Warm Feet, Cold Head

In anticipation of the weather, today I wrapped my feet in socks and boots, and in between the two I stuck plastic baggies to keep my dry socks waterproof. It's a sad fact of winter in Chicago that, like Forrest Gump and his box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. What we've gotten for the past week is very soggy snow. I wear my Asics running shoes a lot and I'm always plotting my path to make sure I don't spend the day with wet feet. In the last couple of weeks, my big toes started poking out of holes in the top... luckily, they don't much care about the appearance of a Network Admin at work... and every time I walk on linoleum after a tour on wet pavement, my right shoe makes this weird, tiny squishing sound that I like but others doubtless find annoying. I can afford shoes, but these ones are veterans of the Chicago Marathon 2007 (AKA the Bataan Death Marathon) and I've only just gotten around to breaking them in. At any rate, no squishy sounds coming from my feet today, just warmth radiating away from industrial-strength leather and soles thick enough to make me as tall as Tim Ryder. If you know or are Tim, you know that's an accomplishment and, hopefully, a compliment.

Still, on the opposite side of my body, my head is cold today because I finally got a haircut last night. I'd ignored my head since we shot "The Crashers," and it was not flattering to me in the slightest. My hair doesn't get long so much as big. Much as I tried to pin it down by shampooing and conditioning, it still sprouted out like a big gray-brown dandelion. Lucky they don't care much about my appearance at work, but at some point I figured I had to do something about it. With Brandi busy working up Super Tuesday stats at wgntv.com, and a temporary reprieve from the gym due to my having donated blood, I headed out to the SuperCuts to get the kind of buzz that won't get you in trouble with the law. At least, here.

• As a sidebar, the dude cutting my hair was very cool, and covered in tattoos. I noticed one on his arm was kind of mechanical, put two and two together and said, "You've got a cyborg arm tattoo!" He was impressed; apparently, in the two years since he got the tattoo, nobody had realized it was supposed to look like his skin was peeled away, exposing the mechanics underneath. Looked pretty obvious to me. Then again, part of me secretly believes I'm surrounded by robots anyway, so you'll forgive me if I treat this as proof.
• As another sidebar, to finish up my college English degree, I took a summer class in differential equations. The most interesting part of that class was the equation for finding out the temperature of a body colder or warmer than its surroundings. As the body approaches the ambient temperature, it slows the rate of its cooling, so you cannot chart the change in temperature linearly. That's where differential equations--mathematics in which the output of one equation feeds into itself at a different point in time or space--come in, to help you calculate the temperature of the object at any time. The same equations are used in chaos theory to make those cool graphics and loose weather predictions and by Jeff Goldblum in "Jurassic Park" to explain why dinosaur containment will inevitably fail.
  

I guess the rest of this story is anticlimactic. I got enough taken off that anyone who doesn't notice the change isn't looking or hasn't seen me in two and a half months. I'm looking forward to running and swimming again, having now recovered enough blood or at least fluid to keep me conscious, and having lost enough hair that I can keep cool even in a mild sprint. I used to like winter so much, but now I just wish it were as simple as the other seasons.

Sigh.