Bathing caps, BMWs, and booze

Today I have (still have) a lot of reading to do for a paper due tomorrow about tectonics in Death Valley for my seminar class. Seeing as how it's Sunday and no one wants to do any work, I attempted to do the reading and write my summary. Of course when one is reading very technical scientific papers, it occasionally becomes difficult to really become enthralled in the material. Needless to say I felt rather unmotivated. This is something I have been feeling a lot this past week and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it isn't due to lack of sleep or the fact that I've had a cold all week. No. It is clearly because I haven't been exercising.

Last month I participated in my first Triathlon and had been exercising (almost) every single day to prepare for it. And since then I have gone completely cold turkey on the working out front. I had heard form friends that when they stop exercising that they start to feel 'blah' or antsy from not being out and about. I had always maintained that whether I running outside or running my fingers over a video game controller it wouldn't affect me.

Well...on the off chance that i needed at little pep in my step from exercise I went for a swim before continuing to read my papers. And today, for the first time, I had my bathing cap that they handed out for the Tri and I used it, not because I was hoping to swim extra fast and wanted the reduced drag, but because I needed something to keep the hair out of my face when I swim. Apparently water doesn't care if you comb your hair in the morning or not, it makes everything hang down and that is very annoying when you go up to breath and the only thing you see is not the wall but hair.

AND on a completely unrelated note, during brunch this morning my two friends Clay and Ben and I were discussing whether one thing was arbitrarily better than another. Ben brought up cars, something I am very knowledgeable about, and asked if a Ferrari was a better car than a BMW. To which I and Clay (who had just spent a semester in Italy) responded with Ferrari's being better. Ben then responded with: why? Well, this is harder to answer because they are different cars aimed at different markets. Is a Ferrari a great car to haul a week's worth of groceries home? Is a BMW the best car for going head to head with a Lamborghini on the track? This of course leads to the inevitable wishy-washy answer of: it depends on the situation. To be sure everyone would love to have a Ferrari in their driveway, but they would probably not care for the upkeep costs or track ready ride during daily stop and go traffic. But on the same token, the super rich would probably never want a BMW in their driveway when all their friends have Ferrari's and Bentley's.

It's been a week since I've turned 21 and I haven't really taken advantage of my new alcohol status. I suppose this week I will go to the liquor store to get carded just so I can show them my ID and say, "Yes, it was just my birthday."