Extra Pedestrian

Bear with me, I may actually have a point this time. 
 Shortly after the turn of the century, I spent a few semesters at the University of Florida.  A not-insignificant portion of my time in Gainesville was devoted to keeping my head above water, financially-speaking, as I attempted to pay my own way through college.  Though a portion of my tuition was paid by a state-funded scholarship, I was responsible for covering not only the remaining balance, but also my books, apartment, car, insurance, cell phone, food and entertainment.  While this was indeed a beating -- and often a hindrance to experiencing the relatively carefree lifestyle that many college students enjoy -- it remains a source of personal pride to have carried the weight on my own. 
 Before moving to Gainesville, though -- and for the weeks between semesters -- I'd earned money slicing-and-imbibing behind a sushi bar near my hometown in the state's panhandle.  Though it'd be a lie to say I was anything mo

originally posted to Facebook on February 10, 2013 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We said goodbye to Maw Maw last Saturday.  It was every bit as difficult as imagined. I’ve been trying for over a week to wrap my mind around it – much like I did almost a year ago, when my mom’s mom, Grandma, passed away.  I've been fortunate enough in not having to deal with these things for so much of my life, I find myself unsure of how to feel, how to respond, and what to do. I do suppose that it’s common at these times to look for perspective, positives, lessons learned, legacies to further.  Of course, in both cases, this has been our family's approach.   And there's certainly a large role for faith to play in helping to stunt the blow.  In that way, Grandma and Maw Maw are both doing just fine right about now, if you follow.  It’s only the rest of us, those left behind, who have to compose ourselves, gather

When I was thirteen years old, a pair of hurricanes struck my hometown merely two months apart.  The first, a relatively weak Category 2 storm, hit in such a way that I was able to stand on the front porch with my dad and uncle (my mom, brother, and sister were out of town at the time) as the winds and rain came over from the back of the house.  We ate snacks as we watched the iridescent glow of electrical bursts coming from the transformer station just beyond the reaches of our neighborhood.  We comically ruminated on the pronunciation of "debris" while branches fell from nearby trees.  I lamented all of the yard-cleaning work that lay before me in the coming days.  With all due respect to the dangerous situation that a hurricane can be, as well as an understanding that this was not truly an event to celebrate, I do remember feeling rather excited about the opportunity to witness such a storm up close.  If you're in a safe place when nature flexes some muscle,

I keep trying to think of how I should preface what's to follow, but each attempt has turned into what would better serve as a spin-off post regarding the enigma that is the office bathroom. There is so much to consider on this topic -- office size, coworker demographics, stall/urinal etiquette, the baffling lack of white noise, any number of ruminations on timing. It's overwhelming, really.   But for today, we'll skip ahead a bit, to an idea typically kept quiet, except among the most trusted of coworkers -- the hidden bathroom. Now, I say hidden, but this is usually a misnomer. To my knowledge, there are very few cases wherein an office bathroom is concealed by a bookcase-operated rotating wall, like some sort of Holy Golden Toilet (band name alert!), discoverable only by Indiana Jones and his Nazi rivals (questionable band name alert). Rather, such a bathroom is merely isolated, whether by frequency, demographics, or location. Perhaps your hidden bathroom is

No.  Not one more guy walking down the street. This isn't about that.  That's a superfluous sequel to a horror movie about a murderous hitchhiker, or another warm body hustling down a New York City avenue.  Or perhaps an unpublished verse to that terrific James Taylor song.  This is not that sort of extra pedestrian.  I'm aiming for the other definition, the one more self-deprecating.  Wildly mediocre. Especially ordinary.  Markedly uninteresting. Spectacularly... meh. For years I've had myself convinced that writing is one of my strong suits.  And it may very well be.  Or it may also be a study in self-delusion.  Either way, I've decided to start keeping better track of the occasional stories I've told, the hours I've killed behind a keyboard -- a record of all of the time I have wasted, a little of yours, scores of mine.  There will likely be some underwhelming material, and occasional expanses of difficult-to-follow passages diverting away from