Things I miss about Tampa
We’re driving home to Baton Rouge from our vacation in Tampa. I’m blogging from a wi-fi hotspot generated by my husband’s Palm Pre. Awesome. We waited in a traffic jam outside of Gainsville for almost an hour. An 18-wheeler jack-knifed across two lanes. So, I’m sitting here in the car thinking about what I miss about Tampa, a place I called home for ten years. Friends and family are the obvious top of the list, so let’s skip that one. In no particular order:
1. Disney – Grueling in August, when we usually go, but magical during the cooler weather. (Magical is cliche, but apt.)
2. Orange blossoms – Not only do they smell divine, they smell of divinity.
3. Cuban food – From the dive at the strip mall to the fanciest restaurant, can’t go wrong with black beans and yellow rice.
4. Concerts and touring companies – Because Tampa is a big city, it gets nearly all the major concert tours and other cultural events. There are many venues and a variety of big and alt/indie things to do.
5. The Tampa Theatre – A historical landmark building, a renovated 1920s movie theater, the Tampa theater offers all sorts of independent and off beat movies and oldies. It also has an old-time organ which is played by an organist before the movie.
6. Independent movies – On that note, the Tampa Bay Area has multiple theaters that offer indie, foreign, and limited-release movies. Baton Rouge has an indie movie maybe once a month.
7. The beach – I’m not a beach person. I hate the sand and you can’t have a beach experience without it. However, over the years I’ve developed a limited tolerance of it and I’ve cultivated elaborate rituals to avoid it. When I can manage avoiding the sand, I enjoy the beach immensely. This vacation I had all the accouterments and I have the sunburn to prove it.
8. The football culture – This is a complicated one. Tampa has changed greatly since I left. When l Iived there, the Bucks were a joke and USF didn’t have a football team. Consequently, the football culture was minimal in Tampa (not in other cities, obviously, since Florida is a football state through and through). I lived ten blissful football free years.
9. Bougainvillaes – Beautiful flowering bushes in all sorts of colors. They are in a dead heat with the crepe myrtle in Louisiana. They are lush and tropical whereas crepe myrtle are more flouncy and southern.
10. Good grocery stores – Florida has Publix, which is an amazing grocery store with great food choices. It’s not upscale gourmet like Calandro’s, it’s just a nice grocery store with an excellent bakery and deli. They offer a lot of food that is prepped and ready to cook. We used to buy yummy fresh fish – boned, cleaned, and spiced - that we just tossed on the hibachi or in the oven. Publix always has quality produce too. It’s more expensive than, say, Winn Dixie, but it’s a better class of food. Plus, their commercials are always clever.
Related posts:Ways to cheat on foursquare
1. Add your home as a venue.
2. Become mayor of your home.
3. Add your work as a venue.
4. Become mayor of your job.
5. Add places that are clearly not venues like THE BEACH. The beach is not a venue.
6. Become mayor of the beach.
7. Lie.
8. Lie a lot.
Note: I have done none of these things.
Related posts:The hidden cost of graduate school
So I just paid my student loan a couple of days ago, which basically means I hit a button on the loan website and depleted my financial resources for another month. I started to reflect on the debilitating costs of graduate school, costs which most people don’t consider even later in their lives after they’ve graduated. When you compare the cumulative financial drain of graduate school to the financial gains of other professional (more…)
Related posts:Ben Franklin’s Facebook Status
Today’s Times Book Review section has a nicely written, humorous article on Ben Franklin and his Almanac: Ben Franklin is a Big Fat Idiot. The title made it mandatory reading for me given my utter adulation of Al Franken. In fact, the author, Joe Queenan, seems to have as much of a crush on Franklin as I have on Franken.
To his disappointment, Queenan discovered that the Almanac was not nearly as inspirational as he remembered it to be and so he laments the resultant bit of tarnish on Franklin’s halo. His claims that Franklin’s aphorisms failed “the acid test of validity and usefulness.” Take this one, for example: “Keep your mouth wet, feet dry.” Ok, I agree, teh stoopid.
The first thing that came to mind as I read the article was Facebook. Ben Franklin seems to have written down whatever little thing came to his mind — short bursts of words, conventional wisdom, and some shit that probably only made sense to him and his neighbors. “Every little makes a mickle.” WTF?
So, if the article had a comment section, which it doesn’t, I’d post the author an encouraging comment and tell him just to enjoy the status updates for what they are and give ol’ Ben some of his glow back.
Related posts: