Random musings from a scattered brain
Life
I may not know where I’m going, but I know all too well where I’ve been
Sep 1st
Hey everyone. It’s been good bit since I stopped in here, longer than I expected at any rate. It hasn’t that I’ve not had any thoughts or opinions on matters at hand, its just that I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff and didn’t know what – if any – of those thoughts I really wanted to make public.
As I recently noted, I’ve been having some health issues. More namely, chest pains and heart palpitations. The last of my series of appointments (with the Cardiologist) was on August 20th and it looks like my entire cardiovascular system checks out OK.
It turns out that a lot of my symptoms, when taken together, quite eerily mimic heart problems but the heart itself is fine.
Still, there were some days in there when I really felt like I might die. I haven’t taken care of myself very well over the last 10 or so years and it’s come back to haunt me.
Many people who know me now might be surprised to find out that before I was this mass of humanity, I was actually quite an athlete in my younger days.
I played 5-set tennis matches, marathon basketball games, street hockey and football just about as often as I could – even in the middle of a Miami summer.
More >
Culinary Challenge #1: Cooking the “vile weed.”
Aug 18th
Hey guys. A few posts ago, I mentioned that a viewing of The Meryl Streep/Amy Adams film Julie & Julia had inspired me to try a cooking challenge of my own: Once every two weeks, cook a dish containing an ingredient I normally detest. Granted, since I’ve started cooking regularly, that list has shrunk considerably, but there are plenty of candidates out there.
Case in point: the ingredient I chose for my first challenge: The Dreaded Brussels Sprout (*cue eerie music*)
Whenever I ate Brussels sprouts as a kid, they were always served the same way: boiled. The smell was nauseating and the taste, well, there are very few things I’ve literally gagged on while eating them. Brussels sprouts is one of them.
So, when I announced that I’d be attempting to cook something with this evil miniature cabbage, the reaction wasn’t surprising. Oh sure, there were a few people who proclaimed their love, even a couple who gave me great ideas on how to cook them. Most, though, reacted with sheer horror.
One friend told me I was on my own, even refusing my request for a prayer, saying “sorry, you brought this evil upon yourself.”
One said that the only way he’d eat that “vile weed” was deep fried and dipped in chocolate.
Even my dog thought I was crazy.
More >
There’s a panic on the streets of London…
Aug 13th
Panic on the streets of London
Panic on the streets of Birmingham
I wonder to myself
Could life ever be sane again?
—The Smiths
When the sun sets tonight over London’s skyline, the populace will know that there is only one more sleep left before the entire city is dumped headfirst into Opening Day 2010.
The Barclay’s Premier League kicks off its football (the European kind) season tomorrow, and for the first time, I will be paying attention. See, I’ve always watched soccer at a distance. I’ve respected the athletes but found it very hard to become emotionally invested in the sport. It’s kind of hard to do when the best teams in the best league play in Europe and some of the games start before 8AM Eastern Time.
But, with this year’s World Cup I found my interest transformed. I didn’t just watch the games, I absorbed them. The more I watched, the more I began to see why the rest of the world finds so much to love in this crazy, beautiful sport.
Sure, I’ll admit that Landon Donovan’s last minute goal against Algeria helped, but there were games involving teams I didn’t care a lick about that had me nibbling my fingernails in nervousness.
I have some friends who are soccer fanatics. They recognized this change in me and plainly stated that if I really wanted to sink my teeth into the sport and keep myself interested, I needed to pick a team to root for.
Makes sense, really. You’re always more likely to pay attention to something in the long term if you have a rooting interest. So I did my research.
Allow me to cook you a story…
Aug 7th
Today, I watched Julie & Julia. I added it to my NetFlix queue because it had Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in it. I had a vague idea of the story, but never any of the specifics.
The “Julie” half of the movie is about Julie Powell (real-life writer) who has started several writing projects but has never seen them through to the end. She likes cooking – a lot, actually – and uses her time in a kitchen as a way to come back to herself after a day amongst a Government run cubicle farm.
She decides to give herself a challenge – and a deadline. The challenge because she needed more from her life and the deadline because she’s afraid that without it, she’ll never get it done.
The challenge: To cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking – all 524 recipes – in a year.
Her husband gives her the idea to blog about it. He thinks it would help her get back in touch with her writing. She eventually relents, and off we go.
So, yeah….she’s a writer at heart who loves cooking, uses it as therapy and blogs because it gives her attainable, short-term goals where her writing is concerned.
Basically, she’s me in a skirt. More >
It was 20 years ago today…
Aug 6th
Today is my 38th birthday. I don’t write this in some vain attempt to get good wishes, believe me. A lot of my friends only found out today’s my day via Facebook because I don’t really bring it up. I don’t like to call attention to the fact that I’m getting older.
In fact, normally, I wouldn’t mention it at all. It only comes up because this morning it hit me square between the eyes that I turned 18 twenty years ago.
I even remember where I was the moment the clock struck midnight on August 6, 1990. I was sleeping on a bus.
No, really 
I was in Illinois with the rest of the Miami Sunset Senior High Mu Alpha Theta Mathematics team, attending what would be my last high-school related event: The National Mathematics finals at Northern Illinois University.
One of the things the different teams did was take a day off from the competition, load into busses and go to Six Flags Great America, a theme park outside DeKalb.
It was at this park that I learned of my affinity for Whack-A-Mole and my dislike of free-fall style roller coasters. It was a great day. So much fun. I still remember a lot of the details.