7/12/02, 1:23 am

Everyone I meet is talking about the NY Times Magazine article about fat from this weekend. It's a shocker that medical "experts" may have been so wrong about the roles and effects of fat and carbohydrates in our diet... But then, doctors have been wrong (generally with indignant authority) throughout the history of medicine. The four humors, levels of bile as the be-all and end-all, bleeding with leeches, formula instead of breast milk for babies, circumcision, masturbation of women to treat hysteria...

I haven't heard too many profound discoveries about diet, though, that contradict common sense and a naturalistic perspective. It makes sense that the healthiest foods are the least processed, the vegetables grown organically and locally. And it makes sense that anything can make you a fat slob if you eat a lot of it and don't exercise. If you exercise a lot, it makes sense that you can eat with more reckless abandon. It makes sense the dairy causes congestion, that whole grains have more to offer the body than processed grains, and those are far better than refined simple sugars. It's not rocket science that too much of anything isn't good for you. No discovery thing is going to make a McDonald's hamburger healthy.

Don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with us researching this and being interested in it. I have a problem with being crazed by it. With dieting being a multi-billion dollar industry. With being hit over the head with "fat free" labels while products marketed as healthy are loaded with high-fructose corn syrup.

All that frenetic energy in our culture around diet could be much better focused at, say, playing sports... which would solve the fat problem.

Anyway, while I'm ranting, I may as well mention that Eli Lilly's recent campaign in Florida is atrocious. They're mailing free samples of Prozac to people, unrequested. The recent phenomenon of prescription drug advertising has pissed me off for a while, and this is absolutely despicable. For more background, and to send your thoughts on the matter to the CEO of Eli Lilly, check out ActForChange's action item.

Today, more fun working with the search engine at work. Sand volleyball at the gym after, practicing for the tournaments this weekend. The hot tub was good post-play therapy. Later, a tasty veggie burger and beer (also tasty: Brooklyn Pilsner) at Cafeteria with Jeanhee. Now some laundry to fold before I collapse.

Oh, one more note. Tonight I hit 70% on my iPod Workout Program. By my rough math, that means I've averaged one workout every two days since I started this quest.

7/12/02, 1:17 am

This is a post about volleyball in New York City, mostly Manhattan. I wrote it as an email in response to a friend of a friend who was looking for info and figured it would be good to share so people can find it via the search engines...

The two big leagues in the city are NY Urban and Big City Volleyball. Urban is bigger, older, less organized, and less expensive than Big City. I've played in both and overall prefer Big City. Both leagues have scrimmages at the beginning of each season where individuals can come out and be placed on a team. Games for both these leagues are at high school and college gyms mostly on the upper west and upper east side.

Urban has an open play every Friday night at Brandeis High School (84th between Amsterdam & Columbus) at 7pm. Get there early to sign up. They have beginner, intermediate and advanced courts there.

Big City does a similar thing at Dalton on the upper east side on Friday nights.

The Gotham League is a gay and lesbian volleyball league at a high school in Chelsea. They're straight-friendly and have open play on Wednesday nights during the summer.

URLs: http://www.nyurban.com/ | http://www.bigcityvolleyball.com | http://www.gothamvolleyball.org

Those are the leagues. Pick up...

There's pick up doubles in the sand court in Central Park every weekend (not far from the bandshell). Level of play is extremely competitive. There's also pick up fours and sixes on courts on pavement in the same area.

There's a court with pick-up play weekends and after work downtown near the World Financial Center on the water.

I've heard that there's a sand court at Riverside Park, but I've never been there.

Pier 25 on the Hudson River offers sand courts you can rent by the hour.

On the weekends, lots of people set up nets in Prospect Park in Brooklyn on the grass or dirt. We did that pretty regularly for a while, but lately we've been playing on beach most weekends. We'll probably do it a few more times this summer and start up again in the fall, though. Most people in Prospect Park are pretty friendly, and if you're on your own you can probably join people's games if you ask nicely and they have space.

There are also beach tournaments most weekends on the Jersey Shore and on Long Island for an outside-the-city adventure. They're pretty competitive and physically demanding. I really enjoy them. URLs: http://www.jsvba.com | http://www.eevb.net

I guess that's about it. There's a lot of people who love volleyball in the city, and once you start playing and meeting them, you'll see the same people around again.

Hope that helps. Happy bumps, sets and spikes!

7/11/02 1:38 am

Don't know where to start this one. It's been a swirl since my last post.

First, check out emusic.com if you haven't already. I signed up for their trial and I've been pleasantly surprised by the simplicity of their service. It's what I've been hoping for: an easy, reasonably priced way to download mp3s. Their selection could stand to expand, but they did have three Rainer Maria albums, which scored major points in my book. (Their musical mixes are better than my metaphors, too...)

At work today, I pulled off a small success with Lucene, an open source search engine. It's indexing database-stored content within the context of our application server. Pretty cool, a simple but flexible API and really fun. The afternoon blew by as I was enthralled in the work.

I had lunch with Melissa and Anthony and Liz at Spice. Melissa and I have made it a regular weekly occasion, which is wonderful. It's a weekly reminder to me that she's leaving New York, though. I'm going to miss her.

After work, I had a nice cross-town walk (NYC cooled off today) and drinks with some friends. A close friend of a close friend was recently diagnosed with a disease. It's an unusual one. We don't know what causes it or how to cure it. He's young. My age.

Somewhere else in the world, another 25-year-old took his own life recently. Gene Kan had a lot going for him. I don't understand young suicides. Seems to me that no matter how bad things get, the worst-case scenario is that that you start over with nothing in a locale of your choice. Compassion is the order of the day, though, because if I don't understand it, I don't understand what it was like inside his heart and mind.

A few time zones away, another friend has the love of her life break up with her out of the blue, without warning.

I ate my first marshmallow tonight.

(I don't mean to suggest in anyway that the marshmallow is on par with the other news I've shared. Like I said, it's a swirl.)

It was at the tail end of the most delicious and decadent and pricey meal I've had in quite a while. It was Mary's idea, and a good one. We went to Blue Water Grill and sat outside looking out to Union Square. We drank white wine and ate sushi and Bluepoint oysters and lobster and yellowfin tuna and, later, chocolate fondue. It was almost a four-hour affair. I savored each amazing mouthful. At the end I felt high.

This blog comments thing is really interesting. It's changing the way I think about the site. Thanks to those of you participating thus far. It's fun to close the feedback loop online (even if I do see most of you on a regular basis).

So there. A life is an odd experience, huh?

7/9/02, 11:24 pm

The bachelor lifestyle, summer 2002 nyc... last one at work with music playing out loud in an empty open office plan. Walk past Ed Koch in the market on the way home.

Make dinner with the lights off cause it's cooler in my apartment that way. Leftover bowties with pesto. Tofu teriyaki. Kale with honey mustard dressing. A peach Spritzer.

Both windows open. Two fans blowing. Move the laundry on the floor, in hopes I'll be compelled to do it before work tomorrow morning.

Shirt off. Electric guitar on. Wish my strap wasn't leather sticking to my skin. Drum machine on. A beat. More distortion. Marvel at the simple beauty, the simple groove, of two complementary chords in rhythm.

Some cold chocolate rice milk straight out of the box.

Switch to acoustic. Plug it in. More reverb. Dig up the last verse to the song from the Bolivia/Peru trip. Contemplate recording it, but that would mean restarting the computer, which is too much of a hassle.

Contemplate a shower to cool off before sleep. Towel is in the laundry pile. Damn.

Receive an essay via email from a writer friend. Similes and flowery language expressing sentimental thoughts. Personal, the way I like words.

Decide to blog. Without flowers or pastel sentimentality. With sentences that ,y grade-school teachers would scrawl all over.

Words appropriate to a young man on a hot night in a large city.

7/9/02, 2:42 am

And the webmaster said... "let there be comments," and there were comments. Well, there was now the capability for comments. It remains to be seen if there will actually be any comments.

Man, now I'm feeling some pressure to write something worth commenting on. Ah, screw it.

7/8/02, 1:57 am

Sometimes the vacations are best when you don't need them. I've been feeling great lately, relaxed and enjoying the summertime. Work's been pleasantly low-stress and I've been wearing flip-flops and short the last couple of weeks. So when I left for the airport last Wednesday afternoon, I didn't feel the usual relief of starting a vacation.

Instead, I relaxed right into the trip. Flew from La Guardia to Newport News, Virginia ($50 on AirTran!), and then rented a car for the three-hour drive to the house my mom had rented on North Carolina's Outer Banks. It was the first time I'd driven on my new New York license, and the first time I'd driven any distance at all since last August. Pretty crazy to go almost a year without driving, but that's living in NYC for you.

Once there, I did a whole lot of nothing. Took naps on the beach, enjoyed watching cable TV, hung out with three of my little sisters, and ate good healthy cooking.

I made a dent in "Fast Food Nation," which I'm finding fascinating. It's one of those books that you have to read passages out loud from if there's anyone around, because the facts are so astonishing.

I brought the volleyball net and set that up two days on the beach. I gave my little sisters some lessons and we played some doubles. Monica said it was her favorite part of vacation, and both she and Isabella are talking about playing this winter for their school teams.

Mike took me out surfing on Saturday, which was a blast. I rode his long board, which makes it gloriously easy to catch waves. I was able to stand up a few times and get some good rides. I haven't done it since last summer on the Cape, and I joked with Mike that if I continue to improve at this rate, we'll really be tearing it up when I'm 60 and he's 80.

On the evening of the fourth, we had a beach bonfire and watched the fireworks. There are some pics of them in rotation on this site's homepage. Interesting results from experiments with the digital camera.

On the ride home, we had some interesting discussions about yin and yang, and explained the basics of bank accounts, investing, and inflation to Monica. After Mom and the girls fell asleep, Mike and I listened to an electronica show on a college radio station.

Now, I'm glad to be home, especially since my dad outfitted my apartment with a couple of fans while I was away. Stay tuned for more relaxing, more volleyball, and hopefully some summertime concerts... maybe some new songwriting efforts, too. I'd like to do some more of that.