Chris Lutz and I went clothes shopping today and the idea of buying clothes from a store proved very novel.  Sizes beyond 44 rarely exist in department stores and I got to go to a Kohl’s, the magical land where the only thing not on sale are the employees.  I stuck to 44s mostly and Chris walked me through some fashion lessons I felt I should have known for a solid decade by now but he took to his task with missionary zeal.  I learned that there are more colors to belts than just brown and black and that collar stays make you look pimp juice.

Somewhere between looking at sports jackets and sweater vents, the first romantic relationship of my adult life ended.  I’m pretty good at dealing with ups and downs of life so realized that for the next 12 hours the best thing I could do would be to keep myself occupied while my neocortex waged war with my amygdala. I barely made it up my driveway due to the thick, sticky, falling snow and made my first order of business an elaborate lunch of grilled seasoned chicken breast with a Waldorf salad with greens.  Midway through the power cut out and I had a lot of partly chopped vegetables and a now 1/2 cooked chicken breast.  There goes that distraction.  I had the salad part while listening to a book on tape but found myself getting fidgety.  Normally, I’d hop on my treadmill and watch a movie or two to exhaustion but this route was taken from me as well from having no power and no 4 wheel drive vehicles were around so leaving wasn’t an option either.  I remembered that one of my housemates had a rowing machine they’d never used so I retrieved the box from the attic and assembled it.

For the next three hours, I sat in my darkened house using a rowing machine listening to a book on tape about the history of modern violence as the UPSs in my house beeped at their dearth of power as “Terry, you’re lonely” was replaced with “Terry, you’re crazy”.  At least my bad days tend to be interesting.  And I can fit into size 42 pants comfortably for the first time in my adult life.