Category: Personal (Page 20 of 26)

Five years ago today on the Ideapad: “It is enough for you to know that I am dizzily happy these days.”

Today? More on the side of contented than vertiginous, to be accurate, but no less happy. Owning a dog will do that to you.

I am also drawn to post right above that one: “One cannot understate the elation of shopping for pants after a successful diet and discovering that all the pants at one’s usual size are, suddenly, too big in the waist.” Apparently the first week of May 2001 was a good time to be me. (Note to self: keep dieting!)

Me, October 2000: “But man, the bread is good.”

Me, March 2002: “They bought two petit baguettes and a pair of croissants and a pain au chocolat. … They ate their breakfast in relative quiet, drinking the bottled water instead of the champagne, enjoying their last few hours in the Parisian spring air..”

Me, February 2005: “Voila!—your baguette is piping hot and quite wonderful.”

I am back in Paris, and you, dear reader, have no idea how fucking hard it is to observe Passover right now.

If you’re looking for me, I’m in New York for a few hours today (and yesterday), mid-step between vacation (out of the continental U.S.) and travel for business (also outside the States), in what seems like perpetual motion. Three trips to three different locations for three-fourths of a four-week span is more tiring than expected. Still fun, though.

So much time and so little to do…. Strike that, reverse it.

Because it’s been awhile:

~ How are you? Me, I’m ready to diet and exercise more regularly. I hope to go to yoga (yoga! for the second time!) tonight.

~ Somehow I made it through the past two weeks without posting about the weather. The latter half of January was way too warm for my tastes. What will July bring?

~ Remind me to tell you sometime about my jinxed Hawaii vacation.

~ One of the few consistent joys in life is owning a dog. (You know, this guy.)

~ Go Steelers!

Some of us make our careers in traditional ways. I, for example, work on the Internet, and am at a desk or in a conference room much of the day.

My wife, on the other hand, does stuff like this:

Ever have food poisoning? Let me tell you about food poisoning.

Food poisoning is having what you think is a good meal and going to sleep as though your life will be normal the next day, even though you are about to forget the definition of the word “comfortable” for the next two days. Then it’s waking up and thinking something is wonky in your stomach, and maybe dinner didn’t sit right, but you didn’t eat the four-cheese appetizer, so what’s the big deal?

Next comes a few hours of internal wooOOooOOooOOoo, as though your stomach is working hard to keep things running properly, coupled with weird waves of “man I just don’t feel good” that don’t quite match a stomachache but they’re coming on stronger and stronger and ew is that nausea? because nausea is just the last thing you want to deal with and maybe if you had some flat Coke you could calm down a bit, or maybe a nap is a good idea.

Ah, and then you’ll get the idea that you should power through your queasiness and just eat something, because maybe you just need a fresh base in your system. This is usually the fatal error. It doesn’t take long before your insides figure it out: “that’s it, we need a full evacuation, stat.”

A few minutes later you find yourself crouched in front of a porcelain bowl, food coming out of the wrong end of your body, ignoring the normal exit routes and infiltrating your nostrils, with none of the “thank goodness that’s over I feel better now” that often accompanies such a session, and that’s when the realization sets in: this is food poisoning.

From there it mercilessly goes downhill. You spend the next 24 hours drifting in and out of sleep, lying virtually immobile in your bed because shifting sides only encourages the sickness to emerge. Every hour or two you return to your knees, your body forcing you to push all remnants of external substance out of your system, your body straining and convulsing relentlessly, your face dripping with sweat, your body teaching you where the phrase “violently ill” originated.

Every episode, every moment is painful: not just the vomiting but the coughs and and the tiredness and the muscle strains in your neck and your chest that will linger for days. Your head hurts, your mouth goes dry, your nose bleeds. You get hot, you get chills, you perspire continuously. You burst capillaries around your temples, or maybe on your eyelids or, if you’re really hard-core, directly in your eyeballs, causing weird red welts in your eyes or even filling the whites of your eyes with blood that lingers for weeks after the sick leaves your body.

And then there’s the comedown, once you’ve gone nine or 12 hours without retching and 30 or more hours without food, when you force yourself to eat that first saltine and a few sips of flat cola, which aren’t the least bit appetizing and serve only to strike fear deep within you, that maybe you’re still under the poison spell and are tempting your stomach to strike back; and those blissful moments a few hours later when you finally, finally rediscover hunger.

This, dear reader, is food poisoning. I should know: I’ve endured it twice, most recently this week, conveniently timed to obliterate the bulk of a vacation in Florida.

EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS: if only.

My grandmother passed away yesterday.

– Death notice, Newark Star-Ledger

– How I like to remember her

Let the official record show that Grandma made a mean hamantaschen (and kreplach and mocha cake and rugelach). The rest is a fond, kind memory best shared offline.

Not only is the design and programming on this site ancient, the whole concept is, too: Tuesday marks the Ideapad’s seventh birthday. Been a bit quiet in the main column of late, but the linklog on the right is busy as usual.

This past weekend I ventured to Lancaster, Pa., for the first time in nine years. Franklin & Marshall College was celebrating its annual Homecoming, and as a graduate of the Class of 1995, I joined numerous friends at our 10-year reunion.

(What follows is not a pristine op-ed so much as an opinionated summary of events at the request of several colleagues. Click Read More if you’re interested in the rest.)

This past weekend I ventured to Lancaster, Pa., for the first time in nine years. Franklin & Marshall College was celebrating its annual Homecoming, and as a graduate of the Class of 1995, I joined numerous friends at our 10-year reunion.

Superficially, the weekend was a success. Campus looked great, as it often does; I saw friends with whom I reconnected, places full of fond memories, and acquaintances who made me smile. My dorms, apartment, frat house, newspaper office, radio station: all intact, and not much worse for wear. The new buildings and pathways on campus look great, and Homecoming events were well-organized.

However.

My satisfaction was tempered significantly by the annual alumni meeting of my fraternity, Phi Kappa Sigma, where the brotherhood learned about the dire straits the active membership faces—an effect that stems directly from the re-recognition of Greek life last year. Our officers made clear that should the school bar a freshman pledge class this spring, Phi Kap—a 151-year-old organization, the oldest of its kind at F&M, and the third-oldest active chapter of the fraternity—could face extinction. While the national chapter shares blame for the severity of the situation, the assumption here is that the school would cry no tears should the fraternity disappear, the alumni equivalent of rooting for a 38-year-old ballplayer whose team is patiently waiting for his contract to end.

Similarly, those who attended the Class of ’95 Reunion Dinner came away thoroughly disappointed with its execution. For $30 a head, we were brought to what used to be the dining hall and treated to a tiny and inexpensive buffet dinner: gnocchi with sausage, “cheesesteak wraps,” some soup and salad, and a do-it-yourself mashed potato bar. The beer and wine served at the bar hardly made up the cost difference. Let me also throw into the mix the fact that barely half of our class alumni council attended the dinner they organized. I should have followed their example.

By griping to a powerless audience, I am apparently preaching to the choir, too; I heard this weekend about classmates who stopped participating in alumni organizations after tiring of making suggestions that were summarily ignored. Never one to stand idly by, I post this in the hope that people react in a positive manner. I even called the alumni office to request a refund on the dinner. (At least the College Reporter, the campus newspaper, is on an upswing and run by editors who are dedicated and proud.)

As a result, I unfortunately stand by much of my statement from April, however disillusioned and acerbic the tone. F&M remains a beautiful and welcoming school, but it has flaws that endanger the lifestyle and culture that made me proud to have gone there. One would think a bad dinner wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it’s actually a microcosm of the past year, the generic emails and profit-first nature of the campus thrown into bold relief.

At least my trip turned out as expected. Nice trip to school? Check. Show Lancaster County to my (good sport and rather patient) wife? Check. Get a reminder of how the school is treating me as an alumnus and a Greek associate? Big, fat, ugly check. And a check, by the way, is what F&M won’t be receiving from me, since voting with my pocketbook is the most surefire way to get the school to take notice.