Boy, Am I Depressed!

Tom Terrific in Madison, WI sent along this painfully accurate description of my predicament:

New Retirement Plan

If you had bought $1,000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00.

With Enron, you would have $16.50 of the original $1,000.00.

With Worldcom, you would have less than $5.00 left.

If you had bought $1,000.00 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drunk all the beer, then turned in the cans for the 10 cent deposit, you would have $214.00.

Based on the above, my current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. This is a new retirement program.

I call it the 401Keg.

Good idea. 401Keg. I have been battling depression. I have been treating myself with 401Keg (or an equivalent). However, I have moved on to a new medication and I seem to be in a better mood. Over the last two weeks, I missed 3 out of 5 classes. I just didn't want to go to school. What a bummer. I have made all of my classes this week (groan). I even went to meet my torturer trainer. I am 6 lb. overweight and my chest, waist, and hip measurements have gone the wrong direction. Today was assessment day: weigh-in, blood pressure, flexibility (improved), and strength (improved) tests. It was my first time to show up at the gym fitness center in two weeks.

I am giving tests to all of my classes over the next several days. See Peppermint Patty (above) and you get a pretty accurate portrayal of my students. However, hope springs eternal. One of my students contacted a senior history professor at Yale. She must have made sense because this guy answered her questions, enclosed a recent article as an attachment to the e-mail, and supplied a list of recommended monographs. None of the suggested books are to be had in any of the libraries in the Harrington Library Consortium, but this student has placed interlibrary loan requests for the books.

If this be (fair & balanced) guarded optimism, so be it.