 5-HT transporter." In other words, dopamine appears to suppress serotonin, which in turn triggers obsessive-compulsive thought patterns.

You can't stop thinking about Dave. No wonder! Dave's hiding under a wet flap of cortex!

Your brain is officially in love, and it officially is driving you crazy.

Oliver Sacks, the famed neurologist and author, once cited the case of a 90-year-old woman who had suddenly become radiant, flirty, even frisky. The diagnosis: a long-delayed onset of neurosyphilis had loosed the reins on her inhibitions.

She did not want to be treated.

"What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony," Sacks wrote. "That inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or a disease . . . it is the very realm of Cupid and Dionysus."

* * *

Cupid can't last, you know.

Oxytocin and other chemicals kick in, running around your brain to make you bond with your lover, producing a mellower, more sustainable relationship.

Women: contented sigh. Men: light snoring.

Or, your Previously Perfect Love Pumpkin turns into possibly the most selfish, cheating, low-down dirty dog this side of Amarillo. You get dumped. This is what produces "drama."

"Drama" is not good for your "brain."

What it feels like:

A one-way ticket to the Tex-Mex Border Bar of the Mind. It's always dark in here, stinks of old cigars. The clock on the wall always reads Beer:30. Your caudate nucleus is now slouched over a bar stool in the dark. Sitting next to it is Freddy Fender.

Suddenly your brain bellows, off-key:

WASTED DAYS AND WASTED NIGHTS!

Freddy looks up from his beer.

I HAVE LEFT FOR YOU BEHIND!

Freddy throws his arm around your brain and joins in:

FOR YOU DON'T BELONG TO ME!

YOUR HEART BELONGS TO SOMEONE ELSE!

Your brain can spend entire days doing this.

This is because your brain has kicked into reverse, and love is long gone.

O!

Rejection, rage, despair!

Dopamine leaves the scene of the affair, now running off into the nucleus accumbens, the insular cortex, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, research by Fisher and others shows. Jilted lovers' brains now light up in these areas when they look at pictures of their former flames -- this brain matter is associated with taking big risks, addiction, physical pain and obsessive-compulsive disorders. This is why, researchers theorize, people become obsessed with lost love, and are driven, in extreme cases, to stalking, suicide, homicide, rubber tubing.

Regan, the California researcher, notes that such cases are rare, and may have more to do with existing mental issues than simple unrequited love. Still, she says, passion is destined to end, whether mellowing into long-term love or blowing up on the freeway at 4 a.m. Given this, she wonders if "we do our self a disservice by glorifying passionate love so much."

"The search for eternal passion is very misguided," she says. "It's the search for the perfect high that keeps people discarding relationships right and left . You don't feel the same way you did; people want to break up, instead of seeing it as normal."

And so, alas. Even neurologists, to go with Shakespeare's priest, now tell us passion is true love's fool's gold, a flamboyant dead end on the evolutionary chain of primate happiness.

The only problem with this insight is that no one pays it any mind. Doomed passion may not make us right, and it may not even make us very happy.

It only makes us human. It only makes us who we are.

Good Song: Menomena - Wet and Rusting

Sufjan tix are a no-go.

When trying to get free tickets to go see the greatest songwriter currently out there, Sufjan Stevens, do not think that showing up at 7am for a 9am ticket release will be fruitful. Camp out, or don't even try. You have been warned.

Ciao!


Good Song: Fischerspooner - Get Confused

CO Trip - Winter 2007

In one word: Amazing.

That would just about sum up my trip out to the mountains of Colorado. I am not so sure I will ever be able to snowboard anywhere on the East Coast after experiencing the terrain, the views, the SNOW, the margaritas, and the peoples first hand. Each time I head to Massunutten, Wisp, or wherever from here on out I will shed a little tear for my trip out west. I'm finding there is just too much to say in one sitting in order to properly explain what I felt when I was out at Breck', Keystone, and, Vail for the past week - so I'll do my best instead with a photo journal of sorts.

The trip started hanging out in LoDo (Lower Downtown) Denver for a couple days while the cuz took care of some legal bidness. It snowed, and as a result...I ran. Or well, explored as much as I could in 60 minutes of excercise. I headed down towards Union Station, past the baseball stadium, and onto this great multi-use paved trail that runs along the Platte River. The pic above shows the views of the river, and as much of the metro Denver skyline in the snowstorm. As I ran...

I stumbled upon what is quite possibly THE largest REI in the whole entire universe. It was 3 floors of an endless supply of outdoor gear, and quite honestly I couldn't stop myself from drooling down my windbreaker. The also had one enormous climbing wall, but no time for distractions. Instead, I picked up a pair of sunglasses for the soon-to-be sunny days in the MTNs. I finished up the workout and then...

Ventured into the outdoor 16th Street Mall. I must say, that Denverites love their Starbucks as I saw atleast 4 stores within a 6 block stretch while I was riding the free bus shuttle that treks up and down the strip. Following that I met back up with the others, and we headed off towards Breckenridge to crash at a cabin below Peak 7 - again, in a snowstorm. Trucks proceeded to put chains on, and do all kinds of crazy stuff you would never see in around D.C. We kept on truckin'.
The next morning I woke up to see this view out of the cabin's living room window looking up onto the lower Breckenridge range, and more importantly about 5 inches of the fresh white stuff. Niiiiiice.We headed to the slopes of Breckenridge the first day, and I was in awe of the views and the amount of slopes they had. Above is the view as you get off the lift around the middle of the mountain. We rode some groomers, some glades, and eventually the upper bowls once we were warmed up and found our snow legs.
That first day was cold, with a high of maybe 12 degrees F and as you can see above winds kicking up to 30+ mph gusts. Made for some exciting times going up the lifts, and even more so trying to traverse across the mountain to get anywhere. The picture above is at the top of the Horseshoe Bowl.Above is looking over the edge of the Horseshoe Bowl, and beyond into the town of Breck'. Good stuff! Hard to really get an idea of how steep this terrain is from the photo, but basically think of a bowl you would eat Mac and Cheese out of and then consider trying to ski/snowboard down the sides of it. Mmm, mac and cheese.
In the afternoon the weather turned for the worse as another snow storm rolled in and threw down about 3 inches. We rolled out via gondola, and back to the cabin to warm up and rest up before heading out on the town to find some cute ski bunnies and/or drinks. Ok, in hindsight we never really saw too many females in town (so that is a small, but notable disadvantage to the rockies) but we did see many many drinks. And they were tasty!
The next day we hit the Keystone ski area across the valley from Breck. Above is the view from the top of the lift right before we went into the trees, you can make out the Breckenridge trails off to the right. Keystone was my first experience of skiing glades (thinned out woods) and woods. I loved every second of it, and it took every ounce of energy out of us. There is nothing better than cutting that first line through the powder, carving between the trees, getting stuck in the powder, and then doing it all over again. Below you'll see a little piece of heaven.The next day we headed back to Breckenridge for a more relaxed day so we could regroup after an exhausting day at Keystone, and a push for a BIG following day at Vail. We headed over to the trails on Peak 10 looking for some good powder, found it, rode it, and moved back over for a couple more runs on Peak 7 and 8. Drinks followed at a local establishment in Frisco to watch the BCS Nat. Champs. What happened Ohio State!?

Vail was the last resort we hit, and the acres of trail they had was just sickening. Glades, looong steep groomers, bowls, drop-offs, terrain parks, whatever, they had it. Above is looking down one of the bowls on the backside, and across into a couple other bowls. The temps were in the low 40's and winds were M.I.A. Making for a superb day of rocking out.

Above is right before the drop into "Lover's Leap", and looking over to the backside bowls at Vail.
On the opposite side from "Lover's Leap", you have an incredible view into the 10 Mile Mountain Range. Take that lift you see up, and you will have your head pinned to your right shoulder staring at that view.

Thanks for reading!

Good Song: The Delays - Hideaway

Back in the Rockies!

After 4 VERY short hours of sleep, I headed off at 5:45am to catch the Metro to Union Station. From there I caught the 6:35 am Amtrak train to BWI airport. I then proceed to miss the BWI airport stop, and head in for a short jaunt in B-more. Grrrreat. A quick turn around, and a jump onto a southbound MARC train I get to check in at 8:05 for an 8:35 flight to Denverrrr. The airplane gods were smiling on me this morning! The rest of the trip was smooth sailing, and my snowboard also made it in one piece surprisingly. The plan of this excursion is to be one with the snow for the next 6 days. I've been going through ice-crystal withdrawl with the recent tropical winter episode going down over on the east coast. Not a problem here, theres a good 5 inches on the ground, with 3 inches expected to fall tomorrow...and thats just in the high plains. A couple days kickin around Denver, and then its off for some sweet pow-pow at Breckenridge and Vail. Lets hope for no broken bones!

Mmmm, yellow snow.

Good Song: The Slip - Eisenhower