Wrong answer

Awkward moments in dating:

Playfully teasing a woman you’ve been seeing for a couple of weeks by calling her a stalker, and having her sheepishly admit that, in fact, that’s exactly what she’s been doing.

Uh…

Time to run… run far, far away!

Modified, and modified, and modified

Ran today. Planned on running 5 miles. Original plan was to get up early, go downtown, change at the gym, then run up and down Terwilliger.

Woke up around 8 AM. Too tired from being out late last night. Had to trash the original plan. OK, time for a new plan.

New plan: get up immediately get up, throw some street clothes and some workout clothes in my backpack, go downtown, change, and run up and down Terwilliger.

Got up, went to the bathroom, weighed myself (169.5! Whoo-HOO!), got a Cliff Bar, checked my email, went back to bed.

Woke up around 10:30 AM. OK, OK, new plan: same as previous plan, only getting up right now.

I resisted eating another Cliff Bar (which hurt me later), but realized I didn’t want to carry around a full backpack when I was downtown this afternoon. Since I was getting such a late start, I knew that once I was out of my house and downtown, I wouldn’t want to come back home to drop stuff off. So, I had to dress for the day, instead of planning on changing at some point this afternoon.

Alright, then, newest plan: hurry up and get some workout clothes on, go running in my neighborhood, starting right now. Good plan.

An hour later, after checking my email, chatting a bit online, and otherwise goofing off, I finally got out the door. There was a brief moment of embarrassment when I realized that my drunken neighbors were having their weekly “yard sale” — sucks to be out of work and needing money, I guess. They asked me to buy something, but I pretended not to hear them over my iPod. I did wave, though. I’m only partially a snob.

Since I wanted to run 5 miles (still), I was going to go down the Springwater Corridor trail to about the 2-mile mark, then turn around and come back. That 4 miles, plus the half-mile on the beginning and end that I run to get to the head of the trail, makes a 5 mile round trip.

Unfortunately, my lack of a real breakfast and my dehydration hurt me, I think. I was struggling to make the run out, and by the time I turned around, I was panting, hard. I died and had to stop and walk right at the 3.5 mile point, and continued to alternate walking and running the rest of the way.

Nutrition is important, OK?

Tomorrow I plan on doing a short run in my neighborhood. Hopefully that will make up for the poor performance today.

Away from home

Rapture.

World Cup, the coffee shop inside Powell’s Books, now has free wireless InterWeb access, courtesy of Personal Telco Project.

It’s the perfect combination: good, non-Starbucks coffee; more books than anyone could possibly desire; late-night hours; a high concentration of people who like to read; and now, a place to surf, blog, and email to my heart’s content.

For the record, if I’m not at home, and it’s outside of work hours, you can find me there.

Bridge up

Going to run to work tomorrow. I’m actually looking forward to it.

I ran the waterfront and Eastbank Esplanade on my lunch break yesterday. Got frustrated because the Steel Bridge went up just as I was approaching it and I had to stop. That kinda kept me from getting a rhythm going at first, and contributed to my overall dissatisfaction with the run.

(It’s still amazing to me that I’m getting into this so much. It’s good to be addicted to something that’s so good for me, though.)

Sleep-induced paranoia?

The barista just told me that I looked like I needed a nap.

Of course, they’d probably kick me out if I fell asleep in one of their comfy chairs. Hypocrites.

Drool

First day at 2200 calories, and it’s feeling pretty good so far. Had my normal breakfast (Cliff Bar and tall soy chai, mmmmmm), and just had a burrito and chips from Taco del Mar, and I still have 1000 calories left for tonight.

I’m going to the Baghdad Theater to see a documentary filmed partially in Portland, and the Baghdad is one of those micro-brew theaters that serve beer and pizza. So I’ll probably use up the rest of my calories tonight. I haven’t had beer and pizza in months on this diet.

It’s difficult to type this post with all the drooling I’m doing.

Pain

Running yesterday made my nipples bleed.

Ow.

I was wearing a non-cotton shirt!

Visiting the Charthouse the hard way

I saw 170 lb. on the scale this morning, but I think that’s just a random downward spike. I’m pretty sure I’m still holding steady at 172 for most purposes. And next week I’m adding another 200 calories per day to my diet, bringing my daily intake to 2200. If I am still losing at the same rate I was a couple of weeks ago, then I’m still 800-900 calories down from my “stable” intake, at least for this amount of exercise. So I might, in fact, be losing some more weight before I stabilize, which is OK by me.

Speaking of exercise, I ran from Duniway Park up to the Charthouse restaurant, along Terwilliger Blvd. again this morning, a round trip of about 5 miles. It was rainy, but not pouring down. I was cold at first, but warmed up nicely. I think I did it at a 10 minute pace, too; I left the gym at noon, and got back to the gym around 1:15, so, subtracting the time to walk the 10 blocks to Duniway, I did the 2.5 miles up and down in about 55 minutes. Well, OK, that’s more like an 11 minute pace. Still, pretty good for as steep as it is.

Last time I ran Terwilliger was on March 11, about a month and a week ago. I weighed 181 that morning. Means I’ve lost 11 pounds in 5 weeks, or just over 2 pounds per week.

Today brings my weekly running miles to about 13. I’m still amazed at that total. I can remember when the idea of running a mile seemed beyond me.

Also, this is the first time I’ve actually worn my iPod for the run. It did OK — only skipped two or three times, and that was after about 25 minutes of operation. The iPod is only really sensitive to jostling when nearing the end of it’s 25 minute buffer, and what will usually happen is that it will pause for longer than the normal 2-3 seconds between songs and then skip ahead to the next song in the playlist. Oh, I was playing a specific playlist, not playing on shuffle; when on shuffle mode, the hard drive will spin up after every song. Not good when working out.

Cuckold

An essay I wrote recently on evolutionary psychology. Sorry for the stilted language; it was inspired by the books I’ve been reading, especially David Buss’ “The Evolution of Desire”. Enjoy.

Most observers will agree that for men, the primary sexual strategy is to inseminate as many females as possible, to ensure that at least some of their genetic material will survive into the next generation. However, there is a secondary sexual strategy that men can, and often do, choose: to provide their resources of time, attention and material goods to a single female, in order to reap the benefits that this strategy promises.

Those benefits include (but are not limited to) status in the community, as well as more secure knowledge of the disposition of their progeny.

Men are at a disadvantage, in that it is difficult to be certain that the progeny of their mates are, in fact, their progeny. Those men in the past who provided their resources to a female in order to raise children who did not share the males genes would be at a disadvantage, evolutionarily speaking.

Determining paternity is a challenge for mammals, primates, and especially humans, because conception takes place internally in the female. Maternity is never in question for the female. Therefore, humans have developed adaptive mechanisms for dealing with this.

One such mechanism is psychological in nature. It is called “jealousy”.

From the standpoint of evolution, a man and a woman who are mates are providing each other with some benefit. The man who has opted for the secondary sexual strategy of long-term commitment is offering his resources to the female, and is expecting the female to provide him with a return benefit. In most cases, the benefit he is expecting, and therefore the attribute a man most values in a long-term relationship, is fidelity. Men who are seeking long-term mates do not value promiscuity in females, and do not see infidelity as a positive. They stress fidelity and expect their mates to provide them and them alone with sexual access.

Thus, it is expected that males who are seeking long-term mates to view a woman’s activities with a jealous eye. Since paternity is always in question, a deeply-rooted fear of being cuckolded, well below the conscious level, likely exists in many, if not most, men.

To be sure, jealousy is active in females as well. A male who is active with other females is a threat to the woman, as the male may decide that other children are more valuable and may split his resources, or begin providing them to the other mother and children exclusively. However, the adaptive challenge that is present for the male (to ensure that his resources are only going towards his own children) is not present at all for the female, and in fact a woman may exploit the paternity challenge by getting resources from one male while bearing the children of another. In this way she can have the best of both worlds.

This female strategy, however, butts right up against the challenge posed to men, and few men would endure this situation for very long. The typical male reaction to infidelity is anger or other violent action, while the typical female reaction to the same circumstances is sadness. For the male, a promiscuous mate means that he cannot be certain any of his genetic material will survive into the next generation, thus, his genetic line is threatened to its root. For the woman, infidelity simply means that the males resources may be withdrawn, and, depending on the other resources available to her, this may range from merely inconvenient to a life-threatening action.

Although the past illuminates the root causes of jealousy, and the differential response the two genders have to the acts that trigger this emotion, it does not condemn all humans to suffer the extremes suggested by this essay. Remember, though, that adaptations to evolutionary challenges, such as this one, provide a framework for understanding individual motivations.

In the prehistoric past, it may have been common for men to sequester their mates from all other male contact, and to become enraged at a male’s attention towards their mate; enraged to the point of murder. In modern humans, this is, sadly, still all too common. But much more likely, and much more palatable among humans that ascribe to a moral code, a man may simply decide that a woman who wishes to entertain other male company is not offering acceptable behavior for a long-term commitment and will choose to terminate the relationship and look elsewhere.

Among civilized humanity (I apologize for the loaded term “civilized” but can find no other way to separate modernity from our ancestry) relationships need to fulfill both parties needs, and, due to our evolutionary history, males primary needs in a long-term relationship is fidelity in their mates.