Fat and Hippies

So I just got back from Ithaca where I was at a "retreat". Well, a retreat in the scientific sense whereby you go to some remote local with some sort of "nature" (hence the Ithaca) and stay inside, in the dark, all day listening to people talk in excrutiating detail about excrutiatingly detailed topics. The retreat was on the molecular biophysics of signal transduction which means that the topics ranged from lipids to proteins in lipids to proteins modified by lipids to proteins that sense lipids to proteins that make lipids. And phase diagrams.

We did get to stay in the Statler hotel, however, which is staffed by gays and Mormons. They also make the best cheesecake in the world. Not so much with the pastries.

They did let us out for an afternoon which was exciting because I got to see my friend Amy who never comes to visit me in the City because she's a dirty hippy who lives in a co-op with a three-legged cat and tree-huggers with names like "Grasshopper" and will probably write something nasty in my comment box because I've insulted her fragile sensibility and collarbone. She did, however, take me and Deirdre on a hike around Six Mile Creek. "Oh, it's just a short walk," she says. Um, yeah. Anyway, for those of you who don't know Ithaca very well, it is all up-hill. I know this sounds physically impossible but trust me; I walked everywhere and never went down.

So, anyway, we're walking along, getting attacked by dragonflies (I hate bugs, but dragonflies are the worst! They are ugly and nasty and I haven't figured out what they are useful for yet), when Amy realizes she took us a different way than she was planning and we might have to do a "bit of climbing." Um, yeah. Suffice it to say we did manage to scale the cliff we needed to scale in order to get to the naked man. I actually don't know why this 60 year old man was lying naked on a rock, balls to the wind, reading The Nanny Diaries, nor do I know why he gave us a dirty look when we walked by his naked ass. It wasn't like by lying naked he'd laid claim to that rock or anything, like that guy who licks the car door handle in that Volkswagen commercial. I don't know, maybe he didn't want us looking at his dick. Whatever. It's Ithaca. On our way back to campus (up-hill, of course) we passed a guy in his boxers climbing through the second-floor window of his apartment, which of course makes perfect sense. I mean, where are you going to carry your keys if all you're wearing is your underwear?

I was happy to get back to the City, though, even if the boy made me start running this morning. Thirty minutes and eighteen leg cramps later I still felt like crap. Endorphins, my buttocks. But at least I've found a good use for my $100 pair of running shoes. Violently kicking my boyfriend in the ass.