The Misery Diet

My most excellent friend Kerry sent along this picture today as part of another discussion, and I shamelessly swiped it.  Actually, I don't know if I ever saw it before now. She snapped it, now ten years ago, when we were in China together. A group of Champlain professors took advantage of Dave Finney's (or Champlain president then) Faculty Internationalization Initiative (FII), of distant memory, to travel to China on CIEE tours. I had actually arrived a couple days earlier because I presenting at a conference. It was shortly after I had left my ex-wife and I was living on the floor of my office and eating a lot of ramen noodles. Since I had Global Modules business to do, and because I had no place else to go, I embarked on a seven week, seven country trip from the Middle East to China to Central Europe to Western Europe. I spent some amazing days with a friend in Barcelona at the end of the trip, but mainly I just hung out by myself for almost two months, with the exception of my time in China. It was great to see China with Kerry and Craig before they took off for southern China on their CIEE tour, whereas I headed west in my Journey to the West-themed tour, making it as far west as Kasgar. Anyway, Kerry snapped this picture of me in the Forbidden City on our day there. I'm sure I must have some posts associated with it somewhere (as I close in on 2000 posts I'm, not surprisingly I guess, sometimes surprised by posts I don't remember writing about places that I only vaguely remember visiting).

Yes, the Misery Diet. I think I was down to less than 200 pounds, which, on my frame, is pretty skeletal. This was also after I had my infamous bike wreck and wrapped my face around a guardrail, so I was a bit of a mess. But, somehow, I made it through. I never complained about it at the time because, as my father always told me, "You were born a free, white man in America, so you can never complain about the consequences of your decisions." Essentially, he was saying that I was born with a ton of privilege and thus could actually make decisions, so I needed to keep my mouth shut if they didn't turn out the way I hoped. I was miserable because I had left my wife - and failed her and my son - so I probably deserved a hell of a lot more unhappiness than I found.