Surprising recommended reading: Open by Andre Agassi

Open, Andre Agassi

I will admit that I was intrigued by this book when I heard the first reports of the scandalous behavior that Agassi discloses – drugs, and even more shocking, a hairpiece! However, I was pretty turned off by the first few pages. I don’t read many autobiographies, and as usual I struggled to adjust to the awkward cadence. I’m not one to quit easily on a book so I plowed ahead and soon I could not get enough of his stories.

Agassi really is wide open and lays everything on the table. I’m not sure that I’d want to know any secrets that he felt he couldn’t disclose, now that I have read what he felt right sharing. His candor exposes him as a human, flawed in his own way just like all of us, and it makes me like and respect him more for it.

He clearly did a lot of soul searching and no doubt unearthed a lot of old memories and feelings in the process of writing this book. He says so too, and was not afraid to comment on himself as a person, his motivations, etc. What I found kind of funny was how often he commented on the height of his opponents. He mentions once that at his height he sometimes felt disadvantaged, but it seems like more than that when he names the height of almost any opponent over 6’1”. Call it a complex?

It was also obvious that his pursuit of the women he was interested in was not unlike his pursuit of tournament wins or #1 rankings. What surprised me was that he did not call that out like he did many other characteristics. It made me question how much he really was drawn by each woman as a person rather than the idea of her and the challenge of winning her over. I will admit that I especially liked the story of falling in love with Stefani Graff. It seized my inner romantic and I read it like a giddy teenager. 

I am glad I read Agassi's autobiography. He told his story in such a way that it will inspire others to establish goals and work hard to make them and to take care of the people around them. 

Road warrior

The last week of March through the month of April will be filled with both personal and work travel, and when I am home on the weekends I will have house guests! Believe me, though, I am not complaining. I just spent a really nice weekend back home in Rochester honoring my grandparents together with family. I flew from there to San Francisco, where I feel very lucky to be asked to attend the big Intel launch event. I'll spend the month of April in Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis introducing our new products to clients. I'm happy to do this because I've never been to any of these cities and I love the chance to spend time with our sales team. I think that I have such an easygoing attitude about all of this travel because I know that it will slow way down once we get past all of these launch activities.
I do miss my home, husband and doggies. I try to look on the positive side and think that the quieter house is helping Erich through the final stretch of grad school.
Right now I'm sitting in O'Hare, eating a salad and drinking a beer. This is my own kind of quiet time, and I like it. Of course I should be checking my work email, but instead I am taking some time for myself. "Me time" is so important, but a rare thing in my office. Many of my colleagues let work life permeate their ever-shrinking home life, with nothing but negative mental and physical results. You have probably heard of "work-life balance", well we have "work-life integration." I'm really fighting back against it as hard as I can. Already I feel like I have lost so much of my creativity. Case in point: I've been wanting to blog regularly, but I can't find any inspiration or motivation to write anything that anyone would enjoy reading. So, I've been spending time on planes reading novels rather than email, trying to do anything I can to regain control of my right brain. Any ideas? Hopefully I will be back soon with a sassy, funny, non-work related blog.

Recommended reading: The Hour I First Believed

The Hour I First Believed is the third work of Wally Lamb that I have read (I'm pretty sure it is only his third full-length novel). I read the second book (I Know This Much is True), and now this one, because of how much I loved She's Come Undone. I have liked each book a little bit less than the one before it. Granted, the time in between reading each one was substantial (three books over 13 years) so my tastes have surely changed. Overall, I do recommend this book because the characters are believable and the "point" of the story is presented uniquely.
The "point" is that the events of our past continue to lurk within us and drive our behavior throughout the rest of our lives. This novel takes this idea to the extreme, revolving primarily around the tragedy at Columbine and analyzing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Reading about the very real events and names of victims from Columbine made me uncomfortable in this otherwise fictional story, in a way that I would not have felt if I was reading a non-fictional account. I guess what bothered me was the idea that Lamb was capitalizing on that evil.
Like the characters, the storyline eventually moves on from, but does not forget, Columbine. Lamb does a good job of developing the main character and how he learns about who he really is.
In what I know recognize as Lamb's typical fashion, there are a couple of unnecessarily sexually-explicit passages. I wonder if Lamb himself has experienced deep soul-searching like his characters, realizing why he is driven to these habits...

Callithrix pygmaea

Saw one of these in a Prague pet shop. I think there is something wrong with that. I still enjoyed looking at the little bugger eat this fruit.

Istanbul (not Constantinople)

To summarize my feelings about Istanbul: I am glad I experienced it, especially the significant historical area...but equally as glad that it was a work-funded trip and I didn't waste a vacation on it.

We didn't have much time for sightseeing, but our team took a half day and visited the "Blue" Mosque and the Grand Bazaar. The Blue Mosque is adjacent to the area that was the Hippodrome when Constantinople was the center of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, which makes for an interesting blend of history and culture. I appreciate the fact that this place was home to civilized culture hundreds of years before our country was "discovered". Pictures here:

Istanbul

My hotel was probably very nice at one time, but it was borderline gross (see TripAdvisor review). I didn't even realize how stressed that made me until I got settled into my hotel here in Prague. I also didn't realize how gross the Istanbul hotel was, until I got settled here in Prague and realized that my hair and clothes stunk from Istanbul. Ew!

Recommended Reading

The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

One upside of traveling for work is that I get to catch up on reading. I finished this book on the first leg of my trip to Istanbul.

The True Story of Hansel and Gretel is the story of a Jewish family in Poland during WWII and their desperate struggles to stay alive and to remain together as a family. This was particularly interesting to me because I have always, since elementary school, been interested in this era of recent history. The fact that the story takes place in Poland was even more compelling to me because I actually visited Auschwitz, including Birkenau, on a trip to Poland many years ago. Reading about the Holocaust is sobering enough, experiencing that horrific place is chilling and nauseating. This book does an impressive job of capturing that spirit while creating characters that are endearingly human.

Just another Saturday night...

 
 

Friends, fireworks, and...feces? Unfortunately, what was a classic summer Saturday turned into a bizarre Sunday morning. I started the day as I love to on Saturdays with a great morning yoga class at the gym. Then Erich and I went to a cookout at a co-worker's house to celebrate his daughter's first birthday. It was a great time - I really enjoyed hanging out with my buddies from work and I was glad for Erich to get to know them. Then we cooled off at the pool for a little bit, cooked a really yummy tuna dinner, and headed over to hang out at a neighborhood party. On our walk home we stopped by another neighbor's party and got to know them a little more. I really like living here and love getting to know the people around us. Our friends Cat and Ryan then came over for a visit, and Ryan brought fireworks! That was so fun (don't try this at home). All in all it was an action-packed summer Saturday...great times. But then, at about 4:30 in the morning, Erich woke up to the sound of our dog Vox barking. He took him out back and didn't see anything unusual, so he came back inside and decided to look out the front windows to make sure everything was ok. As he walked to the front of the house, he heard someone trying to open the front door! In a spontaneous act of stupidity (self-admitted), Erich flung the door open! He yelled at the guy to go away, but the guy was convinced that he was supposed to be staying at our house. I was up at that point and called 911. The police got there really quickly, and moved the guy out into the street so they could figure out where he belonged. It was then that we saw that he had POOPED on our front steps!!! WHAT?!?!?!?!?! SO disgusting. It turns out he was staying at a neighbor's house. After everyone left Erich had to clean up the mess. EW. Seriously.

Hellos and Goodbyes

Last week was full of super-high ups and really low downs. On Tuesday, May 5th my niece Leah Elizabeth was born! She is so cuddly with a head full of dark hair, and I miss her already. On Friday, though, my grandfather passed away. It is a really sad thing for our family, of course, but we all know that Grandpa is now exactly where he was ready to be.