To add to my load, I am still keeping my personal intellectual projects in mind. This is making my brain feel:

Oh, and it is the holiday season, with all the joy and stress that goes with it. Ho! Ho! Ho!

There is one fact that I cannot escape any longer. I need to eat better and exercise constantly, or else get my affairs in order. Don’t get me wrong. I am not yet at death’s doorstep, but I am on the path. Ten years ago, I was 100 pounds lighter, able to run several miles, able to dunk a basketball, able to bench 250 lbs, and rarely sick or tired.

Today, I get winded climbing a flight of stairs. Running does not happen at all. I have the vertical leap of a snail. I can still bench 250. I feel tired constantly and get sick easily.

I am going to do something about this.

Now.

My first two reasons for doing this are obvious.

My third is this: I have things to accomplish before I go. I want to teach my little girl to play soccer. I want to see her graduate college. I want to take my wife on a second honeymoon when we hit our fifties. I want to run a mile without feeling like the world is coming to an end. And I want to write.

In that spirit, and as a sort of visualization project for myself, I give this list of books I would like to write.

To my friends, if you see me slacking, taking the elevator instead of the stairs, taking the easy road, eating the worst choice on the menu, this is your explicit permission to get on my ass about it, to chastise me. Whatever it takes. And so:

The Good Life: Intellectual self-help from the Humanities.
A look at how the giant works and figures of the Western Humanities can help us to answer some of the persistent problems and challenges in our own lives.

A Suicide Triptych: Three Austro-Hungarian in the 20th century
An examination of the lives, works, and deaths of Sandor Marai, Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Roth.

In Their Libraries: Great thinkers and their books.
An intellectual history of how personal libraries shaped the thoughts of select individuals, including Leopardi, Thomas Jefferson, H.P. Lovecraft, and more.

Euripides the Thinker
An examination of the intellectual problems within the plays, and how the ancient author handles them.

At the Table with Friends
A foodie memoir of my family’s most memorable table talks and favorite foods. Also, a sort of philosophy of what dinner and dinner conversation could and should be.

I am wondering how the Palin camp, a group that had no problem with buttons reading “the hottest VP from the coolest state” and “Hoosiers for the hot chick,” is so ready to cry misogyny when fair and, in my opinion, fairly soft criticism is offered. Was Gibson really being a liberal tool when asking Palin how specifically the economy should be fixed? Was he wrong to ask her about the Bush doctrine, the plan that currently dominates our foreign policy? And if Tina Fey was belittling Palin based on gender, what of SNL’s portrayal of Senator Clinton in the same skit? Can you belittle one while ennobling the other and still call foul gender play? Palin is vapid and inept, and we’ve had enough stupidity the last eight years. My daughter is older than her passport. This incompetent moose hunter would be a very likely heart attack away from the White House.

I also wonder how the GOP, the “family values” party, can stomach a presidential candidate who, after his first wife was disfigured in an accident, cheated on her repeatedly and finally started courting his current wife while his first wife was recovering. His own children wouldn’t speak to him for several years. Is it a coincidence that this new wife was not only more attractive, but also the heiress to a fortune and powerful political connections made through beer distribution? To McCain’s credit, he did wait more than a few months after the ink on the divorce papers dried before wedding Cindy, and then waited a little before cashing in on his new family connections to run for office.

And speaking of family values, is it just a little surprising that Palin, pontificating on abstinence-only education, now has a 17 year-old daughter made pregnant by an 18 year old (do they have statutory rape in Alaska)? Now these kids are going to get married, and that makes it all good? I hope this boy knows what he is getting himself into, because, judging from the “trooper-gate” scandal, it seems to be difficult, if not dangerous, to disentangle oneself from the Palin clan. For a party that has had Dr. Dobson advising women that to be a good mother they must stay at home with their children, it comes as a stunner that many are now behind a woman raising five children, one of them afflicted with Down’s syndrome, and still claiming that she can do the job. Is it sexist to think that she cannot because she is a woman? It is, unless the woman happens to be running as a “hockey-mom” in a party that adheres to Dobson’s line of thinking.

Family values? Maybe this means “no gay marriage.” Because, when I think of a candidate that truly demonstrates family values, I think of Senator Obama. Faithful to his wife, fiercely protective of his children, trying to pass that infamous sex-education bill that would not, despite what the McCain commercial states, force kindergarteners to know the ‘ins and outs’ of sexual intercourse, but would instead help them be more capable of talking to their parents and teachers if they had been molested. I think of Joe Biden, who did not trade his wife in after an accident. Instead, he lost her and his daughter in a hospital and spent the next two decades riding a train home every night to raise his boys. To me those are “family values.” Sending our outstanding men and women in uniform to war only if the cause is just, instead of deploying our children to die on foreign soil for a cheaper price at the pump and an illusion of military security, those are family values. Allowing people who love each other, gender regardless, to marry and raise children, those are family values. And making sure that every person in America has healthcare, that no mom or dad has to lose sleep at night because they have no idea where the hell the money is going to come from to make sure little Suzie can get the glasses she needs to read, and making sure that she has the books in her school she needs to succeed, those are family values.

We can do better. We must do better. My little girl deserves better, and so do we.

Also, notice the new tab, a place where I will post the workload given me for the particular week.

As for blog of the week, I turn to one much more charming and witty than I could hope to create. Enjoy the School of Life

I have shelved a few books that I have been reading so that I can read The Count of Monte Cristo with someone else. How I love Dumas! Action, adventure, revenge, romance, virtue. Dumas lacks Balzac’s perfectionism, Flaubert’s psychology, and Proust’s glorious prose, but he is by far my favorite French author.

Leopardi’s Thoughts has occupied my bedside and I am finding him something of a kindred spirit, though I am not nearly as pessimistic as he is. His poetry I find particularly poignant, such as this passage from his last poem, “the broom:”

Often, on these bare slopes
Clothed in a kind of mourning
By stone waves which apparently still ripple,
I sit by night, and see the distant stars
High in the clear blue sky
Flame down upon this melancholy waste,
And see them mirrored by
The distant sea, till all this universe
Sparkles throughout its limpid emptiness.

Am I more optimistic, or more naïve?