Tuesday Quote of the Week

"I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition. I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it. I am trying to learn from it.
"Our lives teach us who we are."
~~Salman Rushdie (From "In Good Faith," A 1990 essay response to the reaction to his book The Satanic Verses)

When the cure is, quite possibly, worse than the disease

Not one to drink on New Year's Eve (I generally work, making sure others are drinking), there have been the random occasions where I make those deals (you know...the never agains that last until the memory fades). But while I guarantee I won't be putting these recipes aside for those types of rainy days, this little journey through the history of the hair of dog (literally) and other cures in yesterday's Wall Street Journal is a fun read.

Tuesday Quote of the Week

"The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own image reflected. A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return."
~~Salman Rushdie (From "In Good Faith," A 1990 essay response to the reaction to his book The Satanic Verses)

Priorities

So...for the next couple of days, schools have been closed but the stores will be open 24 hours...

Well, I could have done THAT

So, for most of this week I was suffering from what I assumed to be a stomach virus. I never get sick and have actually never met my primary care doctor. But tired of the whole ordeal and having a free couple of hours, I decided to get checked out.

Of course, my primary care doctor wasn't free (so we still haven't met) so they sent me to the urgent care section of this particular practice. The person who examined me was stumped as to possible reasons for my symptoms as they apparently weren't conclusive. So he sat down at the computer and started looking things up, asking me if I had related symptoms for the particular diseases in question. We went from the common ("Could you be pregnant?" "No" "How do you know?") to increasingly rare or unlikely ("It could be a precursor to heart disease, any history?" and "It's also a symptom of hepatitis, but I see you've been vaccinated.") Finally he just said to give it a couple of days, drink plenty of clear fluids--no caffeine or alcohol (like that's going to happen), and if I was still having trouble to come back.

Next time I'll do my own Internet research.

Tuesday Quote of the Week

"I'm not going to be okay when my wife finds out I was on a train coming from New York City."
~~A man originally headed to Providence on the Acela after being told by a doctor on board that they had rerouted the train to Bridgeport and were taking him to the hospital and had called his wife (he had just borrowed someone's cellphone to call her, so they hit redial), but that he would be okay. (He had just woken up from a seizure.)

Santas Invade San Francisco

Saturday was Santa Con in San Francisco. Basically a Santa-themed day-long bar hop that started in San Francisco 14 years ago and has since spread to several cities worldwide. It's in Boston on Dec. 20. So if you are so inclined, don a Santa suit (or some such apparel) and drink on...

Tuesday Quote of the Week

"We aren't dead yet. We may be in deep trouble but we aren't done for. And while there is life, there must be analysis, struggle, persuasion, argument, polemic, rethinking, and all the other longish words that add up to one very short word: hope."
~~Salman Rushdie

The over-examined life

They say the unexamined life isn't worth living. But what about the over-examined life? More to the pont, if you were to log every single detail--what you eat, drink, and spend; where you walk; how many pages you read; even who you sleep with and how often--when would you find the time to live it?

In the Wall Street Journal today, Jamin Brophy-Warren takes on all the websites that one can use to aggregate the mundane data of your day-to-day life. But does anyone other than Nicholas Fenton care that he drank 632 beers in 2007 (broken out by country of origin)? Apparently they do, since this and several other equally intriguing bits of data are in his annual report and people actually read it.

Word to the wise, though. You better not be planning a divorce or have any other reason to hide all those day-to-day details...

Tuesday quote of the week

"The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other."

~~Ernest Hemingway