In sitting with her and keeping her talking, it came out that she had two very accomplished children whom she always referred to in the past tense. "She was very smart. She spoke perfect Mandarin. And Italian and French and German. She had an MBA from Georgetown. Did you ever meet a girl who spoke perfect Mandarin?" And: "I have a beautiful son. He's a model for Ralph Lauren. People ask me how can. He says Mom, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. He said he doesn't know if he likes girls better than men."

"I must seem very old," she muttered.

The anticlimactic ending was that she was fucking plastered. It was the carefully controlled kind of a professional alcoholic, not the frat guy on spring break. The third guy with us -- young and punkish looking -- told us that he'd been to AA meetings, that she'd mentioned her failed AA attempts too, that he'd seen this before, that calling the police would be the betrayal of being turned in. It was too late to change that. The police officers who came were very, very understanding but firm enough to convince her, eventually, to get in the back of the car and let them drive her home. I wish it had been Alzheimer's.

There's the tiniest of rises on the Memorial Hall Criterium course. It's not even a true slope -- just a change in the camber of the surface, a dip down and back up from the storm drain in the far corner. But it's there.

We rolled up to the line at the front, Stacey's confidence stemming quite legitimately from her dominating finishes in Open Women's events so far this spring, mine from osmosis through our matching orange and blue Kissena kit. It was gorgeously sunny, just shy of 70 degrees, with a slight wind kicking up in the back stretch. "25 laps?!" we exclaimed. "I can't count that high!"

Indeed the first handful seemed interminable. I didn't even let myself look at the counter for a while, and spent the first few laps just telling myself I had to constantly move up the field. Road racing is pass/fail: the drafting advantage, at 20-30%, is so dramatic that if you're not in the group, you're out of contention. And in a criterium --a short, fast, dynamic race around a short loop -- if you're not moving up, someone else is passing you and you're moving backward. Earlier this year, I'd already entered a couple of tough races and, well, failed. I rode the last 30 miles of Battenkill solo (but still considered it a relative success, with riders dehydrating and craming and dropping out left and right). I wanted the taste of fast I'd gotten in a last-lap break at an early bird crit in 2006, when all of my friends lived 40 miles north and instead of the usual early-twenties pursuits I rode my bike all the time.

But suddenly I looked up, and the lap counter read 17 to go. The puzzle began to fit together. Either the pace slowed down or my body settled in; either way, I was no longer gasping for breath. In fact, I was finding good lines in the corners and feeling confident that I could finish with the pack -- a total tipping point. I started to focus on technique: Sprint hard out of turn 4. Actually, stand and sprint out of turn 4. Actually, take the outside line and stand and sprint hard out of turn 4. Actually, shift up two gears, try the inside line, and stand and sprint hard out of turn 4.

I heard a bell, annoucing an intermediate sprint for prizes. We turned some more, soft-pedaled again in the back stretch. I was focused on another tiny tweak to turn 4, reverting to the outside again, when I realized I was coming super strong out of it and heard a voice behind yell, "Go go go, gear up! Gear up!" I racheted up two on the rear and accelerated clear to the line by a pretty long lead.

It took a moment to process that I'd won that sprint. They say there's no pain without gain. But like Bicycling Mag blogger Selene Yeager, my best performances are usually when I'm feeling strong and happy and drowning in my own endorphins. That's what had happened.

Stacey was next to me in a couple of winks: "We can stay away." No answer from me. I was trying to process how that would work. She'd pull, I'd sit on? Long rotations? Short? I'd pull for a couple laps until she could make a definitive solo? "Do you have it?" she prompted. I didn't think so -- I desperately wanted to finish with the pack, I was breathing more than a little hard from the effort, and there were at least 10 to go.

She called it, and we drifted back. I hated to do this -- a break with Stacey would have been awesome, and who knows how much longer she'll be riding in the 4s. But I desperately wanted to pass this one, to finish with the pack. I spent the next few laps trying to plot a good course for the finish. The mind wandered a bit too far ahead, and so I fell into the latter half of the pack; here, there was a tremendous metal-on-metal sound to my back left. We rode on; the next lap was sort of neutralized until we saw two riders both sitting up. The incident was only a few laps from the finish -- it left me a bit distracted. The pack had started to string out in front, and I was looking at the couple of women just ahead of me when I should have been looking up the field. When I realized during the 3rd stretch that they'd taken off in the front, they were already halfway. I forgot to shift and just started moving my legs -- fast enough to glide past one woman, but not fast enough for any fun. I sat up after the line and saw Stacey far off the front -- sure enough, she'd crossed the line first. I counted in front of me: nine bodies, so I'd snuck into tenth.

I've been moaning a lot of late about how the cycling hasn't been fun lately -- it's a lot of hard work and awkward hours right now, but I know it'll make me faster in the end. Well, I got an appetizer. Tenth isn't super considering 24 starters, but it's definitely with the pack and enough to keep me salivating for more. In the meantime, I'm really happy with the intermediate sprint, for which I also won a shiny new Project Rudy helmet!

Extra-special thanks to my breakfast-maker (one egg, corn tortilla, hot sauce, and a square of extra-dark chocolate at the line) and tire-inflater (my valve was being finicky and I, panicky), to Wan whose months of training I didn't get to witness or celebrate because the NJ Marathon finished right around the same time as my race, the race promoters for supporting Women's 4 racing (a rarity on the east coast). I've been whining indiscriminately of late about riding as a chore; I knew I could taste fast but also knew I had a lot of work to do to get there. Now, between the mix of great teammates and shimmering spring weather and a little bit of discernable progress, I'm loving riding again. And now off to log some more hours and miles in the saddle, so I can fly in some road races as well.

Home can be about architecture or a place in geography; or it can be about the sense of permanence we come to know through habit: an article of clothing repeatedly worn, a favorite turn of phrase, a melody of which we are fond, or the many visits to see a friend. Home is about the familiar, about gravity, about falling back into the self after being dispersed and overextended in the world.

Last week, my pet project at work launched! I work on Google Docs, and we've just added spreadsheet forms. Forms are designed for anyone who needs a simple way to collect information from many people, and keep that information where it's always accessible and up-to-date. Creating and sending a form is dead easy, but the best part is that now you can invite anybody with an email account to add content to your spreadsheet.

For a while now, the project and the small team behind it have embodied the Google engineering atmosphere at its best (or my favorite): creative, unique, slightly chaotic, independent, nimble. I'm pleased as punch that we can now share our work with the world.

On the flip side, exactly a week later, I turned 25! My design teammates from near and far surprised me with cupcakes. My engineering teammates went out for a launch dinner that night, and dessert came with a candle in it. Brenna of sweet smiles and blow-your-mind vascular engineering came to visit on either end of a work trip upstate. The first real snow of the year came down thick and fast that evening. And in the very nicest fashion, Mikl was there to share much of that. Worlds collided, and collided well.

I also got visited at work (thanks Allie!), text messaged, emailed, IMed, voicemailed, Facebook messaged — doubly fêted for the launch and the birthday. The swarm of small hellos from friends near and far have burrowed themselves deep in my bones. I'll be warmed from the inside out for a while yet.

Most of the hullaballoo is over now, and I'm left with what feels like a lifetime supply of very delicious red velvet cupcakes. If you're in the New York area, consider yourself invited for tea and cake. Over and out.

1. I've thought Obama was the better option throughout this entire primary season. I've donated to his campaign. And now I reluctantly conclude that Hillary Clinton really shone in tonight's debate. She showed real passion and hands-on knowledge (proper nouns, dates, figures) with all of the different policy points that were debated. Obama seemed to speak only in generalitied and themes. I think he cares about people at the community and philosophical levels; Clinton seems to care at the personal, practical, and policy levels. Who to vote for? Call me undecided!

2. Both candidates are ignoring the primary piece of the US healthcare condundrum. Whether or not they can pay the bill afterwards, people first need to know where to turn for medical professionals they can trust.

The scariest, darkest, most hopeless feeling doesn't come when you don't know how to handle a situation. It comes when you don't know where to turn for help, care, or expertise. I'm young and relatively healthy, with great insurance -- so healthy, in fact, that I'd never established a regular relationship with a GP doctor in this town. When I received a mild concussion from a skiing accident, I didn't have a GP to call and wound up in the emergency room. When a friend in similar circumstances developed a stomachache, he didn't have a regular doctor to phone either, and delayed seeking care until he had a badly ruptured appendix and 9 days of hospitalization.

What to do? America has many of the best medical specialists in the world, but we're abysmally bad at the next 98%. Promote routine care in the form of nurse practitioners, urgent care centers and clinics. Not only does this relieve the burden on our emergency medical system and its high expenses, it gives patients the chance to build a relationship with healthcare professionals. Clinics should be like Apple Genius Bars: you can walk in off the street or make an appointment on short notice, you meet with professionals who are knowledgeable and passionate, and they work with you to find solutions that are in your best interest, sometimes sacrificing immediate profit for the system but gaining in long-term loyalty and fluency.

The verses are happy and rolling and describe a charmed life... which
seems not unrelated to ours in happy families, fancy colleges,
generous friends, and of course the absurd work environment that is
Google (I found a cupcake at work last Friday! ...whilst in pursuit of
fro-yo, no less):

If I ever cried, I knew it wouldn't last.
Candy bars I split, I got the big half.
Knew I had strong legs and I could run fast.

and

I lived up on the mountain and the view was long.
Knew the band would always play my favorite song.
Crowd of strangers, I knew just how to belong.

Then the chorus, with a tune just as snappy, but lamenting the loss of
her one true love, and inexplicably hinting that it was connected to
this charmed life.

Of course, ruminating on that gave me a minor quarter-life crisis. And
so I thought you might like to hear it too. Besides, it's a pretty tune:
"One True" by Uncle Earl

Hawaii is noisy. Noisy, noisy, noisy. Winds sweep the palm fronds just outside this house until. Just before dawn, a veritable din of birdsong swells such that it's impossible to distinguish any one call. "I wake up when the birds sing," says my cousin's four-year-old. Not a bad way to go, really, and somewhere between the lovely symphony and running on eastern standard time I've been waking at dawn too.

Hawaii is also a place where I'm invisible -- where I look just like the next girl, and the next, and the next. I don't think I've ever been in a place where this is true, and I didn't realize how different this can feel until now. It's a neat feeling. In the mainland U.S. I'm obviously asian, though I sometimes get mistaken for filipino or even sometimes hawaiian. In Taiwan where I last visited five years ago, I had a distinctly different -- American -- body structure, a different way of walking, a different way of looking at people and things.

I only run when socially pressured, which is how I ever started running Reach the Beach, and basically how this recent singularity occurred too. Wan-Ju is trying to convince me to run the Big Sur marathon at the end of April. I've promised to try training for two weeks, including several hilly days in Santa Cruz on an upcoming work trip, and then decide. So far, I'm loving the mornings across the Brooklyn Bridge and back. But my bike misses me.

I think it's that rents are lower for "safe"-feeling neighborhoods, which is sadly more important to females, and is in particular one of my reasons for living here. I could probably find the same apartment for a similar price in far west Chelsea or the edges of the LES, but not getting whispered lecheries or randomly touched in subway stations and generally feeling free is worth the extra commute time.

A few months ago, quite early on a weekday evening, I was standing on the Q platform at the yuppiest of yuppie stations, Union Square, when a guy deliberately stroked my chin for a moment before walking past. Unfortunately my reflexes were too slow to push him off the platform; instead I sort of stewed in this incident for weeks until I talked to another friend, who revealed that a somebody had walked by and touched her thigh. And then another friend in that conversation opened up, and another.

Sixty-nine percent of respondents to a recent online survey have been sexually harassed; 10% have been sexually assaulted. Read more at "Subway Harassment Questionnaire Garners a Big Response" in the NYTimes.

That seems to be true of every city I've spent time in other than New York.

New York City is chock full of human beings. A tiny thing like leaving the lobby at work means walking past one construction worker, three security guards, four jaded women standing in a gaggle at the front door, one wan and skinny-jeaned drama queen on a cell phone, and a confused babushka wondering what the hell happened to her dear old Chelsea. I've a theory that transportation time can be measured by people-distance: walking a block past a dozen brownstones with a hundred swaming denizens takes the same effort as driving or biking past the same number in lawn-bordered colonials.

Officially, we have 8.2 million people in New York. C(8.2 million, 2) is about 672 trillion possible encounters. It's too many people to make human contact with everyone whose path I cross. And so I glare my way through most of my days.

One of the methods for achieving kaizen was obsessive field research, and the article detailed the personas used in developing and then marketing Toyota's first full-size truck, the Tundra:

1) fishers and outdoorsmen; 2) home-improvement types; 3) Nascar fans; 4) motorcycle enthusiasts; and 5) country-music lovers.

What's strange about this picture? None of these categories are necessarily truck drivers, or even comment directly on driving needs. (In the vein of, say, road trippers, cargo haulers, errands-around-towners.) They're all orthogonal to the product.

When you focus specifically on usage of the product, you end up with feature-driven needs like "rack for sheetrock", "great handling" or "good sound system". Go one step backward to the contexts surrounding their usage, and you'll find needs like "big gear knob" because, for example, construction workers often leave their work gloves on all day.

I have no memory of the two or five minutes right around midday on Saturday. Apparently a an out-of-control snowboarder slammed into me in a blind spot on a trail right under a liftline at Mt. Snow. I say "apparently" because I don't remember this, nor the few minutes after when everybody came running up the hill at me, and I asked my new friend for his name and my old friends what had happened. I was strapped to a backboard and ski patrolled down to the base, where they did a pretty cursory check, we all ate some lunch, and I went back out for two more (slightly timid) runs before calling it quits. The best part about not remembering the impact is not having its fear. (But I think I'll be wearing a helmet from now on.)

All told, I got off easy. Both the base clinic and the emergency room at New York Methodist (where I spent all of Sunday afternoon) determined that there was nothing permanently wrong with me; I have what's known as a "moderate" concussion. There's a spot in my head that hurts if there's quick motion, and a bit of whiplash. My eyelids are bruised at the corners and they're starting to swell up in the evening. But that's about it.

I want my minutes back, though. As the bruises have pooled up a bit today, so has the anxiety, the introspection, the squeamishness. There's a part of me that wants to see angles and trajectories and impacts. And mostly the expression on "Caleb"'s face in the moment he decided not to stick around. I need neiter apologies nor vengeance; I just want to know.