*“I've been cheated
Been mistreated…”
When I hear the term ‘roid, my first thought is hemorrhoids. I’m at THAT age, you know. When the term is applied to steroids, it is usually in the context of treatment for some serious ailment afflicting a friend or acquaintance.
Now when I think of ‘roids, I’ll simply think: A-Rod. Or A-Roid.
*“I've been made blue
I've been lied to…”
The “truth” is out: Alex Rodriguez, New York Yankee, likely Hall of Fame baseball player and the highest paid athlete in his sport, used steroids while playing for Texas from 2001-2003.
Or so he says.
Signing the biggest contract at that time, A-Rod says he felt pressure to perform and took a few things – some of which you can buy at GNC, he claims – to enhance his performance. “I wanted to prove to everyone that I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time.” Now he is “deeply sorry and regretful,” he tells us. “I’m sorry for that time and sorry to my fans,” he says. I don’t need any of that, he claims.
And why should we believe him? Was it really only 2001-2003 that he used these substances? Is he sorry he used performance-enhancing drugs? Or is he sorry he was outed by Sports Illustrated? Sorry for the act, sorry he got caught, or sorry he lied about the whole thing?
He was “stupid and naïve,” he says, not knowing what he was using. Why would a world class athlete whose livelihood depends on the health of his body take something he knew nothing about? Does that make any sense? He stopped using the pills, injectables in 2003 following an injury. So we are now to believe that he stopped in 2003. And signing the biggest contract ever with the New York Yankees in 2004, where the pressure to perform is immeasurably greater than in Texas, where he formerly played, didn’t make him feel that he had to enhance his performance by taking just a little something extra?
Maybe he should have. He certainly didn’t come through in the clutch in any post-season with New York.
While Barry Bonds faces jail if convicted of lying to federal authorities, while Mark McGwire is permanently ensconced in the Hall of Shame, while Roger Clemens goes before Congress and fiercely defends himself, we are supposed to feel better that at least Alex Rodriguez is a stand-up guy. He admitted steroid use and that he lied.
Kind of.
With this behavior – taking illegal, banned substances and then lying about them until he was caught – what message are we sending to society and especially to young athletes and kids in general? That it is OK to do something you know is either wrong or illegal and then lie about it as long as you later admit your guilt and say you want to put it all behind you?
A-Rod followed up his first interview with a press conference at the Yankees’ spring training complex. Here he provided more details, mostly along the order of “the dog ate my homework,” only for A-Rod it was the story of how his unnamed cousin – surely the stars of this drug-related “Dumb and Dumber” – injected him for three years with something available OTC in the Dominican Republic (it turns out – schock! that the substance was not available in the DR OTC, by the way). He wasn’t sure they were using it right or even if he realized any benefit from using the substance, but he continued getting shots from My Cousin Vinny for three years.
Why should we believe Alex Rodriguez now? Unless he pledges to take drug tests randomly and make the results public each time so we know he’s clean. Meanwhile, whatever A-Rod allegedly took is illegal. Was it banned at the time? Well, it was illegal, and shouldn’t that be enough?
Why do we care if athletes want to abuse their bodies? After all, isn’t their intention to perform better so their team can win and they can become champions? They are willing to risk it all in the long term for short term results. Isn’t that their prerogative? If so, why does it bother us?
Because they cheat. Because they lie. And because, as a society, we feel let down. Our standards are falling. People can cheat and lie, later admit it and we are supposed to forgive them for the transgressions because they finally spoke the truth.
Unfortunately, I can’t be so forgiving. But what I can do, from now on, is never believe anyone who denies doing something wrong, says he is sorry he did something wrong and that he/she will never do it again. I won’t believe anyone from now on.
*“I've been made blue
I've been lied to…”
When A-Rod took his performance-enhancing drugs and lied about it and then admitted it, he took away my inherent belief in the good of people. Now I feel stupid and naïve. And isn’t that a shame?
*Linda Ronstadt – “When Will I Be Loved?”
Monday, February 23, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Going Bananas - January, 2009
I believe that deep down we are all seeking perfection in something. The perfect date. The perfect mate. The perfect weather, the perfect haircut. Remember when Barbara Walters interviewed Monica Lewinsky and all people talked about afterwards was her perfect lipstick? There’s a nail salon near me called ”Perfection Nails.” All those things would be great. And as a perfectionist myself – typos in these essays notwithstanding – I am seeking something more: The perfect banana.
Now don’t start getting all Freudian on me, because this quest is about the fruit and nothing but the fruit, so help me God. And if you chose to read beyond this point, good for you, because this is an essay about the perfect banana. After all, bananas in concept are practically perfect. They contain potassium, which allegedly provides health benefits. If you get cramps in your legs, eat more bananas. They don’t have many calories, and they are neatly wrapped and portable, so you can grab one and go (I keep the plastic bags from the newspaper so I can toss in the peels). Just don’t abuse them in the transit mode or you’ll be that much further from perfection by adding bumps and bruises. You can eat them plain, sans any accoutrements, use them on cereal or as the centerpiece of a banana split.
I had a perfect banana once at a video shoot in Princeton. Even as I ate it, I knew. I knew it would be nearly impossible to find another banana so perfect. It was long and firm, perfectly shaped and completely devoid of brown spots. I want my banana ripe enough to be able to peel it without any trouble, but if it is too easy, it is probably too ripe. I don’t want the peel green, but if it has any number of brown spots, it’s not my kind of banana. That doesn’t mean it is bad or that I won’t eat it, just that it is not perfect. I’m not a banana bread person, so I’m not going to save brown bananas for that purpose. I don’t want to eat banana cream pie or banana bread or anything banana-flavored. Just the banana and nothing but the banana.
My quest for perfection takes me to the produce department of virtually any supermarket. Perfection might just be lurking at the end of the aisle, right? Wrong, if I seek it at Shop-Rite, otherwise known as the cultural center of my town (where your chances of running into someone you know increase exponentially depending on how bad you look that day). Shop-Rite serves up its bananas in plastic bags. The poor bananas, unable to breathe, break out into a warm sweat. As I liberate them from this plastic prison, in my mind I hear the song “Born Free” playing. When I announced I was retiring and people asked me what I planned to do with all that free time, I wanted to say that I planned to hang out in the produce section and free all the bananas from their slimy state. I believe that no good can come from the banana-plastic relationship.
Another reason NOT to buy bananas encased in plastic bags is that I live alone. I don’t want to buy a bunch of bananas, all in the same stage of banana life. I can’t eat that many, and the rest will rot. What I want – and what I get because I dare to defy the rules by opening the bags – is two green bananas and two ripe bananas. You can’t get two different-aged bananas in a single bunch, and from a slimy bunch, at that. Bagged bananas are far from my quest for perfection, so my search continues.
Stop and Shop is a better banana environment. The bananas there not only are born free, but they seem to roam freely through the store. You can find them in the produce aisle, on stands near the registers and the Nilla wafers and hanging in small bunches in various aisles in the store. The only problem there is quantity. If I only want two, sometimes I can’t hang the bunch back on the hook after making my selection. But I notice they seem to be less brown and more firm, key factors in my quest.
I don’t want to pursue perfection through every store, though I will feel triumphant if and when I find the perfect banana. I think it was what Bono had in mind when he and U2 wrote “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” If I find a perfect banana someday, somewhere, my life will have purpose. Of course, once I eat the perfect banana, the quest begins anew.
Now don’t start getting all Freudian on me, because this quest is about the fruit and nothing but the fruit, so help me God. And if you chose to read beyond this point, good for you, because this is an essay about the perfect banana. After all, bananas in concept are practically perfect. They contain potassium, which allegedly provides health benefits. If you get cramps in your legs, eat more bananas. They don’t have many calories, and they are neatly wrapped and portable, so you can grab one and go (I keep the plastic bags from the newspaper so I can toss in the peels). Just don’t abuse them in the transit mode or you’ll be that much further from perfection by adding bumps and bruises. You can eat them plain, sans any accoutrements, use them on cereal or as the centerpiece of a banana split.
I had a perfect banana once at a video shoot in Princeton. Even as I ate it, I knew. I knew it would be nearly impossible to find another banana so perfect. It was long and firm, perfectly shaped and completely devoid of brown spots. I want my banana ripe enough to be able to peel it without any trouble, but if it is too easy, it is probably too ripe. I don’t want the peel green, but if it has any number of brown spots, it’s not my kind of banana. That doesn’t mean it is bad or that I won’t eat it, just that it is not perfect. I’m not a banana bread person, so I’m not going to save brown bananas for that purpose. I don’t want to eat banana cream pie or banana bread or anything banana-flavored. Just the banana and nothing but the banana.
My quest for perfection takes me to the produce department of virtually any supermarket. Perfection might just be lurking at the end of the aisle, right? Wrong, if I seek it at Shop-Rite, otherwise known as the cultural center of my town (where your chances of running into someone you know increase exponentially depending on how bad you look that day). Shop-Rite serves up its bananas in plastic bags. The poor bananas, unable to breathe, break out into a warm sweat. As I liberate them from this plastic prison, in my mind I hear the song “Born Free” playing. When I announced I was retiring and people asked me what I planned to do with all that free time, I wanted to say that I planned to hang out in the produce section and free all the bananas from their slimy state. I believe that no good can come from the banana-plastic relationship.
Another reason NOT to buy bananas encased in plastic bags is that I live alone. I don’t want to buy a bunch of bananas, all in the same stage of banana life. I can’t eat that many, and the rest will rot. What I want – and what I get because I dare to defy the rules by opening the bags – is two green bananas and two ripe bananas. You can’t get two different-aged bananas in a single bunch, and from a slimy bunch, at that. Bagged bananas are far from my quest for perfection, so my search continues.
Stop and Shop is a better banana environment. The bananas there not only are born free, but they seem to roam freely through the store. You can find them in the produce aisle, on stands near the registers and the Nilla wafers and hanging in small bunches in various aisles in the store. The only problem there is quantity. If I only want two, sometimes I can’t hang the bunch back on the hook after making my selection. But I notice they seem to be less brown and more firm, key factors in my quest.
I don’t want to pursue perfection through every store, though I will feel triumphant if and when I find the perfect banana. I think it was what Bono had in mind when he and U2 wrote “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” If I find a perfect banana someday, somewhere, my life will have purpose. Of course, once I eat the perfect banana, the quest begins anew.
What's On? - February, 2008
“What are you watching?” my favorite sister inquired one night.
“I’m switching back and forth between the Soul Train Music Awards, a salute to George Gershwin on PBS and a Yankee game,” I replied.
Yes, my taste in television is more than a little eclectic. At any given time I’m as likely to be watching a documentary on the Kennedy assassination as “Make Me a Supermodel.” When I hear people say, “There’s nothing on,” I always think. “Not for me.” If there is a show about building a cruise ship, a basketball game (I watched five last Sunday) or a new episode of “Men in Trees,” I’m set.
So for me, there is a lot on television, but it is getting harder to figure out what is on where. While there are far more channels, the choice of programming has become stranger and more disconnected from the original intent of the network broadcasting it.
Take, for instance, the Biography Channel, where you can watch four hours a day of “Murder, She Wrote” with only an occasional interruption for a bio of an important historical figure – say, Bruce Willis. Is this the Angela Lansbury Channel? (By the way, if you really can’t get enough of “Murder, She Wrote,” you can also catch it on the Hallmark Channel. There must be some real die-hard Angela Lansbury fans out there for this show to air so often each day.)
My impression of the venerable National Geographic magazine, the august, yellow-rimmed journal showing outstanding photography of far-flung locations and people, doesn’t exactly match the National Geographic Channel. Instead, in addition to actual programs about exotic locations, we are treated to “Outlaw Bikers – Hell’s Angels,” “Bounty Hunters” and a variety of programs about prisons.
Of course, MTV years ago stopped showing music except on off-hours, instead presenting a range of so-called reality shows where an entire subculture of “stars” is established and recycled through “Real World,” “Road Rules,” and the “Real World-Road Rules Challenge.” I can’t help but wonder: Is being a participant on a reality TV show now a bona fide profession? Some of these people either have very understanding employers with generous sabbatical policies or they get paid to wander from show to show, competing in a series of odd physical challenges that have nothing to do with “Music TV.”
MTV isn’t the only confusing channel. The Country Music Channel’s “Trick My Truck” takes a page from MTV’s “Pimp My Ride,” in performing extreme makeovers on vehicles. And what does this have to do with country music, I wonder. No more than VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” or the same network’s “Celebrity Fit Club,” which features has-beens and people you never heard of trying to lose weight and regain whatever show biz career they apparently once had.
Headline News no longer dishes out news headlines, instead featuring a bunch of programs that blur the concept of news. The Discovery Channel has “Dirty Jobs,” where poor host Mike Rowe (featured in a series of TYLENOL commercials over the years) is asked to take on the kind of jobs you can’t imagine someone else doing but are glad they’re not your job. Try sweeping up at a zoo, making pots out of cow pies or making roof shingles for a living. This is Discovery?
The Travel Channel sometimes takes me to exotic locations and on beautiful cruise ships. But the same channel can spend a day televising a bunch of men in a room playing poker. I guess the tie-in is that the players had to travel to get there.
Even A&E – the Arts and Entertainment channel – no longer bears much resemblance to either art or entertainment. Really, does anyone want to watch “Parking Wars,” a program about people trying to find or fighting over a parking spot? Or how about “Airline,” where in every show someone is bound to miss a connecting flight?
American Movie Classics no longer limits its showings to “Citizen Kane” and movies of that ilk. You can often find a recent comedy with Martin Lawrence when you are really in the mood for a Humphrey Bogart classic.
Some networks have gone the route of changing their names to more closely match the content. Court TV is now “Tru,” which doesn’t make it any more credible to me. Is Tru true? Somehow, I doubt it.
And could someone please tell the Weather Channel that we don’t need to see shows on how weather affected history? I just want to know how much snow we are going to get.
As far as I can tell, only Animal Planet lives up to its name, broadcasting programs that feature animals around the clock – or at least until the infomercials take over in the wee hours.
Thank goodness I have my fallbacks; as long as I can watch anything on Home & Garden, the Food Network or a game (substitute baseball in the non-basketball season), I always have something to watch.
I’m not saying that all of this stuff isn’t interesting to someone, but consider this an advisory: Don’t judge a cable network by its name if you are trying to figure out “what’s on?”
“I’m switching back and forth between the Soul Train Music Awards, a salute to George Gershwin on PBS and a Yankee game,” I replied.
Yes, my taste in television is more than a little eclectic. At any given time I’m as likely to be watching a documentary on the Kennedy assassination as “Make Me a Supermodel.” When I hear people say, “There’s nothing on,” I always think. “Not for me.” If there is a show about building a cruise ship, a basketball game (I watched five last Sunday) or a new episode of “Men in Trees,” I’m set.
So for me, there is a lot on television, but it is getting harder to figure out what is on where. While there are far more channels, the choice of programming has become stranger and more disconnected from the original intent of the network broadcasting it.
Take, for instance, the Biography Channel, where you can watch four hours a day of “Murder, She Wrote” with only an occasional interruption for a bio of an important historical figure – say, Bruce Willis. Is this the Angela Lansbury Channel? (By the way, if you really can’t get enough of “Murder, She Wrote,” you can also catch it on the Hallmark Channel. There must be some real die-hard Angela Lansbury fans out there for this show to air so often each day.)
My impression of the venerable National Geographic magazine, the august, yellow-rimmed journal showing outstanding photography of far-flung locations and people, doesn’t exactly match the National Geographic Channel. Instead, in addition to actual programs about exotic locations, we are treated to “Outlaw Bikers – Hell’s Angels,” “Bounty Hunters” and a variety of programs about prisons.
Of course, MTV years ago stopped showing music except on off-hours, instead presenting a range of so-called reality shows where an entire subculture of “stars” is established and recycled through “Real World,” “Road Rules,” and the “Real World-Road Rules Challenge.” I can’t help but wonder: Is being a participant on a reality TV show now a bona fide profession? Some of these people either have very understanding employers with generous sabbatical policies or they get paid to wander from show to show, competing in a series of odd physical challenges that have nothing to do with “Music TV.”
MTV isn’t the only confusing channel. The Country Music Channel’s “Trick My Truck” takes a page from MTV’s “Pimp My Ride,” in performing extreme makeovers on vehicles. And what does this have to do with country music, I wonder. No more than VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” or the same network’s “Celebrity Fit Club,” which features has-beens and people you never heard of trying to lose weight and regain whatever show biz career they apparently once had.
Headline News no longer dishes out news headlines, instead featuring a bunch of programs that blur the concept of news. The Discovery Channel has “Dirty Jobs,” where poor host Mike Rowe (featured in a series of TYLENOL commercials over the years) is asked to take on the kind of jobs you can’t imagine someone else doing but are glad they’re not your job. Try sweeping up at a zoo, making pots out of cow pies or making roof shingles for a living. This is Discovery?
The Travel Channel sometimes takes me to exotic locations and on beautiful cruise ships. But the same channel can spend a day televising a bunch of men in a room playing poker. I guess the tie-in is that the players had to travel to get there.
Even A&E – the Arts and Entertainment channel – no longer bears much resemblance to either art or entertainment. Really, does anyone want to watch “Parking Wars,” a program about people trying to find or fighting over a parking spot? Or how about “Airline,” where in every show someone is bound to miss a connecting flight?
American Movie Classics no longer limits its showings to “Citizen Kane” and movies of that ilk. You can often find a recent comedy with Martin Lawrence when you are really in the mood for a Humphrey Bogart classic.
Some networks have gone the route of changing their names to more closely match the content. Court TV is now “Tru,” which doesn’t make it any more credible to me. Is Tru true? Somehow, I doubt it.
And could someone please tell the Weather Channel that we don’t need to see shows on how weather affected history? I just want to know how much snow we are going to get.
As far as I can tell, only Animal Planet lives up to its name, broadcasting programs that feature animals around the clock – or at least until the infomercials take over in the wee hours.
Thank goodness I have my fallbacks; as long as I can watch anything on Home & Garden, the Food Network or a game (substitute baseball in the non-basketball season), I always have something to watch.
I’m not saying that all of this stuff isn’t interesting to someone, but consider this an advisory: Don’t judge a cable network by its name if you are trying to figure out “what’s on?”
Water - September, 2007
When you own a house, water is the bane of your existence. You need it where and when you want it. It needs to flow freely through your pipes, but not drip through your faucet. You want it in your sink, but not in your basement. You want it to fill your toilet tank and not cause corrosion and that annoying “the toilet is running” thing where just jiggling the handle really doesn’t solve the problem. You want it coming out cold from the icemaker, but you need to be vigilant for clumps, so make sure you work the thing every day, even when you don’t need ice. You run the dehumidifier in the summer and the humidifier in the winter, just to make sure your world is full of the right amount of moisture at all times.
You want the rain to flow gently into your gutters, not fighting with leaves or, God forbid, freezing on your roof in the winter, backing up into the phenomenon called “ice damming,” where it gets under the roof and freezes, only to melt and drip into your home through your sheetrock. Ah, but I am thinking ahead, aren’t I? And do I hear “gutter helmet” as a birthday gift?
Do I sound like I know far more about this issue than I should? Personal experiences aside, who among us hasn’t had a sump pump issue, water in the basement after a big storm, or a leaky pipe? If you have a pool, your issues are compounded by chemistry. Making it look like the pristine Caribbean doesn’t happen by chance. It’s a delicate balance between chlorine, alkaline and a host of other fatal-if-swallowed chemicals in white containers that confounds, confuses and bankrupts you. My formerly blue water today is pea green, despite the little robot guy sucking the crud off the bottom, and I haven’t even figured out how to heat the pool, no less cure it of this color transformation. So I have poured vats of chlorine into it, hit it with alkalinity rise (I confess I have no idea what that is) and followed all the chemical potions suggested by the pool guys. Apparently you even have to do something to “shock” the pool, which turns out to be adding a bunch of packages of more chemical stuff and not merely having me show up in a bathing suit, which I thought would surely be shocking enough. You have to get the pool closed for the winter and opened in the summer, and the same thing goes for the sprinkler system, which gets serviced twice a year. Let’s face it, if we took paid this much attention to our bodies, we’d all be in better shape.
But a leak doesn’t heal on its own. I can limp around for a while on a sore leg, knowing that eventually I’ll recover from whatever it is that ails me now, but the leak in my kitchen ceiling probably isn’t going to recover as quickly. The likely culprit, the shower above in the master bath, isn’t about to give way, but it also isn’t about to get better on its own. Exploratory surgery seems likely, followed by replacement parts and some cosmetic repairs. The house is only 20, but I guess “house years” apply, because at 20, I sure wasn’t leaking – yet.
So, yes, water is everywhere when you own a home, and, if you own a new home (new for you, but not necessarily new construction), it takes a while until you get to know each other well enough to identify your respective water issues. And, no, that is not a tear in my eye, it’s just a drip coming from…somewhere.
You want the rain to flow gently into your gutters, not fighting with leaves or, God forbid, freezing on your roof in the winter, backing up into the phenomenon called “ice damming,” where it gets under the roof and freezes, only to melt and drip into your home through your sheetrock. Ah, but I am thinking ahead, aren’t I? And do I hear “gutter helmet” as a birthday gift?
Do I sound like I know far more about this issue than I should? Personal experiences aside, who among us hasn’t had a sump pump issue, water in the basement after a big storm, or a leaky pipe? If you have a pool, your issues are compounded by chemistry. Making it look like the pristine Caribbean doesn’t happen by chance. It’s a delicate balance between chlorine, alkaline and a host of other fatal-if-swallowed chemicals in white containers that confounds, confuses and bankrupts you. My formerly blue water today is pea green, despite the little robot guy sucking the crud off the bottom, and I haven’t even figured out how to heat the pool, no less cure it of this color transformation. So I have poured vats of chlorine into it, hit it with alkalinity rise (I confess I have no idea what that is) and followed all the chemical potions suggested by the pool guys. Apparently you even have to do something to “shock” the pool, which turns out to be adding a bunch of packages of more chemical stuff and not merely having me show up in a bathing suit, which I thought would surely be shocking enough. You have to get the pool closed for the winter and opened in the summer, and the same thing goes for the sprinkler system, which gets serviced twice a year. Let’s face it, if we took paid this much attention to our bodies, we’d all be in better shape.
But a leak doesn’t heal on its own. I can limp around for a while on a sore leg, knowing that eventually I’ll recover from whatever it is that ails me now, but the leak in my kitchen ceiling probably isn’t going to recover as quickly. The likely culprit, the shower above in the master bath, isn’t about to give way, but it also isn’t about to get better on its own. Exploratory surgery seems likely, followed by replacement parts and some cosmetic repairs. The house is only 20, but I guess “house years” apply, because at 20, I sure wasn’t leaking – yet.
So, yes, water is everywhere when you own a home, and, if you own a new home (new for you, but not necessarily new construction), it takes a while until you get to know each other well enough to identify your respective water issues. And, no, that is not a tear in my eye, it’s just a drip coming from…somewhere.
My New Job Is Me - January, 2007
A bit of a tease, admittedly, but for those of you hungry for the answer to the question, “Whatever happened to What’s Her Name?” I thought I’d give you an update on retirement, a state to which I encourage you all to aspire.
As you know, I left Johnson & Johnson without a detailed plan, deciding instead to take advantage of my new freedom to pursue all the things I never had time to do. Turns out that more of my time is spent sleeping and moisturizing than I ever thought possible. I’m making up for years of sleep deprivation, trying to get at least 7-8 hours a night. But the moisturizing – I swear – seems like it occupies even more of my time. With separate NEUTROGENA, JOHNSON’S and AVEENO products for my face, feet, hands, lips and legs – including different products for morning and night – I’ve counted at least six different products I currently use, all designed to keep my skin smooth, supple and not looking like the leather jacket in my closet. I think that if I didn’t sleep on flannel sheets, I’d probably slide right out of bed. Really, how do we sell this stuff? I’m not sure if the serums are supposed to be injected, ingested, rinsed off or absorbed. It’s not that I don’t want EVERYONE to say, “You look 10 years younger since you retired,” but who can differentiate between all the different brands and types of products for each part of the body? What happens if I use the foot cream on my hands (don’t tell anyone, but once my feet are finished, I do rub the rest on my hands; after all, what ARE you supposed to do with it?); will the NEUTROGENA or AVEENO police break down my door and haul me off to a moisturizer-free cell somewhere?
I’m working my way toward being “positively ageless,” though with the inclusion of shitake mushrooms in several AVEENO products, I sometimes feel more like I am preparing a salad than caring for my skin. And did I mention that I now exfoliate? I’m not sure why, but the package promises great results and makes me feel guilty for not following the prescribed routine. Please don’t mention any of this to my dentist, or he and the hygienist will insist that with all this time devoted to skin care, surely I can squeeze in a regular session of flossing. But who has the time?
During the few waking hours I have that are not devoted to skin care, I have found the joy of afternoon movies (I highly recommend “The Queen” and “Notes on a Scandal.”). I have visited museums, attended too many Rutgers basketball games to even count and joined Weight Watchers (yet again). I’m signed up for three photography courses and considering a trip to Italy. And believe it or not, I spent my first full day of retirement at the Motor Vehicle Agency, which was only too pleased to accept 10 different forms of identification that promise I am a U.S. citizen and to take a digital picture of my face (pre-moisturizing routine, I am afraid, so I still look 56; on the other hand, the license is good for six years, so hopefully I’ll look 56 then, too).
As you can see, retirement is a full life, and life is good. I hope you have had many occasions over the last month where you have had a good laugh and thought of me. What with all that moisturizing, I haven’t had much time to think about you.
As you know, I left Johnson & Johnson without a detailed plan, deciding instead to take advantage of my new freedom to pursue all the things I never had time to do. Turns out that more of my time is spent sleeping and moisturizing than I ever thought possible. I’m making up for years of sleep deprivation, trying to get at least 7-8 hours a night. But the moisturizing – I swear – seems like it occupies even more of my time. With separate NEUTROGENA, JOHNSON’S and AVEENO products for my face, feet, hands, lips and legs – including different products for morning and night – I’ve counted at least six different products I currently use, all designed to keep my skin smooth, supple and not looking like the leather jacket in my closet. I think that if I didn’t sleep on flannel sheets, I’d probably slide right out of bed. Really, how do we sell this stuff? I’m not sure if the serums are supposed to be injected, ingested, rinsed off or absorbed. It’s not that I don’t want EVERYONE to say, “You look 10 years younger since you retired,” but who can differentiate between all the different brands and types of products for each part of the body? What happens if I use the foot cream on my hands (don’t tell anyone, but once my feet are finished, I do rub the rest on my hands; after all, what ARE you supposed to do with it?); will the NEUTROGENA or AVEENO police break down my door and haul me off to a moisturizer-free cell somewhere?
I’m working my way toward being “positively ageless,” though with the inclusion of shitake mushrooms in several AVEENO products, I sometimes feel more like I am preparing a salad than caring for my skin. And did I mention that I now exfoliate? I’m not sure why, but the package promises great results and makes me feel guilty for not following the prescribed routine. Please don’t mention any of this to my dentist, or he and the hygienist will insist that with all this time devoted to skin care, surely I can squeeze in a regular session of flossing. But who has the time?
During the few waking hours I have that are not devoted to skin care, I have found the joy of afternoon movies (I highly recommend “The Queen” and “Notes on a Scandal.”). I have visited museums, attended too many Rutgers basketball games to even count and joined Weight Watchers (yet again). I’m signed up for three photography courses and considering a trip to Italy. And believe it or not, I spent my first full day of retirement at the Motor Vehicle Agency, which was only too pleased to accept 10 different forms of identification that promise I am a U.S. citizen and to take a digital picture of my face (pre-moisturizing routine, I am afraid, so I still look 56; on the other hand, the license is good for six years, so hopefully I’ll look 56 then, too).
As you can see, retirement is a full life, and life is good. I hope you have had many occasions over the last month where you have had a good laugh and thought of me. What with all that moisturizing, I haven’t had much time to think about you.
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