Food

I'd like to think that over the last half year or so I've developed healthier eating habits. The lunches have gotten smaller, the trips to the pizza place across the street have become less frequent, and I've started eating much more veggies and fruits.
All adult and grown-up like.
I've even started going to the gym several times a week over the last few months. While I'm far from what people might consider a health freak, the gym visits have become a bit of a habit, and I've started feeling much better.
I know this might be too much information, but tonight at the gym, I killed off 470 calories (basically my lunch) on the elliptical machine thing. Yay Mike, right?
Not quite. This evening, I had an urge for Burger King, where I got a chicken sandwich and large french fries. Out of curiousity (and arguably, sheer stupidity), I checked out the nutrition board for what I just ate. I was under no illusion that what I had was in any way healthy, and that was proven to me. 510 calories for the sandwich, and 500 for the large fries. (I'm not even going to get into the fat content.)
Dude. Ouch. It wasn't even that good.
I feel something approaching guilt!

Bookstores are dangerous

There's something quite interesting about having worked at a bookstore. Spending so much time there a few years ago, I looked at tons of books that I thought would be interesting to read.
However, at that time, the number of books I wanted to read far exceeded the available resources I had to get them. So, of course, I forgot most of the books that interested me back then.
Now, I've noticed an interesting trend. Books I've lately been recommended are books that I originally wanted to read, or have lead me to them. The book "Yes Man" by Danny Wallace lead me to a book called "Join Me," in which the author puts an advert in the paper saying only "join me." People did.
Another book is "Honeymoon with My Brother." The author's fiance leaves him a few days before the wedding. Everything from the wedding to the honeymoon is paid for already, so instead of letting it go to waste, he takes his brother along to what would have been the honeymoon. They like the vacation so much they give up their jobs and keep on traveling for the next two years.
Not a bad gig if you can get it.

In which I'm completely judgmental

MTV has two "documentary" type shows at the moment. One is "My Sweet 16" or something like that, where these kids throw outrageously expensive parties for their 16th bithday. The other is a show called "Juvies," which is about kids who get themselves in trouble and wind up in Juvenile Hall.
Honestly, I can't figure out which group to be more disturbed by. I'm saddened by the kids from Juvies because they are innocent victims of our age and society, and they have so few role models. In one way, the kids from the Sweet 16 show make me kinda ill too, as they are aggressively vacuous and self-absorbed kids consumed by an intense materialism. However, they are victims as well, in this case, of extremely poor parenting in almost every way that is leaving kids wholely unprepared for the real world. (Oh my God, I just had a scary thought. Maybe these rich kids are being well prepared for their real world. If that's the case, Fuck. I'm heaing off to the mountains.)
Either way, it shows that we are heading to hell in a handbasket.
UPDATE: OK, I guess I'm making some rather vast generalizations, which is never a good idea. Sometimes I type without necessarily putting too much thought into it. Eh.

I'd like to thank...

I've been watching the snow fall for the last few hours. It hasn't accummulated all that much, but it's early yet.
Tonight are the Oscars. I'm not terribly interested in them this year, but I think I'll still tune in. I think I've only seen one movie that was nominated for Best Picture - Little Miss Sunshine.
I don't really know all the nominees for this year, but I'd like Martin Scorcese to win for Best Director and Little Miss Sunshine for Best Movie. It had a great script and a great cast, and basically, it was this year's Little Movie That Could. I always like those.
Of course, it could just be another year where they throw awards at Clint Eastwood.

NYC

I went to see the roommie's band(Mouth of Wilson) last night at a place in NYC. I got up there fairly late, but as there were yet to go on, I decided to pop out for a quick slice somewhere.
I have a theory: when you need a starbucks, they are impossible to find. Apparently, the same is true for pizza places. Who'd have thought? I ambled about, several blocks in each direction, but to no avail, so I gave up and found a deli for a sandwich.
I was bloody hungry, so I started eating on the way back to the bar. It allowed me to slow down a bit, and I looked up.
NYC still floors me. It's the coolest. And here I was at 11 on a Saturday night (I wish I could say it was 10:15, alluding to the Cure song, but oh well) eating a deli sandwich, right in the middle of it.
I think I could dig it there, for sure.
It's nice to slow down now and again to soak it all up.

Ice eventually melts. Yay!

After a lazy start to the Sunday morning, I hopped into the car and took a tour of all my summer haunts to see what they look like in the winter, all snow and ice covered.

On a completely arbitrary note, I was going to name this post "Ain't no cure for the summertime blues." (It's a lyric from an Eddie Cochran song from the 50s.) However, it's not the summer and I don't have the blues, so it doesn't quite fit.
Why hasn't Eddie Cochran been treated to a Hollywood biopic yet? He had a huge, huge hit in "Summertime Blues" and died tragically and quite young in a car crash, not too long after his good friend. Buddy Holly, died in the plane crash. Isn't that usually the stuff biopics are made of? What does a dude need to do to have a biopic made?

It's, like, uh, really cold

We had ourselves a little bit of an ice storm today! Throughout the whole night l, I could hear tiny little ice pellets bounce off my window (which can be maddening after a while if you let it.)
Given this ice storm, I had myself a free day, as work was closed. Not bad! It did, however, feel like a Saturday, which sadly it isn't.
I didn't do all that much, so to make up for my day of slack I'm going to write something.
I finished reading Yes Man last night, and what I got out of it is that people create their own opportunities by being open and positive. One doesn't need to necessarily say yes to everything, but it's a good thing to be open to the possibilities and to determine whether your choices create positive or negative effects. I guess it's kind of like karma.
I don't want to spoil anything of the book, so I'm not gonna say what part of the book possessed me to look at flights to California.
I've always wanted to go, and I've said many times that I was planning it, but I never really carried it out. I think I made the process much too complicated and tried to plan too much, when all I needed was to get on a bloody plane and figure it all out when I got there (ok, maybe I'd reserve a rental car first). I put these ideas on pedestals and I want and require them to be perfect, but things never are, so the idea doesn't become reality. Sometimes things just need to be what they are. At least things happen that way!
Well, I looked at flights for this weekend, and not too surprisingly, they were quite expensive. They got a bit better over the following weekends, but the further away they were from last night, the more hesitation I had. I'm not the most spontaneous person in the world, but if I found a good flight for this weekend, there would have been no hesitation whatsoever. I would have loved to have been gone this weekend, as it ain't getting any warmer here! However, $1100 seemed quite a chunk to part with for spontaneity.

I'm happy, hope you're happy too

Wow.
A friend just reminded me that in my sophmore year at UF, I thought it would be a great idea to move to Athens, Ga., to start a band. The band would have been called "Do you want fries with that."
Unfortunately, I am not kidding. If I had been serious and taken me up on that offer, I would have undoubtedly been asking people if they want fries with their meal.
Actually, come to think of it, I think there might have been considerable alcohol consumption involved to prompt that idea. Whew. Thank God that idea wasn't born out of sensibility.
On an unrelated note: I read an article in New York magazine that talked about how people in their late teens and early 20s are willing to talk about everything online, baring their souls, essentially, and not really concerning themselves with the consequences or their eventual loss of privacy. What an amazing difference 10 or so years make...I feel myself to be fairly open here, but I am fully aware of who reads this now and who may read this in the future, and I censor myself accordingly. (Granted, I'd rather not, but such is life. God knows what I'd say otherwise.) Younger folks, according to this article, seem not to have this filter.
Read more here.

As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.

Louder!

Why the hell did I never get into Jimi Hendrix earlier? My God. I suppose everything in its time. I remember my friends listening to this stuff - loudly - in school. Thought it was cool, but never quite got sucked in.
I usually have a rule that you can't ever go wrong with 7 minute long rock songs, a rule that has served me well. I just put a 15 minute version of Voodoo Child on the 'puter. There are several more that go over 10 minutes.
Wow. How is that even possible?
I went off the the record exchange in Princeton during lunch, and I got a couple of good finds. Prince's "1999", because I had the song "Delirous" stuck in my head, and a Bruce Springsteen video anthology on DVD. Sweet.

Roads

Yesterday, I went off for one of my drives that I usually save for warmer months. I didn't really have a plan in my mind but to explore for a few hours, but I did end up staying on familiar roads for the most part.
I drove through one intersection somewhere in Bucks County, and as I drove through, I looked off to the road on the right and saw that it extended for a quarter mile or so until a curve and the hills hid it from view. I kept on going straight, but I felt a longing to take that road, so much so that I wanted to turn around and check it out. Something about it seemed very interesting and compelling and new, but the thing about intersections is that in order to choose one way to go you have to forego the others. And the road you've taken leads to its own, new intersections, where you'll have to make the same choice again. All those other roads and intersections that you left behind become illusions.
Of course, driving gives me a great opportunity to ponder, so driving past that road I wanted to take lead me to think of the choices I've made over my life that have left me here in an old white house in New Jersey.
1) In high school, I applied to two colleges, getting into both. I got into a school called Oxford College, which was an entryway into Emory University. I didn't go because they didn't have an architecture program, and headed off to the University of Florida.
2) After a first year at college that I consider disastrous on several fronts, I had to think of another direction for my life to take, as being an architect wasn't in the cards. I chose to go for an English degree, with the idea of becoming a teacher so that I could have a career as I pursued writing. (If I could go back, I'd slap myself.)
3) In the summer of 95, I worked as a camp counselor at a camp in north Georgia, teaching tennis and making sure 7-8 year olds didn't hurt themselves or each other. I learned rather quickly that I'd rather not become a teacher, as it would involve having to deal with 20 to 30 things at once, and I'm not any good at that. While I finished off my degree, I was essentially directionless after that.
4) After graduating, I had a choice of continuing the path I had chosen or going on a completely different one. I went back to school, but this time with specific goals in mind, which I did eventually meet.
5) In 1999, I gave myself two options. My sis lived in Knoxville, TN., and my parents had just recently moved to Princeton, NJ. So, since I wanted family somewhere close, I would look in those two places for work. I stayed in K-ville for a few weeks while my sister and bro-in-law where in Europe and diligently looked for work. One interview that didn't lead anywhere. I headed on up to NJ, where on my first day there, my dad gave me a copy of the classifieds and said "Look for work."
I found a job here first, but who knows how different my life would have been if I had stuck it out in Tennessee. I love it there.
I guess I could go on and on, but as I said, you think only in illusions if you dwell on where you could have gone by deciding differently (I'm aware of my tendency to this). It stops up from living in the now. Now is where it's at!

Spam!

Who knows how long these sketches will remain up on YouTube, but if you happen to like Monty Python, take a look:
59 amazing sketches of the Monty Python

Flying

Due to HR switching vacation policies around, I have a boatload of vacation days stored up that I need to use before June. I kinda figured I'd use them all in one go and set aside two weeks around the end of May.
So, today I plopped the paperwork down and got down some firm dates...between May 18 and June 4, I will be elsewhere, absolutely, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Vacation yay!
I'm planning on heading over to Switzerland to visit the family, and later, with my erstwhile vacation buddy and former college roommate Greg, we're gonna head off to the South of France and follow the coast on the way down to Spain. Should be killer, but seeing as how we've done no planning, we may need to get started.
I'm not a big fan of the flying, however. Even the act of checking flights made me kinda apprehensive this morning. I don't necessarily have a fear of flying; it's more the thought of stopping flying in midair that bothers me. It's a rather irrational fear as flying is safer than driving, and thankfully, I can usually play a little mind game on myself to ease it. (The little bottles of wine they offer on flights are also quite helpful.)

St. Augustine road trip, 1994

Every now and again, I want to write something just so I can prove to myself that I can still put a few sentences together and that school wasn't all for naught.
While I have topics I can write about but, for reasons I won't get into, don't want to address here, I think I'll write about one of my favorite road trips.
Not the most orinial idea, but it was the first idea that came to my head and I hate staring at a blank post screen with a blinking cursor.
This specific trip was during my second year at UF, when Greg, his roommate, and I were hanging out at the apartment one weekend evening, doing nothing in particular. We usually went to a local 24-hour hipper-than-thou coffeeshop downtown but for some odd reason didn't go that evening. Approaching a mild boredom and encroaching on midnight, our topic of conversation eventually turned into St. Augustine. OK not so much "turned" as shifted 180 degrees and arbitrarily mentioned: "Does anyone want to go to St. Augustine?"
Now, one of the great things about Gainesville is that it is centered in the state, and thus, only about 1 hour from each coast, making such trips none too inconceivable. Man, sometimes I really miss Florida, and I see an advert for the UF MBA program here...but I digress.
So, seeing as I had the most reliable car, we took off for St. Augustine around midnight. The thinking was that since St. Augustine had several liberal arts colleges in the area, that there must be a place just like our favorite haunt in town.
After an hour drive, we were sadly proved wrong. The place was dead. We drove around desperately searching for something to do, but there was nothing. During our drive through town, we did manage to find ourselves almost driving into the Intracoastal Waterway by way of a poorly marked boat launch. Yay brakes!
As St. Augustine was a wash, we headed off to the beach, which is actually quite cool at 230 in the morning, as you can drive on well marked paths right on the beach. However, it is decidedly less cool when, following poor advice - Greg - we manage to get the car stuck in an unfun amount of sand. This is before cell phones, so we were left to our own devices, and it must have taken us at least an hour to get the car free, using my floor mats as traction for the tires. When I got rid of the car about 4 years ago, I'm sure there was still sand imbedded permanently into the carpet.
Digging cars out of sand at 3 in the morning makes people invariably hungry, so instead of heading back to G-ville, we decided to head south on A1-A (I think) toward Daytona Beach. It seems as though everyone has a 4am Denny's story, and this would happen to be mine. This was the only place open and we were really hungry, which are as good reasons as any to hit up Denny's. The place was actually crowded considering the time.
I think after 5am and a Denny's meal, all logic is lost, so instead of heading back home, we continued on down south to Daytona so that we could eventually find a public access beach we could crash at, which we did find at 530 or so.
I think we managed to grab a few minutes of sleep on the beach, but it wasn't nearly as comfortable as you'd imagine sleeping at the beach at 530am would be.
We couldn't see the sunrise, as everything was covered in a thick shroud of fog. However, we were awakened by a "presence," in the form of a giant goodyear blimp hovering low over the ocean about a hundred yards away.
Talk about an alarm clock!
We made our way slowly home later in the morning...slowly, as we happened to have picked the precise weekend for our little jaunt that the Daytona 500 race was going on at the raceway.
I think I slept the rest of the weekend. Also, writing this has brought a lot of memories back. Amazing thing, nostalgia. It is making me really miss college life right now...the dorms, my friends, UF. Everything. There are so many things I missed out in at UF because I was too shy or reserved or whatever, but right now...it was bloody fantastic.

Beatles and Apple make love, not war

Apple, Beatles settle trademark lawsuit
These folks have been squabling since the 80s, so it's nice to see they made nice for the time being. Actually, this announcement gives substance to the rumor that The Beatles, who have been holdouts for selling music digitally, will partner with iTunes to sell their remastered work. From what I've heard, they'll announce this on February 14. So, we'll see what happens...
I really dig The Shins latest record, Wincing the Night Away. I wanted to add the tune Australia as my Myspace tune, but no luck. Seems they aren't allowing that, which is a drag. (May try again later, tho...)

Retail therapy

I got a new toy:

Smile :)

Wars and bombs and stuff

U.S. not planning for war with Iran, Gates says
(Some would argue that they didn't really plan the Iraq one either, but I'm spliting hairs.)
I would hope that the US has enough sense not to get involved in another war. We can't even decide how we're going to handle the one we're in now. It's a recipe for disaster.
Also, it's a good thing Saddam is gone. Good riddance. However, he was at least able to keep his country from spiraling into a civil war and his people from blowing themselves and scores others up in markets. (Another suicide bombing today, killing upwards of 82.) Granted, he might have been able to do this because he ran a brutal dictatorship...

Gore 08

I just read this in Rolling Stone:
Run, Al, Run

The ideal candidate for the Democrats may be the man who won the popular vote in 2000 -- and who opposed the war in Iraq from the very start

Back in 2002, Al Gore gave a speech eviscerating Bush's proposed action in Iraq. If you are at curious, check this out for the complete text of it. At that time, Bush was enjoying high popularity, and naturally, members of both houses of Congress wouldn't dare step on the toes of a popular president and essentially gave him Carte Blance.
Several of those Congressmen and women are now starting to get in line to run for president in 2008, and of course, seeing as how the was has become overwhelmingly unpopular and the president a lame duck, they are now curiously against this war (no soldier had to die if you had been paying attention 4 years ago, twits).
Al Gore has no such "yes" vote to talk his way out of. He could enter the race after the other democrats have sufficiently beaten themselves up and raise millions of campaign dollars right away. He'd win the democratic nomination and have more than a better shot of winning the presidency in 2008.
So, Al, please run. There's at least $6 - no wait $7!- in it for you if you do. (Sorry, I don't carry much cash. That's all that i have in my wallet at the moment)