Blogging on the Powwow

Twenty years ago this February, I was living in Worcester, MA while I attended college at Clark University. I lived on Hollywood Street, in the "Main South" portion of Worcester, which is not the most desirable place to live. One day, very near my 20th birthday, I returned to my apartment building after a day on campus, climbed to the third floor, and found a large cardboard box sitting outside my apartment door. A new Sharp TV  from my mother! Oh, the delight! At the time I had a black and white TV, which was probably 20 years old if it was a day old, which operated with the help of a failing antenna and  tinfoil. The Sharp TV has been with me/us every since. It has lived in Massachusetts and Maine; in Worcester, Old Orchard Beach, two homes in Saco, and Amesbury. It has been faithful, never failing us even once. I have the original remote control, which with some excessive pressure, still works. We finally decided to give into the pressure and get a flat screen ...

A couple of years ago my friend, Kathy, was reeling after a vacation. You know the feeling - lost, endlessly tired, unproductive, unmotivated, etc. She was discouraged. Why was she feeling this way? What do you expect?  I asked, You have PVAD - Post-Vacation Adjustment Disorder! That began a longstanding, and endlessly helpful, tradition of explaining away all of our woes with a simple phrase: P [fill in the blank]  Adjustment Disorder. In addition to PVAD, we could add PLRAD --Long Run --  the syndrome that I get about 24-48 hours after a run of 18 miles or longer, when I am exhausted and I think that I will be hopelessly behind in all of my professional work (which is actually true) and that I should give up running forever (which is silly, of course). When I have PLRAD, that seems like the only solution. How about PSAD, which is the crushing exhaustion that one feels as the end of a Semester;  or PYOTO, which is what I experienced when the Year of the Oboe ...

I am a woman of routine. I eat the same thing for breakfast every day, 7 days a week: banana, peanut butter, and OJ. I have no interest and no desire to drift from this routine. In my third and fourth years of college, I had the same thing for dinner every night: pasta, red sauce, broccoli, and skimmed milk. All of my friends and colleagues from UNH can order for me when we go out to eat: grilled chicken salad, no croutons, balsamic vinegar, and some sort of starch -- usually French fries. When I eat at a restaurant, I order this same meal about 95% of the time. Routine - I really like routines. Most of my readers know of my commitment to running, but few know of my obsession to run 5 days a week, every week, regardless of schedule, fatigue, and plain ol' common sense. Beds without humans in them need to be made; an unmade bed haunts me and disrupts my other activities until I attend to it. I never leave my office for the day, without attending to any loose papers on my desk. They ...