This Is Not News

Every so often I remind myself I need to keep better track of those little expenditures that add up and explain why my bank balance isn’t where I wanted it to be at the end of the month. By far one of my biggest financial sins is paying for fast food or snack food while I’m away from home. I bought a 2-liter bottle of Coke at the grocery store today for $1.25. At the checkout counter, the store was selling chilled 20-oz bottles of Coke for somewhere around $1.25-$1.50. I could have bought 24 bottles of Snapple iced tea for $13 – or a single cold bottle for 2-3 times as much as a single bottle from the case. A little thinking ahead can save a lot of money.

Actual meals are even worse. If I don’t eat, that’s obviously bad. But once I leave the house, my options are school cafeterias and fast food courts. Most of the time I don’t even enjoy the food I get from these places, but because I didn’t bother to pack anything, they’re my only option. (A caveat – there’s a food court at Temple where I can get either a really good cheesesteak or a really good chicken kebab sandwich. Treating myself to one of these places every once in a while is actually one of my favorite things about being back at Temple.) I was stuck at 30th Street Station a few weeks ago, and in trying to eat something but eat cheap, I grabbed a couple of tacos from Taco Bell. Not only did I not enjoy that meal very much, but a few days later the e. coli story hit. Great timing, eh?

So part of my resolve to eat better and spend more wisely is to cook in bulk on the weekends. I made two batches of tomato sauce, some fried chicken for the fridge, and shredded beef for tacos. (That last dish owes much to Rick Bayless’s cookbooks, and is really in an entirely different universe from the unfortunate Taco Bell incident.) I think it’s a good habit to get into, but the next trick is going to be making sure I save enough of the food to last through the week.

I tell you, as someone who teaches and takes a possibly-unhealthy number of college courses, I thank my lucky stars that Amazon.com and other online booksellers have managed to thrive. At Temple, the university bookstore frequently marks up texts to the point that the used copies are close to – and sometimes more than – the cover price. Thanks to online shopping, not only can I get my books cheaper, I can get them without having to wait in ridiculous lines. Part of me is truly surprised that the college stores still do as much business as they do.

It has been an interesting cultural shift, watching more and more of my students go the online route. I have to take into account the fact that during the first week of class, there are going to be a handful of students who haven’t done the reading because they’re waiting for the text.

On Friday I picked up two more academic IDs, bringing my collection of currently-valid university IDs to 4. I feel like one of those con men you see in movies who have bundles of fake IDs for every contingency. Except that mine all have my real name and the same goofy “I don’t want to scowl but I really don’t feel like grinning like an idiot” sheepish half-grin I have on most of my IDs.

Except my passport. I definitely managed to scowl on that one.

I think I’m going to hook all of these IDs up to one lanyard and just walk around with a gigantic identity necklace all the time.

So yesterday Pattie sends me a story that suggests that our teachers were on to something when they told us to go with our first instinct: Quick Decisions Might Be the Best.

Then today, I read that a scientist conducting a five-year study on procrastination released the report five years past his deadline to tell us that Procrastination Is Getting Worse.

So my habit for mulling things over to the nth degree means that not only am I taking longer to do things, I’m probably getting them wrong while I’m at it. Great.

I really developed some lousy habits as a writer when I was in high school and college, and I’m really paying for them now. I should get around to breaking them some day.

On the other hand, some experimenting in my kitchen has helped me realize that a little bit of the heavy cream we have left over from baking makes Alton Brown’s cocoa recipe even better. So the week’s not a total write-off.

I was getting ready to go to physical therapy this evening, and told Alex I was going to be back soon. She asked where I was going, and reached out her hands to hold mine.

“I’m going to see the guy who helps fix Daddy,” I said, as she walked up my legs and stood on my thighs.

‘Why are you doing that?” she asked, immediately before leaning back, flipping herself over, and sticking the landing, while I reached over to make sure she kept her balance.

“What you’re doing right there, for starters, I replied.

The sad part is, I probably have at least five more years of this and other varieties of human jungle-gym-dom ahead of me before I work off the karmic debt of what I used to do to my dad and my uncles back when I was a kid . . .

If anyone’s still reading this blog, it’s obvious I fell off the face of the Net for a while there. I started living the life of a part-time college instructor, teaching courses at two area universities. It was overall a good experience, and confirmed for me that overall, I really do like the whole teaching thing. I’m just hoping for a more stable professional situation in which to do it. 🙂 Partially to that end, I’m going back to school myself this semester – I’ll start working on getting my certification to teach at the high school level. This will either drive me crazy or allow me to fill some holes in my background. We shall see.

I’m also trying to get back on the blogging bike as well. I’m hoping that the new Congress will provide some opportunitiesd to talk about actual good policy proposals. We shall see. And in Pennsylvania, the state House is providing all kinds of entertainment that has me once again wondering if maybe we should give the whole proportional representation thing a try.

So I’ve been keeping my eye on Amazon’s page for the new iPod Nanos. We went to the nearest Apple Store over the weekend to take a looksee, and I was generally impressed. 8 GB would comfortable hold my whole music library and leave plenty of room for podcasts and such, so I think I’m gonna make the move some time soon. (This means ripping into AAC the CDs I just finished ripping into WMA. I feel like Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black.) I was kinda hoping that Amazon would discount the 2G Nanos the ways they did the first generation. But right now they don’t seem to be able to keep the 8 GB models in stock at full price – the page indicates they ship in one to two weeks. Yikes.

I just got finished reading my daughter her bedtime stories. Tonight she wanted to read a couple of short board books from a Disney Princess set she has. (I’ll let Pattie grumble about the marketing bonanza that is the Disney Princess brand, but anyway.) All of the stories in thsi set are supposed to have little lessons about being a good person, and hey, I can understand the idea there. But there is something that bugs me about the tone of these books. In one of them, Jasmine goes to the market to buy herself a necklace, but decides to spend her money on a new hat for Aladdin because making someone else happy is supposed to be more important. Now given that Jasmine and Aladdin are the princess and prince of the realm, I’m thinkin’ Jasmine could have struck a bit of a two for one deal with the merchant, or at least bought on credit, but I really shouldn’t be nitpicking the plots of children’s books. That much, anyway. The thing that bugs me is the whole woman-sacrifices-her-own-interests-to-please-her-man implication, and maybe I shouldn’t be imposing gender politics on a Disney book . . . but given the aforementioned prevalence of the brand, if I’m not going to impose gender politics on a Disney book, what good are gender politics?

The whole set is full of this stuff. Cinderella teaches the mice proper etiquette. Ariel learns not to go too far away from home because it’s dangerous out there. Belle spends so much time reading that she doesn’t help her father with an experiment and the experiment goes badly. (Why didn’t Belle’s father go and get Belle?) At least Snow White teaches the dwarfs to pick up after themselves.

I dunno. Gimme Dora the Exporer any day. And not just because Dora has access to a chocolate tree.

So every so often I do a Google search on my name, just to see if stuff from Not News has popped up in unexpected places. (At this point it’s amazing how often my name is attached to various message boards, ratings polls, and so on, but anyway.) On a recent search, I found a blog post that mentioned me in connection with a comic book discussion forum I moderated back when I was in high school. Besides finding it amusing that someone would mention this over ten years later, I was struck by the fact that the blogger got just about every detail other than my name wrong. Part of me is amused by this. Part of me is obsessive compulsive and feels like I should do something to correct the record. But then I get into the question of reliable is my memory after all these years? So for now I think I’ll stick with being amused.

Pattie got herself an iPod Nano this past week, and we went up to the Apple Store at the King of Prussia Mall on Saturday. Quite a crowd there. Which is kinda funny, given that the store doesn’t exactly have a huge array of products. There was one display counter, about two or three feet long and a foot or so wide, and on this counter were four iPods. That’s it. Talk about making use of space.

The heck of it is, despite the fact that I have an MP3 player, I now find myself talking myself into getting an iPod. And I’m still not exactly sure why.