An interview with Robert Fagles appeared in the New York Times yesterday. Fagles has translated the Iliad and the Odyssey to wide praise in the last several years, and he’s currently working on translating Virgil’s Aeneid. Reading this interview made me envious for the academic life: Fagles is a retired Ivy League professor, he’s been married for almost 50 years and has two grown daughters, and he works “in a window-lined room in his house on a back road.” And the photo of his desk nook looks lovely. I’ve reconciled myself to not diving into the academic life — I don’t have enough interest in one single subject to get a Ph.D., and I’d rather learn than teach. But it’s still nice to dream.

I ate so much crap yesterday. Breakfast was fine: a bowl of oatmeal with fruit (my usual). But it went downhill from there. My midmorning snack was a packet of Lorna Doone shortbread cookies from a vending machine. Lunch was two pieces of pizza, followed a short time later by a Nestle Crunch bar. Then it turned out one of colleagues had brought in a homemade apple pie, so I had a piece of that in the afternoon. Dinner before my chorus rehearsal was McDonald’s, and during our break I had a chocolate Krispy Kreme donut.

That’s right. I had oatmeal with raisins, shortbread cookies, pizza, a chocolate bar, a piece of apple pie, McDonald’s, and a chocolate donut.

McDonald’s isn’t a regular part of my diet, but I’ve been eating too much chocolate and other sugary products lately. I don’t drink coffee, but I have a chocolate bar almost every afternoon at work. While I don’t put on weight from this stuff, it does make me feel a little icky. So I’ve decided that I’m going to eat healthy today. No chocolate or sugary or greasy foods, just for one day. I’ll have a salad or a sandwich for lunch, and my afternoon snack will be a piece of fruit. Dinner will be real food, and no sugary desserts. I figure if I commit to just one day, I’ll have a better chance of following through.

(I should probably take up some sort of cardiovascular exercise, too.)

This all reminds me that a professor in college once told us that the four food groups were sugar, salt, grease, and beer.

I am a Jew.

See here, here, here, and here, for why I’ve linked to the above site, and help rectify an antisemitic case of Googlebombing by posting

<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew”>Jew</a>

on your site, too.