Sunny’s homemade turkey smash burger: half a pound of 99% lean ground turkey breast in three patties; two thick slices of fresh white onion; two tablespoons of Walden Farms zero-calorie Thousand Island dressing, all on an Albertsons Signature Kaiser roll.
Goodbye junk food.
Some years ago, after diving on a wreck in the Philippines and getting her first glimpse of cephalopods in the wild, my wife was writing about her experience and she spelled “cuttlefish” as “cuddlefish.”
When I pointed out her error, she smiled and said, “well, it’s an honest mistake. With all those arms, what fish could possibly cuddle better?”
Eighteen years later and I can’t think of a reason she’s wrong. Clearly, the spelling needs to be changed.
NB: is calling a cuttlefish’s appendages “arms” too anthro-normative? Would love a ruling from the anti-Speciesism crowd. I would never want to offend: as a scuba diver I prefer cordial relations with our cephalopod friends.
When I was twenty years old, I wanted to be a scholar. I wanted to read, to study, to write, to live a life of the mind like the professors and authors I admired. I wanted to teach, to learn, and to be a part of the grand conversations that form the intellectual fabric of our civilization.
Yet I was plagued by the unemployment rate among twentysomethings with doctorates, by the fact that at the end of ten years of higher education lay no reasonable assurance of a job, just the prospect of being another fish in a pool of Doctors of Philosophy fighting over adjunct professorships in obscure colleges. Overeducated and underemployed, I would spend years seeking a place in academia, overeducated and underemployed, and perhaps for life.
It would be nice to say that I cast all of these fears aside, knuckled down, pushed ahead with my dream, and built a respectable career as an historian/political scientist. But it would be a lie. Lacking the requisite confidence and courage, I ran away from my dream.
So I cooked up a new one: I would go into business. It was the early 1980s, after all, and our heroes were boardroom cowboys. I carried a briefcase, I read the Wall Street Journal, I was a 6’7″ version of Alex P. Keaton. I went to a decent business school, got a job with the firm of an old family friend, hooked myself into China as its economic boom began, and held on for dear life.
And here I am, 37 years later, and every day, the dreams I left behind come back with greater urgency. My wife and son can tell. They sit me down and remind me that life is short. They tell me I don’t need to put off my dreams any longer. And I can no longer hide from the truth in their words. It is time time for the dreams to rise again.
We all look at our lives in different ways. I see mine have gone in four phases. First I was a child, then a student, then I built a career, then I built a family. Now it is phase five. Now I chase my dreams. In 16 days the to-do list gets set aside, and I begin living my life by my bucket list.
Coming down to the wire, my discipline wants to head out on vacation. I put this stop my computer monitor to help keep me focused.
Long-life noodles (yi mian).
Fifty-seven times around Sol.
Twenty thousand eight hundred nineteen twists around the Earth’s core.
B”H.
While spectator sports will not consume much of my post-career life (PCL), in-person attendance once or so a year at the following will pepper into my plans. At any time you may see a post from the bleachers of the following:
I also have two or three sports-related bucket list items I will be sharing soon, and there might be an essay coming.
During my fitness journey, @questnutrition for me has been more than just a source of nutrient-balanced meal-substitutes: they have been a source of inspiration, opening my mind to the possibility that food that was good for me actually could TASTE better than food that is bad for me.
Quest has been a lifesaver over the last week, helping me add 87g of extra protein to my diet each day – essential when subsisting on Scout summer camp food that is typically higher in carbohydrates and fats than proteins.
All this and Kosher, too. Thanks, Quest.
As I sit under a pop-up panting in the summer heat of at the arid but alpine Lockwood Valley, I console myself with the thought that all too many of my summers past have been spent in pressurized aluminum tubes with a view something like the above, hurtling around Asia for work, weathering turbulence, thunderstorms, and tourists.
I will always be grateful to have had those times in my life, but I am just as grateful to have given up planes, taxis, hotels, and and endless parade of conference rooms for this modest view of pine trees, tents, squirrelly Scouts, and gruff Scouters.
A breeze picks up, blowing tent flaps, kicking up dust, and offering a brief respite from the heat. A jet passes far overhead. I breathe deep, and smile.
Sitting in the heat of the summer at high altitude, I pulled out this picture I took eighteen moths ago of the West Glacier stop, formerly the Belton Station on the old Great Northern Line in Montana. It’s still hot outside, but this cooled me down.
These days, when somebody says to me “I’ve got a bad flu,” I ask for a clarification.
“You mean ‘bad flu’ as in ‘I am going to be sick as a dog for the next week,’ or ‘bad flu’ as in ‘by the fourth day I will bleed out and die?'”
After this last pandemic, there is no such thing as a trivial flu anymore.
A Bucket and a Pen 