Category Archives: Digressions

I wrote an earlier post on how movies create unreasonable expectations of men. Now something else of late has begun to unnerve me. In recent weeks I have watched the first three seasons of Coupling (a British sitcom) and the second season of The Wire. I am even starting to notice the same type of disturbing behaviour in other TV shows and movies elsewhere. This is what bothers me: Everyone is always drinking alcohol and yet you NEVER (or almost never) see anyone with hangovers or debilitating hangovers, at least not anywhere near to the extent that I would suffer them were to I engage in similar activities. It appears that everyone and everywhere in the TV universe (where obviously I do not reside) can drink beer after beer, copa after copa, and guzzle down bottles of wine each evening afer work, and the next day they are back to business. Am I the only one disturbed? Worst of all I live in Spain where such practices are obligatory.

When I was a kid, I absolutely hated math (with the exception of long division). Because I despised it so much, I found much more fascinating ways of solving mathematical problems. Instead of actually “doing the math”, I always thought about the person behind the exam or problem and not the problem itself. Thus, I would ask myself, what answer would the examiner probably choose? I also started to notice certain tendencies in certain fields of mathematics. For example, I noticed that in Alegra, X was almost always 3, and was almost never an even number. When it was time to take the SATs, I would only read the possible multiple choice answers and never the questions. Then I would ask, what number would the SAT developers most likely choose to be the correct number? Let me tell you, if there was a 3 or even a -3, that was most likely the correct choice (or at least the one that I put). As a matter of fact, I recall my SAT tutor (yes, I had a tutor) was amazed at how quickly I was able to solve the math problems and yet I could never explain to her how I had solved them.

In any event, today math students are much more clever than I ever was. Click the photo above to see some interesting solutions to math questions.

Despite having enjoyed my shortest vacation season since arriving in Spain six years ago, this summer I was fortunate enough to visit three of the Balearic Islands (Ibiza, Formentera, and Mallorca), Bethany Beach (Delaware), and Washington, DC (including my hometown, Potomac, Maryland). And I did so in just seven work days and a short weekend getaway. Here are my brief reflections on the Balearic Islands, beaches and their beauty …

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If our childhood fears and nightmares of snakes (and even sharks or pirañas) weren’t enough, it appears that venomous fish outnumber snakes. Yes, you heard me correctly. There are enough poisonous fishies out there in lakes, rivers, seas, and oceans to produce a whole new series of horror films to terrify the young. Luckily most of them swim in tropical waters where people have more important tribulations than worrying about malevolent aquatic life. Here is the article that explains it all:

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In my fist blog entry, I digressed on travel distances. Now upon returning from a brief trip home, I recall one of the first books that enthralled my youth, Walk the World’s Rim. Essentially, this story argued that as many times as one traverses the world’s rim, one never truly returns to the same point from which one has disembarked. Nevertheless, my experience of round trips, coming and going, from Madrid to Washington, DC over the past six years is better expressed by the pains of jet lag than any other allusion.

On September 9th, I will have my 6th anniversary of arriving in Madrid. What I have learned is that the jet lag I suffer is exponentially more intense in relation to what I leave behind rather than the actual distance or time of travel. Allow me to explain . . .

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