Zen and the Art of Speedskating

This is the Chinese fortune cookie I got last night at dinner:

“you will pass a difficult test that will make you happier”

How appropriate!! And it’s a forecast that I am trying to set up my interior and exterior life so that it will come to pass… I know this is weird, but I take these fortunes very seriously, I have gotten some very intense Chinese fortune cookies messages in my life, and I save them in my wallet (I have about 40 in there right now). Just getting into Olympic trials was my goal at first, now I want to do well! But really, getting there, the experience of competing against some of the best sprinters in the world, that is what counts for me.

I am in Salt Lake City at the moment, and the last few days have been consumed with apartment hunting. Lots of stepping into bare living rooms, peering into empty closets, and padding around unfamiliar rooms. Jessica and I did a lot of imposing the imagined shadow of our lives upon empty spaces, flipping our furniture around like mental tetris pieces, and seeing if it fits. All with hopeful landlords looking over our shoulder.

Many of our friends are kidding us about moving to one of the “reddest” of the red states, and into a place where instead of the separation of church and state, the church IS the state. But the neighborhood we finally chose to live in (the extremely hilly part of the avenues) is a funky, old neighborhood, full of like-minded souls.

For example, there are hiking/mountain biking trails within 5 minutes of our doorstep. Jess and I took a few minutes to wander down one of them, to clear our heads of the apartment worries.

5 minutes into our walk (knee feels 90% ok, by the way) we see a medium height woman walking the other way. Below her all-American clear eyed features and conservatively bobbed black hair, she had an extensive network of tattoos winding around her. Jessica noticed a barbed wire tattoo around her neck, I noticed lines of odd text winding like rivers around the geography of her arms, the strange script resembling tolkien-esque elvish or maybe old norse runes! Hard to tell at a glance, but fascinating.

This is really not an LDS neighborhood! And I think I could have a more interesting discussion with tattoo girl than with most intensely fundamentalist people. That is a generalization, to be sure, but sometimes, when choosing a neighborhood to live in, the swirl of generalizations, and a street full of cars sporting Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers, can be all one has to go on.

Filed under: on the road