Spacemen by the seashore

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Well, real­ly space­men by the bayshore, but it sounds bet­ter with allit­er­a­tion. And I real­ly did­n’t want to lead with «Astro­nauts by the estu­ary» for lots of rea­sons, not least of which is that it isn’t actu­al­ly alliteration.

Street art is (some­times) fas­ci­nat­ing here in San Fran­cis­co. From stick­er­ers to mural­ists to… flat met­al cutouts of astro­nauts. On my run today I went past these and could­n’t quite believe my eyes. It was­n’t just one of these—there were four or five that I saw. Two were on land like the one pic­tured here and the oth­ers were out in the bay on the old rem­nants of long-for­got­ten piers. Every now and then this town reminds me why I live here.

I got a late start, but I was back home by noon so I can call it a morn­ing run. I’ve got a lot more to do today so I hope that was my good foun­da­tion for the rest of the day. I’m pret­ty tired but hope­ful­ly I’ll be refreshed by the time I get showered.

The run start­ed faster than I thought—10 or 11 min­utes per mile pace—but by the end of the first mile I had slowed to my reg­u­lar (hate to call it that) 13 minute mile pace. At 1.5 miles I took a walk break. No shame in that exact­ly, but if I want to do bet­ter I might have to go run­ning more than once a week.

Oth­er notable things from the run? Not much. There con­tin­ues to be a lot of con­struc­tion down the Third Street cor­ri­dor. I caught a pic­ture of these cranes think­ing they’d be the high­light of the run until I saw the flat steel space­men. Well, you get to see the cranes anyway.

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Published by splicer

2 Replies to “Spacemen by the seashore”

  1. Believe in yourself

    This is not real­ly a reply. It’s a new post.  I ran across this this morn­ing — one of those things where you open up a book to a ran­dom page and are struck by the rel­e­vance of what it opens to.  From the book “The 100 Sim­ple Secrets Of Hap­py Peo­ple,” by David Niv­en, Phd: 

    “Don’t write your­self off. If you don’t believe in your­self, you won’t be able to function.”

    “Steve Blass was a great major league pitch­er in 1972. In fact, he was one of the very best. One year lat­er, he was on his way out of base­ball. Did he get hurt? No. Did any­thing change?

    “One thing changed: Steve Blass lost his con­fi­dence. As Blass said, ‘When it was gone, it was gone for good.’ He start­ed think­ing about all the things that could go wrong, and sud­den­ly they did. Steve Blass no longer believed he could be a major league pitch­er, and before he knew it, he no longer was a major league pitcher.

    “The abil­i­ty to do any­thing must be accom­pa­nied by the belief that we can do it. As impor­tant as learn­ing how is learn­ing that you know how. There is an old say­ing, ‘Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, either way, you’re right.’ ”

     

    “Across all ages and all groups, a sol­id belief in one’s own abili­bies increas­es life sat­is­fac­tion by about 30 per­cent, and makes us hap­pi­er both in our home lives and in our work lives.”   Myers and Diener 1995

    Inter­est­ing­ly, the very next entry is titled:  “Don’t Believe in Your­self Too Much.”

  2. Either way, you’re right
    On bicy­cles and motor­cy­cles they tell you: always look where you want to be. If your eyes are fixed on that tree stump, you’ll prob­a­bly end up run­ning right into it. But even if you think you’re com­ing around a cor­ner too fast, you focus on the far­thest part of the road and that’s prob­a­bly where you’ll end up.

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