So. I have a highly contagious eye infection. Pink eye, I guess, although my doctor never got around to calling it that.

Yay.

He did display a surprisingly Old Testament sense of dramatics, though. After telling me to "act like a leper" and "remove [my]self from civilization for a few days," he gave me a prescription for some antibiotics and a couple of days of isolation.

Actually, I wish he'd have taken it a little bit further. Who wouldn't want to hear their doctor say that tiny microbes would drive me before them and listen to the lamentations of my women unless we smote them with the divine hand of antibiotics?

Anyway, after getting that diagnosis, I promptly ran over to the nearest Chuck E. Cheese, and starting wiping my eye gunk on all the games. Because, really, parents get off easy suffering only while they're actually at Chuck E. Cheese. They should get the benefit of sick children for days to come.

I'm only kidding. I didn't do that. It's my lifelong goal to never set foot within 50 ear-curdling yards of a Chuck E. Cheese. And making children cry just invokes Murphy's Law, which states that they'll be crying about four feet behind my head while I'm trying to eat out.

So I spent the weekend suffering through this, feeling it get worse, even convincing myself that I'd somehow snuck some weedkiller into my eye without realizing it. It was that gross and painful. I even golfed with one eye practically swollen shut (before I knew I was contagious), and actually hit the ball better than I ever have. Which isn't saying much. For me, hitting the ball good simply means hitting the ball.

So now the excitement of two or three days of working from home.

And hopefully this isn't a misdiagnosis along the lines of the South Park Halloween episode in which people were coming back as zombies, but the doctors kept saying they only had pink eye.

04/19/06  -- 11:44 p.m.

In honor of White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's departure, I think I'll spend tomorrow in total McClellan mode, approaching every conversation from his uniquely slippery perspective. I think it might go a little something like this:

My wife: "Did you leave this wet towel on the bed?"

Me: "I can neither confirm nor deny that a wet towel was left on the bed. Nor can I speculate on who left it there. But I can assure you that all options are still on the table for reducing the number of wet towels left on beds."

Wife: "I've asked you a couple of times not to do leave wet towels laying around."

Me: "If there are past instances of such behavior, I'll need to look into that and get back to you."

Wife: "I'm telling you now that I've asked you before not to do that."

Me: "Again, I'll have to check my records and sources and get back to you. I don't have that information in front of me right now."

Wife: "I mean, were you born and raised in a barn?"

Me: "I don't have any direct memories or knowledge of my birth, so again, I can't speculate. I think that's the kind of question that you should take to my mother."

Wife: "All I want to know is if you left this wet towel on the bed..."

Me: "Again, I'm not in a position to say one way or the other. I think playing the blame game right now feeds the kind of wild speculation that we don't really need in such dangerous times."

Wife: "Dangerous times? Are you talking about when you banged your knee getting out of the shower this morning?"

Me: "I think that's a perfect example of the way in which playing the blame game, as well as focusing too much on the proliferation of wet towels, can distract us from very real dangers..."

Wife: "I think you're in very real danger right now."

04/15/06

"Ahh! The old fishing hole ... so peaceful and relaxing. Doesn't even matter if I catch a single fish -- ah! Come on you stupid fish, take the bait! Don't make me come down there!" -- Homer Simpson

I've spent this weekend at the inlaws' house, where my wife's side of the family is getting together for Easter. As usual, it's been a really nice, relaxed time.

At one point, we headed out to the pond and got in the paddleboat. I'd grabbed a rod with a plastic worm at the end of the line, and as we lazed around the pond, I'd make casts to the shoreline and around fallen trees.

I only got one hit, and I probably got that only because the worm and hook landed on the fish's nose, but it was a good one. I had cast towards a small island on the edge of the pond, and something inhaled the worm and took off to the side. If you've never tried to land a fish into a paddleboat, when the fish has taken off to the left and you've got the rod bent over your wife's head while you reel the fish in, you've missed a rare fishing treat. I fought the fish for about forty-five seconds, maybe a minute, and finally landed a largemouth bass, nice and fat, that probably weighed four, maybe five, pounds. It's probably only four pounds, but let's admit that it'll grow to five pounds with repeated tellings.

It was the first fish I've caught in years, since I've fallen out of the habit (my fault) of going fishing with my dad in the summer. I'll have to change that this year.

But I sat there for a moment or two, holding the bass by its jaw once I'd removed the hook, just admiring it. And I was torn between the fact that I could take it to the bank, where it would make for some good fillets, and the fact that it really needed to go back into the pond. The pond seems to be mainly bream, which can weed out a bass population in a hurry, and this bass's belly seemed to indicate that it might have some eggs left to lay. So back into the pond it went, and I felt pretty good about that. Although next time I hit the lake with my dad, we're bringing some bass back to eat, Lake Hartwell PCBs and mercury and all.

It also reminded me that my sister won't eat fish, and I think she said that the main reason for that was memories of our childhood. Dad was an avid bass fisherman, and he'd routinely bring back a livewell full of bass. Mom would get the fillet knife and get the meat from the bass, many of which were still alive and flopping even as she cut into them. I can imagine how that could turn my sister off of eating fish for the rest of her life. As for me, it would take a few more years for my bleeding heart to come out, as I was under the sweet spell of lightly breaded and fried fillets. And I still love me some fish.

While we were floating on the pond, we were also watching a flock of geese that had taken up residence. My father-in-law had said that the flock had two baby geese that had just been born. We didn't see those, and while it's possible that they were tucked away by the shoreline and we just didn't see them, the hard reality is that they could just as easily have been snatched by a hawk or a bass (it could have accounted for the fat belly of the bass I caught, for all I know). So while I was debating the merits of keeping the pond stocked with bass vs. enjoying some fried fish, nature was merrily going on in its savage, amoral way.

04/14/06 -- A Night with David Sedaris

"Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it." -- David Sedaris

"I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out." -- David Sedaris

The missus and I caught David Sedaris on stage the other night -- it was part of my birthday present. What a hoot!

He read from roughly four stories. The first was a new story containing a conversation between a sheep and a scheming crow that ended, really, the only way it could. The second reading was really only the first line from an in-progress story, from the perspective of a leech that lives in a hippopotamus' anus (I remember reading the New Yorker essay that inspired this tale, and I can't wait to see what Sedaris does with it once he's finished. He also read from a recently published story about a babysitter named Mrs. Peacock -- it was a perfect example of those tales that come from his prissy childhood. He then read a story about the troubles he ran into in France because of his habit of answering "d'accord" ("fine," "all right,"OK") to questions and requests he didn't understand. He wrapped things up by reading a few really funny entries from his daily journal.

The daily journal part was really interesting, because you could see how he takes random elements that aren't meaty enough for stories of their own, and uses them instead as flavor for other stories. A good example was the "D'accord" story, which contained a funny but minor portion about seeing a dog with a wooden leg.

The daily journal section was also important to the night, because I think Sedaris was also slyly using the night as a writing discussion. He was adamant in his advice to keep a notebook on your person, and to convert those notes to a daily journal. He also revealed that he's serious about his writing schedule and the projects he's working on.

It showed, too. Throughout the night, I was struck by how much stronger his writing is than it was when he first came on the scene.  The story about the crow and the lamb contained neat pieces that seemed to work as misdirection, but ultimately they all made sense in the end. The story about Mrs. Peacock ended with a wonderful image that I don't think he could have pulled off in his early days, when the outrageousness of his stories were enough to carry the day.

Sedaris was also signing books before and after the show, and I kinda regret not getting one signed. But it's probably for the best. If I'd gotten up to the table, I'd have felt compelled to tell him that my sister and I have adopted the motto "Stalking the Talent Family" (referring to him and his sister Amy, because my sister and I think they're highly talented and not a bad model to follow -- not because we're actually stalking them), and the night could have gone in any direction after that.

All in all, a night that was warm with laughter. Sedaris' persona gets on your good side to begin with, and his delivery and timing are awesome. If you get a chance to catch him live on stage, you should definitely do it. By the time he's done, you'd swear only an hour has passed, when in fact it's been at least two.

And you'll never think about The House at Pooh Corner in quite the same way again.

04/06/06 -- Learning an ancient skill

The Iaido seminar was a lot of fun, and quite an education. Luckily, I remembered to take my knee pads; couldn't have made it through without them. I was surprised, though, with how much the basketball court floor hurt the soles of my feet and lower back. And even though I'd seen several of the waza (practice routines) before, and had even practiced them, it was sad how many of my wazas that day were affected by fatigue. I guess seven or eight hours of swinging a sword will do that. I'm pretty sure I didn't do an overhead cut correctly the entire day.

I wasn't the only one whose back was screaming. At one point during a break, there were four or five of us sprawled out on the floor on our backs, trying to relax our muscles a bit. In our white gi tops and black hakamas, it looked like someone had shot a bunch of flabby penguins.

But it was a lot of fun. We got to learn a lot about the sword (both the composition and the history), were shown two new wazas, and got to see some high quality Iaido.

The used iaito that I bought turned out to be too short, which I knew it would be. But once I was taught how to properly sheathe the sword, it quickly became apparent that the blade needed to be at least two or three inches longer. But I'm learning, saving up for a better iaito, and the short iaito will do me for just a little bit longer. Besides, I can always sell it for close to what I paid, or donate it to the dojo. There's at least one young kid in our school who's showing some real talent, and you can only get so far with the bokken (wooden sword). Maybe they could use it.

I say that like I really know what I'm talking about (I really don't), but I can imagine it would be really difficult to learn how to do a waza when you don't have the actual scabbard (saya) to work with.

I guess the first question people probably ask about something like Iaido is,"Why would you want to learn something like that?"

Well, first of all, it has a practical application in our Aikido studies. Many Aikido moves descend from sword cuts, so actually working with a sword trains us to use both hands together in a coordinated fashion. Plus the arc of a sword cut is what we're looking for in many of our Aikido techniques.

Plus, it's really cool to learn something that not very many people care about. Almost like you're helping to keep something noble going. I was dismayed to hear our sensei talk about various arts dying out in Japan, simply because the few remaining practitioners were elderly and would be dying soon. I'm a purist that way, though; I tend to think a lot of old ways are better (if I lived in a neighborhood with children, I'm sure I'd have my "Get off my dang lawn" yell perfected by now).

Plus, it's really intricate. The act of moving your hands to get in position to draw the sword holds all kinds of hidden movements, and ultimately, the goal is to one day perform these wazas with a live sword. I'm a long way away from that; I'm butchering myself with a dulled blade as it is. But that pursuit of precision is very appealing.

Plus, let's face it. Swords are cool. :)