Notes from the Cube Farm and a Hot Dog Crisis

My aunt emailed me out of the blue today (much appreciated, Sharon!), and we started discussing the future, and whether my 30s will be more enlightening than my 20s. She told me I should write, and I've heard that in the past. I'm not great at it, but I'm not bad at it.

I've been adverse to personal blogs, mainly because one loses a sense of one's uniqueness once your random thoughts are out on the Internet. But I think Sharon's onto something, maybe writing is fine, and I can share my posts with anyone I damn well please. If some a-hole stumbles across this and mocks yet another person out there staking a claim into cyberspace, oh well.

Is it just me, or did the previous sentence sound like cyber Manifest Destiny? Scary.

The deal is this, folks. It's 2007, people read blogs. Just because I have one doesn't mean I have to pour out every little detail. But in case I die (and death being the theme of the past 1 1/2 months), at least those who cared can come here and see some part of me. When I'm old and suffering from dementia (or, quite frankly, just inheriting the family trait of a craptastic memory), I'll have this. Or killing time at work.

Onto other things:

While I should be working on a PowerPoint for the boss (no worries, it will be completed), I caught up on the AP wire. A Japanese hot-dog eating champion (29 years old) is suffering from an arthritic jaw. He can only stick one finger in his mouth before feeling pain in his mandible (why don't we use this word rather than jaw?). What kills me is this paragraph:

"Perhaps Kobayashi saw this day coming, as his blog also includes some harsh self-criticism. 'I feel so ashamed that I didn't hear the alarm bells ringing in my own body,' it says. 'But with the aim of winning the title and setting a new record in my head, I couldn't stop my training regime so close to the competition.'"

Why does a man put his body through something like that? A life defined by speed-eating hot dogs? Is this acceptable? This just makes me sad.

His blog if you're interested: http://www.takeru-kobayashi.com/