May I be excused?

It's 4 p.m. and, no, you can't have a cookie. Or ice cream. Or potato chips.

Why not?

Mom and Grandma both say "because you'll spoil your dinner."

It's a truth that's been passed down through the generations since the invention of between-meal snacks. Eating before dinner makes you un-hungry for dinner and then you get in trouble and end up having to sit at the table through The Cosby Show because you're still trying to clean your plate.

It's interesting to pause and note that between-meal snacks were a factor in instigating the French Revolution. The aristocrats spent a lot of their free time (and all they had was time) bragging to the hungry masses about their fresh croissants and assorted pastries. The rest is history.

Anyway, it was bound to happen that some ambitious and shady American doctor would eventually put a name, label and price on the dinner-spoiling industry. As seen on TV, that doctor's creation is the Full Bar.

Advertised as being "inspired by weight loss surgery principles," Full Bar is supposedly a natural way to help you lose weight by making you eating less. Brilliantly, the product's Web site notes that "when you feel full, you eat less." So, if you fill up part of your stomach before mealtime, your stomach will fill with less food at mealtime.

If I was at all a responsible kind of person, I would have put that whole paragraph in quotes, except for the sarcastic bits, but I'm simply laughing too much to bother.

A minuscule amount of research as uncovered three facts about Full Bar:

1. It's made of natural ingredients, which include puffed wheat cereal and sugar.
2. Full Bar contains no nutritional value, appetite suppressants or fat burners.
3. 24 Full Bars will cost you $50. Plus shipping.

It seems that we've had this whole "weight loss" phenomenon all wrong! It's not about how much you eat, or even what you eat. It's not about ingredients or will power or calories or carbs or sugar or vitamins or exercise. Turns out, it's all about timing your eating properly. Would you believe that if you eat one of these expensive non-nutritional snacks 30 minutes before you eat dinner, you won't be as hungry for dinner?

Of course you believe it! You were raised to believe it.

Mom, Grandma and the French have been right all along. They should get some royalties out of this.

So, I take it back ... Have a cookie. Have some ice cream. Have a Full Bar. Knock yourself out, and watch the pounds melt away.

Hello Again

Until the advent of Facebook, I always assumed that once a friendship died there was no going back. At least not until the next reunion. Even with Facebook connections, I still carry that belief. What is "friendship," really?

I don't know ... Whatever ... Anyway ...

This weekend I swallowed my pride and took the initiative to rekindle the long dormant embers of a friendship that has been cold for too long. And as luck would have it, the library system welcomed me back with open arms, provided I show proof of residence.

After a mere 30 minutes of taking in that book-y smell and perusing the shelves and shelves of available fiction, I proudly exited the library with my head held high, two books nestled in my arm and a brand new library card attached to my key chain. What'll they think of next?

Apparently pride is quickly regurgitated.

Why did I take this long overdue step? It's essentially because I'm a gigantic nerd (not that only nerds own library cards, and not that there's anything wrong with being a nerd) and I spent several hours one night last week researching and compiling a spring/summer reading list for myself.

For some reason, I've been missing that piece of paper we used get at the end of the school year that had very intelligent-sounding literary suggestions. And then there were the various syllabi that literature majors are handed from term to term with even more intelligent-sounding explorations. And then there's my obsession with lists and words. And, as Debi can attest, lists of words.

So, now I have a list and a goal and a resource and all is right with the world.

Interested in comparing your nerdiness to mine? Here ya go:

• The Things They Carried (O'Brien)
• A Lesson Before Dying (Gaines)
• Robinson Crusoe (Defoe)
• Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row (J. Masters)
• The Diary of Sam Pepys (Pepys)
• Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys)
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens)
• Love in the Time of Cholera (Garcia-Marquez)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez)
• Einstein's Dreams (Lightman)
• Winnie the Pooh (Milne)
• A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson)
• The Gone-away World (Harkaway)
• Narrow Dog to Indian River (Darlington)
• A Far Cry from Kensington (Spark)
• The Four Corners of the Sky (Malone)
• The School of Essential Ingredients (Bauermeister)
• Dune (Herbert)
• The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Larsen)
• The Servants' Quarters (Freed)
• Road Dogs (Leonard)
• Woodsburner (Pipkin, Talese)
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers)
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Roach)
• Pirate Latitudes (Crichton)
• The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)

I wrote a haiku about retainers.

Resigned to my fate,
I haven't gagged much today.
Ask me tomorrow.

Part of the Routine

Sitting at my desk, I lean back to admire the smooth, even curve of my bite in my peanut butter sandwich when Eric walks by on his way to the printer. He points to the yogurt container in my lunch bag and says, "Do you ever wonder why people lick the lids of those things?"

Actually, no, I've never wondered that before. But it's on my mind now.

I suppose it's one of those automatic things that you do without thinking about it because you've always done it without thinking about it. Like closing your eyes when you sneeze, burying your face in fresh-from-the-dryer laundry, watching a scary movie when you get to Aaron's house, or tripping the weird kid in the hallway on the class trip to the water fountain.

I learned a lot about repeatable patterns and routines in school. And not just high school - it goes all the way back to elementary school. That's where we had the communal coat closets and everyone put their coats and boots and backpacks in the same place day after day after day. It's also where we automatically lined up in alphabetical order to go anywhere and everywhere. I always stood behind Michelle Walter and next to John Walker.

We visited the library on Wednesdays, the gym on Tuesdays, and on Fridays we pushed our desks to the sides of the classroom so the other homerooms could come into Miss Lasher's room with their carpet remnants for movies and film strips. On Mondays we went to art and sat in our assigned seats that were ever-so-helpfully numbered, and that left Thursdays for music class where we learned to sing the names of the states in alphabetical order. I wonder if anyone under the age of 30 knows what a film strip is.

At the sounding of the mid-day lunch command, we marched like little soldiers in our orderly lines to the cafeteria. Kids who brought their lunches carried the bright plastic boxes at their sides with one finger on the unreliable plastic latch that caused copious amounts of embarrassment when it would open without warning and spill one poor kid's lunch all over the floor because he didn't have it properly secured. Let that be a lesson.

Line by line, we filed into the cafeteria. With the freedom to sit by our friends, we always sat in the same places next to our friends. Me on the end, Val to my left, Mandy in front of me, Debi next to Mandy. No boys allowed.

Sometimes my dad would bring enormous chocolate chip cookies home from work and mom would cram one into my lunchbox. She'd have to break off a little bit of it to fit it all in, and on those days we all got really excited about dessert. Face it, we were always excited about dessert. And we still are. Sometimes there were Twinkies, other times Little Debbie snack cakes. One universal favorite was pudding. Chocolate Jell-O pudding was a heavenly treat. Not wanting to waste even the smallest taste, we'd break into those cups and immediately lick the lid clean.

Hmmmmm.

Did the dryer just go off?

Believe in Miracles

Yesterday, after the professional Russian hockey players beat the professional Czech hockey players (and before the professional U.S. hockey players beat the professional Canadian hockey players), NBC aired a terrific segment about the 1980 U.S. amateur hockey team that, against all odds, defeated the unbeatable Russian national team and went on to win the gold medal. It was such a moving moment in sports history that I wish I'd been old enough to have any level of understanding, reasoning or memory. Alas, I was probably napping when it happened, but I did eventually see Miracle.

Seeing the nation rally behind a team of virtually unknown but amazingly talented athletes led me to the conclusion that by continuing to allow professional athletes to compete in the Olympic games, we are ensuring that there will never again be any Miracle on Ice moments. And aren't those moments that the Olympics should be about?

The Olympic games should be a chance for the little guys to show off the athleticism and skill that they practice tirelessly day-in and day-out. Those athletes shouldn't be relegated to sitting at home eating pizza and wishing for their chance. The Olympic Games are their stage. What message are we sending when we tell our up-and-coming athletes to ride the pine while we send in the professionals to take care of business and appease the greedy political machines.

A fan of professional sports (the NBA excluded), I understand the ferocity of the American competitive spirit. I love sports and wouldn't trade our freedom of professional sporting for anything, but would it be unimaginably painful to gate check our egos and put the popularity contest on hold for a couple of weeks every few years to give anonymous talent its chance to shine?

Selecting the best of our professional athletes to make up the "national teams" does nothing to ignite the national spirit that is the basis of the Games. It doesn't demonstrate our unity through diversity nor does it showcase our faith in the future of this country. All it does is prove that we're good at keeping statistics, that we can create a roster of professional athletes who have the best ones, and that we're too arrogant, lazy, disinterested, [insert your own adjective here] to look any further. We are missing the forest.

Have you ever attended a high school basketball game? College hockey? Heck, intramural volleyball? You'd be hard pressed to find more heart in someone who earns millions of dollars a year for lacing up his shoes and waving to the crowd than in a teenager who's standing at the plate hearing his hometown cheering in the stands.

Call me crazy, but when it comes to the team I want to see representing my country and me in a world-wide competition, I want to see real people who are like me (but without all of the insecurity and ADD and with more dedication). I don't want to see paid celebrities that I can see every night on ESPN or Dancing with the Stars. I'm talking the Jerry Rice's and Emmitt Smith's here, not the Shawn Johnson's and Apolo Ohno's, whose Olympian status was the reason they were on the show.

I may be on my own, but I would much rather watch a team with a heart full of pride and promise lose than a humdrum "team that can't lose" take the gold Olympiad after Olympiad after Olympiad. That sounds dull and opposite to the Olympic Creed:

"The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well."

If not during the Olympics, when will the passionately hopeful have their moment?

In the meantime: Go USA!

You know what? While I'm at it: Go Moldova!

The River City: Summarized

Richmond’s origins stretch back to 1609 when English settlers from Jamestown decided to get outta dodge. In 1780, the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia was moved from Williamsburg to Richmond, and it remains the capital to this day. Often referred to as The River City, Richmond is built on the shores of the James River, which is the 12th largest river in the U.S. that is in a single state.

In 1781, Benedict Arnold commanded that the Richmond be burned to the ground but by 1782, Richmond had risen from the ashes and has managed to thrive without a repeat of that disaster, thanks to the James and Richmond’s Department of Fire and Emergency Services.

Located in the center of the state, Richmond has, depending on traffic, relatively easy access to Virginia Beach, Washington, DC and whatever is located on the North Carolina border. Rightly considered to be a southern state, Virginia is still far enough north to offer both the pleasantries and the un-pleasantries of all four seasons. Summers, however, are hotter and often reach into the 90s while winters are mild wherein ice is prevalent and snow is rare—unless it’s 2010 and I feel like I’m living in Erie again. My snow brush is thrilled, though, as it’s usually stuck in the closet year after year. Richmond also sees the occasional hurricane.

This is a city rank with history. In 1775, in support of the American Revolution, Patrick Henry delivered his famous “Give Me Liberty or … Death” speech in the city’s St. John’s Church. As fate would have it, Henry saw both of his demands met as Americans defeated the British and became independent in 1783, and then in 1799 he died of stomach cancer. Forty years later, the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) was founded.

MCV is now the medical campus of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), which is located downtown and joins Virginia Union University and The University of Richmond as the city’s biggest schools where thousands of students study each year. Some study to be doctors, some study to be lawyers, teachers or writers. Still others go on to attain degrees in travel and tourism, which makes it fortunate that Richmond has so much to offer in the lines of tourism. From the Edgar Allan Poe Museum to the Holywood Cemetery, Landmark Theatre and the Fan District, there’s something for tourists of all interests. Dining, nightlife and culture are abundant in Richmond as long as you don’t go too far east.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Richmond was elected the Capital of the Confederacy. In 1907, Monument Avenue, a popular west to far-enough-east thoroughfare, was designed to honor local Confederate heroes including J.E.B Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. (Of these, Stonewall Jackson was the only one who didn’t survive the War.) Years later and amidst heated controversy, a statue of tennis great Arthur Ashe was commissioned and seemingly put an end to the commissioning of Monument Avenue statues.

Speaking of sports heroes, Richmond features no professional sporting teams. However, amateurs are welcome. The Richmond Renegades hockey team no longer exists, and there was an indoor football team here for a while, but they didn’t last long. Baseball is the local pastime of choice and the city recently lost our beloved Richmond Braves. They are being replaced this spring by the Richmond Flying Squirrels – a name that will inevitably inspire incapacitating fear in their opponents. Richmond International Raceway is a popular destination at least twice a year when NASCAR comes to town. Indy Racing also draws a smaller crowd, but either way traffic on race day is always impossible.

To get here, book your flight to RIC or make your way east to Washington, DC and head due south on Interstate 95. Don’t take the first I-295 exit because it bypasses the city and you’ll end up in Charlottesville, and it’ll take you at least an hour to get back. Lesson learned.

Bring your family, dress in layers and enjoy all that Richmond has to offer!

Ain't that a hole in the boat

So. Life, right?

Oof.

Yesterday I remembered that I used to keep a fairly regular blog.

Last night I reread most of its nonsense and was impressed to find that I still understand most of the inside jokes.

This morning I decided that I needed a new writing project.

This afternoon I received a notebook in the mail from my cousin Maggie. As part of her school project, I'm to fill a couple of pages with info about the city and state in which I live.

Tonight I will write the best essay about Richmond, Virginia that the world has ever seen.

Tomorrow-ish you will agree with me.

The day after that I'll send the notebook to one of you so you can play, too. Aaron.

Ha!

Does anyone know anyone who lives in Tennessee?