Tag: miscellany

This is absurd — and makes me a little queasy. New Jersey has enough problems, most of them self-induced, but do we really need the stereotype proven on national television by shows of dubious quality? Do we?

The tree is up, but I can’t tell if it’s OK where it is. In recent years, we’ve placed it by the back window of our living room, which allowed it to be a focal point for people coming into the house.

This year, however, we have the dog’s pen in that spot so we’ve moved the tree to the front of the house, in front of the big window in the dining room. It’s there for now, but could be taken down. I’ve purposely not tightened the stand up in case Annie finds it completely wrong when she gets home.

In the meantime, there are papers to be graded, poems to revised, dogs to be walked and some other chores to take care of.

The dogs are watching a squirrel out the back window, oblivious to the intersections that have me lost in thought this morning. Today, I am 47, older than the sports heroes I grew up worshipping, older Jack Kerouac was when he died, older than my imagination allowed when I was younger.

But birthdays are just calendar pages and the age question is not one that has plagued me much over the years. Birthdays are joyous, celebrating the anniversary of coming into the world, but I am lost in a different kind of thought this morning, knowing that this year’s celebration is marked by the darkness of death.

Annie’s Aunt Jean died on Tuesday, the anniversary of our dog Honey’s death, and will be buried tomorrow. Today, we head to Long Island to pay our respects, to see her family. So my birthday, once again, will be spent in mourning.

I don’t offer this to be selfish. It is just an observation. And perhaps, it is wholly appropriate that the two poles of our existence meet like this, that we are made to live with death as we celebrate life, that the reminder that all of it is part of the larger whole….

I finally went to the doctor Monday, after four weeks of coughing. I haven’t been able to run, and sometimes the cough is almost asthmatic — I can’t catch my breath.

But I’m stubborn and stupid and I hate to go to the doctor when it appears to be just a cold.

Instead, I’ve spent more than four weeks getting little sleep and I broke.

So off to the doctor I went to be prescribed a steroid and codeine cough syup — which, as I said on Twitter yesterday, makes me feel like a junkie homerun hitter. So, now my head hurts, I’m tired and I still have another four or five papers to grade tonight (plus pulling together a lesson plan and starting a column).

If you don’t see more blog entries today, you’ll know why.

Um….

I don’t think America needed to see Tom DeLay shake his booty on national television. (I’m sitting with my wife, who watches the show religiously.)

Couldn’t we have just let this guy fade into the sunset, to be remembered as a corrupt partisan who helped drive the conservative movement off a cliff?

A 16 for that dance? Are the judges hoping that DeLay will get his Congressional pals to name an airport after them? Or maybe some federal money for a TV dancing school?

Just too bizarre for words.