In one of my last posts before leaving on my trip abroad, I shared with you my goal of abstaining from email.  I am delighted to report that I was successful!  Now it’s your turn!

For three glorious weeks I neither wrote an email nor looked at an email.  I will admit that for the first week or so I still went online a few times, mainly to keep up-to-date on my favorite sports teams.  For the second two weeks, though, I spent the least amount of time that I ever have sitting in front of a computer.

The verdict- it was amazingly liberating and cleansing!  For three weeks my entire focus was on the real world, as opposed to the virtual world of computers.  My interactions with people were in person (a novel concept nowadays) and I loved it.  Naturally, since returning I’ve shifted back into checking my email numerous times per day and visiting those same few websites over and over.  However, I am doing my best to abstain from email on the weekends as a compromise, and I even hope to stay away from email after work as well.

Fighting against computers is an almost hopeless battle, but my few weeks away showed me the wonderful world of not staring at a screen for hours each day.  Now I just have to find that elusive middle ground.  Wish me luck!

Watching the Patriots play their games is not only a major outlet for my intense competitiveness; it’s also an opportunity for me to turn off my mind for three plus hours and do nothing but watch.  And of course be verbally engaged, which anyone that has watched a game with me can attest to being quite the experience.

From the Patriots-Bills’ game back in the late 1990s, which ended with a Drew Bledsoe to Ben “Winter” Coates touchdown on the last play of the game and my friend Derek and I out on my front lawn rolling around, hootin and hollorin up a storm, to that first Super Bowl win in 2001.  The Patriots have truly been a release for me, and a way to bond with complete strangers at the nearest bar.

Unlike the fateful day in the fall of 2003, when I watched the Aaron Boone home-run off of Tim Wakefield in a bar in Noosa, a small town in Australia (I had to call Derek from a pay phone in order to have someone to lament to!) alone, I have always found people to watch Patriots’ games with.  Literally a 5 minute walk from my apartment in San Francisco I came across a full on Patriots/Red Sox bar.  All TVs are tuned to the game and the bar filled with New Englanders, the people among whom I feel most at home with.  There is just nothing else like walking into a bar full of people that you mostly don’t know and within an hour bonding with these same people over a football game.

It really is amazing.  As I got my pizza at halftime (you can bring food into the bars here!), I had a feeling that even though the Patriots were down by eleven this would be an exciting game with an exciting finish.  Indeed it was!  I will spare you most of the details, but though they lost, when they tied the game with a touchdown on fourth down, with one second left in the game, the bar absolutely erupted.  And I mean it ERUPTED!

I found myself in a mass of people, jumping up and down, hugging random guys, almost tackling the guy next to me out of joy, screaming incoherently.  Again, this is fairly easy to visualize for those that have watched a game with me!  You won’t find me too much happier about too much else!

Though the Patriots lost in overtime, to the hated Jets of all teams, I found myself not nearly as upset as I would have been in the past.  Maybe it was because Matt Cassel, the backup to the injured Tom Brady, played so well and represents the underdog in all of us, or maybe it was because it was just a fun game to watch.  What I do know is how much damn fun I had jumping up and down with a group of random guys celebrating one play of one football game, representing one of sixteen games I will end up watching this regular season.

I can’t wait for the next game so I can do it all over again.  It just doesn’t get much better.

Playing tennis or basketball has always helped me to click the off switch on all of the thoughts that are constantly swirling around in my head. It’s just me, my racket or basketball, and the relaxation that comes to me whenever I am on the courts.

Then there are those extra special moments on the courts, the ones that have only come to me a handful of times. And it is in those times that I am truly feeling it. It’s when everything slows down for me on the tennis court and the ball looks twice its normal size. I am able to hit winners from anywhere on the court and I am cracking my serve with surgeon-like precision, placing it exactly where I want it to go. It’s when I am completely in the zone on the basketball court and I simply can’t miss a shot. My feet are light as I run up and down the court, and I am staying with players far better than me. These are the moments I live for. And they are made all the more special in that I never quite know when the next one is on the horizon.

No matter what’s been going on in my life, the courts have been there for me, beckoning me to throw the stress and worry of life aside for a couple of hours and work up a good old sweat. I might not have been feeling it yesterday, but I was still able to clear my mind and enjoy myself out there. It’s another example of how enjoying the perfect foam in our lives, whether it’s playing sports or whatever it is that you most enjoy doing, can enrich and fulfill us. Life wouldn’t be the same without it!

The drive alone from Denver, though the Rockies, and then through Utah was stunning. Utah seemingly should just be designated as one big national park. All we managed to do for the 11 or so hours of driving was stare out of the car windows, with dazed expressions on our faces. And the words incredible, stunning, amazing, and unreal kept circulating between us. Conversations consisted of the following with some variation in form:

My Girlfriend: “This is incredible.”

Me: “Unreal.”

And so went our incredibly diverse and creative use of the English language!

We decided to visit the North Rim of the Canyon, as opposed to the South Rim for the main reason that it only gets about 10 percent of the visitors that the South Rim does. And it’s on average 5-10 degrees cooler than the South Rim, making it more pleasant and easier to hike. Compared to the hordes of tourists we experienced at Mt. Rushmore (I felt like I had been transported to an ant mound), this was heaven. I thoroughly recommend to anyone to visit the North Rim, and stay at its one lodge- the Grand Canyon Lodge.

We arrived at night, so there was no Canyon sighting, and it was extremely odd to look out over the horizon, knowing that there was an incredibly large hole in the ground in front of us! We checked into our cabin, and passed out from a long, exhausting day of driving. We woke up the next day, and upon getting my first view of the Canyon, I realized that of all the words my girlfriend and I had kept repeating the previous day, none even came close to describing what we were now seeing. And so I turn to my journal once again, in an attempt to recapture the feeling I had:

“I still couldn’t get over the feeling that the Canyon was really there- that it wasn’t simply painted on a humongous canvas, stretching for miles on end… I don’t care who you are, where you are from, what you do, or what your interests are, if you aren’t impressed by the Canyon then you can’t be human! It really had a calming effect on me and there is no other way to describe looking at it but that it induced a peaceful feeling.”

I think I will have to leave the description of my experience at that. There is simply no better, or more elegant way that I can think of. As opposed to enjoying the little details in life that make up the perfect foam, this is one of those experiences that doesn’t come along every day, and it is a huge reminder of how incredible our natural world is. If we can garner even the tiniest fraction of enjoyment from our daily experiences that we can receive from this majestic place, then we will have a lot less to complain about.

A young Pakistani man bought the house next door to my parents’ house.  His parents came to stay with him for a period of a few months, and during the course of their stay, my mother met with this young man’s mother on several occasions.  They mainly came together for an afternoon tea and a few hours of discussion.

My mother and this Pakistani women developed a friendship and when it came time for her to return to Pakistan with her husband, my mother mentioned that she would be going abroad to Switzerland.  She promised to send her a postcard during her trip.

While she was in Switzerland, my mother did remember to send the postcard and didn’t think anything more or less than when she sent anyone else a postcard from abroad.  A week after returning to the Unites States, she received a call from the Pakistani women.  She had the following simple words to share:

“Thank you so, so, so much.  You made me so happy…”

It took a short while to write and send this postcard, but the effect that it had on another person was immeasurably greater.  It turns out that this Pakistani women’s own mother had died a short time after she returned home, and had been feeling utterly and completely full of despair.  She was able to do exactly what I mentioned towards the end of my last post: she took solace in one of the small details of her life.  She was able to let a simple postcard from a faraway friend, bring her happiness.

I don’t know about you, but this story really moved me, and is a powerful example of how amazing life can be, if we only let it.  This women certainly did- in a time of absolute personal darkness, she was still able to garner happiness from her friend’s greetings.  We can never know what will happen when we follow up on a promise or take a few minutes to do something for someone else.  It just might make all the difference in the world, and for this Pakistani women, it sure did.

One of my favorite activities, one that allows me to escape for a bit from the stresses and demands of our daily lives, is to go to a cafe. I absolutely LOVE cafes. I always enjoy good coffee, particularly a well-made espresso, latte, or cappuccino, but for me it has always been more about the company and about the opportunity to clear my ever-thinking mind. While I do enjoy being in groups from time to time, I have always enjoyed spending more intimate time with one or two other people, and what better place to spend a few hours, relaxing, catching up, and shootin’ the breeze than a cafe.

The cafe where the idea for this blog was initially born is a wonderful little cafe named Pastiche. It is located in Federal Hill, the little Italy of Providence, Rhode Island. I was discussing the idea of writing a book with my best friend. Two years (and a failed attempt at writing a book) later, after a lot of thought, I have decided to follow through on my drive to write and to share some of my observations.

Anyway, back to the cafe. It’s a place where Rhode Islanders come for a sumptuous dessert, perhaps accompanied by a tasty and lively espresso or cappuccino. It’s a place to lounge in, and according to their official dinning rules, patrons are allowed to stay for up to two hours after the purchase of their last item. Thus, though they are not a true European cafe, where people can stay for hours and hours on end, having finished their one cup of coffee five minutes into their stay, Pastiche is close, very close. And exactly my kind of cafe.

A cafe has always given me the opportunity to observe, and not just the people around me, but to “observe” my own thoughts as well. It is often in the company of a friend or two, that thoughts I might have been having for some time in the back of my mind, finally make it to the front. It is these thoughts and observations that I will attempt to share throughout the course of the lifetime of this blog.

So back to the meaning of “The Perfect Foam”. As you may have guessed (both by the picture of a cappuccino on my homepage and by the above reference to a cafe), the perfect foam refers to the one-third of a cappuccino comprised of foamed milk.

I have always been an up and down kind of guy. One aspect of my personality is my ability to get supremely excited over small details- the perfect ice-tea on a hot day, some home-made ice-cream, bread and butter, etc. I might have had the worst possible day (at least in my own eyes), but I have always been able to push things aside and get excited over something as small as the perfect foam. I have had more than a few friends look at me with absolute bewilderment as I happily held up my spoon, having just dipped it into a freshly-made cappuccino, and exclaim, “now this is the perfect foam”, with an ear to ear smile on my face. This may not seem like much, and it isn’t the fact that it is foam that has the ability to make me this happy that matters. It is the ability to find joy, even when a day seems completely ruined, and to find this joy in something as small as the perfect foam (I should add that what makes foam perfect, is its thickness- it MUST be thick!).

Personally, I believe that this is what makes our lives so great, and so utterly human. We have the wonderful ability to get excited, and to find joy in the smaller details in life. Whether it’s a certain song, a certain type of food, or anything else, what would life be if we each couldn’t enjoy them?

For me, the day that I stop getting excited over the perfect foam, is when I know that I have my priorities completely in the wrong place. Sometimes it can be helpful for all of us to take a few minutes, take a step back, and realize that there are always details of our lives that we can enjoy.