I've been eating entirely too well lately. My belly is fat and my wallet is lean, which is exactly opposite of the way I'd like it to be. Added to that, I've been spending far too much time trying to quantify my eating experiences. I don't know why rating restaurants appeals to me. I think it's some sort of perverse form self-congratulations: "Wow, look at all the nice places I've been. Yea me." I really need to get this out of my system. First the binging, then the purging.
Unfortunately, food isn't my only weakness. Lately I've been trying to become more of a wine snob. I've spent a lot of money on wine lately. And in the last three days, I've managed to received two bottles of wine, a bottle of sake, a bottle of scotch, a bottle of port, a decanter, and a wine pull as gifts. I really need to slow down before my liver goes out.
On the less gluttonous side of life, I came into work on Saturday and there was no AC, my e-mail didn't work, and our network was down. Needless to say, I didn't stay long. My keyboard isn't nearly as disgusting as it was before though and I'm quite happy about that.
How does it being? Something like this perhaps: New Harry Potter book's coming out in July. I know! I'm so excited. Have you heard that somebody's going to die? Ya well, people have been dying since book 4. Ya, but it's supposed to be someone really important this time. Oh yeah? I'll bet it's Ron, he's so useless. Nah, too easy. Maybe Hermione. No! Don't say that. That's awful. Well, it'd be perfect then. No, some one close but not THAT important. Maybe Dumbledore. Oh that's a good one. But I think Dumbledore's gotta make it to book seven. How about Hagrid? Yeah, maybe Hagrid. But I still think Dumbledore's going to eat it. No way. Way. Wanna bet? Sure.
Multiply that by umpteen million readers and you start having on-line betting sites collecting wagers on the soon to be released Harry Potter book. I wonder though, isn't it supposed to be on bookstore shelves on Saturday? (For those of you who don't know what a book store is, it's like Amazon, but real.) These books don't just magically apparate from storerooms, which I imagine to be heavily guarded, to bookstores around the world. I don't know something about formal betting on an outcome that's already been decided is weird. There's supposed to be a difference between odds and opinions isn't there?
Actually what really gets me is that people are betting on a children's book. Say what you will about all the things that J.K. Rowling has done for reading and how popular the books are, they just aren't great fiction. Easily accessible maybe, but not great. So betting and children. Hello, is something wrong here? Next thing you know you'll be going all in on Party Poker against a 12-year old math genius with daddy's credit card and a whole lot of I-Don't-Give-A-Damn. Man, children are growing up way too fast today.
It's a little late to comment on the London Bombings. Wikipedia already has had this entry up ever since the event happened. It's amazing how quickly the news gets to us these days. And how quickly it becomes history. Which is all a ways of saying that I'm a step too slow to be current. I'm starting to show my age. A strangely prescient coincidence: I went to sleep the night before the bombings searching for a particular quote from a book by Tad Williams that I had read long ago and ended up coming across this one several times, "We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger." If the two don't seem related, let me explain.
In truth, we were blind to our vulnerabilities before September 11th. That day made us aware of how much we took our safety for granted. That day made us afraid. So, we took steps to increase security, to increase awareness, to be vigilant. We started our campaign against terror. And what a convenient enemy terror makes. It is not a nation, it has no voice. It is always there to be a reason for your cause. You can be forgiven almost anything if you say, "I was afraid." I think though to fight terror, you must go to where terror lives. Terror does not live in a foreign country, terror does not live in the ideals of those that hate us, terror does not live anywhere that you can reach with missiles or food or democracy. No, terror lives at home, in your heart.
In truth, we were blind to many things before we awoke that morning to the images of two towers falling. And that day we started telling ourselves this lie: we can one day be as safe as we were on September 10th. But we were always vulnerable and we will always be vulnerable. From the crime in your neighborhood to the wars waged around the world, there will always be things that threaten our way of life. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said it best, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." We should be afraid, afraid of what fear will cause us to do, how it changes the way we live, what ends it justifies.