On Anticipation

First I have added more bike makers to the list. However in order to do that I had to remove the old survey, add a new survey and put in all the original answers, since there already seven votes I had to allow myself to vote multiple times (I am not walking around the office voting from different machines just to get the numbers back to where they were, and I don’t have seven PCs at home.) So this works on the honour system, please only vote once, and don’t ask me to add another bike maker, because it is quite the pain to add to a poll once people have voted. (On an related note, I would like to add, in the interests of objectivity and all that, I have not voted and will not vote, also, although at this point only ‘two people’ have voted, me from my laptop and desktop – two votes for Cervelo – I have simply taken the votes from the old poll and transferred them to the new poll, I have not changed anyone’s pre-existing vote.)

Tonight I am going to do the Escape the Don ride. There is a certain degree of nervousness, as I know I am about to get my rear end seriously handed to me and the thought of chasing after a bunch of tiny red blinking lights on dark city roads, in some of the less desirable areas of town –to put things lightly-, is rather depressing. But I know that every time I do these psycho rides I get stronger, I get better and one day I will not be the guy frantically trying to keep up with the pack, instead I’ll be the guy pulling most of the time while the pack frantically tries to keep up with me.

On a totally unrelated note, I have been thinking a lot lately about why I blog. I suppose part of it is my dream of becoming a great novelist and living off fat royalty cheques for the rest of my days, won’t happen if my writing is not great and the writing won’t be great if I don’t practice. I suppose that dream is an awful lot like my dream of winning the lottery, statistically possible, but practically impossible. But as I think about it, I recall some years ago an Iranian woman, not very old, perhaps in her 20s being interviewed on the radio, it was the first time I had heard the term ‘blog’ actually, so it must have been 2002, or 2003. This woman noted the fact that it would be people like her who would finally bring the Ayatollahs down. I wonder, could blogging ever be more than just naval gazing? Could my writings, well alright, not my writings, but could someone’s words written in a journal spell the end of some horrible regime? It occurs to me it already has happened, Trent Lott lost his position as Senate Majority leader when bloggers forced Lott’s remarks at Storm Thurmond’s birthday into the news. But could a blog ever do in a repressive regime like Iran or North Korea? Or China?

We live in interesting times, challenging certainly, but also interesting. Outcomes are far from certain.