2 things

1. Awesomely, I discovered today that even though maple and brown sugar Quaker Instant Oatmeal is best before a certain date, it remains quite serviceable and, dare I say, satisfying for at least 8 months afterwards.
2. Usually it takes me months, if not years, to look back and be slightly embarrassed by things I've written on this site, but today I am already a bit ashamed of this line from yesterday: "I'm 27. Time to get regular with this shit." Ugh.

I have that. That too. Oh, and definitely that.

So I'm sitting in Amy's room at the same conference-center-that-used-to-be-a-monastery that from which I wrote around this time last year while she works, and after about 45 minutes of Googling my bodily idiosyncrasies to see which horrible diseases I might have (answer: all of them) I decided that maybe my time would be better spent forcing myself to write, to get back into the habit of doing so more than once a month.

I've been listening to this book on my iPod that I downloaded a long time ago and ignored forever called The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, and every time I listen to it for an hour or so, I tell myself that I should stop. It's quite directly responsible for this morning's WebMD-fest, for one thing. It's penetrated straight to the core of my long-suppressed hypochondriasis. An Amazon review:

"After you turn 7, your risk of dying doubles every eight years." By your 80s, you "no longer even have a distinctive odor ... You're vanishing." "The brain of a 90-year-old is the same size as that of a 3-year-old." And it goes on and on. David Shields's litany of decay and decrepitude might have overwhelmed the age-sensitive reader (like this one), but The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead manages to transcend the maudlin by melding personal history with frank biological data about every stage of life, creating an "autobiography about my body" that seeks meaning in death, but moreover, life.

So, yeah. It's tailor-made to give me nightmares, but it's also touching, funny sometimes, and in the end, as my first ever philosophy professor might have said, it's life-affirming, not life-negating. And it's inspired me to call a doctor next week and get myself checked out for the first time in years. Hell, maybe even a dentist too, even though I just saw one and had half my face drilled out 6 months ago. I'm 27. Time to get regular with this shit.

In news much more inline with making me feel alive, I went to a batting cage with a friend from work the other day, and was pleased to find that I can still hit the ball. And develop mean-ass blisters.

Wicked

I spent the weekend in the Boston area for a wedding, and took this picture of the corner of a local newspaper while I waited for a pizza that ended up smacking the Brooklyn pizza smugness right off my face. I took plenty of pictures of people at the wedding, too, which will appear soon in the places that pictures of people often go. Stupid pictures like this one go here on my stupid website. So I can say stupid things about them.

I just got a kick out of the fact that the word "wicked," a colloquialism that finds its way into just about every sentence locally (and is used everywhere else in the world whenever the speaker wishes to mock the dialect of those who worship at the Church of Fenway), is now being used by a cabal of regional papers to promote their provincial web presence.

The days of the local rag may be numbered, but I take comfort in knowing that they're not going down without making caricatures of themselves and reinforcing stereotypes about the people that've kept them in business this long.

You know it's going to be a good day when...

...you end up behind a van like this at a red light and you inexplicably have your camera handy.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm too old to think things like this are funny. But then I realize that I already know the answer to that question.

Bonus awesomeness: the Duschqueen website (of course I went to it) looks like it might have been designed by the same guy that made this site.