Working Out Difficult, Overrated

Working hard < Working smart

 I finally ran out of excuses. Any attempts to blame a lack of home base, a dearth of viable options, or lingering cost issues have faded...the stars have aligned and there is simply no reason why I can't go to the gym now.

After my half-baked attempts to work out in Sri Lanka failed miserably, I reduced my entire workout regimen to a handful of situps between swigs of ayurvedic tinctures that promised to make me skinny and healthy. Shockingly, the aged berry potion I purchased from the "doctor" in Kandy didn't magically make me lose 30 pounds as he promised, but I took the failure in stride...hell, even some roadside miracle tonics don't perform up to standards. But cmon, this was Sri Lanka after all, so I gave myself a free pass on fitness until I returned to civilization.

Friends of the blog may recall that as my time in South Asia wrapped up, I made a New Year's resolution to do 10,000 pushups in 2011. I wasn't about to let everyone down, so when I settled into my comfortably white-washed life in Geneva, I kept pace and am proud to report that I'm well on my way to meeting my goal by year's end. Sadly, however, I took this somewhat minor accomplishment as a sign that my body was improving itself despite the kilograms of falafel and gnocchi I was pumping in to it. As a reward, I gave up on even attempting to join a real gym or go running outside or anything silly like that. No, I was contempt to drink cheap Swiss pinot noir, crack out 50 up-downs and contentedly fry up some garlic for my "healthy" pasta dinners.

Sadly these blissfully excused days of laziness have drawn to a close. I've got a dresser and a shower to call my own, and there are plenty of cheap or even free work-out options in and around NYC. So finally this past week, armed with freshly washed gym shorts that had seen little action that hadn't involved watching Hulu from a desk chair over the past 8 months, I laced up the cross-trainers and hit the gym. 

And the second I hit the gym, it hit back. My back hurts. My legs hurt. My arms? Well they don't hurt that much but they certainly aren't at 100%. It turns out that doing almost no physical activity for three business quarters atrophied my body such that after just two days of diligent gym-going, I'm calling it off today so I can rest. Possibly also so I can take an ice bath. Alarmingly, despite 4 total hours of gym so far, I haven't seen the drastic physical transformation I had expected; nothing that a deliciously heavy pasta dinner can't cure though.

Today might be a loss but come rain or snow or sleet or shine, I'll be making a concerted effort to get my butt to the gym at least 3 times a week, hopefully even more than that. If nothing else it will seem like a nice way to feel productive while I fail time and again to get a job.

Off Of The Couches And Into The Streets!

Lego Rome wasn't built in a day

63 days.
 
It took me 63 days, return date from Geneva to today, to actually get into a somewhat normal living situation and off of random people's couches. Granted, there were some mitigating factors at play that dragged out the process, including being unsure of my permanence in the country at first, the sudden nature of my leaving The Continent, and a complete lack of certitude as to my eventual landing spot. Any immediacy in settling on a sub-par sublet was eviscerated by the amazing reception I got from all my friends, many of whom offered me keys, room, and board, all at the low low price of the pleasure of my company. Without a reliable budget or even a geographic focus, I was truly forced to embrace the nomadic lifestyle of a couch surfing corporate wash-out, replete with rolling bag full of unlaundered clothes, constantly asking the world, "what's the wireless password here?" Truly, it was a harrowing process and the extremely long delay in landing a new sublet was due to a million outside factors beyond my control.

Either that or I'm just a lazy bastard. Personally I think it's the former, but I could feel murmurs rippling through the crowd that suspicions of the latter were fast crystallizing. I'm still recovering from the emotional and physical toll that my recent adventures took on me, soul and body, and I did myself few favors given my lifestyle in the two years leading up to fleeing society. Hell I barely remember the first 30 days after I got back, mostly due to exhaustion and needing to sleep for a week just to get back on my feet. I needed some time to slow things down, take stock, and rest before getting back to it. But 63 days??

In 63 days, rabbits, foxes, and kangaroos can successfully reproduce. In 63 days, if you count for only 8 hours a day at a relatively fast clip, you can count to a million...three times. 63 days is longer than the Falklands War, the Indo-Pakistani War, and the 6 Days War...combined. And hell, it only took the Apollo 11 astronauts three friggin days to get into lunar orbit! Now, as a matter of course I believe that the marketplace of ideas should decide belief and that we must balance all the facts before making any decisions, but the numbers appear to be stacked pretty solidly against my near-glacial pace of house hunting.

Despite my stutter-start failure in getting my rear in gear, at least I am finally making some progress. I'm all set up in a new West Village spot for the coming weeks, and after a quick trip to visit my parents and steal every ounce of unclaimed food in the pantry I should have enough food to last me at least through the weekend. The job hunt is slow but I'm registered with the proper temp agencies and eventually will make one of these assignments work. And possibly best of all? Last week I got new jeans! Yup, things are looking up, to be certain.

What's to become of the next 63 days? From where I'm sitting, seems like it takes about 48 days to sail around the world using only natural forces...but I'll settle for getting dental insurance.

Come With Me, Sir

For God's sake, please don't cut the blue wire!

I don't pretend to understand the system used by TSA and various border patrol officers for investigating suspicious characters as they cross international boundaries, but up until a month ago I at least put up with its decisions. Well, in so far as it never stopped me from moving about the world unfettered and un-patted-down. It was a nice existence wherein I had the audacious self-entitlement to brag about my mobility to those less fortunate. My friends in the foreign service who always get stopped received comments like, "weird, I always go right through even though I've been all over the place!" My road-weary brothers who constantly find delay got flippantly delivered sucks to be you's, and pretty much everyone else was told, "hey, it's just a random thing man, whatevs."

Whatevs, my left butt cheek! In the past month I've been stopped on three separate occasions, and I do believe that my dumb luck has done run out.

When leaving St. Thomas a few weeks back, I got pulled aside by TSA for a thorough pat down and pants inspection that was really more of an annoyance than an invasion. I was traveling light, so the security folks got to see a shabbily dressed single man traveling alone from the tropics to New York City carrying only a notebook, a wallet, and a packet of sugar-free gum. If that doesn't scream "red flag" than I don't know what does, but the freedom to not carry on a carry-on is a luxury I'm not about to trade for the world. The only other time I was stopped in the past, the TSA lady had a bad reaction to the cat hair on my bag, acquired from a recent visit to my parent's house, and my impromptu bag inspection became a move along sir. No harm, no foul. The St. Thomas folks were a bit more intense, and dare I say competent, in their screening, but they were both wicked friendly to the point that I wanted to fill out a positive comment card afterwards and tell their supervisors they had actually brightened my day.

I got a granola bar instead.

But I tell you what, a week or so ago on my trip to Montreal, the Canadian border patrol really knocked me down from "optimistic patriot" to "skeptical dissenter." Driving up with famous rock star and friend of the blog Shwa "I Just Want To Cuddle" Losben, we two fairly clean cut and upstanding young gentleman were grilled at the border both entering and leaving the frozen north! Already a bit behind schedule, we itched to get into Montreal and get our party on. Sailing through the first border check point, the car was filled with innocently dropped wow that was easy's and a series of unfortunately timed comments about our national security being in jeopardy if this was how they were going to handle things. Boy oh boy was that misguided.

Not two minutes later, we approached the second border checkpoint, and following a quick grilling by the border guard we found ourselves detained at the checkpoint security station. Quietly we sat, awaiting whatever random fate was to befall us, me having a serious need to hit the bathroom and Shwa a serious need to find out why the hell we had been stopped. By the end of this interaction, neither need would be met.

In the drab, portable office-in-a-trailer sat two seemingly bitter border guards, each grilling a separate Canadian couple about their various and sundry US purchases and subsequent failure to declare said purchases. One particularly ill-spirited border guard had apparently seized one woman's engagement ring, purchased in the US over a year earlier but never declared upon entry, and released it back to the unhappy couple only after they begrudgingly relinquished a 10% of fair market value tithe-qua-penalty. Shwa and I were now certain that they were going to nail us on some kind of ridiculous excise tax despite the fact that our carriage lacked any sort of marketable goods. Then came our turn, and the questions were shot rapid fire in our general direction, ultimately uncovering only that we were in fact completely legitimate travelers with valid passports and absolutely zero inclination to do anything but spend American dollars in their stupid country.

During this inquisition, a litany of aggressive WTFs came to mind, including:
- Excuse me, do you think we can get some answers here?
- You know, out bilateral investment treaties pay your salary
- Are you a Pisces? I bet you are, cause all the Pisces I know are fucking assholes

Thanks to an impressive display of self-control and general fear that we'd actually be locked up for even looking at them cross-eyed, I kept my tongue holstered and my potty dance to a minimum. I didn't dare spend any more time in that woebegone shed of misery...best just to get out of there and defile a Tim Horton's up the road.

Amazingly, we got stopped again on our way back through the border to the US! Convinced that I had been flagged because of my recent travels around the world, I asked the border folks what the hell was their problem (in a nice way of course), and unlike their north-bound counterparts they politely took a minute to treat me like a human. "I guess it's just bad luck, these are really random. You guys didn't do anything wrong, and I really do hope that this doesn't dissuade you from coming back up to visit Canada in the future." Once again, I felt like filling out a positive comment card and letting his supervisor know that their border guards were putting smiles right back onto all the faces they had moments earlier ripped them off of. I suppose two out of three positive experiences with border patrol wasn't that bad, and they deserved some kind of recognition for their good work.

I got another granola bar instead.

You Get Out What You Poutine

Dream come true, or night ruining train wreck?

"Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it"

~ Your annoying roommate who thinks he knows what's best for you ~

  
Have you ever thought you wanted something so badly that you would change your plans drastically just to get it? Shifted your entire vacation schedule to make sure you see a hallowed church or glorious ancient wonder of the world? Well that's how I felt about trying poutine in Montreal last weekend. While investing one of my many free days in a trip to Montreal, my travel buddy and friend of the blog Shwa "Slow Jam" Losben asked me how I wanted to spend our big day out Quebec's white-washed Gotham. Without doubt or hesitation, I demanded merely that we see Old Montreal and check out the poutine selection. History and snack food, that's what I'm all about.

Poutine, for those who don't know, is a big pile of french fries, smothered in brown gravy and covered with bits of squeaky cheese curd. Needless to say, this was going to require another pass on my no-dairy policy and at least two lactaid to ensure my personal safety. For the whole day Sunday, we asked every local we met where we could score the best poutine in town - general consensus was La Banquise, a short cab ride from where we had spent most of the afternoon day drinking and engaging in enlightened discourse. Predictably, what started with a meaningful conversation about the distinctions between macro- and micro-level morality over a pint of Boreale devolved into a pissing contest about which one of us was smarter over happy hour shots of Jack Daniels. With both the weather and the conversation turning stormy, we hopped a taxi and handed the nice man behind the wheel a piece of paper with La Banquise scribbled on it in Sharpie. As Shwa was quick to point out, I dropped into my broken "not sure if you speak English" English, and I asked driver, "you know this? Can you drive there yes?"

"Yeah I know it, hop on in guys," he shot back in perfect diction.

The meter ticked up at what appeared to be an alarming pace, and a bit of panic helped clear the clouds in my head left behind by our impromptu bar crawl. We've been driving an awfully long time, I thought to myself. This poutine better be friggin' awesome. After a rainy exit from the overpriced cab, we got seated pretty quickly at the super tacky and super busy La Banquise, and my compatriot and I settled quickly on splitting a large original style poutine and a couple of brewskies. My fork shaking with anticipation, I dove in head first as soon as my prize arrived on the table, unapologetically shoving three full spoonfuls into my face before coming up for air. I leaned back. I savored.

I hated it. How this was possible I knew not. Apparently I had incorrectly assumed that because each element of this delightful mess was in and of itself delicious, the mixed whole would be triply amazing. To be entirely fair to the dish, perhaps it suffered from a bit of "anticipation failure" as much as it was itself a disappointment. Once it was built up in my mind as the greatest thing ever, the very purpose of my visit to a foreign country, it's hard to really live up to that hype. At that point, my poutine needed to be extraordinary simply to meet my most basic of expectations. Such is the danger of building up your travel expectations without really knowing what you're getting into - for all the people that see Angkor Watt and oooh and aaah with joy, there are assuredly just as many vacationers that meh and sigh.

Granted, being saddened by the site of a hallowed 800 year old Khmer temple mountain is a slightly bigger let down than receiving middling poutine in the frozen north, but it still sucks to get exactly what you want only to discover it sucks.

I Call Shotgun!

Failed to bring enough Pizzeria Pretzel Combos for everyone

Much as I had set out recently to prove that following your dreams isn't just for the young and wealthy, so too did I set out recently to prove that road trips are an entirely appropriate way for a grown man to invest his time and energy. To this end, last weekend I embarked upon a fateful journey to the frozen north in an effort to check out Montreal and all that it had to offer. From the overpriced Cuban cigars to the streets packed with underage, booze-hounding Americans, I planned to indulge my inner 19-year-old and apologize for never taking him to this part of Canada sooner in life.

Tagging along with my good buddy and friend of the blog Shwa "Rock Lobster" Losben, I shoved a few t-shirts into a backpack, bought a giant bag of Chex Mix and hit the road. Since Shwa was heading up to play a show at Clarkson University, we figured we would extend the trip out a bit and drive the few extra hours across the border and into funky town USA...er, Canada. And like all great journeys with two idiots at the helm of a meandering ship, half the fun was getting there.

From my earliest days as a licensed driver with somewhere better to be, I've loved road trips. My freshman year of college I spent nearly every weekend driving the six hours back and forth to college from my homestead on Long Island in order to visit my then girlfriend...I will allow the reader to fascinate as to the reasons why. Each Friday, I'd arm myself with two powerbars, two bottles of water, a pre-ordered book of 96 punk CDs, and meticulously highlighted maps and route guides to make sure I didn't screw up the route. So concerned was I with getting each direction exactly right, I would stress myself out just planning the damn trip! By the time I was a senior in college, and said girlfriend had moved out to middle-of-nowhere PA, I ran the engine a bit leaner...two powerbars became a pack of cheap Winstons and two bottles of water a 20 oz. Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke. I measured progress in just how shaky my hands were at any given moment, but I still obsessed about getting the directions right the first time through. I've since learned to let go of all those hang-ups, and thanks to smart phones, GPS-guides, and basically not giving a rat's ass when I arrive somewhere, I've relaxed a bit on my trip preparations.

With snack food in hand, I hopped into the captain's chair and started mucking about with the radio. Unlike my college days, I much prefer the haphazard musings of whatever local radio stations might be willing to offer me as I pass from state to state, allowing me to stay in touch with the kids by learning about which Bruno Mars song I should request at NYU dive bars. Practice note - while I like the sound of Just The Way You Are, I feel that it's ridiculously upbeat message improperly prepares teenagers for the rigors of real relationships. I'll opt for Grenade, thank you very much.

Despite a couple of bumps along the way, including a grilling by the Canadian border patrol and a ridiculously dramatic death-defying swerve off the highway, Shwa and I put together a pretty awesome road trip and I felt successful in my never-ending campaign to stave off adulthood at all costs. I'm assuming that if and when I become a family man, my wife and kids will not want to survive on Panera and powerbars for six hours at a time, but until then I'll road trip however I please.

Best Laid Plans

"Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change."

~ Stephen Hawking ~

I like it when things have an order to them. It's nice to know that you can trust X food not to have dairy in it or Y bus to show up around when it says it will. Of course, random and haphazard travel through the developing world throws all of this into chaos, but at least it's chaos when I expect it, disorganization by design. I'm happy to cast caution into the wind when the time calls for it, but when it comes to scheduling my emotional well-being I like to have just a teensy bit more control over the situation. So when my pre-determined itinerary suddenly shifted last month and all of my carefully laid plans fell into disarray, my psyche struggled to adjust. Before taking off on my "crazy" journey to Sri Lanka and Geneva, it should come as no shock to anyone that I spent nearly 7 months putting this whole exit strategy into place. Sudden upheaval? More like meticulously carved plan of action!

But shit happens. Plans change, and we're forced to adapt quickly or end up suffering for our inability to do so. On the road I'm usually ready for these kinds of split-second changes and am actually pretty good about keeping others calm in the process. While flying from Lima to Iquitos in Peru, for instance, my flight was turned around when it was revealed that buzzards from a nearby jungle trash heap had invaded the local airspace, making it so even the great and powerful Sully couldn't land that bucket of bolts. Did I panic? No, I got on the phone and in broken Spanish somehow managed to switch the reservations of not only myself but two of my travel companions to the afternoon flight and got them to waive the charges. And when I got stranded on a Panamanian island for four hours with no water or bathroom after our guide misunderstood the phrase "pick us up in forty minutes," did I lose my cool? No, me and my ex-girlfriend took to making sandals and undergarments out of palm leaves which we stripped off the trees. I weave a mean frond-cross-hatch, by the by.

But my latest game changer was different - it wasn't a slight setback or a change of expectation. I was coming back early without laying the normal groundwork for my arrival, leaving me unsure of job, home, or future. Pepper in some of the oh so normal events that recently occurred in my life, such as turning 30, becoming an uncle, spending three months in Sri Lankan solitude, etc., and my brain was a lil bit frazzled. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow became I need this on my desk yesterday, overpriced falafel replaced by impossible rent costs. Waking up after the five month dream was rough, and I'm only just now really coming out of my sleepy haze.

And my leading theory as to why I'm only just now getting back to normal? Because right around now was my originally scheduled return time. My last hurrah in St. Thomas this past weekend was to be my final adventure on the road, signalling the body to stop instinctively slapping the snooze alarm on my adult life and to step out into the light of day. Maybe I'm not as flexible as I thought after all...given a month of adjustment time, I basically just waited until the world caught up to my expectations. Granted, existential readjustment is more complex than weaving a brassiere, but only slightly. Those straps are tricky!

On my way back through the Atlanta airport from the impossibly sunny Caribbean, I thought about all the little steps it was finally time to take in adjusting back into a normal-ish life. Figuring that the process was really only starting, I decided to make a list of what needed to get done to help organize my thoughts. I spent weeks and weeks making packing lists and preparations to travel abroad, but spent exactly 12 hours throwing everything into a bag and racing back home...how could I possibly have expected that to work? Proud of myself for the admission, I allowed for one final trip to Chick-Fil-A to let my brain flood those serotonin receptors and positively reinforce all the wonderful progress I was making as a normal functioning human, but I would deny myself fries in order to stay healthy.

But you know what? Dude behind the counter tossed some fries in there anyway. I signaled to him that I didn't pay for them, but he waved me off..."oh don't worry about it. Enjoy them!" So to celebrate my return to responsible decision making, I failed to cross off even the first item on my newly drafted list.

Oh well. Best laid plans, as they say.

There's No Accounting For Taste

Corn fields: preferred vacation spot of sexual deviants the world over

Some people figure it out early, knowing right off the bat their preferences. For others it takes years of angst-filled searching, arguments with the family, and a series of self-reflective moments that challenge the very core of their being. In either case people tend to fall off the wagon now and then, straying from their chosen path to test out the other waters, check out to see if just maybe their pre-conceived notions of propriety and right in their choice was as correct as they thought. Debate rages whether its a matter of nature or nurture, and the priests and scientists may be fighting it out for decades to come without any real answers.

I'm talking of course about one's taste in vacations. People tend to just enjoy the happiness associated with just being on vacation, so we don't always look back to figure out how we'd like to spend our hard earned days off / extended unemployment. Now thirty plus years wise, I think it's time I made some decisions in my life about how I like to spend my leisure time and be honest with the world about who I am.

The most major distinction I see amongst vacationers is of course Mountain versus Beach. Sure, we can all love the beach when it's cold out and getting up to the hills when you want some bbq and a breeze in summer time, but when faced with the option of one or the other, apples or oranges, which one is the winner? In a none-too-shocking vote of 1 to 0, I voted myself a Mountain man. Sure, a small native chieftan in the jungles of Peru once laughingly told me, "you are not meant to survive in the wild," but I'm not talking about survival skills. I'm talking about a little cabin thing, a grill of some kind, a 30 rack, and the ability to sit on a deck and watch the sun do stuff in the sky. Rise, set, whatever, as long as my feet are up and it's breezy outside. You can do that all at the beach too, but there people expect you to go in and out of the ocean and it's hot out there. I wasn't built for heat, so Mountain wins.

However, my desire to watch leaves grow from the safety of my well-stocked chalet often loses out to a taste for adventure...hence my repeated visits to Asia. The beach does hold some extra appeal to me when it happens to be located at the end of an unmarked path carved lazily through the underbrush of the Malaysian coast. And thanks to a childhood spent on the Jersey Shore, I'm used to my beaches being somewhat crashed out and full of unknowns. So this past weekend when I was down in St. Thomas for the wedding of my good friend Nick I of course was overwhelmed by how goddamn nice everything was.

The potable water didn't make me sick. Paths were clearly marked and the people understood everything I said to them. And the bathrooms, oh the bathrooms! You could sip a pina colada off the floor, I tells ya! Amazingly though, I half prefer the adventure of diseased, convoluted, bathroom-free beach going. Call it what you will, but I think my masochistic drive for challenging vacations are just a part of who I am...why question it? Maybe I'll end up spending a few extra days holed up in a cheap hostel, afraid to stray too far from the facilities, but it's exciting. Most likely I'll bitch about it the entire time, and then afterwards I'll end up with better stories out of the whole ordeal.

When it comes to the wedding last weekend, I must readily admit that I enjoyed the ever-loving crap out of my shmancy hotel room, swim-up bar, and picture perfect dining room experience. Big ups to Nick and the resort, Marriott Frenchman's Reef, and a full admission that as far as the sweet life goes, they pulled it off big time. Still, you give me some street curry and a bat-filled fan room for 8 bucks a day and I will lose it with joy. What can I say, I know what I like.

Goin' South

One of them was eaten by hill people

 
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."

~ Mahatma Gandhi ~

I really thought it was time to settle back into a normal routine. I finally adjusted to being back in the states and was very seriously somewhat kinda considering starting to think about looking for non-couch-based housing again. Then a warm breeze gusted open the lovely curtains at my friend's apartment, rousing me from my squatter slumber and ruining an otherwise glorious mid-week, mid-afternoon nap. Despite the spike in mercury a chill crept down my spine. The snow had melted. Flowers, re-awakened. My post-travel recovery coma was in danger, for Father Time had marched forward and Wedding Season was upon me.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love weddings, but my constitution is that of a jellyfish, my willpower non-existent. "Another Long Island Iced Tea?" Why yes please. "Porterhouse steak with a red wine demi-glaze and frites?" Don't mind if I do. "Stay up for four straight days making it rain all over this hotel, dropping down science on how we wreck every establishment dumb enough to let us forfeit a security deposit in lieu of being responsible?" You betcha. The first thing to go at any nuptial celebraccion is my 85% veganism. And my friends find no end in teasing me as to this point.

This latest wedding trip took me down to St. Thomas to rock out with my Crocs out down Caribbean way. The first mettle-testing treat came into view well before I even got to the ceremony; for anyone who has ever been to the A Terminal of the Atlanta airport knows all too well the gravitational draw that is Chick-Fil-A. My bagel-centric northeast lifestyle affords me few opportunities to go Cowboy and get down to Chick-Fil-A territory, or as I like to call it, "the promised land," so I actively schedule flights through Atlanta with enough of a layover to get me some chicken biscuit action. I'm not saying I've ever added in a stopover through Atlanta when I could've easily flown direct, but I'm not saying I wouldn't consider it.

Anyways, my vegan guilt was nipping at my frontal lobe and begging me to get back to eating well again, so I put the buttery goodness of chicken biscuits out of mind and patted myself aggressively on my proverbial back. Job well done, I prematurely boasted. My flight was off in a different terminal anyways so there was no real chance of me getting pulled into the black hole of failure. So I took my time, wandering lazily over to my gate, only to arrive and find that due to weather issues in Florida they moved my plane...back to the A terminal...shouting distance from the Chick-Fil-A. Ruh roh.

Still convinced I was strong enough to make it through without caving at Mile One of this ill-fated self-restraint marathon, I busted a move over to the gate to catch my flight and get out of the danger zone before it was too late. Panting and short of breath, I charged past the precious and powered through a crowd to get onto my plane to paradise and away from dark, sexy temptation. In the comic timing that only the universe itself can design, my thunderous arrival coincided perfectly with the Delta rep hopping on the horn, announcing sorrowfully that "due to weather issues in Florida, we have moved back the departure time...three hours." Me and my half-assed veganism were screwed.

Accepting my fate as a lapsed health nut, I ambled over to the terminal map to find exactly where my Christian chicken joint was hiding and panicked when I didn't see it on the board. I read and re-read the directory, angrily scanning the Food Services list over and over again to find my way home. My irascible chicken lust turned my quest of inconvenience into a full on manhunt, and I opted to just run up and down the hallways hoping to spot the Chick-Fil-A logo. Each foot fell effortlessly forward, pulling me knowingly towards my prize. I moved independent of thought or want, my automation driven by the sole and unified purpose of savoring that chicken biscuity goodness. Seconds felt like eternities, but I could smell that I was closing in, and then....nirvana!

I brushed past an indecisive mid-westerner debating between chicken and spicy chicken, and with hands trembling asked the nice lady for a chicken biscuit. "Sorry hun, breakfast ended 30 minutes ago." I was crushed. Devastated. Breakfast had passed, and with it all hope of biscuit. Forced to settle for the basic Chick-Fil-A chick-fil-a sandwich, I reassured myself that even without the biscuit, this mid-morning lunch was still a brag-worthy event, so I sent out some taunting text messages to fellow chicken lovers alerting them of my accomplishments. Sneaking off to a nearby seating area, I hunkered down and plowed through that sandwich with a determination bordering on frenzy. Each carefully lain pickle danced with the lightly breaded fillet and quickly flooded my neuroreceptors with massive amounts of soul-soothing serotonin. Greasy and satisfied, only then did I notice I hadn't snagged any napkins whilst scoring my sandwich.

No matter. The receipt would do.