Religiously speaking...

The Baptists’ holiday mailer:
     Come to church this Christmas Sunday.  Bring your fear of God!

The Catholics’ holiday mailer:
     Come to church this Christmas Sunday.  Bring your checkbook!

The Mormons’ holiday mailer:
     Come to church this Christmas Sunday.  Bring someone to recruit!  And a casserole!

          I decided to share some gross stereotypes of a couple of my favorite churches to help spread some holiday cheer.  There's always some element of truth in humor, but there's always some amount of misunderstanding in stereotypes.  I also realize this sample is limited to just Christian churches but I think it’s still not quite politically correct yet to poke fun at Middle Eastern religions, and I’m less familiar with Eastern religions.  And I’ve never even heard of the Zuni’s religion*.

          I actually have some very strong beliefs about life and religion, but I think most people who talk to me don’t realize it.  I tend to be fascinated in other systems of beliefs and in finding out how different peoples use their beliefs to make themselves better.  That comes in part because I really don’t appreciate people telling me what a crappy person I am because I attend Church X without giving me any other reason for being crappy.  Fortunately I’ve found that this isn’t a common practice of all people of any given religion, and I’ve more often found that most people are pretty cool with you no matter what you believe [sincerely].


* Actually I learned a very little bit about it from one of my first anthropology teachers who lived at Zuni for a while.

It's not working out

Sulu:  Sir, enemy vessels sighted at 7 o'clock.
Kirk:  Curse those fiends.  How could anyone stoop to such an early hour?
Sulu:  Sir, they have just installed a pull-up bar device.
Kirk:  Will they stop at nothing?!
*BOOM*
Kirk:  Damage report Mr. Scott!
Scott:  Sir, we've sustained a major blow to the pride!  We cannota take another blow like that, Sir!

     The ol' stretchy bands snapped on me a couple weeks ago so it was time I took some drastic measures for my physical therapy.  And I'm supposedly whole again but too afraid to go find out just how weak I really am now.  So I took an anti-climatically head-long dive into wall push-ups.  Yay.  It would actually be quite embarrassing to admit that I was getting somewhat of a workout from it if it weren't for the fact that it was an improvement for me at that point.  Fortunately I can proudly say that I'm at knee push-ups and going "strong".  Note: they will not be referred to as "girl push-ups" again until I've graduated to real push-ups.

     Actually, this morning I installed the pull-up bar.  Our apartment is pretty old and we've got a couple of very high door frames.  This works out perfectly because I hate trying to do pull-ups and only getting partway down before I am standing on the ground.  Bending my legs isn't an option for me because... it isn't.  That's about as logical of an argument as I can make about it.

     Pull-ups and chin-ups are a wonderful experience for me.  Were a wonderful experience for me.  Even back in elementary school, as weak as I was then, I could do pull-ups.  When I say "weak" I really mean it.  When all the other kids were doing 10 or some unconscionably large number of push-ups, catching hard, round flying objects out of the air with their hands, or many other herculean fetes of strength and skill I was in the back doing the Chubby Checker 'Twist' to try to make it to push-up number 4.  But somehow I could do pull-ups

     So now that I've graduated back to being able to do pull-ups I'm feeling humbled once again.  I managed to crank out a couple sets of 3.  3 pull-ups.  And they were the hardest 3 of my life.  I'm pretty sure I could hear bone-on-bone contact each time I went up, and rust breaking free and dissolving each time I let myself back down.

The best part about my state of muscle-building is how long it doesn't take me.  I felt ready to be done after about 15 minutes.  I'm sure this was entirely physical and not at all mental.

Running

Things that run: my wife's car, my wife, my nose for most of my life, our refrigerator (haha, get it? nevermind)
Things that don't run: most of my old vehicles, my nose now that I started sleeping 8 hours a night, my computer in a few months

I think I can finally add myself to the first list.  Sort of.  Today I just finished my first several mile race.  We were told it was a 15-mile loop, someone claimed 13.5, our splits and logic put it somewhere between the two so I'm just going to go with 14 miles.  Whatever it was, I finished it in under 3 hours.  Ya, compare it to marathoners and I've got myself a crappy time.  However, this was on a trail in the woods.

Things that make trail racing hard: mud, crossing streams up to your ankles, crossing streams up to your knees, crossing streams up to your ankles (yep, the repetition was intentional), single-track trails that won't let you pass slow people, single-track trail that won't let fast people pass you, roots, branches, berry bush thorns to the face, inclines, declines, around-clines, and back upclines, hunting for the right path because it wasn't marked, and most of all: about 2 dozen trees that have fallen onto the path.  Most of those trees were approximately a foot in diameter, which is actually a really tall hurdle once you're several miles of depleted calories into it.  However, there were no mosquitoes.  So it really wasn't that bad.  I hate mosquitoes.

I was actually training for a 10-miler.  It was a 30 mile fun run that was divided into 3 10.5 mile loops.  I was going to run just a single loop since I've only been running for 14 weeks now post-doctor's blessing.  I made it through an 8 mile training run a couple weeks ago in the Shenandoah National Forest, was tired but otherwise alright and figured this would be the right distance for me.  Well, we got to the turn-around point at 8.5 miles and since the actual loop (15ish miles) was only 4 extra miles beyond what I had planned and since I was feeling pretty decent we decided to push on.  It's an ultra (from here) and people walk.  If I got too sore or tired I would just walk the last couple miles out of the valley.

So I bonked at like mile 9.5.  I had been gradually getting more and more sore, but I had plenty of energy until this point.  It all just drained out of me.  I felt like I was in boot camp again.  Or back on one of my first 45-minute "death" runs with Trisha--she didn't call them that, I did.  The net effect is that I got really slow and ended up walking all the uphills and only slowly trotting everything else.  This is normal for ultra runners.  I, however, was not running an ultra marathon.  When we got to the last aid station Trisha made me eat some pretzels and things.  About a half mile or a mile later I very suddenly felt energized again and we blew past the guys who had passed us after I bonked.  It was no runner's high, but the effect was the same and had me laughing for the rest of my run.

Considering the terrain and bonking I was pretty happy to finish under 3 hours.  Trisha even made me finish the race at a run, rather than a walk.  Mind you, the last 1/4 mile was pretty much straight up.

Anyways, as we drove away I was telling the race to eat my shorts--I had done it!  I definitely didn't say it to the race's face.  No, no, not to its face.

Next up, we have a Halloween 30 miler.  We just have to figure out costumes.  I originally planned to do 20 miles of it, but I have to reevaluate now that I know I can run further, but also because I wore myself out on what was partially intended to be just a training run/race.

Vacant, Vacating and Vacationing

Instead of my usual, emotional and judgmental posts I think this post warrants more of a quick explanation of where I've been lately.  In 30 seconds or more, depending on how fast I type.

Obviously we moved to Baltimore.  I spent a good week not doing anything other than unpacking and putting stuff away.  The down side is it was an entire, full week.  The up side is that our apartment doesn't look like we just moved in.  It just looks like we have too much stuff.  But our too much stuff is at least organized pretty well.

Trisha ran her race in Leadville, Colorado.  In the meantime I decided to read "Born to Run".  I hid the book as much as possible so that all the real runners (pretty much everyone in the city on race weekend) wouldn't look at me in disgust.  I have to say, I rather liked the book and McDougall's arguments.  I realize there's great evidence against what he's got to say.  I realize there's great evidence for what he's got to say.  What frustrates me the most--as is generally the case in my life as a moderate--is that people on both sides of the various issues can't give the opposing sides a chance.  They think they're right so they listen from that perspective alone. 

Regarding the barefoot running issue among the various issues, for one of the few occasions in my life I am going to follow a fad.  I'm not following the fad just to follow the fad.  It took me years to actually give the Harry Potter shows a chance just because I hate following fads.  And I'm not going to lance myself into the barefoot thing pell-mell.  I'll be easing in.  Please don't comment too much about how it's a dumb/great idea.  PERSONAL experiences or actual articles on Pubmed would be more alright, though.

Anyway, I am also trying the running thing out for reals again.  Post-mono, post-motorcycle accident rehab and such and I could start running again earlier this summer.  To celebrate I am signed up for my first 10 miler in about 3 weeks.  I'll be going for completion rather than a time, but I'm proud of myself for running a 7 mile training run last weekend.  I'll be the tortoise in the race.  But I'll be in the race.

I've been applying for jobs too.  I've sent out applications to all sorts of different posts.  The neat thing is that it's not out of desperation but because there are more things I can do with my experiences than I realized.  The latest one is a bit intimidating and has set their bar for qualifications pretty high.  I got a nice vote of confidence from people who have supervised me recently and in the more distant past and that helps.  I'm glad Trish is the bread-winner for now.

Speaking of bread, we've been cooking lots of new things.  We've checked out farmer's markets, pick-your-own berry farms and I've even started cooking dehydrated beans instead of cooking beans from a can.  SOOOO much tastier!  It's actually a pleasure to eat beans instead of a side thought.

I've also had a chance to read several books.  I've talked about how much I love to read but never seem to get much reading done.  Mostly they've been short literary pieces, but there's some variety.  I expect I'll post something about my reading list at the end of the year.

Upcoming weekend is still a mystery.  The Grand Prix is coming to Baltimore.  It would cost too much to watch and it's not entirely our thing anyway.  So the options thus far are: go camping for 2.5 days nearby, go to New York (I've never been, but it's still damaged from the storm, and family won't be in town), or visit D.C. in more depth.  The options all have a lot of +s and a few -s so we're not sure.  I'm sure we'll figure it out Thursday afternoon when the long Grand Prix weekend starts.

The Curse of 7 Gods

     I hate 1-way streets with a passion.  Mostly just American 1-way streets.  I admit that there must be some kind of logic to them.  That’s the end of my paragraph.

     So here’s the story, we moved to Baltimore.  I just arrived a few days ago and I was driving to and from our storage unit this afternoon.  I’ve done alright route-finding so far: not perfectly but I've never really gotten lost, just off by a street or two sometimes, and that’s easy to correct.  Nevertheless, I blew the dust off my phone’s GPS and set it up just to make sure I didn’t end up driving into no man’s land—Baltimore has its scarier parts, even by my standards.  And thus the adventure began.

      I should have realized from the beginning what I was getting myself into when the GPS told me to turn the wrong way down a 1-way street.  I simply adjusted and went to the next street and got right back on track.  The GPS then took a good 30 seconds to a minute to recalibrate itself—this is a long time when you’re on the road looking for a turn a couple blocks away from you.  This happened twice within a short distance from our temporary apartment.

     After the initial hang-ups I figured we were just fine, the GPS and me.  And we were until we got across town.  This time the I got directions to drive through a dead-end, over the sidewalk and hang a right at the fire hydrant about 20 feet in front of me.  I decided I should maybe stop instead.  Fortunately I was in the neighborhood of my future apartment—it’s a big pretzel-shaped series of roads that, despite the fact that they all seem to intersect, you can’t actually turn onto any of them.  In other words, all the roads are 1-way and lead to the center of the pretzel where traffic has been stopped since the dawn of man.  Once you drive through a few times, it’s not so bad.  By the time I got out of there and onto a better route, the GPS had just recalibrated again.  Really.

     At this point I just decided to bag it and work through Google Maps on my phone.  No incidents after that but I also didn’t have the bonus of the sexy, robotic female voice of undetermined age, ethnicity, accent or emotional state.  I say no incident but I mean no incident related to Google Maps or my phone.  On my way back home I couldn’t find the mini-highway that takes me to my neighborhood.  I knew the name of the street that I wanted (the mini-highway), plus the name of a couple optional streets in case I couldn’t find the one I really wanted.  I found none of them.  Better yet, I found myself in a right-hand lane that disappeared into a curb (literally), fought my way into the center lane (literally. Ok, maybe not really fought), and went straight through the light.  Had there been any kind of signage I would have just run over the curb and slammed into a building because I found myself going down a 1-way street the wrong way.

     This brings me back to my original statement: I hate 1-way streets with a passion.  I might have liked them a little more had I even seen a sign.  I don’t much like the placement of “do not enter” signs in America either—half underneath a tree, 30 yards (not meters) before the intersection, or turned to face the other side of the street even though they're all bloody 1-way streets in the first place going my direction of traffic.  To not belabor the point further than what I’ve been doing since the beginning of this post, I was on the 1-way street going the wrong way.  Fortunately, the local loiterers shouted directions to me from halfway down the block (“you son of a ******, it’s a 1-way ****** street!”).  This gracious act helped me quickly identify my problem.  Having only received the curse of upwards of a half-dozen deities that I’d never heard of before, I ducked into the next street I could find where a woman was staring at me open-mouthed, unable to finish opening her car door, so dumb-stricken she was (note the somewhat archaic syntax and morphology of that last Inflectional Phrase) at seeing what I had done.

     I let out a good belly-laugh and a har-har-har as I came around the next corner and before allowing myself to feel guilty and upset at the whole scene, as per my sensitive nature.  The belly laugh was the funnest part.

Arabic Summer Institute

    If those words aren't scary enough for you, how about INTENSIVE ARABIC or "concentrated Arabic studies".  As if it wasn't hard enough to learn Arabic in the first place.

    Somehow I envisioned depicting my mental image of Arabic as something scarier than a teenage mutant couch potato bunny that’s been stock-piling Ben & Jerry’s in his gut for the last decade.  Hopefully the red eyes at least do something.

     Actually Arabic is not all that hard.  Language classes tend to push students really hard because class spots can be limited and because programs want to keep their funding (re: SUNY).  But when you take away some of the pressure from above, Arabic isn't so terribly much more difficult than anything else.  But that's an entirely different discussion that will require a lot more citations and anecdotes before I feel comfortable making my case.

    This summer I've extended my already 8 years of schooling to be a teaching assistant and sometimes instructor (I dare not use the term part-time, adjunct or anything else.  I'm a lowly TA that gets to teach 3ish days a week).  Somehow my 200+ credit hours for my BA in Linguistics and French (including a side trip through electronics, astronomy and fencing) plus MA in Arabic did not satiate my lust for being in an academic environment.  After 3 hours a morning of core classes, plus homework/grading, plus 3 hours a week of a conversation course (times two sections for me), a listening hour (like a lab), an Arabic film, an Arabic lecture and some kind of cultural activity each week—after all that, I’m officially satiated.

    You might think that cramming everything we do into 1 semester is difficult, but for ASI we’ve crammed it into 1 single month.  Impressively, the students have largely risen to the occasion and can speak, read and write in Arabic—at a basic level.  They could tell you were to go in Arabic.  Literally.

    The real problem that I discovered in all of this is that I am the instructor, not the student.  Every day I walk past the Chinese intensive class and the Farsi intensive class as I go to work TAing and instructing.  They all get to learn a new language in 1 month.  Not me.

    I've been dreaming of learning Chinese since 2005 when I started Arabic.  I signed up for Swahili around 2007/2008 but had to drop the class before it started so I could take a required class that was only taught at that time.  And since 2008 I've been dreaming of learning Russian.  The only reason I didn't pursue it was that I decided that love of life and the outdoors should be as important to me as driving myself upward in academia—nigh-sacrilege at the time!  Trisha and I even took an ASL class while we were dating, a recap of the month of ASL I audited in college.  I haven't stopped wanting to learn any of these new-to-me languages.  On the contrary, I've been asking around to see what good resources there are for me to use on my own.

    I kind of wish I could be like this guy: Alexander Arguelles.  He reads some dozens of languages.  Well.  I'm not sure about his speaking, since speaking can't be completely picked up from reading.  But still, I get jealous hearing about him and many others who have the time and the opportunity to learn more languages.

    I'm not sure it's just the ability to communicate with others that fascinates me.  I'm not the most talkative person unless you catch me in an uncharacteristic mood.  What I do like is the mathy part of language learning, building and manipulating those syntactic, morphological and phonological formulae that are so clear for the first couple years of study.  It's like a puzzle!

    But I also like being able to understand other people.  When folks are in line behind or ahead of me at the grocery store speaking in another language I get elated when I can eavesdrop on them.  It's even more fun when they're saying stuff they don't want other people to understand.  It’s amazing how many private conversations are held at an uncomfortably loud level while the people speaking assume nobody else speaks their language.  My favorite is when people do this in Spanish, as if no one in America speaks Spanish!!

Memoirs of German Haus

My favorite part about the title is that the word memoir comes from French.

Today I witnessed the unleashing of decades of tension between Germany and Russia.  I don't recall what catalyzed the fighting but I do recall watching Russia chasing Germany's butt out the house and down the street despite the fact that Germany was carrying heavy weaponry.  In the meantime, America waited on the sidelines watching and laughing until both sides were exhausted and were about out of ammo.  That's about the time they intervened and shot both of them in the face.  And butt, actually.  All in all, pretty historically accurate.

The picture is the interim before America got involved.  You'll notice Russia in the foreground with Germany proudly marching forward even though he's out of ammo.  As the one documenting the aftermath of such a historic catastrophe but not getting involved, I wonder who I am.

Whew!

So then there was the time I disappeared for two months....

Actually this happens every semester, but this time around it was worse.  Besides finishing up my semester we had to move in time for Trisha to start her new job.  So it went something like: write a page, pack a box, find another apartment lead, repeat.  Everything got done, but not at the level of quality I'd have liked.  But we've signed our new lease (for late July!) and lucked out on the place we picked out.

The move threatened to be epic (reminding me of a river trip put-in I drove when all hell broke loose) but ended up being pretty easy.  Budget, bless their hearts, overbooked their trucks the day we were moving and we drew the long straw.  We ended up making a deal with U-Haul and got out of town the next day but we were a bit stressed since I had to be back to Austin RIGHT after we finished the move, so time was scarce.

On top of the booking part, we started hearing about tornadoes in Alabama and Missouri, then flooding from North to South on the Mississippi, then that I-40 was completely torn up throughout Tennessee.  There was probably a hurricane eminent too.  Basically, there was no safe route to take anywhere in the US.  Even rerouting through Canada (adding an extra 1000 miles probably) would've been dangerous because of weather.  Fortunately we didn't have any trouble the entire trip.  We stayed just ahead and behind crappy weather.

The rough part of the trip was that the truck was longer than we asked for.  That was fine for me, it was like driving a bus with a short trailer...something I've done once or twice in Moab (or perhaps closer to about 350 times per summer).  So it was fine until I got tired and it became Trisha's turn to drive.  She did really well.  Extremely well considering one of our first (and few) construction zones came about 3 miles after she started driving--you know when they put concrete barriers on both sides of your car?  That's what she got, plus the tiniest 6" shoulder on one side.  Brave woman.

My motivation for about 50 miles of our trek

So we made it.  But the next adventure was our first night in Baltimore.  We'd stayed there a month ago looking for apartments, but this time we couldn't get a place downtown.  We used Hotwire to locate a place in NW Baltimore for about $60.  Expensive by my families standards, but that's about as cheap as we could get in any event.  The hotel turned out to be an Econolodge.  This wasn't just any Econolodge.  This was an Econolodge in a sketchy neighborhood where some activist meeting was taking place down the street about 1/2 block, and next door.  Basically there were people out at night on some out-of-the-way suburban street at midnight dressed up.

It turns out some of the hotel rooms were pay-by-the-hour so that just made it all the more interesting.  They also only had a smoking room left, despite our reservation.  That wouldn't have been so bad but I have bad enough allergies as it is, and Trisha doesn't like that smell any more than I do.  Throw in a couple twin-sized beds donated from some barracks during the Korean war (maybe those were the ones my family donated to the Salvation Army after the kids moved out :) ) and we lived out a scene from Leave It To Beaver.  What a night.

Morning, really.  A few hours after we went to sleep, someone knocks on the door.  For the first time in my life I'm out cold, dead asleep and enjoying my lack of consciousness immensely.  Trisha, for the first time in her life, was sleeping lightly from nervousness.  The guy keeps pounding on the door.  I actually heard some guy doing this before I went to bed, and then again after Trisha woke me up 2 hours early so we could check out ASAP.  I won't say it was the worst hotel experience I've ever had, but Trisha probably would.  The best part is that Hotwire put us in a Westin Inn the next night for the same price.  HA!

We had a couple days of fun in DC and then I flew back to Austin to work/study half the summer.  I'm living in Trisha's old Co-op house and she's subleasing an apartment in a nice part of town.  We've done fine not missing each other (it's been a week and a half), but going to church feels really weird.  I keep interpreting the casual smile of "hello" as "You sick man!  What have you done to cause your wife to leave you?!"  Thanks to how my mind works, life is far more exciting for me than for most people.

BMI (Bloody Mean, Idn’it?!): A New Perspective

Preface:
     The other day I posted a blurb about my current BMI.  A few of my friends told me where I can stick my BMI, in a good-naturedly way of course :)  While their comments were meant to be nice, I remembered a lot of occasions where I’ve heard less than nice things, and it also triggered a lot of memories and some strong feelings about an issue that seems to only have one side in the public’s view.  I joked about being much closer to malnutrition than obesity :)  But I wasn’t joking.  I’m happy to be healthy enough to get up off the couch and be active once again.  Even if I wasn’t really going to slump over and fall off a rock, dead.



BMI (Bloody Mean, Idn’it?!): A New Perspective

     We’re all victims.  No matter how many toes we dangle off the edge, whether we stand tip-toed, on one foot, jump on and off again in less than a second, or think thin thoughts, the scale still seems to sense every pound.

     We’re not just victims of the bathroom scale, though.  We’re also caught up in society’s physical attractiveness scale.  Since birth we are bombarded with images of thin people dancing across the stages, posing for magazines and acting on movies and television shows, not to mention the wire-thin dolls and buff action figures that line the toy store shelves.  It’s unclear whether they’re trying to depict real society or they’re telling us that’s how we are supposed to look.  The effect is the same: it’s what we see so it’s what we expect people to be like, whether consciously or subconsciously it has become our paradigm.

     My problem’s a little bit different though.  I’m one of the thin people.  So is my immediate family.  Ever since high school I’ve been told how lucky I am that I have a thin body and how easy it must be for me.  I’d almost start believing them if I hadn’t grown up with this same body they say I’m lucky to have.  My sister is the same way.  She’s given birth to three kids now and is still thinner than me—we’re the same height.

     How can I call this a problem?  It’s very simple.  We’re all victims and the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  A comic my dad once gave me showed four cows standing in four different pastures that all came to one point—four quadrants like the Four Corner’s states, right?  Each cow had his head underneath the barbed wire eating the grass from the field on her (they weren’t bulls) right.  My body has been the same way for me.  While people tell me how great it is to be wire-thin, I remember how it was growing up being wire thin.

     You see, long, long ago in a junior high school far, far away that I never want to go back to and hardly care to be reminded of there was me: the skinny kid that had few friends, didn’t know how to act, couldn’t get a girlfriend to save his pathetic junior high school social life, and was skinny.  The best (read: worst) part of being skinny in junior high is that everyone bigger than you can pick on you.  And does.  That equated to most everyone there, including the 7th graders when I got to 8th grade.  This was so much the case (at least in my mind) that I grew up having less and less desire to try to talk to anyone.  There were plenty of people who had it worse than I had it, I’m sure.  But for the first 17 years of my existence I didn’t really realize that.

     The effect didn’t last just 17 years, though.  Right out of high school I signed the papers at the recruiting station and committed the next 6 years of my life to proving to the world that I wasn’t just some wimpy, skinny kid.  I wanted to be somebody.  And the fun of being skinny continued with gale force.  In boot camp, I calculated the weight of a loaded ALICE pack, flak jacket, Kevlar helmet, boots and uniform, rifle and whatever other crap we had to carry at about 70 – 80 lbs.  I don’t know where I got my figures from at that time but they weren’t at all unreasonable.  But at 137 pounds fresh out of high school, the weight was unreasonable.  Have you ever tried hiking up a mountain carrying half your body weight?  70 lbs is a lot different at 137 lbs body weight versus 180.  Don’t believe me?  Load up the old bookbag you used to haul around with you at school and throw it on your 10 year-old kid and see how they do.  I’m not saying I couldn’t do it and that nobody else had a hard time of it, including the people lucky enough to be built with a nice, large framed body.

     I mentioned that my sister gets some of the same flak that I do.  Let me tell you a little about her high school experience.  I’ll be pretty direct here too, be warned.  About the time that girls start developing hips and a chest—the elements that high school boys rate a girl by, and probably a lot of grown-ups too who haven’t quite figured things out—my sister didn’t.  She was flat as the asphalt track she used to run on and about as shapely as the pole she would high jump over.  I don’t suppose any of us would have the nerve to say that the ability to high jump well because of her body type was a great trade-off for being largely ignored by the male student population—at least in the high school mindset.  Some years later, now, she has people regularly tell her that they hate her for being skinny, and one neighbor told her that she looks like Olive Oil from Popeye.  I'm not sure the word "hate" is a very positive one, even when used in "jest", nor that the image of Olive Oil is quite what my sister was hoping for during all those years she hid in her bedroom with the door closed reading books.

     I hope readers aren’t tempted to offer the cold consolation or preach the fallacious philosophy that it was only elementary and high school: you get over it.  It’s not true.  Consider: those 17 years are the formative years of your life.  How you experience life and how you are taught to react to it largely shapes your future.  That’s not to say you don’t become more and more aware, and more and more responsible for your actions.  But breaking a cycle that started since you were very young is difficult.  Ask any lifetime smoker who has ever wanted to quit.  Beyond the chemical addiction comes the difficulty of a lifetime of habit built up where the smoker hardly remembers anything different than smoking.  A friend of mine started when she was five years old; I was naïve enough to tell her to “just quit.”

     Having that paradigm of needing to be bigger than I am in order to fit the right body image drove me to weight lifting.  It wasn’t so much an addiction; I actually enjoyed it and put it to a practical use in the military.  The trouble was that in order to gain weight I had to constantly eat heaping platefuls of food and spend hours in the gym every day.  The fattest I’ve ever been was also when I had the most muscle on my body, and it was at the end of my active duty training.  When I got done, went home and didn’t have a gym anymore I dropped about half the weight I had gained over the period of several very active months all within the first month or so, and most of the rest over a couple more months.  It’s not like I quit doing pushups or running hills, my body simply dissolves itself rapidly when it isn’t constantly being exercised.

     One of the scariest examples of this is a very recent experience.  Up until last year, I’ve managed to stay at least a few symbolic pounds over my high school weight.  I generally had the DMV write that I’m 150 lbs on my driver’s license, which helps me maintain the hope and illusion that “if I really wanted to I would be that weight.  I just have to start working out again.  …next month.”  But last year I got mono.  My average to low activity level shot through the floor.  I spent about a month or so in bed not eating much, and the following couple months not eating much more and definitely not working out.  My body weight did the same thing it did after active duty training, only this time I didn’t have the built-up muscle and fat to lose.  You want to tell me about not having energy because of being too big?  Believe me, it’s the same feeling when your body has no fat and it has to consume muscle in order to operate.  Ok, so that’s a small stretch—I’m not as small as the starving children in Africa.  But that’s a bit how it feels.  Yes, I feel bad for the guy who has to carry around a lot of extra fat and then tries to start running.  I understand.  I used to do pull-ups and dips with iron plates tied around my waist.  But can that same guy see it from my perspective?  At least he has muscle to move that fat around.  For me, it feels like all I have are bones to try to do the same work his muscles are doing.

     In all honesty, I don’t expect anyone to be convinced that it’s so much harder for me.  Not any more than I think I should have to feel that it’s so much harder for anyone else.  We’re all like those cows trying to eat out of the other pasture where the grass is always more luscious, no matter what your own looks like.  From my side of the pasture, I’m just tired of the echoes of 17 years’ worth of hearing people yell at me and tell me that I’m not good enough because I’m too skinny, and another 13 years of hearing people yell at me and tell me that I’m horrible because I’m so lucky to be skinny.  Maybe for the next 30 years we can change it up and just treat me nicely for being a human being and not discriminating based on what I look like.

Work

Trisha accepted her offer in Baltimore so we're heading out that way now.  While I can't go to school now and nobody's accepted my applications for work, at least there should be some options for both in that area.  In fact, there are some PhD programs that are a little more up my alley and jobs too all right around there.  At the least I figure we could get a house for a few years and have me renovate it some, and finally get a garden!

A New Suit

It was a bright and sunny day out while I was walking near a creek in town.  It’s been cold here for longer than we expected in this part of the country, and once the worst of the coldness dissipated we were left with clouds and rain.  But today was different and for at least a few good minutes I made use of it.  I didn’t stop to smell the flowers or anything like that, but I did notice how green the grass was, how many squirrels were out as well as the bushes and vines growing on their trellises.

This evoked a fond childhood memory of the blackberry bush in the front yard.  I love blackberries, if not for the amazing sweet yet tart taste that works so well in jams, pies, yogurt and by themselves, then for the nostalgia of it.  It did not evoke any memories of falling into that stupid bush when I was reaching too far in to pick that last handful, or the black widow I discovered living in the thing when I crawled under it and sent me screaming to my mother.  No, this warm sunny day only brought back berries and basking.
 
Then the cynical switch flipped in my bipolar brain and I wondered what would happen if the city planted blackberry bushes next to the sidewalk, there by the creek.  Invariably one thing.  Someone with a berry allergy would eat it and have to go to the hospital, or someone would choke on a berry, or eat a rotten one and get food poisoning, or stab their hand with a thorn, or any number of mishaps would take place and they would sue.  And they would win.
 
The fault would fall on the city for not maintaining a healthy berry bush, for not spraying for bugs, for not washing the spray off, and for not putting a nice wax coating on each of the berries to make them look nice.  And because of this neglect, the city would be responsible for anything bad that happened to people eating the berries.
 
You’ll notice, though, that nobody goes around suing the city when their kids eat scrub oak leaves and puke them up, or get hay fever from the lawn, or even if people choose to eat the weird, unidentifiable red berries that nobody has any clue what kind of plant they’re actually growing out of; is that a sapling? A hedge?  Vine?  Wax berry bush??  And if someone did eat those berries, there’s no way they could sue the city because the judge would call them stupid.  They’re responsible for not eating crap that’s not growing in a garden or sitting in a supermarket.  In other words, they knew better than to trust some shady-looking berry standing at a street corner offering some unidentifiable chemical for consumption.
 
But the blackberry, on the other hand, that’s not the person’s fault.  It was only a blackberry.  You see those in the grocery store and you can eat them, for free if nobody’s looking.  So we can just trust the blackberries because they live next door, without ever finding anything out about them or making sure they’re clean, right?
 
It’s so much easier to pass responsibility to someone else, someone that we can get money from.  But I tell you what, one trip underneath the blackberry bush seeing what’s really going on in there taught me a lesson at nine years old that I’ve never forgotten: you can eat as many blackberries off the bush as you want, but if you eat the ones Mom saved for making a pie, your butt’s gonna look like a bowl of raspberries for a week.

(DST) Disrespect of Sleep Time

We woke up on time this morning, as far as I'm concerned and as far as more than half the world is concerned.  Church services are normally at 9am for us and around 8:30 we were having a leisurely breakfast.  It wasn't until I looked at my computer (dialed in to the nation's schedule) that I realized it was actually 9:30.  It had struck again.

Duped is a word I would not hesitate to use here.  Betrayed, deceived, or even (hold your breath) beguiled.  I would say I like duped the best, except that I was tired enough getting out of bed as it was that I didn't much "like" anything at that hour.

I still cannot fathom why we go through this process.  It's not really related to farming, work shifts, health, safety or anything else.  At least not conclusively.  Sure, some folks have stated that it started for reason X or Y, but why in 2011 are we still doing this?  Just when my body is getting its sync after the last invasive change to my sleeping schedule--which is hard enough for me to do as a student--it's time to adjust to a new one.

For a week, companies send out emails to their employees reminding them about DST.  As a kid I remember DST often coinciding with a special weekend-long church conference, so we got warning on Saturday night of the impending doom when we would wake up.  This weekend there was no salvation, and no more Mom & Dad to knock on the door and bear the bad news.

We officially made it to church on time, for Standard Time.  We hoped the parking lot would only be half full and that there would be two factions vying for church power: the old garde who had been there since the time-honored traditional 9am, and the reformists who believe scheduling should be based on principles of "truth", such as forgetting to adjust our clocks the night before.  As scholars, we naturally fell into the more logical second sect.  And the parking lot was already full.

I just don't like the idea of changing times twice a year.  I have three main reasons, in this order.
1)  It's stupid.
2)  Just when it's getting nice and light in the morning well before I have to start working or schooling, just when it's getting pretty out when I'm trying to exercise but there's still not a soul on the road trying to run me over yet, it goes back to dark.  Just because this is worded like a grievance doesn't mean it doesn't count as a reason.
3)  It's a waste of time to try to keep changing schedules and making everything adapt to them, twice a year.  By schedules I mean both commercial and physiological.  By "wasted" I mean I would've made it to church on time, or not tired, or both if they'd just left it alone.
4)  (Hey, I'm in the Humanities, not the sciences.  I never had to go past Pre-Algebra to get into literature)  I have never never never understood "Spring forward, Fall back".  Even when I think I've got it, 6 months go by and I go from being anything but a morning person to an early-riser without even knowing it until I get to work/school.

I'm sure there are plenty of advantages to having DST....just absolutely sure of it.  But honestly, I bet that if the nation/northwestern quarter of the planet got used to not changing the clock that people would find as many reasons to back up sticking with the tradition they've followed for the last century.

Back to reason #4.  Laugh all you want but to me "forward" can refer to the concept of moving ahead, which to me means "later", or it could mean advancing in a backwards way, like the saying was meant to be taken.  I'm not actually sure which one made more sense to me in the beginning, but trying to re-solve the mystery twice a year for most of 30 years still hasn't produced any other result than frustration.  Except that I did come up with my own saying "Spring sucks, Fall rocks".  You know, like falling rocks?  Get it?  Get it?? Well at least the first part of it has some intellectual value to it.  But that still doesn't make me remember when it's happening in the first place.

Back to reason #1.  Yes, it's a reason.  In rhetoric it's called litotes.  If you don't buy that, try aschematiston.  Or maybe just insomnia.

Squirrel!!

We made a discovery a couple weeks ago.  Perhaps this is common knowledge to some people, but it seems more like something we could all care less about.  Except me.

I've been baffled by those little blue reflective markers in the middle of the street.  Near Trisha's parents' house they seem to be thrown randomly across the road: not in the center, not at regular intervals.

I started noticing them here in Austin too.  Austin reflective markers are actually quite cool.  Naturally they're yellow at night like anywhere else, except when you're driving down the wrong side of the road.  Austin has set up reflectors to glow red if you're going towards oncoming traffic and yellow if you're where you're supposed to be.  But as for the blue ones, like elsewhere they seemed to be at strange intervals.  At least here they come pretty close to the center of the road.

Then it dawned on me.  Blue.  Blue is like water.  At first I hypothesized that this might mean there's a snow cone shop out there for every blue reflector.  Sadly my field research disproved this.  But I did find out that for every blue reflector, there's a fire hydrant.  But the fire hydrants are NOT blue.  This is the sneaky part of what they do here.  In fact, fire hydrants can be painted silver OR red, but never blue.

Since then I point out every fire hydrant I spot after I've seen the associated reflector.  Trisha enjoys this immensely and has rarely been annoyed at my interrupting our discussions about job offers and family every 50 feet.

I suppose a quick internet search would have solved all our problems, but it's sure fun to figure things out on your own sometimes.

Vroom. Vroom.

Anyone that knows me, really knows me, knows how much I love cars, trucks and motorcycles.  Heck, I turned down a really good university appointment one summer so I could pursue my childhood dream of driving trucks.  It started out with a bus, then transformed into a semi-truck gig a year later.  I have never regretted it.

Lately with how busy I am it has been impossible to keep up on all the repairs for the old stuff I buy.  Some of it ends up being a good deal, more of it not.  I'm coming to believe the philosophy of just saving up and buying something good that will last and not leave you stranded.  If that takes a bit of busing and walking to save up for it, so be it.

So all my vehicles are being sold or have been sold.  I've had a few.  Right now I'm getting rid of a neat 1980 Honda CM400T, a street bike that hasn't ever let me down.  It's good enough to ride on the freeway and better on the city streets, and it has even handled some very brief encounters with dirt roads.  Successfully.  It just broke down again, but like any other time it was able to limp back home and then to the shop.

The Harley is the piece of work though.  It looks great, and rides great.  When it works.  Which is rarely.  It is so close to being fixed but I just don't have the time or patience to deal with it anymore.  It definitely looks like one of my kind of vehicles.  Medium-high handle bars, big engine.  Just redneck enough for me to love it.



Trisha told me that if we didn't compromise careers but went wherever she wanted that she would buy me a motorcycle.  A new motorcycle.  So my dreams of gardening and housekeeping came back to mind....  Just for fun, I have been looking around at different bikes though.  Here's what I've come up with.

And I don't know anything about picture copyright laws, so if I'm doing something wrong could someone please let me know before I get in trouble?  At the least, it's free advertising for them.

Ducati Monster.  It's weird at first blush, but it grows on you.  The oddest thing for me is that it's a sport bike.  Here's how I justify it.  It's Italian.  It's a sport bike with class.  This isn't your college student Ninja or anything.  It's a real bike.  It might also be uncomfortable for long rides.  I doubt I'll be driving to Canada on it though.

Buell Lightening.  Again, do not be deceived.  It looks like some kid's dirt bike but it's made by Eric Buell who was a sport bike engineer attached to Harley-Davidson.  Who knew HD made sport bikes??  They're well put together from what I've seen and heard.

This is another Sportster 883.  The picture is directly off HD's website.  I like the carbon look, but the gas tank is too small for me.

Honda Shadow.  It's hard to go wrong with Japanese.  I've had a couple Hondas now and they've been great.  This is the only one that Trisha didn't refer to as being "dippy-looking".  Well, those are my words but that's what she meant.

Kawasaki Ninja.  I really can't see myself driving a piece of plastic.  Of course, I guess that's what everything is these days.

Tron LightCycle.  I'm an 80s sort of a guy.  I could really see myself in one of these.  The best part is that I could block erratic traffic from passing me and cutting me off.  Parking would be a breeze too.  Now that I think about I really do want one of these.

2010 Tron LightCycle.  Now we're talking.  Same perks as the 80s edition but with a little more zing to it.  Plus, I might be able to get the sales rep to thrown in one of those rockin leather suits.





This is still the research phase so I haven't quite set my mind (or heart) on any of these yet.  I'm curious what others would recommend to me.

"I can't believe I ate the whole thing"

That's a cinnamon roll.  An 8 dollar cinnamon roll.  We went to San Antonio Saturday and stopped at Lulu's Bakery & Cafe on our way back home. We almost only go to restaurants by recommendation out here and we're almost never disappointed.  There is so much good food in Austin (and near it) and this place was no exception.

In fact, the menu offered jumbo burgers, which I got and which actually tasted like real beef, as well as "over-sized chicken fried steak."  Good grief!!  The thing was bigger than a dinner plate!  We actually sat at the bar/counter and watched the short-order cooks and waitresses work their magic.  As much as Trisha doesn't eat meat, she was impressed at the oddity and size of everything there.  I guess everything is bigger in Texas, including the traffic jams on the way back to Austin on I-35.

Speaking of food (which I do a lot and am quite happy about), I cooked my usual tomato thing so we could have lunches this week.  I call it spaghetti but nobody agrees with the name.  I pretty much never use spaghetti noodles, only sometimes use noodles of any kind usually replacing them with couscous grains and every once in a while rice, and don't even make it into a legitimate sauce.

However, my "spaghetti" is so good and so fresh a Frenchman would even eat it and not consider it a wasted dish.  It's never exactly the same thing, but this time around it consisted of: 1/2 a large garlic (meaning 1/2 the bulb itself, not just a clove), 1 onion, olive oil, 5 or 6 tomatoes sort of cut and boiled down for a while, about twice the basil you see in the picture there (note that the small leaves are the size of baby spinach leaves, the large ones the size of small, mature spinach leaves, for comparison), mature spinach, spices (fennel seed, oregano, black pepper) and Better than Bouillon.

The main variations are spinach or not, yellow squash, marjoram, rosemary, thyme, lavender, bay leaves and the type of tomato.  It all just depends on what I feel like putting in and what I remember to use.  Also, if I could use homegrown tomatoes, that's what I'd do every time.  Since Trisha doesn't eat cheese, that's the only other thing I usually consider.

Speaking of speaking of food, I looked over my selections of yogurt for the last couple weeks and discovered they all have "natural flavor": that stuff that nobody really knows where it comes from including the guy who squashed the bug and extracted its juices for Red #whichever.  Even my favorite one, Liberté, that I thought was natural has it.  The only one of the lot that didn't have it was Greek Gods, the one I made fun of for looking silly.  So this week I bought all the Greek Gods flavors at HEB Central Market to try out.

Central Market is the local competitor to Whole Foods down here.  It sports a line of main-stream hippy and fresh products that attracts most everyone from Billy-Bob the beef-braising, brisquette-barbequeing Texan to June-Flower the hippy with the home-made-looking sun dress with the tag from the local wanna-be store, and a lot of people in between.  Not too many people from the country (I just wanted to write that name) and not a ton of legit hippies, but a really good range of food options for people like me who want to improve their diet and not trash the Earth, but want to take a moderate approach about it.

And no, I don't fit into any of those persona types.  I wear the same, standard Eric-uniform I've been wearing since probably after high school that 90% of the time repels stereotypes and leaves you with this aura of mystique as I walk by.  Or something like that.  Yep, not only is it the same uniform, but possibly even the very same non-hip, non-trendy jeans and tee-shirts that I was wearing at that time.  I wouldn't know.

At last! But not really: A report on my report

     I was able to meet with my supervisor this last week and start getting some new direction for my master's report.  This is the first time we've met this semester, which would almost be scary except that we're using a term paper from last semester as the basis for the report.
     It's actually kind of exciting to be working on it.  It's a subject I rather enjoy and I am finally starting to understand how researching works.  I've picked up bits and pieces of how to research from various classes and tips from fellow grad students (mainly my wife).  So while many papers have been awful to try to write, this one is actually fun.  Mostly.  I think that doing it on a subject and question that I'm curious about is the other biggest factor.  If indeed I go on to a PhD, it's something I can develop.
     The rough part is that I have to flesh out a good draft in about 3 weeks.  That's not a long time.  Considering I read the average textbook at about 10 pages an hour and also how many articles I need to use for my paper and it's a little daunting.  Fortunately I've just started learning how to read like a grad student this semester.  And also fortunately, it's a field that I've read about off and on for a few years.
     All in all, I'm kind of excited that I should be able to graduate.  And not only that, I should contribute new information that will actually benefit my field, even if only a little bit.
     The working name of the paper is "Teaching Arabic Vocabulary within a Diglossic Situation."  Meaning: how can we present Arabic vocabulary to students and help them actually learn it and not be totally overwhelmed when they feel like they're learning two languages at the same time.  There's not a ton of literature out there about this exact question, which makes it easier and harder.  Easier because I can stay somewhat general, and also still get something worthwhile out there.  Harder because I can continue other people's studies as easily or directly, and because I generally have less to drawn on.
     Oh well, until May it's just living the dream: changing the world, one comma at a time.

Repenting on the way to church

Some years ago, one of my friends spoke in church about the importance of obedience.  Even in our teen-age years he was able to help us apply gospel principles to practical affairs.  He pointed out how every Sunday he would have seen one of our church leaders driving by his house on the way to church except that all he could make out was a little white blur.  Obedience in all things, he taught.  This was back when he and I and other friends terrorized the neighborhood.

I notice this even today, and it doesn't matter how big of a population our church members represent or what geographic region we're in, the doctrine of "repenting on the way to church" holds true.  In fact, it's a universal Christian principle.  At least in America.  On our way back from our meetings, Trisha and I witness members of other faiths relying on the Parable of the White Blur as they head in the other direction.

It's an eternal principle, too.  Just this morning we saw a car pull up right behind us on the freeway, tail-gate us, pull around us and tail gate the SUV in front of us.  As all three of us merged into the exit lane, this same light blue Mercury Sable from Austin, Texas heading southbound on I-183 at 8:51 am taking the I-35 North exit (did you catch all that, Jeff?) almost manages to pass the SUV on the right before having to slow back down.

We counted how many times the car changed lanes and how many other cars it tailgated before arriving at church with us.  We even got a good luck at them stopped at the light.  It was an older couple with a wheelchair folded up in their back seat!  The irony is that we actually got to church before them, without breaking any laws or endangering anyone's life.

What I find funniest is that this isn't the only couple who does this on their way to church.  We saw a lady do the same thing one Sunday morning a few months ago.  She ended up having a part to play in the church services. 

Our favorite game, now, is to guess which cars on the freeway are going to church with us and which are not.  Invariably, the ones breaking the most laws end up going to the same place.  I guess it proves your faith more that God will forgive you if you leave at the last possible moment and arrive more literally like a bat out of hell, taken into the presence of God than to prepare in advance.  Being prepared isn't a real test of faith.

The best part of it is that we get to calmly sit and judge people for their misdeeds, and then think less of them for it during our church meetings.  It helps keep me awake.  Some call that a sin, I just call it a practical solution to a real-world problem.  I'm applying what I learned as a teenager.

I guess that since breaking the law doesn't really get you to church any faster then the moral of the story is that, if indeed the first ones to church get forgiven more fully, then we're still in the clear in the end anyways.

I'm sorry, is that "yogurt" or "yoghurt" or "Yo Gurty!" or...

In this week's news....  Alright, so my blog isn't a food blog, but I like food so I blog about it more.  Plus, I manage to offend less people when I blog about food.

I decided to explore yogurt this month.  I've always liked it for various reasons.  It's sweet.  It's milk.  It's got a little kick.  It helps reset your system if you've recovered from stomach flu.  I just like it.

However as Trisha and I are eating more and more organic and local, and as we're becoming more aware of what we really put into our bodies when we eat, I've become more curious about yogurts.  I decided to give up the supermarket brand yogurts and common ones, like Yoplait, after watching how cows get treated on most industrial farms.  It's horrible.  Finding anything from sustainable farms or even organic farms is costly but I ventured the risk and tried one of my first "weird" brand yogurt several months ago.  Liberté.  I was not disappointed.  In fact, I tried Mountain High first and it was fine.  But Liberté just had me sold.

This month, however, I wanted to explore more instead of just settle on the first thing out there.  I developed a couple questions to guide me too:
Just what is "Greek Yogurt"?
Now that I've been eating organic yogurt, do the supermarket brands taste any different to me or still just fine?
What exactly do those cultures do??  I saw Streptococcus listed among them on Wikipedia.  Ummm...??  What gives?
How are we really supposed to spell yogurt?  y-o-g-u-r-t ?  y-o-g-H-u-r-t ?  d-o-u-g-h-n-u-t ?
What brands are there?
What brands tastes best?
Which ones are organic?
What flavors taste good?

I haven't answered most of these questions, but rather I'm beginning my research.  Curse you, grad school, for forcing me to more completely pursue my questions instead of settling for what the advertisements tell me!!

Here's the pictures of what I tried last week and what I'll be eating this week.  There's a bunch so I tried to keep the file sizes to about 120k each.  So here's the line-up.  Like I said, I haven't eaten them all yet so I only have a few comments.  But here's what I think.

Trisha recommended this one.  I think they got it sometimes at the Co-Op where she used to live.  It's Maple-flavored so I'm a little...intrigued.  It claims to have a creamy top, and I like creamy yogurt so maybe it'll be alright.
This one says it has no hormones and is all natural.  The ingredient list is pretty easy to read.

 This isn't trick photography.  This yogurt cup really is this fat.  And I didn't center the frame.  Darn it Jim, I'm a doctor, not a photographer.
Despite the really trendy-looking cup, I wasn't as impressed with this yogurt.  I had raspberry flavor, which isn't my favorite, so I'm trying peach now.  But before I mixed the fruit and yogurt together, I still wasn't as nuts about the cream itself.
As for ingredients, it's surprisingly legible except for locust bean gum.  No idea what that is.  Yet.

Don't laugh at the container.  I already took care of that.  In fact, I make it a point to never buy yogurt in ret--- silly-looking containers.  Trisha told me to pick this one up and try it yesterday.  I honestly didn't even see it, despite it being right in front of my face.  In other words, I've gotten to the point where I ignore what I considered "silly" yogurts so much that I'm oblivious to them.  Yet, this is the very reason I'm trying this new adventure: to give a non-prejudiced chance to as many yogurts as I can so that I prove my tastes right, or open up my options.
Non-organic, has a little bit of gunk, probably from cows injected with hormones.

 Silly.  This is the second of 2 reasons I wondered just what makes yogurt "Greek" yogurt.  The first is down below.
I tried this one and actually liked it, if I remember right.  I tried it before really planning to write a blog about it, though so I'll need to give it another chance.  I remember liking the cream a little better, despite myself.  Also, it has pure cane sugar and honey as its sweeteners.  We'll see what round 2 produces.

 If you can zoom in on this, I recommend doing so.  They call it "ambrosia" because "it's just that good".  Okay, so that's me putting words into their mouths but that's what I assume "ambrosia" is supposed to mean.  I didn't study the classics.  First, it's not made in Greece (no, this is not reason number one yet from above) so why the Greek name, claim that it's Greek yogurt, or the reference to some nectary drink imbuing people with immortality that I have no idea what is?
Result: it wasn't that good.  It tasted about like Mountain High's plain yogurt.  It wasn't bad, though.  And I will say this: all organic.

 Here's my personal winner!  I LOVE this yogurt.  It's made in Canadia, Québec to be specific.  Yet they use Vermont milk.  It doesn't claim to be organic :( !  But the ingredient list is fairly short, and the only names I didn't understand were the culture names.  No corn syrup, no malto-phosphate-gunk #5.  Plus, I LOVE blackberry flavor.  The lemon flavor comes out just right too.  Even the plum-walnut, coconut and strawberry flavors, none of which I'm nuts about--they are all worth eating, in my opinion.

 Didn't give it a fair chance.  It said "Chocolate Undergroud" so I had to try it.  And it's non-fat.  Next time I'll remove the strange variables.  But it's organic and low on weirdness.
The end result for this one was like crossing pudding with lemon yogurt.  Strange.  Not something I'll eat regulary.  But at least it wasn't bad.  I'll certainly give a normal flavor a real chance.

Yoplait!  Yoplait is known for its high fructose corn syrup.  But this one said Greek on it so I told myself I'd give it a chance in the name of science.
For this one, no corn syrup.  It's regular sugar.  But they still added in vitamins and mystery gunk.  I'm not nuts about anything being infused because I get my vitamins from their natural sources, but I'll give it a go.
Not organic; fat-free; doesn't say a word about being from cows not treated with hormones.



I'd love to hear if there are any particularly good yogurts out there that I haven't discovered yet.  I realize my sample is pretty small at present but it's a start.  It's too bad I'm not much of an investigative writer.  I'd love to see a really well-written article about different types of yogurts.  For now, this is my experiment and adventure for the month.

"♫Food, glorious food, what is there more handsome?♫"

I've decided to open a Chinese restaurant...an adult-themed Chinese restaurant.  Here's what the menu will look like:
Peeking Duck
Vegetable Chow Fun
Actually, that's all I've come up with.  And I didn't modify the last one.  It just sounded funny to me as-is.

Yesterday I ate too much dessert and drank too much milk.  I told Trisha that my stomach was aching a little bit from it last night.  First, I had half of a cookie that we bought from Mad Cakes around the corner from our house, a "Chewy Chocolate Cookie" which ended up tasting more like a thin brownie than anything; then an old fashioned style sour cream doughnut, one of those weird shaped ones with a bigger hole in the middle and tastes more cakey than even the average doughnut, chocolate; and lastly a pudding filled bismark.  I've heard these called eclair doughnuts, Boston cream doughnuts, but whatever they are, they usually suck and don't have much filling in them.  Just a tiny squirt that fills 1/4 of the doughnut and leaves my mouth watering for what I paid for and wondering why I keep calling these my favorite doughnuts.  This one was rectangular, so naturally it didn't taste as good as a round one.  However, it actually had the right ratio of doughnut to pudding filling.  I had intended to save the bismark for today, but my painful Arabic reading made me crave success, so naturally I turned to my bismark.  And I didn't want it to get stale.  Or lonely.  Note that I left half the cookie.

Today, after vowing I wouldn't make the same mistake again, I pulled out the other half of the cookie.  Trisha groaned and rolled her eyes.  I told her I didn't want to end up binging like I did last night, so I'd just go ahead and eat the cookie now.  While conversing, I finished the cookie, wiped my mouth and drank my water (not as good as yesterday's milk).  Mentally finished, I started wadding my paper cookie wrapper up to throw away.  When what to my astonishment I discovered one last bit of cookie!!  I completely derailed from our conversation--justifiably--praised all that was holy, and made the bit last for three additional bites.  Now was not this exceeding joy?

On a completely unrelated note, I started reading "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser which talks about America and our terrible eating habits.  I am appalled.

"eet eez layk waypeeng mahy [bahtt] weez seelk"

I censored the title a little bit, but I finally watched the Matrix earlier this month and now know where it comes from.  I had always thought the guy who first said it to me was making fun of me for speaking French.

So Trisha asked me to teach her some French a while back and we've at last gotten around to it.  We spent a good portion of a two-hour drive learning verbs.  I like camping, I like eating, I like bicycling and so forth.  When we got back home I made her a PowerPoint presentation so she could see a picture, say what they were doing in the picture, then click on it and see it in writing, then click on it again and hear me pronounce it out loud.  It's pretty much my super basic mini vocabulary lesson style from teaching days.  And no, this did not form the core of my classes either.  Here's my favorite picture as a sample:

 

Yep, I'm a budding artist.  I actually prefer these Microsoft Paint renderings over real images for a few reasons.  1 is that it saves me the time of drawing something decent, or finding it online.  2 is that I get exactly what I want.  3 is that I felt like the more personalized the pictures, the more students remembered the word.  It's interesting, therefore remarkable, therefore they remember.  And let's throw a 4 out there: I actually think it's fun to draw--to see if I can actually make a picture of something I like and see if it's recognizable :)

In the words of Bill Cosby, I told you that story so that I could tell you this one.  Today at church, Trisha talked to one of the French-speaking members who asked how I'm doing (I don't attend right now because I felt I should limit how much I get out of the house).  In a moment of supreme language skill--meaning circumlocution: that most valuable skill in foreign language learning and communication--Trisha realized she did not know how to say "sick".  Instead she came up with the best description for Mono that she could: Il aime dormir (he likes to sleep).  How true!  Fortunately the lady didn't take it as I feared: that I'm skipping church because I don't want to wake up at 8am.  Rather, she helped Trisha out and said: Ah, il est malade!  Le pauvre!  (Oh, he's sick!  Poor thing!)  Actually, I kind of like awkwardness so it might have amused me to get a different kind of welcome when I get to start going to church again.

Speaking of awkward, I have a good friend who saw me walking up to a building she was studying in.  She opened the door as I was walking up and yelled out "Hey Eric!  How's the Mono?!" loud enough for the entire block to hear.  She was completely sincere, nice, and good-intentioned and I totally appreciated the welcome and care.  But it's a really good thing I don't mind divulging very personal information to most anybody.  I thought the awkwardness of the whole situation was pretty funny.

And finally, I have now had one of my greatest successes of my lifetime.  I've had some really big fears and some things I don't do well.  I honestly do try to overcome them by looking from another perspective or by experiencing.  Eyeballs is a big one, and I learned to wear contacts.  Swimming was another, and I learned to swim a 1/2 mile a few summers ago.  Baking cookies is a skill I have never had.  I can fail at that faster than I could run a 100m in high school.  Mind you, I've baked cheesecake, pound cake, normal cake, bread, biscuits, dutch oven cobblers, not to mention cooking dinners from scratch and making up my own recipes.  Successfully.  Somehow, cookies were a totally different animal.

This month, I tried basic Chocolate Chip Cookies from The Joy of Cooking.  Fail.  And then Chocolate Cinnamon Cookies from a website I like.  Not good.  And lastly Brown Sugar Cookies from the same website.  The pattern pretty much followed the new Star Wars movies, except that my last attempt wasn't just mediocre, I aced it!  This may be the best cookie I've ever eaten.  I could be wrong, but it is definitely up there.