Cody

So I read this article about a study done recently, they found that Americans on average had one less close friend than they did twenty or so years ago. The average person 20 years ago had three CLOSE friends, now it is two. I still need to read the actual study, which isn’t that long but I can see this happening. I can feel it happening to myself everytime I hop on the computer and surf the internet for hours at a time, every time I scroll through my phonebook and shy away from calling most of the people in it, every time we can hardly get enough people together to play capture the flag or frisbee golf.

I know that most people like to “do their own thing” most of the time and I am definitely in that crowd. Every so often though I wish my friends would like to do more things than sit around and watch the TV or a movie. I know a lot of activities cost money but we have found things to do that don’t cost a dime, save for start-up costs of course.

I don’t know what I’m getting at except that maybe I wish I felt like I was more connected to my friends, the world, and some community that I could consider myself a part of.

I think this also connects to “being a better friend” and checking up on people on my myspace/facebook from time to time.

I’d like to take a self-defense oriented martial art just for my own sake and that of others around me. My tastes lead me away from seemingly competition oriented arts like Tae Kwon Do, Karate, and Aikido as I am not a very competitive person and I especially do not enjoy performing in front of large crowds of strangers.

There’s a place in Boulder called the “Combative Arts Faction” that I might check out sometime. I found their ad on a bulletin board on campus a long time ago, it had a picture of a ninja on it and, something that has me slightly skeptical about the place, someone’s graffiti that proclaimed “FAKE” or something along those lines. So this has brought me to some, perhaps carried away, thoughts of wondering whether the person that scrawled this on the ad was a disgruntled student or truly a martial arts master disgusted at the possibly unauthentic ways of the “Combative Arts Faction.” Paranoid? I know. The only thing that has me on the fence still is that they have an $80 monthly fee. That’s a lot of money to write away when I am just beginning to move out on my own. Therefore I might have to settle for a less appealing CU course or something of that sort. Time and motivation will tell, I guess.

So Tyler and I went mountain biking at Hall Ranch today. It’s an absolutely gorgeous place to visit with fantastic geology and fauna. The trail is rated black diamond technical, meaning it was freaking hard! Especially for us noobies wearing PANTS while we biked up and over big rocks and such. I had to get off my bike numerous times because I either: didn’t have enough momentum to get over a large rock or, my back tire would get stuck while my front tire was about to climb over a rock. We stopped about 3/4 of the way up as we were beat and this was our second official mountain biking outing.

On the way down, which was much more fun by the way, I fell off my bike FORWARDS and toward THE GROUND. I was actually barely moving on my bike when my front tire got lodged between two rocks and my leg was kind of trapped under my bike. Now I have a fairly large bump on the side of my right knee and it hurts to bend below a 90 degree angle. I can still walk though, so praise the flying spaghetti monster that I didn’t break anything (I think).

Last but not least, Tyler noticed on the way down that my buttocks region of my jeans looked like I had “taken a shit”. There were some muddy parts on the trail and my tire must have flung some mud into my ass as I was standing up on the ride down.