I Drank a Gallon of Water a Day for a Week - Here’s What Happened

Introduction

What follows is a work of fiction. All characters, situations, observations, and insinuations are fictitious, coincidental, or accidental. The characters were pulled out of thin air and have nothing in common with any human being who ever lived, nor any zombie or otherwise undead individual. Nothing that happens in this story ever happened to a real person, or ever will. In fact, this story is practically science fiction, except that it’s totally unscientific and doesn’t have spaceships or aliens or anything. That said, any similarity of any character to an actual space alien, past present or future, is (obviously) purely coincidental or conjectural.

I drank a gallon of water every day for a week – here’s what happened

I was casting about for a New Year’s Resolution but nothing was coming to mind. Last year I resolved to dance like nobody’s watching, and I even bought a new Bluetooth speaker, but I found the dancing made me sad, because I live alone and there was nobody to watch me. A one-man dance party doesn’t feel much like self improvement.

So this year I decided to try drinking a gallon of water a day. Supposedly hydration is really important, and after all, what have I got to lose? Because I’m in an apartment building, my water bill is the same no matter what I do.

I thought about buying one of those graduated gallon water bottles with motivational phrases on them—you know, starting at the top with “GOOD MORNING” then “HYDRATE YOURSELF” then “REMEMBER YOUR GOAL,” etc., down to “ALMOST FINISHED” and then finally “YOU DID IT” at the bottom—but then I’m like dang, that’s $25 I’d rather not spend. Plus, I know myself, and I respond better to the whip than the carrot, if you catch my drift. So I washed out an empty gallon milk jug and wrote on it with a sharpie:

7AM GET COFFEE
9AM NO EXCUSES
11AM THIS IS NOTHING
1PM DON’T BE A LOSER
3PM NO PITY PARTY
5PM OOH, BIG MAN
7PM EVERYONE GETS A RIBBON
9PM BIG WHOOP

I set everything out the night before, feeling pretty excited. I hadn’t felt such keen anticipation since I started charging my new Bluetooth speaker at about this time last year.

Day One

At 9am I filled my big jug and then poured about a pint of it into my teakettle. This is the hardest part since there’s some sloshing and trial-and-error involved but I think it’s the genius of my method. See, others who do this drink only out of their $25 graduated jug and drag it around with them, like wearing a badge of honor so everyone will ask about it and they can start taking credit for their awesome resolution in advance. That’s not for me, I don’t need to brag. Plus, I don’t need the ruggedness of the Motivational Bottle … I don’t worry about leaks since I’m mostly at home. When I go out I’ll fill some smaller, more reliable vessel from the main one and then return for refills.

Some say it’s bad to hydrate with coffee but if I gave that up, I’d be doing two New Year’s Resolutions and I don’t want to boil the ocean here. I’m trying to tackle something I can actually achieve, so as to be more compassionate with myself (my Resolution from two years ago that I’m still struggling to keep).

Well, things were going fine until about 11am, when I’d peed so many times I felt like I was wearing out the carpet between my armchair and the toilet. I was peeing so much it seemed like the bowl would be completely full by nightfall. I’m of the “if it’s yellow keep it mellow, if it’s brown wash it down” school, in terms of flushing, except “keep it mellow” never made sense—I mean, what’s non-mellow about flushing? So I think of it as “if it’s brown, flush it down, if it’s jaune leave it alone.” (I am considering putting that on a placard above the toilet, with a little translation of “jaune” from the French.)

Just to divert my mind from the constant awareness of my pestering bladder, I went to the park and sat at my favorite bench for a while, watching life go by, and then this man came up to me, sat down, and said, “Hey, are you one of the dads?” I was like, “No,” and he said, “So you just like sitting and watching kids on a playground?” and I just stared at him, like, isn’t that obvious? He went on to say, “Look, a couple of other parents and I have talked about this and we all agree, we’re gonna have to ask you to leave.” So I shot back, “I was leaving anyway, I have to pee!” I have to admit, it was nice to have a really good comeback for once.

In terms of the more tangible benefits of all this drinking, I have to say that by 9pm, I’d never felt so good. My skin seemed better, I felt stronger in my body, my posture was more erect … even my hair felt better. Totally worth all the peeing.

Day Two

My bladder woke me up from a dream in which I was touring this old Victorian mansion that they’d turned into a museum, and I had to pee (yes, even in my dream) and found this tiny little half-bathroom, but instead of a toilet it just had a little portal to pee into. Halfway through my business the whole room started to move, slowly lowering toward the ground floor, and I realized it wasn’t a bathroom, it was an elevator! Yikes! I was like, “When I reach the next floor, the door’s gonna open and I’d better be finished!” Then I woke up.

The drinking itself was still pretty easy today and I nailed the pour into my teakettle, first try. If anything the constant peeing was even worse, though, and beyond that, by lunchtime I started getting pretty bored of drinking plain water. I’d been warned by drink-a-gallon-a-day websites not to have any sugar, though, because it’d throw off my electrolytes. Then I realized hey, if I make Top Ramen soup and drink the broth, that’s two cups of water right there! So I did that.

Big mistake! OMG, all the salt in that ramen totally bloated me! I should have known! Salt is an electrolyte! I stood in the mirror looking in horror at my bloated (and unfortunately hairy) belly (though not hairy due to drinking water, I hasten to add). I looked kind of like ET. Out of habit, I also scrutinized my face in the mirror, and as I looked closer I realized hey, my eyebrows are looking good! I flicked them with my finger a few times and realized, wow, drinking all this water has totally cured my eyebrow dandruff! Bonus!

All the afternoon water drinking eventually brought down the bloat, and after my final 9pm pint—nailed it!—I was ready for some yoga. I put in my video and (literally) went through the motions. I still can’t even come close to the Yogi Squat, but it’s only the second day of my new hydration regimen.

Day Three

I have hit my stride. The more I drink water now, the more I love it. In fact I doubled up on my 9am pint, drinking a whole quart, and it felt so good. I paid a price, though: I immediately had to pee, and then afterward, the sensation of water on my hands as I washed them made me have to pee again immediately, and for a second it looked like a vicious cycle I’d never break out of.

I went for a little hike and had to pee so bad halfway through. Alas, the outhouse at the trailhead was still at least thirty minutes away, which was like two pees worth, and there were so many hikers! I couldn’t find any privacy! I bushwhacked off-trail for a bit, and then my sneakers lost traction and I slid down into this ravine, and at the bottom I discovered—to my shock and horror—a dead body! It looked like some young adult hiker, halfway claimed by the earth. I scrambled up that slope so fast I couldn’t believe it. Surely my excellent hydration gave me wings. Problem was, just before reaching the trail again I slid on some leaves and tumbled all the way back down there. Then I looked more closely at the body and realized it was just an old shirt tangled around a fallen tree limb. Silly me.

Day Four

Another peeing dream woke me up and for a terrifying moment I thought I’d wet the bed. But I hadn’t … just a little leakage which is totally normal when you drink a gallon of water a day.

In addition to the better skin, relief from back pain, and higher energy, all of which I’d secretly hoped this hydration would give me, I got a big surprise: I got a job! My first in years! It’s selling tickets at the Events Center. The ticket window opens hours before the game and things start off really slow, so peeing wasn’t a problem at first—I’d just put the “BACK IN 5 MINUTES” sign out and go do my business. But once the rush started, no dice. I could not leave my post. It got worse and worse to where people were asking, “Are you okay!?” I guess my face was getting contorted. But then I realized I could just pee in this wastebasket without even getting out of my seat! Don’t worry, the wastebasket has a liner. All the wadded-up paper napkins in there dampen the sound down to almost nothing. I did have to sit pretty far forward in my chair to, well, eclipse everything, but nobody was the wiser.

Now, if you think I’m trying to connect the dots between drinking water and getting a job, I totally am. Those may seem unrelated but if I hadn’t been so hydrated, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to accept the offer.

The health benefits continue. I did an experiment: I looked in the mirror, located a zit, studied my face carefully to remember exactly where it was, drank a pint of water, and then looked again. Sure enough, the zit was gone! Water is like a miracle elixir!

Day Five

Other gallon-a-day blogs had warned me that I’d get bored of drinking water. Well, so far they’re wrong, but you know what is boring? All this peeing! It’s getting so old! Also, even though practice normally improves one’s prowess at practically anything, I seem to be getting worse at not spattering the rim. Either that, or I’m just more observant. I have to mop up the rim pretty much every time now. And my hands are starting to get a bit raw from all that washing, like with OCD people. The rest of my skin is positively glowing from all the water, but for some reason not my hands. I was reading on this one blog about smearing lotion on my hands and then putting on disposable rubber gloves, right before bed, so I’m considering that.

I showed up to work today but nobody was there. I searched everywhere and finally found my supervisor, and it turns out I misunderstood about the job: it’s not a daily thing, but only as needed, when they have a big game and somebody calls in sick. Oh well. I have a small passive income and it’s better to focus on my blogging anyway.

I fell asleep today and had one of those marathon naps where it’s hard to move afterward, so I missed one of my drinking sessions. I chugged a quart after that and was back on track.

Day Six

Not so much to report, actually. Drinking water, even a gallon a day, turns out to not actually be that complicated. One highlight: the hydration is helping my vision. If I really squint, I can read the kitchen clock from the kitchen nook table without my glasses.

Day Seven

This has gone so well, I woke up this morning thinking about continuing my gallon-a-day habit for the whole month, or more. This would give me a good blog topic while continuing to improve my health in umpteen different ways! But I’ve also been thinking a lot about the new Avatar movie, which is over three hours long. I really want to see it in the theater, and I’m sure the crowds have thinned out by now, but there’s no way I could make it through without getting up to pee at least six times. Who knows how many plot points I’d miss. And I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a long, long time.

And that got me thinking that, just like with last year’s dancing, achieving this Resolution is making me a little sad. Why, you may ask? Well, at some point I’ll have reaped all the health benefits, and then I’ll have nothing left to look forward to. So I think after I polish off my last pint tonight, I’ll call it quits, and keep the optimal hydration project in my back pocket for later. It’ll be like my ace-in-the-hole, my Plan B, the card up my sleeve. Next time I’m feeling really low, I’ll just start back up the gallon-a-day, and things will start to get real, real good again!

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Further reading

• New Year’s Resolutions
• One-Size-Fits-All New Year’s Resolution
• New Year’s Resolutions - Dental Hygiene Edition
• New Year’s Resolutions - Let’s Get It Right This Time
• A Wide Net Approach to New Year’s Resolutions
• The DUMB Approach to New Year’s Resolutions

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - The Fall of the House of Albert

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language.

Introduction

I wrote recently that boredom is a problem for the brain to solve. The essay below was the fruit of a period of protracted boredom I suffered about fifteen years ago, during my college Christmas vacation. I’d gone to visit family and friends in my hometown, and after everybody else left to go back to school, I was alone for awhile—with no PC, not enough books, and nothing to do. Of course I didn’t have a cell phone yet, but more to the point there was nobody to call. I didn’t even have the family cat, Mulla, for company; he’d fallen down dead on Christmas Eve, right in front of the tree.

To occupy myself, I wrote what follows, by hand, with an actual pen and paper. (It’s nominally a letter to my brother Geoff, but of course it’s actually an essay; this was long before the blogosphere existed.) I’ve edited the essay just a bit here, mainly to give the albertnet reader some essential background information.

Fall of the House of Albert - January 9, 1991

Let me describe this day, this ninth day of the new year, a Wednesday, to you. Outside, stale grey. Not unusual. The temperature, a frustrating thirty- eight degrees. When I phone up the weather service I have to sit through the “Time & Temperature Advertising can work for your business! Call...” plug before getting the statistic. It’s frustrating because it’s too cold to ride comfortably, but not cold enough to give me a good excuse not to ride. Tell you the truth, my legs haven’t yet recovered from whatever I did to them: trying to pretend I could dance, I guess, but also some kind of overuse, or maybe it’s actually atrophy.

Truth is, I haven’t been all that motivated, to train or anything else. Remember the David Letterman cat poster, designed to present that cutesy animal theme coupled with a sobering dose of reality? A cat lying there with the caption, “Since they neutered me, I haven’t felt like doing much of anything. Life has lost all meaning; I wish I were dead.” Well, I haven’t been neutered and have no suicidal tendencies (not even an album) but I can relate to wanting to lie down all the time for lack of anything better to do. Today I’ve alternated between reading and sleeping.

I only have two books with me (and no library card, and no money for anything new). I’ve been reading Thurber, which is fine, but his essays are like snacks—great a few at a time, but nothing to binge on. I’ve also got a Nabokov book, but my brain is still too sore from finals to concentrate that hard. Actually, my brain’s probably just gone flabby. You know, da break, it a makes ya dumb, see. I jes set heah tinkin’, but none a dem brain waves an’ shit is movin’ up deah, ya know?

Plus, there’s nobody around. Friends and family have scattered. My dad is always either at work or at his lady friend’s house. I am the sole occupant of this house—which, when it was my childhood home, used to bustle with six loud people. Now it’s as silent and depressing as this grey day, this stale winter. It’s a stark physical embodiment of sheer nihilism. It’s an existential nothingness which can inspire nothing but a sudden split from big extra-credit words into the almost nostalgic “BLAH! JUST BLAH! ALL OVER THE PLACE SPACED-OUT BLAH! BLAH!” (Why “nostalgic”? About a decade ago our friend’s mom totally lost it over my her son’s chronic mental and physical disorganization and berated him with these words, right in front of us. Her strange outburst was immortalized—her words thrown on our pile of go-to utterances alongside quotes from “Breaking Away” and “Mad Max.”)

To catalog the blank slate (and empty chalk tray) of my environment, I will describe the dining room table I’m sitting at. A few pairs of scissors, I don’t know why. Piles of newspapers. There used to be a plastic basket for these in the corner, but after last trash pickup, it disappeared. And really, I can’t compel myself to care. This table is big enough for eight; that leaves plenty of room for shoving crap down to clear eating space for a maximum of two people. So the newspapers stay, along with a lot of other shit that is depressingly stationary, like this crappy stapler, mauve in color (who chose this and why?) with which, in an idle moment of fidgeting, I inadvertently punched a staple right through my thumb.

Nothing moves here. When I first arrived here for Christmas break, the house was strangely unoccupied. It turned out my brothers, to punish me for getting a ride from the airport from a friend instead of letting them pick me up, had vacated the place. I walked from room to room looking in vain for somebody; it felt like a ghost town. Now that feeling has returned, magnified by my newly acute perception.

Cat-food lids, two, and pennies, three; an undoubtedly dead Radio Shack D-Cell; a Realistic Weatheradio. All worthless, or worse. Cat-food lids: no more Mulla. Pennies: get these trinkets the hell out of here, they’re hardly reminiscent enough of money even to remind me how broke I am. The Weatheradio: useless in this drearily monotonous cold-and-grey. A foil-wrapped blob of some fruitcake or something everyone—I mean, my dad and I—are too lazy to eat or throw out. My dad even told me the other night, “Oh, here is some cake you could eat.” I could have said, “Dad, hello, where have you been? That’s weeks old, and nobody knows what it is or where it came from!”

But why shatter the tranquility? My dad’s mind is elsewhere, totally oblivious to this house and how it seems frozen in stone. A piece of coat-hanger has been on the floor, mere inches from the trash can, since I can remember. I could throw it away, but why? What difference does it make if it’s on the floor or in the can? Pop wouldn’t notice. I’d still see it in there a week from now. I could gather up these newspapers and put them in the corner, but they’d still hang around, like an odor. Besides, if I cleared off the table, think of the horror of that wide, empty expanse of wood, removing what little sign there is that this house is occupied at all. A huge cleaning operation of the entire abode would turn it into a magnified doll-house, except for all the weird crap I dare not move, because it could be involved in a supposedly active project. I’m talking about the Subaru manual, the drill, the Dremel tool, and other assorted tools on the funky white table adjacent to the dining table.

Wait, there’s something else on the funky table, unrelated to any project: an envelope labeled “Cartoons: Seen by J & boys 1990.” Who else is supposed to see it? Is some stranger going to wander in here and say to me, “Excuse me, but I see from the envelope label that I haven’t seen these cartoons yet. Mind if I peruse them awhile?” I really wonder about the label. Why give the year? Does Pop expect a natural disaster to bury this place in thirty feet of stone and ash, and he wants archaeologists digging it up centuries later to be spared the trouble of carbon-dating it all? (They might find the foil-wrapped mystery-cake, miraculously preserved and mere inches from the remains of my body, and create a touching tale of how I was about to take it to my grandma when suddenly buried alive.)

Maybe Pop wrote down the year because he realistically expects the envelope to sit there for years to come. The Albert Museum is taking form before our eyes! I have a vision of affixing a neat label to everything here: “Mauve stapler, 1990.” “D-Cell, 1989.” “Weatheradio, circa 1991.” The pennies lie about their chronological relation to the House of Albert. The newspapers, on the other hand, fix a moment of this house’s life—or indeed, its death—in history.

[In retrospect, it only appeared the house was dying. This was a transition period, when my dad’s attentions were elsewhere, and he was basically living at his lady friend’s house, so my childhood home—“2380” we always called it (and still do)—had become a mere staging area. This changed mightily and the house became a home again, to my brother Bryan’s family, a new generation of Alberts who surely still think of it as their childhood home.]

The really weird thing about all this stillness is that it isn’t entirely unnoticed by Dad. Almost, but not quite. The things I’ve described thus far will doubtless remain for eternity. Yet anything I leave around disrupts Pop’s sense of order. It’s as though any stapler or D-Cell or drill that has been stationary long enough has rightfully earned its place. Or maybe it becomes invisible; it eludes my dad’s perception in the same manner as the rotation of the earth. Continuity creates the illusion of motionlessness.

So powerful is Pop’s perception of foreign objects in his domain that he will even request, on occasion, that these objects be removed. The other day, or maybe several centuries ago, he asked me to remove my Christmas presents from the far corner of the living room where they were tucked away in the intersection of fireplace and piano.

Never mind that in the big scheme of things, those presents are the most transient objects in the whole house. Imagine a time-lapse movie of this house—you know, like the ones National Geographic makes by filming a glacier for ten years and then playing back the footage at high speed so that the whole decade can be watched in 30 seconds and we can see a glacier in motion. My time-lapse movie would focus on this living room. It would capture the top of the harpsichord, which is covered with heaps of catalogs and junk mail, the highlights being a 1990 DAK Industries catalog and a birthday card from dad’s sweetheart, J—.

Let’s say the filming spans a period from Dec. 1, 1990, to Jan 31, 1991, and is then condensed into twenty seconds of viewed footage. People in this movie appear for such a short time they are subliminal. Other objects, such as the DAK catalog, appear throughout the video and can be carefully examined. Exactly four seconds into the movie, the birthday card from J— magically appears near the center of the screen. Nothing changes for another four seconds; then, my Christmas presents suddenly appear in the lower left-hand corner. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that I defied Dad’s concern for clutter and didn’t move the presents until I left for California. That means the presents would remain in the picture for seven seconds, and then vanish again. In the remaining five seconds, the DAK catalog and the birthday card remain, undisturbed.

The movie isn’t very interesting until we consider the sequel, in which we extend the time-lapse photography to encompass the span between Dec. 1, 1990, to Jan. 31, 2001, and is still condensed into twenty seconds. Now, the finished movie is somewhat different. The birthday card appears, for all practical purposes, instantly. It remains throughout the movie, along with the DAK catalog and all the other junk. For all the careful watching he can muster, the viewer is totally unable to spot the Christmas presents left by me in the lower left-hand corner. Only with the state-of- the-art video freeze-frame technology (which is really quite advanced in the year 2001!) can he finally spot the presents without going back to the original footage.

I will ask you to bear with me in one final version of this time-lapse-movie allegory. Let us assume we have a much bigger budget and have cameras positioned all over the house. Let us also add sound. Imagine that a team of skilled technicians is perusing all the footage from a video span beginning the night after my last brother left, Jan. 4, and ending Jan. 18, the day after I’m gone. This movie won’t be quite as condensed, making almost five minutes of viewed footage. You’ve seen, no doubt, time-laps films of something as simple as a night’s sleep, and have almost certainly felt awed at how much goes on during something as simple as sleep. That’s why you’ll be amazed at how little goes on in this movie.

The scene seems to linger on either my bed or the living room sofa. Certain cameras never see anything. The technicians are continually frustrated when not a single one of their cameras picks up any movement at all. The home viewer wants action, damn it, and out of two weeks of raw footage, they can’t even fill up five minutes with anything but sleeping and an occasional meal. The financial backers are threatening to pull out, and perhaps the worst of it is this actor, the star in fact, who keeps complaining, “There’s nothing here for me to do. I can’t get into this role at all ... you could get by with a clumsy actor, an extra. You could practically make do with a mannequin.”

Which I guess is my point. What am I doing here, anyway?

Fiction - The Happiest Christmas Story I Know

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language and alcohol abuse.

Introduction

What follows is a work of fiction.  I am not in the story, and neither are you, or anybody you know, or anybody who even exists, etc., so relax.

The Happiest Christmas Story I Know

                “I’ve had this ocean dream a bunch of times over the years, especially when I’m stressed out.  So maybe I’ve been having it lately because of the holidays,” Nick said.  “And this week I had it twice.  It’s hard to sleep afterward.”

                Dr. Waters tapped his lower lip with his pen, as if acting out a cliché:  “the deep thinker.”  He said, “Go ahead and describe the dream to me in detail.”

                “Okay, so I’m snorkeling in Hawaii.  I’m just having a great old time, looking at all these exotic, brightly colored tropical fish.  There are so many of them, so many varieties, it looks like a screen saver or something.  The water is so clear, and the sun is so strong, I can see the coral and starfish and stuff on the ocean floor.  So I keep swimming out, following fish around, and I start to see rarer fish, and larger ones.  Then I see an eel, and that’s kind of startling, because don’t they sometimes sting?

                 “And then I see something really scary:  out of the corner of my eye I see some really big thing slip by.  I wing my head around and it’s swimming off, and it’s like a shark or something, or that unnamed huge vicious thing that eats Nemo’s mother, you know?  A barracuda?  So suddenly I’m hyperventilating through the snorkel because this isn’t Sea World, there’s no Plexiglas here, I’m on this creature’s turf and it could take me out!  And then I suddenly notice something even scarier:  I can’t see the ocean floor anymore, just this giant dark void.  I’d been snorkeling over this low kind of shelf, and there were other snorkelers around and kids and everything, and now there’s nobody but me, and I’m way far out to sea.

                “So naturally my first instinct is to start swimming like crazy back to the shore, you know?  But I can’t figure out where it is!  I have no frame of reference.  I’m like one of those pilots lost in fog who after a while can’t even figure out which way is up and might fly straight into the ground.  I start frantically swimming, just to be taking some kind of action, and then I think, what if I’m swimming farther out to sea?  It’s terrifying.  And that’s where I always wake up.”

                Dr. Waters was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “And you’ve had this dream twice recently, and you think it’s because you’re stressed out about the holidays.”

                “Well, yeah,” Nick said.  He stared at the ceiling for awhile.  “So isn’t this where you’re supposed to tell me what my dream means?”

                “Well, I’m not a strong believer in analyzing dreams.  I’m more interested in hearing what you think is bothering you so much about the holidays.”

                “I don’t know.  I guess it’s because I’m supposed to be, like, especially happy, right now, with all the holiday cheer everywhere, but I’m not.”  Nick suddenly snorted with laughter.

                “What’s funny?” asked Dr. Waters.

                “Oh, I just remember this ‘Peanuts’ cartoon my brother once read me, way back when we were teenagers.  He did the voices.  Charlie Brown is talking to Lucy and saying, ‘I don’t understand it.  It’s Christmas and everybody is happy, and I’m supposed to be happy.  But I’m not.  Why am I not happy?’  And then—the way my brother reads it, with his own contribution—Lucy says, “‘Fuck off, Charlie Brown!  Just fuck off!’”

                Dr. Waters chuckled.  “Yeah, that’s pretty good,” he said.  “But getting back to your stress:  you feel that you should be happy, and it bothers you that you’re not.  So nothing about the holiday season gives you any joy?  Nothing to offset the stress?”

                Nick was silent for awhile.  “No,” he sighed.  “I just hate all of it.  The retail frenzy, the lights strung up everywhere … they just remind me of the obligations I’m not making good on.  I should do my Christmas shopping but I can’t stand the malls.  The stupid decorations and displays, and that horrible music, always the new takes on tired old Christmas songs, ‘Sleigh Ride’ and worse, ‘Jingle Bell Rock,’ and then there’s always some mall-stalking douchebag who suckers you into trying some lotion or unguent or ‘epidermal astringent’ or something.  So I skip the department stores, and I refuse to get caught up in all that Cyber-Monday crap, and then I feel lame for buying anyone anything.”

                “I see.  Now, do you think there’s anything … indulgent, about this pure hatred of the season?”

                “What do you mean ‘indulgent’?”

                “Well, we’ve talked a lot in these sessions about attitude, and the choices you make about how you see the world.  Isn’t there some aspect of the holidays you could warm up to?  I wonder if you’re not deliberately—though perhaps unconsciously—focusing on the negative here, perhaps to achieve some kind of purity in your disdain for it.  Perhaps you’re indulging your impulse to go negative.”

                Nick said nothing for a good while.  He sighed.  Finally Dr. Waters broke the silence.  “Nick, I’d like you to think back, over all the Christmases you’ve had, throughout childhood too, and try to think of the most recent positive memory you have.  Not just a brief moment, like when you got some really cool gift, but something meaningful.  Take your time.”

                More silence.  Ten minutes.  Finally Nick said, “I have a memory, but it’s kind of complicated.  I’d need to give you some back story.”  Dr. Waters nodded his approval, and Nick continued:  “It was my first Christmas after I started college.  I was royally pissed off at my parents.  This was a couple of years after their divorce, long past the period of each one trying to win me over to their side, but they were still bitter.  I was pissed because they were both unwilling to pay for my flight home for the holidays.  Of course each thought the other should pay for it, and they couldn’t go in together because then they’d have to actually cooperate, plus they’d both remarried and why put that burden on my stepparents who don’t even know me, right?  So my initial plan was to stay back, skip the holidays completely, just molder away in the dorms for the whole three weeks.  That’s what I told my parents I was gonna do, but they must have thought I was bluffing, and I guess I was.  I caved in pretty early because I didn’t want the flight to get too expensive.

                “So anyway, I decided since I was paying for the ticket myself, that, you know, fuck my parents, right?  I wouldn’t stay with either of them.  My friend Micky agreed to put me up at his place.  He was a bit older, had been on his own for years, never sees his folks over the holidays.  My hero, right?  He set up a little bed in his basement, random mismatched sheets and weird old blankets … even set out some light reading for me, a stack of magazines like ‘Big Fat & Sassy.’  Pretty funny.

                “So Christmas Eve rolls around and my mom is hell-bent on having her kids eat dinner at her place that night.  It shouldn’t matter because Christmas Eve was never a big deal in our family—we usually just watched TV or something.  But she’s mainly looking to make sure we’re not spending it with our dad.  Which was totally unfair, because she was getting us for Christmas dinner anyway.  Ryan and I agreed to this because the previous year my dad got us, and his second wife served these weird onion balls with the turkey dinner.  I don’t know why, but my brother and I couldn’t face those onion balls again.  We talked about that dinner like it was a POW camp or something.  So the deal was, Mom would get us for Christmas dinner and Dad would get us for Christmas morning.  So when she brings up Christmas Eve dinner we’re thinking she’s being kind of selfish—I mean, two dinners in a  row?—so Ryan gets this great idea of throwing a huge party and having all this food there.  Actually, I think he was going to do the party anyway, or maybe it was his roommates’  party, but he piled on with the food idea.  So I was going to do that.

                “But when I tell my mom, she gets all sore at me, and is practically crying, so I figure what the hell, the party’ll go late and I can hang with my mom first.  So I try to eat light at my mom’s dinner, but it’s just the two of us, and she knows how much I eat and flat-out accuses me of planning to secretly join my brother for dinner later.  So to prove her wrong—well, to pretend to—I eat my fill.  And then when enough time has passed I head over to Ryan’s party.  I get my friend Paul to come along.  His folks weren’t doing anything anyway.

                “Of course to Ryan it was a big deal that we both refuse Mom’s Christmas Eve dinner, on principle, and he’d made me promise not to cave.  So I have to lie to him, too.  And, of course, he wants to make sure I’m telling the truth, so he serves me this gargantuan portion of enchiladas.  I’m so stuffed after that I feel like I’m gonna puke.  And then Paul challenges me to a boat race.”

                “Boat race?” said Dr. Waters, perplexed. 

                Nick chortled.  “You haven’t heard ‘boat race’?  It’s a drinking contest.  You know, who can chug a beer the fastest.”

                “Oh, I see.  Sorry to interrupt.  Please continue.”  Throughout this story Dr. Waters hadn’t been taking any notes.  He’d just stared into space, his head tilted slightly.

                “So anyhow, it is a party, and I am the fastest boat racer around.  I never realized it until college.  It’s a gift, really.  I can just open my throat, and—BAM!—just pour it right down, like my throat’s a clear pipe.  And Ryan had never even seen this!  We’d never even boat-raced before!  So here it is, my moment of glory, and I pound this plastic cup of beer in like two seconds, and then this horrible thing happens:  I totally puke!  Not ‘cause I’m drunk, but just too damn full!  I kind of catch the barf in my hands, and I’m running for the sink but it’s totally crowded and I’m knocking people out of the way and they’re all seeing my hands full of barf and laughing their asses off.  And I know what they’re all thinking—oh, this lightweight can’t hold his booze, it’s only 9:30 and he’s already throwing up!  It was so humiliating.  Paul is laughing harder than anybody.  ‘Way to catch it in your hands!’ he keeps saying.  And the worst part is Ryan looking at me, all confused.  He knows I haven’t been there long enough to get that drunk.  I don’t know what to say.

                “So Paul and I leave.  I’m just too ashamed to stay there.  I’ve got barf all down my pants and can’t stand the idea of having to explain it to every new person I see.  But it’s too early to turn in, so Ryan drives downtown and we park the car and start looking for a bar.

                “The weird thing is that I don’t think either of us had ever set foot in a bar before.  We were only eighteen.”

“Why did you think they’d let you in?”

“This was 1986 and the drinking age was still eighteen.  It occurred to me later that of course you’d have to be twenty-one to go to a bar—eighteen-year-olds could only buy 3.2 beer and only at the grocery store—but at the time I just wasn’t thinking.  I mean, I’d never considered it.  Like I said, we weren’t the kind of guys who went to bars.  Our idea of a good time was buying a case of generic beer and drinking it in the garage.

“It didn’t matter, though.  We go to this total dive bar and don’t even get carded.  The bartender isn’t one of these chatty, friendly types … he doesn’t say a word.  He’s like a pithed teenager running a roller coaster at an amusement park.  And this bar … they haven’t decorated for the holidays at all.  No tree, not a single sprig of holly, no ribbons, no nothing.  They probably don’t have the money to do it right and realize a half-assed job would just make the place even more squalid.  Or maybe they know their clientele, know that it’s just a bunchy of lonely no-hopers who would just as soon pretend it’s not even ‘the holidays.’

“So there aren’t a lot of people in there and the ones we see all look totally depressed.  Each of them is sitting alone, nobody talking to anybody.  Just sitting, staring forward, working their way through their drinks.  I thought we might get a few dirty looks—I mean, these yuppie kids infiltrating their bunker here—by they don’t give a shit.  If they’d looked homeless or crazy that would have actually been less depressing.  They look unwell, one guy’s skin is practically grey.  One dude is wearing one of those cheesy ‘Members Only’ jackets.

“So all I can think about is how, as dingy and awful and depressing as this place is, for these guys it must be better than sitting alone at home on Christmas Eve.  It didn’t occur to me until years later that some of these guys may have had no idea what day it even was, and were just in there every night.  At the time, I definitely had the feeling they were escaping something, and that they had every intention of being so hung over on Christmas morning they wouldn’t even care that they were all alone.

“I think Paul was as uncomfortable as I was there, and anyway he has to drive so he can’t have more than one drink.  Back then we hadn’t learned how to sip a beer, we just instinctively drank them as fast as a glass of water, so we’re done in no time.  I think we both had the idea of staying just long enough that it didn’t look like we were fleeing the place.  So we head out.

“We could have strolled the Pearl Street mall, which is this really nice outdoor deal, all the shops done up with lights and everything, but it’s like five degrees out and I feel like the skin on my face is gonna crack.  So we just hustle back to the car and head back to Paul’s place.  He was still living with his folks.  They weren’t home, I think they were at a holiday party or something. 

“So we sit around his house for awhile.  We’re pretty bored and there’s nothing on TV, so we decide to do something we’d never done during our high school years, but which always seemed like a rite of passage:  we raid his dad’s liquor cabinet.  We got pretty plastered.  There were all kinds of booze, which was funny because Paul’s dad was actually a very temperant guy.  I never even saw him drink.  We figured if we drank from each bottle equally, maybe he wouldn’t notice anything was missing.

“Once we realize Paul is too drunk to drive, I figure I’ll walk over to Micky’s, but it’s at least a mile and I’m not looking forward to braving that cold, so I keep procrastinating.  Just after midnight Paul’s parents show up, and his dad offers to drive me home.  I try as hard as I can to seem sober, and I’m so worried about him smelling booze—his booze!—on my breath, I keep the window down through the whole drive.  I was so drunk I actually believed this would work.  But Paul’s dad never said a thing, he was really nice.

“Micky has gone to bed by the time I get there, but I let myself in.  I’d only brought one pair of jeans to Boulder with me, and have the foresight to throw my barfy jeans in the washing machine.  Then I pass out.  The next morning I bounce out of bed at like seven, feeling completely fine.  No hangover at all!  I throw my wet jeans in the dryer but I can’t get it to work.  I ask Micky to help and he’s like, ‘Dude, my dryer’s broken.’  I’m thinking, crap, what am I supposed to do?  Even if I find a Laundromat open on Christmas, am I supposed to stand around in there in my undies?  Plus, I’m expected at my dad’s place before long.  I figure since he’d traded Christmas dinner for this morning with his kids, he’ll be pretty chapped if I show up late.

“But having escaped a hangover I’m feeling invincible so I just pull on the wet jeans, throw on my coat, and bolt out the door to run the mile or so to my dad’s house.  And it’s the awesomest thing:  the sky is blue, it’s sunny, and there’s at least a foot of fresh snow. 

So I race through the cold bright morning, high-stepping through the snow, which is the dry, powdery kind so it’s flying everywhere, like in an ad for a ski resort.  Not a soul is out there so it’s like I have the whole world to myself.  You know how snow seems to muffle sounds?  Everything is completely silent except the creaking of my shoes on the snow, and my own breathing.  I’m panting pretty hard, not adjusted to the high altitude.  So I’m just hauling ass through all this snow, and about halfway to my dad’s I have to stop and take a breather, and I notice that me jeans have frozen stiff!

“And I’m standing there panting but I’m not even shivering, because I’ve been working so hard, and I’m just feeling euphoric.  I feel such a sense of release after being at that bar the night before.  See, I’d been kind of dreading Christmas morning, because my dad wouldn’t know how to run the show.  Christmas morning in my childhood was perfect:  the same stockings every year, hand-embroidered by Mom, stuffed with all the right stuff—the orange shoved down in the foot, her perfect homemade fudge in crackly waxed paper, the gift-wrapped tube of Crest, the Chapstick—and as we tore through our gifts we’d be smelling the yeasty stollen baking in the oven.  Well, none of that was going to happen this year.  Dad would probably make some weird greyish brown pancakes with like thirty types of flour in them, and flaxseed and wheat germ and all types of healthy stuff, and the stockings won’t be red, they won’t match, they’ll be stuffed with god knows what, and my evil stepmother will be there, and everything will be all wrong.  So that’s why I’d been dreading it. 

“But standing outside now, surrounded by all this dazzling snow, panting, feeling invincible, I’m thinking about how I’m breaking with the past, all these lost traditions, but it’s okay, I’ll always be me.  I’ll make my own life now, with my own rules.  I’d thought that before and it was kind of scary, like maybe I’d just screw everything up, but now I’m strangely heartened by the realization that whatever happens, at least I’m not going to end up like those poor lonely bastards in that dive bar, just trying to get through Christmas Eve.”

Dr. Waters looked at Nick.  Nick looked at Dr. Waters.  Neither said anything for awhile.  Nick’s smile faded and morphed into a frown.

“Well, that’s the story,” he said.  “You told me to tell you a happy holiday memory, and I did.  So … what happens next?”

“You seem to have some expectation.  What would you like to happen?” Dr. Waters asked.

“Well, I assume you asked me to tell you that story for some reason.  So, is it supposed to cheer me up?”

“I don’t believe in magic bullets.  I’m sorry if you thought that memory would automatically fix something.  The point of our work here is to help you gain insight into yourself.  So tell me:  is the point of your story that you felt you didn’t need anybody?”

“I never said that.  I don’t know if the story has a point.  Unless you see one.”

“One interpretation, one that I would support, is that as a college kid you came to the mythical conclusion that you no longer needed anybody.”

“Oh, like I was delusional!  Really!  Tell me more!”

“The happy part of the story seemed to be you reveling in this sense of self-sufficiency.  But I can’t help but think you weren’t self-sufficient at all.  For instance, the night before, in your drunken, naïve state, you felt you could walk a mile to your friend Micky’s house in the middle of the night when it’s five degrees out.  That would have been a really stupid thing to do.  You might have gotten tired, or dizzy, and maybe you’d have decided to rest awhile in a snow bank and then you could have passed out and died of exposure.  Happens all the time.  Instead your friend’s dad showed up and gave you a ride, and it never dawned on you, even after you’d sobered up, that he may have saved your life.”

“Oh, I see, and you think it was also stupid to run through the snow to my dad’s house?”

“No, that’s totally different because you weren’t drunk, and if you did have a problem it was morning and somebody would have found you.”

“Okay, so I was young and drunk and almost made one bad decision.  That erases all the joy of my story?”

“No, that’s only one way in which you were deceiving yourself.  The other is that you were euphoric at solving your own problem, with the wet jeans, and you proceeded from that idea to a larger sense that you didn’t need anybody.  But in that moment you didn’t consider that, even if the old Christmas rituals wouldn’t be observed, you were still on the way to be with your family.  Yes, you had the burden of divorced parents to deal with, but being with those two, and your brother, would be far better than being alone.  Your epiphany seems to have been that, due to your growing independence, you’d never end up alone in a bar on Christmas Eve.  But that’s a delusion.  Really, you’d only escape such a future—if you escaped it at all—because of your family, not because of your own strength as an individual.  That’s what I get from the story.”

“Oh, well, aren’t you clever!  But how can you even say that?  Who are you to say whether my broken-up family was better than nothing?”

“That’s not just my conclusion.  You knew that yourself, at least at one time.”

“What are you even talking about?!”

“You said yourself, your original plan was to stay back at school and blow off the holidays altogether.  But you realized you didn’t really want this, that you’d be lonely spending all that time by yourself.  It was so important to you to go home, you paid for the airfare yourself!”

Nick bit his lip.  He stared at Dr. Waters.  “That wasn’t to be with my family.  That was to be with my friends.”

“Let me ask you.  Paul and Micky … are you in touch with them anymore?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

“Well, thanks a lot, Dr. Waters.  That was the happiest Christmas story I knew, and now you’ve spoiled it.  That really helps me feel better about the holidays.”

“My goal wasn’t to spoil your story.  I was hoping you could figure out what made a past holiday season at least somewhat joyful, and try to replicate that.”

“Okay, but I can’t, right?  Because my joy then was a delusion, as you’ve so helpfully pointed out.  Maybe joy is always a delusion.  Maybe that’s why I hate the holidays so much.”

“Well, that’s one conclusion.  Another conclusion might be that you could have been more grateful that you had somewhere, anywhere, to go to besides a bar.”

“Okay, fine.  I wasn’t grateful.  I took my family for granted.  But how many times to I have to say it:  I was young!  I was just a stupid college kid, okay?”

“So do you think, as an adult, you’ve become more insightful?  You’ve put that naïveté behind?”

Nick snorted.  “You tell me.  You’re the expert.  What do you think?  Am I still delusional?”

“I don’t think I can answer that simply.  But I’m suddenly reminded about the dream you described earlier.  Setting aside what I said earlier about interpreting dreams, that one might shed some light.”

“Go on.”

“Okay.  You saw this barracuda, and you were terrified because you didn’t know which way to flee, right?  And there’s the sudden depth of the ocean.  You could swim all you wanted, but for all you know you’d just be heading further out to sea.”

“Exactly.  That’s what makes it such an awful dream.”

“Well, you—the you in your dream—seems too panicked to think straight.  You don’t seem to have had the simple insight to stop looking down, through the mask, and just pull your head out of the water.  You couldn’t have been that far from shore, right?  You just locate the beach and swim toward it!  Right?”

Nick said nothing.

“Maybe you have this dream again and again because your subconscious is trying to get it right.  But you keep waking up before having that crucial insight, that you’re not as lost as you seem, that you just need to stop fixating on what you think you need, and try to look at things in a new way.  Again, we can only guess at the meaning of dreams, but maybe this is a useful metaphor anyway.”

Nick swung his legs around to the floor and sat on the edge of the couch.  He held his head in his hands and stared at the floor.  After awhile he looked at his watch.  “Dr. Waters, we have five minutes left but I think for now I just need to think.  If it’s okay with you I think I’ll just be on my way.”

Dr. Waters nodded and rose to his feet.  He crossed over to the door and opened it.  “Very well, Nick.  I’ll see you next time.”  As Nick shuffled out the door Dr. Waters patted his shoulder.

“Thanks,” Nick said.

From the Archives - Business Travel

Introduction

I used to travel a fair bit on business. Not so much anymore, partially due to technologies like conference calling and net conferences. I realized recently that I’ve gone over a year now without a business trip. In observance of that anniversary, I offer here a humor piece on business travel, from my archives.

Rest assured I did not actually submit this extravagantly detailed report to my employer. That said, every item, thought, feeling, and reflection presented here is 100% factual.

The photo below has nothing to do with this post. I just think it’s funny.

From the Archives - EXPENSE REPORT

“Please include all details of Meals, Entertainment, and Other expenses (IRS REQUIRES).”

Date: 8/4/97

Amount: $14

Description (names, titles): Myself, Super Shuttle to SF Int’l Airport

Details: The van showed up early, catching me just out of the shower. Ran to van with belt and shoes in my hand, hair wet, tripping over my duffel bag. Van got me to the airport almost two hours before my flight.

_____________________________

Date: 8/4/97

Amount: $4.15

Description (names, titles): Myself, Burgers, Etc., SF Int’l Airport

Details: “Burgers, Etc.”: the name suits the place nicely. Totally uninspired, dutifully descriptive; they could have called it “Burgers & Crap.” If you’ve looked at my receipt, you may wonder why I had a meatball and a tuna sandwich at 8:13am. It was a mistake: the clerk, Rhad, was new and hit the meatball sandwich button by mistake. He then made matters worse by canceling the tuna, rather than the meatball, sandwich. If you’re wondering why I got a 20% “Airport Employee Discount,” it’s to compensate for the price difference between the meatball and the tuna (so Rhad wouldn’t get in trouble for botching his over-ring).

_____________________________

Date: 8/4/97

Amount: $333.59

Description (names, titles): Myself, flight to Columbus, OH

Details: Asked for exit row for more legroom, got wrong exit row seat that had no extra legroom and didn’t recline, had no left-hand armrest. Felt guilty for ignoring flight attendant’s safety instructions. Airline magazine had pointless article about Ruth somebody, founder of Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, and how it was called “Chris’s Steakhouse” for years until our enlightened period when she could put her own name on it. I wonder if the waitresses still wear short denim miniskirts. Ads in the magazine were for Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and for a variety of products and services aimed at executives: seminars by either Steven Covey or Charles Kurault, on either improving quality or increasing shareholder value, or both. Dozens of ads for new laptops, new cell phones, new two-way pagers, more ways to accrue frequent flier miles—evidently ads designed to rub travelers’ noses in the frantic pace of their lives.

SkyMall catalog was equally depressing: pages and pages of ads for inspirational posters, framed or unframed, with captions like “DEDICATION: If we don’t take care of our customers, somebody else will” below, incongruously, a close-up of a handshake. Or, “ATTITUDE: It’s the only buzzword you lowly cogs of industry could ever hope to understand,” below a picture of a grossly magnified drop of water hitting the surface of a pool. The silent movie was “Dante’s Peak,” starring Pierce Brosnan. Another Hollywood loss-leader, mercilessly foisted upon the trapped traveler, and I wasn’t about to spend $4 on headphones to find out if it’s any better with sound.

In-flight “meal” was blanched pressed ham product, white foam bun, little Pepperidge Farm “Exquisite Cookie” which was a sandwich cookie the color of an undercooked waffle with a brown middle tasting like the faintly minty product they put in green mint chocolate chip ice cream. Beverage: my usual tomato juice, of which they must have a glut, because they gave me the whole can, which I spilled. Paper napkin became a red, stringy mess, like a murder.

Flight attendant’s singsong voice was a perfect replica of some prototypical flight attendant of long ago, who should be paid royalties for his or her now classic inflection, with special emphasis placed on those words that are the most unnecessary: “Please do be sure to check around your seat for any personal items you may have left on boaaaaard. Be careful opening the overhead bins as items may have shifted duuuuring the flight. Should your future travel plans again call for air travel, we do hope that you will again choose America West as your airline pro-viiiii-der.”

_____________________________

Date: 8/4/97

Amount: $4.51

Description (names, titles): Myself, Pizza Hut, Phoenix Airport

Details: I do not know why the receipt says “Manhattan Brew T8.” It must be a ghost of what this Pizza Hut once was. This was my layover. I had one glistening cheese pan pizza, purchased after an endless search that kept turning up the unhelpful trio of “America’s Best Bagels,” “Hot Dog Factory,” and “Cinnabon” repeated in disorientingly identical food courts throughout the airport. The other alternative was an airport bar full of miserable smokers. Had just enough time after my Pizza Hut “meal” to stand in line at a phone booth behind three other business travelers, all apparently running late and ready to murder a women who couldn’t get her calling card to work. Gave up on getting voice-mail. Saw several joyous family reunions at the gate, wished I was travelling on pleasure.

_____________________________

Date: 8/4/97

Amount: $143.15

Description (names, titles): Myself, Avis, rental car, Columbus, OH

Details: Car was a midsize, Buick Skylark or equivalent, as promised on my itinerary. Can’t remember what it was, but it was exactly equivalent to—certainly no better than—a Buick Skylark. That is to say, it was the kind of car that nobody would actually buy; the kind of car people win on game shows. A car that was so nondescript that it got lost in parking lots—I would find myself wandering about, befuddled, comparing the license plate number on my keychain to that of a hundred other fleet cars. Felt trapped because the seatbelt would automatically lock me in when the engine was running. This would have made it awkward when dropping off passengers, though I had no passengers. Just somebody else’s car stereo presets.

_____________________________

Date: 8/4/97

Amount: $18.86

Description (names, titles): Myself, Grady’s American Grill, Hilliard, OH

Details: Service was, as usual, impeccable. Everybody in the Midwest is so nice. They bend over backwards and it’s really unnecessary: I’m eating by myself, with nobody to impress with my choice of restaurant, no business to conduct that requires silent, efficient service with no distractions. Don’t make too much fuss, I want to say, it’s just me, taking in my nourishment. The waitress was new. I asked her if she recommended the seafood pasta, and she said, “Well, that depends. If you like pasta, and you like seafood, then I would recommend it. But if you don’t like seafood, then I wouldn’t get it.” Fair enough.

During the meal the waitress—perhaps sensing my loneliness—refilled my water six times, brought more bread, and asked, “Does the seafood pasta taste good?” I assured her the taste was excellent. We did not discuss texture, appearance, or quantity, all of which were excellent. On my left, a couple, the man grand, the woman petite, having a fine time, the man eating most of his wife’s dinner and all of his. A group of six were loud and boisterous. Another couple, perhaps on their first date, were eager, polite, reserved, and stricken, either with love or shyness. I alone was quieter. I wish sometimes for a restaurant that only seats single diners—all tables of one.

(Before settling on Grady’s, I had wandered into TGI Friday’s and was immediately scared off by its lively music, “fun” crowd, and paper-lined plastic baskets of onion rings, fried mushroom buttons, and other munchables. A fun place, you know, to take a bunch of friends, especially if you’re all losers. I also ruled out Spageddies, as I had eaten there once before and found it highly mediocre. I remember that meal well: I’d had a fettuccine dish consisting of limp pasta in what had to be Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, with the lightest dusting of fresh Parmesan cheese, dispensed ineffectually by the waitress, who was new, and who held the excellent Zyliss rotary cheese grater backwards and upside down, turned the handle the wrong way and unscrewed it from the grater, until finally I gave up and said “when” and that’s all the cheese I got.)

_____________________________

Date: 8/4/97

Amount: $97.23

Description (names, titles): Myself, Homewood Suites Hotel, Hilliard, OH

Details: Depressingly palatial. Huge living room, desk with two chairs, sofa, armchair, TV, VCR, kitchenette with range, fridge, dishwasher. Two closets. The bed was longer than my queen at home, and wider than it was long. Could’ve slept my three brothers and myself easily. I used just one edge of it, like Gulliver in the seldom remembered “Brobdingnag” episode of his travels. There was a second TV in the bedroom—I could have watched two shows at once. Two bureaus, two nightstands, two Gideon’s Bibles. Imagine: a traveling couple cannot manage to share a Bible, so they each take one up and sit there, side by side in that gargantuan bed, reading.

I imagined putting up all my friends here the night before a bike race. Three would easily fit in the hide-a-bed in the living room, four in the bed, a dozen more on the floor. We never had such nice accommodations when I was racing; we’d be crammed into the available floor space of a single room. Here they have a pool, a spa, cable, continental breakfast, even “getting to know you night,” which is every night, and which is free food down in the lobby. Free food! Imagine! The calendar on the fridge tells what food is on what night: on August 4, it was “baked potatoes with the works.” The next night was Spageddies night. I never did attend “getting to know you night,” because I am depressed by the thought of getting to know the hotel staff. Am I really here that often?

Actually, this is my first stay at the Homewood—the latest stop in my nomadic search for the least offensive hotel. You see, as embarrassed as I am by how seriously these places take my simple needs, I’m strangely irritable in all matters of hotel comfort. Since convenience is the only benefit to travelling, the silver lining on being away from my wife and everybody else I know, I have become slavishly devoted to it. The slightest flaw becomes egregious. I gave up the Sheraton Suites because, besides being too far from the office, they insulted my intelligence by having Nintendo in the room, and had this ridiculous round mirror, on an articulated arm, bolted to the main bathroom mirror. What its use was I’ll never know, but it just banged around and got in my way, and distracted me as I found myself struggling, time and time again, to figure out its purpose. The Wyndham Suites was too noisy: the air conditioner shrieked like a wind tunnel, the bathroom fan was always on, wheezing and rattling, and a construction project—a badly needed renovation—caused various annoyances like a half-mile detour to get to the elevator. Beyond that, the shower head came out around my chest, so washing my hair became a contortionist’s act.

The Sumner Suites, meanwhile, is so convenient to the office that it took a huge number of grievances before I finally gave up on it. For one, the elevator bell was way too loud, which not only woke me up (I sleep nervously on the road) but insulted me with its needlessness. I mean, who doesn’t notice that his elevator has stopped, and that the doors are open? Then, their workout room was absolutely swimming in Lemon Fresh Pledge. One time, the housekeep left my door open all day. What’s more, once when my Vingcard stopped working, the front desk staff gave me a new key, no questions asked, meaning any respectable-looking fellow could get instant access to my room. And, perhaps most annoyingly, when I routinely smuggled the extra bath bar into my toiletry bag, they never replaced it. As though the housekeeper was saying, “I know your kind—you soap stealers, do you think we’re stupid here! I saw your squirreled-away soap! You’re not getting two bars a day just to take home!” Damn it, that soap is rightfully mine. It’s like my consolation prize, something to take home to my wife as a peace offering after leaving her home alone all week.

Now, the Homewood Suites is much better. I’m sure I’ll have my minor grievances—I’ll tire of the two identical paintings which won’t vary from room to room, and of the sandpaper-like fake Kleenex, never more than five tissues to a box. And, I’ll probably never get over the fact that the windows won’t open. I read an article about hotels, actually, and about what they’re willing to do for customers and what they aren’t. Your nicer hotels are willing to use tan-colored towels, for example, even though they can’t bleach them—a nice touch. But almost no hotel will have windows you can open, because, among other things, they’re worried about people jumping.

dana albert blog