shawnbakken.net

Perhaps you’ve heard the adage: “Never shop hungry.” If you go to the grocery store with an empty stomach, you’re more likely to find the candy/chips/canned goods section, stick your arm out and run down the aisle, pouring everything on the middle shelf into your cart. When you finally check out and bring the food out to your car, you’re left wondering just how long you can survive eating nothing but lima beans. Recently, I discovered that the opposite is true as well: “Never shop full.”

After a large meal at Olive Garden—lots of pasta, soup and breadsticks—my parents and I went to pick up some food for the next couple days. We walked up and down the aisles… and didn’t want to buy anything. “We don’t need to have dinner, we can just starve tomorrow night.” At the time, it sounded like a reasonable proposal, reasonable enough that we followed through on it. Well, just the “not buying food” part. We didn’t starve the next night—we had plenty of lima beans from the last time we shopped hungry.

“Hello, my name is Shawn and I have a knee injury.”

It’s not a perfect comparison—there are no group meetings or sponsors—but I have been in rehab (i.e., physical therapy) for about two months and frequently feel the urge to relapse while watching my soccer team play. Then I bend my knee to a certain degree or twist my leg around and that urge goes away.

At least it did until last week. Before a game on Wednesday, I decided to help the keeper warm up by taking some shots on net. I felt okay after the first few times, so I started kicking the ball harder. Not as hard as possible, mind you—I thought keeping the ball in reach of the keeper was a little more important than powerfully sending it soaring up into the roof.

That five minutes or so felt great, but as the game progressed while I stood on the sideline, my knee started to let me know it was displeased. Very displeased. Ooh yeah, that was definitely a relapse. When I got home, I was having trouble walking up and down stairs again.

Thankfully, physical therapy has gone well enough that I recovered quickly and I’m doing all right. I went to the local YMCA today and rode on an exercise bike for about 20 minutes. I didn’t push myself really hard because I didn’t want to rupture anything, but after a semester of circuit training twice a week and then two months of not being able to work hard enough to break a sweat, those 20 minutes felt pretty good. As for my limping down the stairs towards the locker room afterward… I think it’s fair to say I haven’t graduated from KIA just yet.

A few days after I hurt my right knee playing soccer (the Sunday before Thanksgiving), it wasn’t getting much better—it was still really painful trying to bend around to put on socks and pants, let alone climb stairs—so I went to the doctor to have her take a look at it. (more…)

Interesting factoid of the day: if you’re having trouble waking up in the wee hours of the morning, you don’t need coffee, a cold shower or a quickie with your significant other (or a combination of the three, though I recommend you avoid bringing coffee into the shower with you). Nope, another excellent way to suddenly be wide awake is to have someone try to break into your house… while you’re home. (more…)

My plan tonight was to go out and meet friends at Khan’s Mongolian Barbecue, one of my favoritest restaurants ever. Yummy, yummy food. However, there are two locations in the Twin Cities—Richfield and Roseville—and I accidentally went to the wrong one. Oops…

As it turned out, that wasn’t an entirely bad thing. I was wandering around inside the restaurant looking for said friends and suddenly heard, “SHAWN!” I looked down and saw Matthew Feeney sitting in a chair right in front of me. He stood up and gave me a hug, then offered me a fortune cookie that the waiter had brought. Hey, I wasn’t gonna turn down a free fortune…

It wasn’t until later that I found out I’d gone to the wrong restaurant, but that cookie made the mistake totally worthwhile. I opened the cookie, ate it, then took a look at the fortune inside. We were playing the “in bed” game, adding that to the ends of the fortunes, and this has to be the best I’ve ever seen:

You will be happiest if you please yourself first.

Last week, I was talking to one of my classmates who has a tendency to arrive a minute or two after the class officially starts. I complained that he has an extra cushion to show up since his last name starts with an S, whereas mine starts with B. (When your last name is Bakken, you’re always gonna be near the top of the list for roll call.) I decided it was time for a little equality, so I bet him a nickel that the professor would take attendance in reverse for the next class. Not only did he accept my bet, he said he’d give me a whole five pennies instead of a nickel. How could I turn that down? (more…)

Ah, my not-quite-as-beloved-as-before Buffalo Wild Wings. We once relished each other’s company and felt that the world was at peace while we were together, even when the New York Yankees were in town. That’s when I would order my wings with the Caribbean Jerk sauce, which is indeed quite yummy. But now, whenever I see your logo on a store or a commercial—especially a commercial—I suffer from a horrible flashback of Thursday. Horrible, horrible, horrible…

In a way, it’s reminiscent of being on Beauty and the Geek. Various people across the nation loved Richard because they thought he was funny. Lemme tell ya, he’s a lot funnier when you only get a 20-minute dose of him every week. If you’re there all the time… it gets aggravating after a while.

Similarly, if you’re an extra for a 30-second commercial, people might love to see someone they know right behind one of the main actors. Lemme tell ya, that’s a lot funner (yes, I said funner) when you only see the 30 seconds. If you’re there for the entire filming session (this one in particular)… it gets way more than aggravating after a loooooong while. (more…)

2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 32 (unless my math is off, in which case someone should take my junior high math team trophy for 4th place in state and smash it 2 to the 5th power-th times). That number was really the most special part about it. Well, that plus my first time going dumpster diving.

My mom has been doing a lot of cleaning around the house. And when I say “cleaning”, I mean “throwing out lots of random crap that we don’t want or need.” Consequently, there have been a multitude of garbage bags that she’s asked me to toss into a local dumpster. That in itself generally isn’t a big deal. It’s only when she realizes there’s a bag in the corner that should have been tossed, which means there’s a bag in the dumpster that isn’t supposed to be there. Yeah, that’s a big deal.

So there we were, driving off into the distance at 10:00 at night—after all, we had to go out to a restaurant for my birthday dinner. I don’t really need a party with gifts and balloons, but those little ice cream sundaes with candles on them? They’re like heaven with whipped cream on top. Upon arriving at the dumpster, we turned on the headlights, grabbed a flashlight to shine inside and went digging. (Technically, I’m tall enough that I wasn’t actually diving in there, but grant me some creative license, wouldja?)

Thankfully, only a few more things had been added since I’d made my initial drop. Even more thankfully, none of those things tried to bite me or emit noxious fumes to knock me to the ground, twitching and foaming at the mouth. Nope, I just lifted a few things, saw the bag that shouldn’t have been there, switched it with the bag to throw out and headed home.

Admittedly, it wasn’t terribly exciting—not much of a story for the grandkids—but at least I can tell people that I have gone dumpster diving. On my birthday. After eating an ice cream sundae. And I never felt the urge to heave it back up into the dumpster 2 to the 5th power-th times, either. My junior high math teacher would be proud.

I visited my older brother Brent earlier today and Gemma, his daughter, introduced me to Wii Sports for the first time. Also for the first time, I was destroyed playing sports against someone who’s about 1/4 my age.

For those of you who don’t know, the Wii operates by using some funky motion sensors that allow it to detect when you move your hands, thus swinging a racket or a bat or throwing the controller through the TV screen. I’m sure the game interprets that last one pretty badly, but it’s hard to tell when there’s no screen anymore.

So during the course of our gaming, I was swinging myself around, getting all hot and sweaty and nasty, and I had very few positive results to show for it. Some of my not-so-shining moments included winning points in tennis because Gemma helped me win—she’d hit the ball when it was out of bounds because she wanted to play to deuce—I managed to get one hit out of the infield playing baseball and I discovered I’m very adept at rolling gutter balls when I’m bowling. The worst, though… I need to work on my boxing skills.

Or perhaps I just need to work on my Wii technique. Brent explained that not only do the sensors detect motion, they detect the way you’re pointing the controllers. Thus, when you’re pointing your hands forward instead of holding them upright, the punch will land lower on the target, which would explain my difficulties with one of the training exercises. The Nintendo trainer has a pad on each hand and holds them up one at a time for you to punch. Each time you hit a pad, you get a point. Each time you hit the trainer, you get minus one point.

Because I was having trouble with the controllers… I think a real trainer would have been a little pissed off. During the course of a minute, I managed to hit the pads 14 times, but I also punched him in the gut 24 times. That’s when I started to wonder if I might have been better off just throwing the controller at the TV screen—at least I would have only missed the pads once.

My journey home from work takes me up Interstate 35, which not-so-fortunately was under construction today. Going to work wasn’t much trouble, but coming back north… it was sloooooooow. Why? Because there was a section where the right lane was closed, leaving one open for everyone to squeeze through.

Naturally, there are the really annoying people who think they’re in a hurry or something, so while most good drivers merge into the left lane with plenty of space remaining, they blaze a trail up the empty lane and cut in at the last possible moment, perhaps even a little late, resulting in the harsh demise of an orange traffic cone or two. I hate that. I really do. They can’t be courteous drivers like the rest of us. Nope, they need to get ahead of you. Now. And it’s a two lane road, so what can you do?

Not much, unless you’re my hero of the day: a large semi who was tailing me at 80 mph. It was a little uncomfortable to have such a huge mass of steel driving so close behind me at that speed, but it’s not like I could pump the brakes to get him to back off—that’s a recipe for pancakes. Shawn-flavored pancakes. Once we got closer to that stretch of construction, though, everyone slowed down, so we were creeping along as the occasional annoying person buzzed past us.

After the first couple passed by, I glanced into my rear-view mirror and saw that the semi was drifting to the right. A lot. It kept drifting and drifting and drifting until it was straddling both lanes. And then it stayed there. Just moving along at the speed of sludge oozing downhill as cars… well, I’m not sure what they were doing behind the truck, but they sure as hell weren’t getting around it.

No more cars speeding by and slowing everyone down when they cut in at the last possible moment. Nope, just a bunch of us driving in the left lane followed by a very wide semi and what was probably a gigantic clusterfuck of cars and trucks right behind it. It felt like vindication without guilt because no one did anything wrong. Well, that whole “driving in both lanes” thing probably wasn’t “legal”, but I’d bet today’s paycheck that if a cop saw what was going on, he’d laugh so hard that he’d spray his half-chewed donut all over the windshield.

So to my hero of the day, thank you for making my drive home a much more enjoyable experience. As my way of saying thanks, I’d love to cook a meal for you sometime. Maybe pancakes. Any kind but Shawn-flavored.