Gum and Dog Fur

I could rain down invective on whomever chucked their used Juicyfruit into the woods, or wherever it was that my big white pointer lay down on it and got it stuck to his bony, yet fur-covered elbow. We live where there are lots of white pines, so naturally I thought the dark sticky-looking blot was just old sap. But a sniff revealed it was not piney in the least; it was distinctly Juicyfruit.

But that is a waste of good umbrage. There are more important things. The only reason I’m bothering to write about it is that, after an evening of fruitlessly picking at it, and pitying his contortions to lick it, I turned to the trusty Web.

I want to give props to an Italian Greyhound website where I found the remedy. I wasn’t authorized to post a thank-you on the message board itself, because I don’t have an Italian Greyhound. Well, they don’t know that, but I don’t have an account or access or the time or inclination to go about getting that. So I’ll just give ‘em a link and a thank-you.

What did the trick? Peanut butter. (Kirkland brand creamy organic from Costco, to be specific.) Just a teaspoon or so massaged in. And boy, did the doggie like that! Really wanted to help. Apparently any oil will do to break up the gum (and this would work in human hair too), but the grittiness of peanut butter and its semi-solid state probably help make it break up the gum and keep it from running all over the place. So noted!

Lorraine Cosgrove Ware

The following are comments I was honored to have the opportunity to share on the very sad occasion of the memorial service for my friend Lorraine. (Photo here by her friend Ronnie.)

Just a brief disclaimer, in words from the poet John Donne:
Language thou art too narrow, and too weak
To ease us now; great sorrow cannot speak.

So we may not speak of our sorrow today, though we feel it. We’ll speak instead of our gratitude for having known Lorraine.

Lorraine was impeccable.

In her dress, her manners, her taste and how she kept her home (and her boat), in the work she produced and her professionalism… also in her treatment of friends and loved ones. Everything about her was polished and crisp and sharp.

If you didn’t know Lorraine and heard that description, you might picture someone prim or fussy or stuck-in-the-muddish.

I had the really good fortune to share an office with Lorraine for six years at her most recent workplace. I have to admit: That first day when she came in with her impeccable self to the office, I was intimidated. And when, day after day, she was so perfectly put together and coiffed, so professional, so clearly accomplished and ambitious…I, feeling like a lumbering ragamuffin by contrast, wondered, gee, will we have anything in common? Will we even get along?

As you can imagine, it didn’t take long for me to be delighted by her friendliness and surprised by her sort-of sly and very sharp and even subversive wit. That’s not what appearances had led me to expect. She was definitely not prim or fussy or stuck-in-the-muddish. She was a total blessing to my work life, and we became real friends in and beyond the office.

We solved many of the world’s problems, we liked to say, up there in the pod on the third floor on Old Connecticut Path. And we wondered indignantly why the Nobel Committee was not calling. Lorraine had mock outrage down to an ironic science. And she could portray a satiric buying-in to the absurdities in life, with a subtlety and pointedness that would put Stephen Colbert to shame. Her sense of humor was, indeed, impeccable. Perhaps most uniquely, she told incredibly comic stories without malice.

Lorraine was smart. She made good decisions. She made an especially good one, downright impeccable, in choosing her spouse. Andy was a great match for many reasons—besides just being a good guy. She loved him like crazy. They shared a lot of adventures, had common interests, and were both keenly funny. Most memorable just now, though, is how Andy accompanied Lorraine through the experience of cancer with sensitivity and strength and humor. And those of us who love Lorraine are so grateful to you Andy for being there every day and taking such good care of her.

So, Lorraine had cancer. But she did not become a cancer victim. She was an impeccable model of how to handle, even fight an illness and yet remain fully engaged in the rest of life. And doing that, she paved a way down a difficult road that we will all inevitably travel.

There are some lessons I aim to remember from how she lived. (I’ve distilled them to bullet points with examples in the spirit of research, her professional specialty…)

Go broad.
Make all you’ve done a part of you.
Live in the South Pacific. Sell cosmetics. Meditate. Learn the songs of cowboys, hired hands, and other wanderers. Get an MBA and Big Papi’s autograph.

Go deep.
Do things thoroughly.
Don’t just get a boat, take electronic instrumentation classes with the Power Squadron. Don’t just go to the doctor, explore every modality in pursuit of your health.

Be daring.
You’re tougher than you look.
Sail in the dark. Eat haggis. Ski black diamonds first thing in the morning.
Be caring.
Share your strength.
Mentor colleagues. Send gifts to nieces and nephews. Keep things beautiful.

Laugh often.
And help others laugh.
Stop the battle of Gettysburg. Collide with Jimmy Connors in a doorway. Be one of the “chicks” in the house. [You may have to ask some of her friends for explanations here.]

Stay open.
Embrace what the world offers.
Read The House of Seven Gables. Be an exceptional hostess. Go to a fife & drum muster.

Go broad. Go deep. Be daring. Be caring. Laugh often. Stay open.

And, mostly, let’s remember—and thank—Lorraine, for being an impeccable teacher.

Hey, What Happened to All Those Posts? (Plus Invective)

What happened to all my posts?

Since May? Huh? Oh, right, now I remember; they never did make it out of my head. But they were boiling away in there and I e-mailed myself many reminders and enticing ideas. I’ll try to revisit them and see if any had value that survived the moment.

(New job recently and other schedule-altering things. Transitions eat up time. (What’ll be my excuse in another five months?))

But one thing continually plaguing my mind and bringing on fits of sputtering invective these days is how we are poisoning our world. Not in a dramatic Exxon Valdez kind of way; in an incremental, dull, nonphotogenic kind of way.

Dry cleaning. Paint for toys. Plastic water bottles. Antibiotics (and antibacterials, don’t get me started) and hormones in strange places. Cellular phones and towers. Agriculture. New and improved products of every stripe.

It’s not stuff you can get high-minded about avoiding. Everybody should now know that smoking is very bad for your health. If you persist in doing it, you’re a dum-dum. Likewise, eating a Supersize Me diet or working in asbestos remediation without a respirator are bad ideas. Most people have a choice in these things.

And, sure, they have a choice about dry cleaning, buying toys, walking down the street, or drinking water. But it’s an uninformed choice since they don’t know these things are potentially hazardous in the long term. And have no logical reason to suspect them. Products and services are offered up without concern and consumed without question. Despite complaints to the contrary from free market champions, there’s too little regulation about what we put on or in our bodies, let alone in the water or earth or air. How can we be so stupid?

More to the point, why does the government, which historically loves to invoke the defense of the citizenry to back up all kinds of bold and improbable acts (overseas particularly), not step up defend us once shadowy killers have been identified near at hand? (This is an analogy that bears exploring and would bring a new twist to a war on “terror.”) How do we ourselves contribute to the flood of poison? When will the connection be obvious enough to force action?

Maybe it’s not fair to ask how we can be so stupid. Maybe we are intrinsically hopeful and optimistic and trusting people and until presented with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, we prefer to go blithely about like Candide, all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds (wasn’t that it?). But whether we (and I’m applying that collective pronoun back a generation or so) were trusting or wilfully ignorant, I think better living through chemistry has come around to bite us in the butt.

The reason I’m particularly pissed off about all this is that my close circle of friends (to say nothing of acquaintances or people at one degree of separation) now includes too many widow[er]s who are not yet at or past middle age. Bone, ovarian, pancreatic, and breast cancer killed their spouses. We do not live in Love Canal. We do not live in Hannaford, Washington, or Chernobyl, Ukraine. These friends who died took care of themselves, lived healthy, active, and athletic lives. Did not work in factories, mines, or incinerators. Did all they could to fight the disease. But where did it come from?

I know, thankfully, just as many survivors of cancer as people who have died from it. They too are young: in their 20s, 30s, 40s. Breast, brain, testicular, uterine…. And their survival would lead a lot of people to cheer: Hooray for treatment and advances in medicine. Send more money for cancer research! I’m glad they are still alive and grateful for what made that happen. So yes, keep the treatments coming. But what I still want to know is, where did the cancer come from?

Pharmaceutical companies enthusiastically pursue research into treatments, because they can sell these expensive life-saving tortures to people and doctors desperate to save lives. Where’s the profit in finding out the cause of these illnesses? Especially if the cause turns out to be within some other arm of your diversified business. (Check out The New Cigarette, reviewed in Slate.com.) Where’s the money to find and fight the genesis of this scourge instead of just swatting it back? (Yes, I know, in the same place as the money for finding and fighting the genesis for terrorism, but I digress.) Cynically, the return on the investment just isn’t as good.

I have a friend who takes this thinking a step further, with a so-far only privately expressed, completely heretical notion: Down with the Jimmy Fund!

That campaign platform would be a hard sell, even for me in my riled-up snit. But behind the memorably shocking slogan, his idea is serious. Spend at least as much on stopping the disease from occurring in the first place as on developing new ways to fight it once it strikes.

Somewhere there must be organizations or people researching exactly what we are putting in our environment that is killing us. (Let alone the fishes and frogs.) Anyone out there know? That way when next I’m asked to sponsor riders in the Pan Mass Challenge, a very fine event (money goes to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute), I can split my contribution between those riders and someone investigating further upstream.

Where does it come from? What unknown dangers wait in my cupboards? Where is the Upton Sinclair of our times?

Confessions of a Lazy Blogger

I realize it is not done to manipulate one’s posts. I know it is fogeyish to overconstruct one’s supposedly casual rants and raves. I dig that it’s all about the immediate.

But still. Sometimes I compose a post in another application, you know, like Word or a textpad or even an e-mail. And then, sometimes, when I’ve been sitting there too long and my fingers have grown icy…. it’s just too much to actually take whatever heartfelt thingamajig I’ve composed and copy it over into the clicks and boxes of WordPress. It’s not that this interface is particularly onerous either. I’m just particularly lazy. And then, that poor post, not feeling so urgent once it’s written, gets filed for the next (next, next) day.

So my confession to you, imaginary reader, is that I’m gonna backdate some posts to the time I actually wrote them. If the machinery allows me such deception. I haven’t actually tried it yet. Such a revelation of disorganization or inertia or fiddling with dates may prevent me from running for public office one day, but I hope you won’t hold it against me. Thanks.

Fearful Invective

I know this is a really trite and prissy thing to get irate about, but certain brands of so-called reality TV do seem to succinctly represent a rotten society.

I’m late jumping on this bandwagon, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t deride these “competitive” reality shows, even the people who say they like watching them. The reason I’m late to this is that I’ve avoided the whole gamy field by simply not paying any attention at all. So, my vitriol is uninformed. I won’t argue that. That doesn’t make it wrong.

I had remained safely in my “reality”-free world until they upgraded the workout room in my workplace. I was very grateful for the new erg and the replacement for the antebellum weight machine and so forth, but sad that dual TVs had been deemed critical to the improvements. These days, as it happens, I tend to frequent the room at the same time as some very nice seeming person who treads away on a conveyor belt and watches Fear Factor.

Here, people, is the end of western civilization. (See my previous mention of The Four Gated City.) This is the irrevocable crumbling decay that is happening under our own stuffed-up noses.

The first few bits of the show that I caught while whipping through my weight workout didn’t seem so bad. People climbing a rope ladder hanging from a helicopter to grab a flag, swimming underwater to unlock something—whatever, these seemed like physical challenges no more bizarre than football or platform diving. But soon the whole gross-out aspect became evident. Transferring leeches between two containers using only your mouth, lying in a bed of millipedes, that kind of thing. Retarded. But the thing that put me over the edge, made me have to leave the room and think the world was going down the toilet, was when they introduced some buxom contestant and did the sun-dappled profile of her. Ahh, here she is with her sister riding horses in the countryside and the sister’s voiceover saying how sweet Ashlee is, though tough, and how much she really, really loves horses. So naturally her challenge is to play horseshoes with someone and whoever loses has to take the number of points they lost by and eat that many inches of horse rectum. Yes, that’s right friends, horse rectum (apparently dried). The screen shows the pretty girls, the host holding up a yard long thing that looks like your dog’s rawhide chew toy, and of course, of course, a couple of horses (ass view) in the background.

Really. I don’t expect people to want to always watch something edifying or be Dr. Bloody Bronowski or anything, but is this stuff really worth the firing of a single neuron? The crass manipulation of emotion and the encouragement of nastily selfish behavior is what seems most offensive, though on the other hand, aren’t they supposed to not harm animals in the production of entertainment? Did the producers just pop down to Safeway to buy a whole horse rectum, byproduct of some otherwise legitimate horse slaughter? Admittedly, I’d probably find the eating of horse rectum objectionable under most circumstances, even say, the more benign Iron Chef, but there was something especially repellent about the setup on Fear Factor. I know, duh, that’s the whole idea, get it—fear and repugnance. Primal, maybe irresistible things. But is there no better way to scratch that particular itch? And not to get unbearably righteous (like I haven’t already), isn’t there something despicable about eating as punishment when there are people starving in the world?

You may be wondering what happened to that horseshoe contestant, but literally, I left. And ever since when I’ve had to be in that room while the treader watches her show I blast music into my ears at dangerous levels and studiously don’t look at the screen.

A security professional I sometimes work with posits that the replacement of quasi-civilized TV (e.g., Spencer for Hire or The Beverly Hillbillies) with the truly abominable crap known as reality TV is what has caused the world to hate the United States (as the source of most of it), and want to strike out at us and all we stand for. I think he has a point.

Survivalist Cuisine

For a long time now, probably since I read Doris Lessing’s Four Gated City (of which more later), I’ve had a sense, a small lurking anxiety, that I should know how to feed myself without benefit of grocery store. We’ve all been encouraged (by “Them”) since 9/11 to have several days’ or weeks’ worth of nonperishable food and stuff on hand in case of emergencies, from the relatively benign blizzards and hurricanes to the more alarming bird flus and chemical attacks, for which of course one also needs the inevitable plastic sheeting and duct tape. (We haven’t heard so much about that lately, have we? Another passing duck-and-cover campaign, serving for naught but nostalgia at our quaint responses to horror.)

In any case, the issue has occupied some space in my mind well before it really needed to. (I mean, the issue of foraging. Stocking the extra tuna fish and beans is uninteresting. The wine stash is another matter.) And, in the usual way that my out-of-the-way intentions take years to be acted upon, I finally picked some weeds from my back yard and cooked them tonight. The food was tolerable, even tasty, aided considerably by the other, less local ingredients, but it gives me an immense sense of satisfaction to have not just thrown the junk on the brush heap, but to have made dinner with it.

There’s probably an entire menu to be offered from my ¾ acre of New England, zone 6 yard and largely untended first and second growth woods. Acorns, dandelions, mystery mushrooms, purslane maybe, wild cherries, fiddleheads, and incidentally edible things I’ve planted like hyssop and borage. But I’m talking here about burdock. (Top photo from Virginia Tech’s site on weed identification.)

This impressive looking plant grows really well here. It’s actually quite handsome and has modestly pretty pink-lavender flowers, which around now turn into the most tenacious burrs. So I’d be chopping them down anyhow, or else finding the burrs throughout my laundry. A friend in Vermont had told me about two years ago that the roots of burdock were quite nutritious. He hadn’t tried them so couldn’t tell me whether they tasted like shite or not.

I’m happy to report that they’re not bad, though it was a true tug-of-war to harvest them and while preparing them they seem frighteningly woody and dirty. Apparently they’re a common ingredient in Japanese food, and the recipe I used is called Kimpira Gobo (gobo being the word for burdock). I modified it from a couple of recipes, one from a cool site of foraged food recipes called Wild Food! by Steve Brill.

1-2 c. scrubbed, sliced burdock (they say don’t peel it but I didn’t have a sturdy enough scrubber, so I peeled)
2 c. peeled and match-sticked carrots
1 T veg. oil
2 t sesame oil
2 T sesame seeds
1 T soy sauce
1 T water
Prepare the burdock and carrots (peel and slice). Throw the burdock into cold water to keep from turning brown. In a wok or large skillet, heat the two oils. When hot, sprinkle in sesame seeds and cook, stirring for about a minute. Drain burdock and add it and the carrots to the pan. Cook and stir over medium-high heat for five to seven minutes. Add soy sauce and water, cover and continue cooking until liquid is mostly gone. Total cooking time about 10 minutes.

Serve over rice.

It was good, the carrots adding sweetness and the burdock tasting nutty or almost popcorny. A bit chewy where I think they’re supposed to be tender, or crisp. But not bad. OK, I also had an incongruously Mediterranean salad with tomatoes and avocados, as well as a decent Spanish red wine. Which might have helped.

Other sources say to boil for 20 minutes. Maybe I’ll try that next time…. The stuff seems to grow back at the least provocation…

Va col canto… Thank You, Lorraine

The world is a poorer place this week than last, with the untimely death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

There are some fine obituaries of the 52-year-old mezzo-soprano in The New York Times (registration required), Playbill, and The San Francisco Chronicle, whose music critic Joshua Kosman puts it so well:

“I always loved hearing Hunt Lieberson sing, but I hated writing about her performances. More than with any other artist, her splendor seemed to defy description or accurate measure.

Words failed; superlatives bounced off her performances with an empty clang. You’d have to have been John Keats to convey any sense of the beauty she brought into the world.”

I saw her numerous times in Boston and always her first note would stun you, take your breath away, leave you all goose-bumpy. A friend who had excellent seats (center, row 4 or something) at a recital in 1998 or 99 said that sitting directly in front of her, he could feel the air vibrating before his face.

Whenever mailings came from the BSO or the Bank of America Celebrity Series, I always looked eagerly to see when she was coming to town and arrange my budgeted music consumption around that. I suspect those mailings will now pile up unread for awhile.

The New Yorker of Jan. 5, 2004, ran a profile of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Through that, and the facts of her career, she has been called the anti-diva, an arch maverick and other appealing epithets. Maybe because of going about it differently or in spite of that, she gave the world something amazing and lasting in her too short life. I am forever grateful.

If you have not heard her, try her recording of Handel Arias for a general sampling of gorgeous stuff. I am particularly partial to an early recording (she was still plain Hunt and billed as a soprano) of Handel’s cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno with Jill Feldman and Drew Minter. Both recordings include the aria Va col canto. (Va col canto lusingando/ la sua bella il rusignuolo…. With his singing the nightingale/ charms his beloved.) It will make you remember being in love on a crystal September day with wind in your hair. Something soaring like that.

NPR offers a free listen to a tune it called the best classical song of 2004, Handel’s Ombra mai fu. Also the aria from J.S. Bach’s cantata Ich habe genug, along with an interview with the singer.

“Guantanamo” Means Shame

I can have nothing new to say on this subject, but to add my voice to others embarrassed by our country's current bosses' capriciousness with the Constitution and what we thought were supposed to be American values: fairness, the rights of the individual, devotion to rule of law.

I am ashamed by it.

I try honestly to think whether anyone in power can believe the Guantanamo arrangement has any upside. They must believe so to stick with it, or simply be terrible cretins, because the moral ugliness of it, the damage to the nation's reputation, and most especially the ill-will engendered can not serve for any good. In its effort at balance NPR reports that "supporters say the camp is a valuable source of information and vital to the U.S. effort to combat terrorism." So give 'em a trial so that info gets out… Even if there are hardened terrorists among the crowd there (and I don’t deny that possibility), the claims and statistical probability of innocence among the majority of them are probably only fueling the fires of more hardened terrorists not stuck in the Pearl of the Antilles.

And, oh, the preposterousness of having a prison (and naval base) in the territory of a country we have no truck with? The absurdity is so large it gets lost from view. Why not have a POW camp in Iran then? North Korea?

The rationale for keeping people imprisoned, unvisitable, far from home, with no charges or hope for redress, is that they were "picked up in the field of battle." His Honor Justice Antonin Scalia (a class act), claims, “War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts.” Yeah, we're all about only doing what we “have to,” that's the American way. Nevermind that this war isn't a "war" in the traditional sense. We didn't give trials to POWs in previous wars because, first of all, most of them were in uniform and not denying they were enemy combatants, plus, there was some understanding that eventually, one way or another, the war would be declared at an end. There's no indication that anyone in power thinks the amorphous war with undefined enemies we're in will end anytime before the sun burns out. It definitely won't if we treat the people who already hate us in ways to make them hate us more. In Scalia's words: “Give me a break.”

Hey, Jill Carroll could be considered to have been picked up "in the field of battle," and they just released her today (for which, hurray).

I am not a Christian, but I see the nobility and virtue (as well as difficulty) of turning the other cheek, of loving thine enemy. How do fundamentalist Christian war-making types reconcile those tenets of the religion, I wonder?

On Wasting Time

One reason I need to increase efficiency and productivity is to make up for vast quantities of “wasted” time in my life. I’m quite sure that’s true. But still I question myself, what is wasted time? I mean, some time is inarguably, frustratingly wasted, like getting halfway to work and realizing I’ve left my laptop at home and having to backtrack 10 extra miles. That’s plain infuriating. Unless you happen to see a pileated woodpecker or something in that extra leg. And how often is that? (Once.)

But other things that tend to fall into the category of time wasting, I’m not so sure. Especially in the philosophic mood this week finds me in, having just had a long weekend’s whirlwind celebration of my mother’s 80 hale years, and then having heard news of two untimely deaths in my circle (a 40-something woman and a 16-year-old man). Makes ya kind of pause and think it really doesn’t matter, really, if I get that trim around the bathroom windows painted right now, or after the college basketball season… and that sort of thing.

So, noodling around websites that make you laugh or tickle your interest—even if they don’t really relate to anything productive in your life—is that a waste? I haven’t gotten to where I schedule time for it, like I do for exercise or socializing or dogwalking or things that I would declare important and inalienable in my pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. It gets fit into the interstices between these things, and sometimes, like the moss in sidewalk cracks, it takes root and expands the allotted space and if it gets really bad it cracks the cement block around it, which is usually (analogically speaking) domestic upkeep or timely arrival at appointed thingies.

(Like right now, after work and before meeting friends for dinner, I was supposed to go get a new headlamp for my car, but writing this, which I didn’t really intend to do, is cutting into the time available to get to AutoZone and back to Naked Fish in time…. But what’s important? The right-hand headlight still works.)

I blather on about this as my means of introducing a couple of sites that have delighted me (and sucked up time) lately. Best has been sent to my by colleague Todd, who got it from former colleague David, and it’s called The Institute of Official Cheer. Who can resist the “Gallery of Regrettable Food” or “Interior Desecrations”?

Rather lower brow is a collection of TV news bloopers on YouTube, which for some stupid reason crack me up. Laughing is therapeutic, no? So is it a waste of time?

When I’m really suffering low blood flow to the brain, I can pretty reliably get a chuckle out of Engrish.com, a photo compendium of Japanese and Korean signs and t-shirts in English. It’s the proofreader and kid-who-grew-up-watching-Monty-Python’s-Flying-Circus in me that makes me susceptible.

For more intelligent stimulus, I love 3 Quarks Daily. As we say around these parts, wicked smaht.

Ah-ha, that site just offered up justification for all this “time wasting”! With a link to a Fortune article entitled Be Smarter at Work, Slack Off.

On Being Over-Busy

Such a boring modern first-world plight. One takes on things and takes on things and never discards things. And by things I mean things, which is bad enough because for most of us storage space is finite, but also projects, activities, goals, habits, commitments. And it is so hard to part with those already in the queue. But really time is finite too. At least as far as we know within this mortal coil.

My roommate Gretchen back in Ann Arbor had a good way of looking at life—from the college students’ perspective. You take so many classes, say, four or five in a full load. But then you have a boyfriend maybe, that’s equivalent to another class (at least). And if you live in a shared household, that’s like another class. Say you belong to the rowing club—another class. Work a few hours in the library? Class. Volunteer at the food coop for discounts? Class. Have a social life? Class. Now you see your course schedule is rather overloaded. How do you keep up with the homework???

The trouble is, especially further on in adult life, where you have things you are somehow more obliged to do than when you were in college and where the view of the short horizon of life is clearer and fills you with the existential hum (Vonnegut’s phrase), the course schedule builds and builds and you never graduate from any of them….

You often hear people say, I have to simplify, I want to scale back on things. My problem is, I don’t really want to. I want to keep adding more. But I’m rather more dreamy than efficient, distracted by the trees when observing the forest, etc., so it pushes one (me) to the brink of idiocy trying to do it all.

So I’m interested in the life hacking concept.

After perusing Lifehack.org and Hackyourlife.com, I have to kind of conclude it’s just a modernized, expanded, searchable version of Heloise’s Hints. (There’s still a Heloise, though she can’t possibly be the original. (I’ll look into that, in all the spare corners of the day life hacking will give me….)) Whereas Heloise’s hints are mainly aimed at the home and personal care spheres, life hacking extends to work, maintenance of one’s electronic identity and presence, and Internet powerusage. You’ll still find tips on more efficient sleeping, eating, and bathing, but it sounds ever so much cooler as “hacking.”

I like the idea, whether it’s a 50s era Heloise or a 00s era hack. I started practicing a little hack unknowingly. I really like to work out at lunch, either running and weight lifting or playing pickup basketball. But I always am running late at work or know I’ve got to leave early…. Working out for 45-60 minutes is great, but the whole getting geared up and then cleaned up is maddeningly time consuming. So I’ve started wearing the “foundation wear” of the workout to work on the days I think I’m going to go play. That means I’ve switched to black athletic socks, and I do have to adapt my wardrobe choices to accommodate the T-back of a typical sports bra (no scoop necks on those days). But it saves minutes! Also, combined shower/shampoo gel helps…. Or just living with sweat-dried hair. It’s work, for heaven’s sake; I’m not a model nor do I meet with “the public.”

So, would putting enough of these neurotic hacks together actually amount to another hour in the day? Or just make me a compulsive oddball? Guess we’ll see.