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Perhaps you’ve heard the adage: “Never shop hungry.” If you go to the grocery store with an empty stomach, you’re more likely to find the candy/chips/canned goods section, stick your arm out and run down the aisle, pouring everything on the middle shelf into your cart. When you finally check out and bring the food out to your car, you’re left wondering just how long you can survive eating nothing but lima beans. Recently, I discovered that the opposite is true as well: “Never shop full.”

After a large meal at Olive Garden—lots of pasta, soup and breadsticks—my parents and I went to pick up some food for the next couple days. We walked up and down the aisles… and didn’t want to buy anything. “We don’t need to have dinner, we can just starve tomorrow night.” At the time, it sounded like a reasonable proposal, reasonable enough that we followed through on it. Well, just the “not buying food” part. We didn’t starve the next night—we had plenty of lima beans from the last time we shopped hungry.

Announcement over the P.A. system in Walgreens:

“It is 10 minutes until 10:00. We’ll be closing in… 10 minutes.”

Here’s a hypothetical scenario (based on the Christian faith and conceived after watching Heroes last week—three cheers for TV polluting my mind!): Just before you die, you go to confession or somehow purge yourself of sin and thus believe that you’re dying with a pure soul.

You pass away in your sleep and “wake up” in an stereotypical conception of Heaven, clouds underneath with a deep blue sky and bright shining sun overhead. It’s very peaceful, very pleasant and you feel warm and happy.

However, as you travel around amongst the clouds, all of the souls drifting around you are strangers. They look at you and smile as they float by, but you don’t recognize any of their faces. You have family and friends who died before you, but you don’t see them anywhere. All of the people you loved and cherished, those you respected and admired… none of them are there.

Here’s the question: Are you in Heaven or Hell?

If I remember correctly, February 2nd commemorates the 5th anniversary of me flying home to revel in my failure of being one of the four remaining Beauty and the Geek participants in the mansion. Okay, technically, there wasn’t much revelry—even if Scarlet and I had won the $250K, we wouldn’t be allowed to revel in our victory lest the producers take the money away and slap us with a big, nasty lawsuit. I wouldn’t think that going from victorious to penniless would inspire any festivities, but that’s just me.

The thing I’ll remember most about that day isn’t waking up in a hotel bed instead of my room in the mansion. It isn’t eating normal food instead of brand-name food with duct tape covering up the brand names. It isn’t even passing out on the airplane before the stewardess could tell me how to buckle my seat belt for the flight home. Nope, the thing I’ll remember most is getting off the plane. Read the rest of this entry »

I was at a restaurant on Sunday and had to use the bathroom before we left (one of the downsides of drinking three glasses of Mountain Dew in one sitting). I headed through the door, walked past the urinals and saw two toilet stalls: one regular and one handicap stall.

As you probably know, handicap stalls are designed a little differently to make them more accessible for someone in a wheelchair: the stalls are wider so the chair can turn and there are handrails to help the person lift himself from seat to seat. (The stall can also be helpful for someone with constipation: you can spread your legs wider and grab the handrails to brace yourself every time you squeeze.) There was just one problem.

As I looked at the stalls side-by-side, the one on the right was wider and had rails, but both were unoccupied and both doors were swung in towards the toilets. In other words, if you’re using a wheelchair to get into the handicap stall, you push the door open, roll your chair inside and the door gets pinned between the chair and the wall.

Since you can’t use the urinal, you need to use the stall. If you need to use the stall, all you have for protection from prying eyes is the wheelchair, so if you’re shy about peeing where people can stare at you in the face… better lay off the Mountain Dew until you get home.

Go ahead, call me indifferent, see if I care.

“Hello, my name is Shawn and I have a knee injury.”

It’s not a perfect comparison—there are no group meetings or sponsors—but I have been in rehab (i.e., physical therapy) for about two months and frequently feel the urge to relapse while watching my soccer team play. Then I bend my knee to a certain degree or twist my leg around and that urge goes away.

At least it did until last week. Before a game on Wednesday, I decided to help the keeper warm up by taking some shots on net. I felt okay after the first few times, so I started kicking the ball harder. Not as hard as possible, mind you—I thought keeping the ball in reach of the keeper was a little more important than powerfully sending it soaring up into the roof.

That five minutes or so felt great, but as the game progressed while I stood on the sideline, my knee started to let me know it was displeased. Very displeased. Ooh yeah, that was definitely a relapse. When I got home, I was having trouble walking up and down stairs again.

Thankfully, physical therapy has gone well enough that I recovered quickly and I’m doing all right. I went to the local YMCA today and rode on an exercise bike for about 20 minutes. I didn’t push myself really hard because I didn’t want to rupture anything, but after a semester of circuit training twice a week and then two months of not being able to work hard enough to break a sweat, those 20 minutes felt pretty good. As for my limping down the stairs towards the locker room afterward… I think it’s fair to say I haven’t graduated from KIA just yet.

That’s how my grandmother suggests that we live our lives: decide where we want to be in five years, then work towards that point starting now.

On January 17th, 2005—five years ago—I left a hotel with six other guys, got into in a van, stopped at Denny’s for breakfast, drove around for what seemed like hours, then eventually strolled through the front door of a mansion and into the midst of the reality TV phenomenon known as “Beauty and the Geek”. (The show being a “phenomenon” may be debatable, but please don’t spoil my delusions for the moment.) It was awesome, frustrating, amazing, sometimes nauseating… it only lasted two weeks, but it changed my life in so many ways that if I’d had a five-year plan at that point, it would have been shot straight to hell.

I sent a “Happy Anniversary” message to some of my fellow… you know, I’ve never put much thought into it before, but what were we? Participants? Contestants? Cast members? Probably all of the above, but regardless, I sent a message to a handful of them and hope that they’ve got a couple happy memories to reflect on after so many years. The likelihood of us getting together for a little reunion is minuscule at best—people seem to have gone their separate ways—but if some TV channel shows a mini-marathon of Season 1 in June (the month when the show first aired), I’ll be happy. I’ll also probably feel awesome, frustrated, amazed and sometimes nauseated all over again, but at least this time I can write that stuff in the margins of my five-year plan.

My apologies for missing the dates when these events occurred, but allow me to wish people:

“Merry Christmas!”
“Joyous Kwanzaa!” and
“Chhhappy Chhhannukah!” (I wasn’t sure how to type a throat-clearing “chhh” noise, so that’s the best I could do.)

As for those of you who consider “Chrismukkah” a legitimate holiday, you should be strapped down to a table, beaten with a candy cane, whipped with a cat-o’-nine-dreidels and banned from watching “The O.C.” ever, ever again.

If I missed any other real holidays, my apologies, but I’m busy getting ready to celebrate the end of a decade and party into the 10’s. Don’t forget to start things off on the right foot, everyone: Lift your left foot off the ground just before the clock strikes midnight. Happy New Year!!!

A few days after I hurt my right knee playing soccer (the Sunday before Thanksgiving), it wasn’t getting much better—it was still really painful trying to bend around to put on socks and pants, let alone climb stairs—so I went to the doctor to have her take a look at it. Read the rest of this entry »