MAY DAY

I love this photograph. I got it from istockphoto.com. I also use dreamstime.com to stock my blog. I keep meaning to credit photographers. I started out doing as much. I even heard from one, about a Las Vegas photograph. He appreciated the credit. He wished me luck. This one, in the Bahamas, is by Roberto Adrian, a Miami-based photographer. What I love about this picture is that it makes you want to be there, right now.

I’m as civic minded as they come, but May Day has never tugged at my social-justice-workers’-rights heartstrings. I know that’s shallow as a puddle and that I should stop and consider the plight of those who are less fortunate in the workaday sense than I am. (Well, overall. What I do involves e-n-d-l-e-s-s vicissitudes and supplication.) Most years I am too intellectually indisposed to contemplate the implications of May Day, reeling with the incontrovertible cliché that swimsuit season is less than one month away. May One means it’s almost May Thirty-One. May Day, May Day: just over four weeks until Memorial Day, when we start hitting the pool, day after day. All these mouse-potato days at the computer (mouse potato: I don’t understand why that phrase hasn’t caught on, it is so apt) do not leave one fit as a fiddle. I am considering a standup desk.

Which makes this sweeps a perfect fit: Time 4 The Beach, a Slim-Fast promotion with People Magazine as co-conspirator. The prize is a vague four-day, three-night beach vacation of the sponsors’ choice, approximately four hours from the winner’s home. Let’s see: that could mean Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, yes, they’d fit the bill. Time for the beach! And the pool.

Of course yesterday, not today, was May Day. I was too fixated on margarita reminiscentae to get into May Day anxiety yesterday. As for the margarita I was considering making last evening, I ended up getting a bottle of Pinot Grigio instead of margarita provisions. I went to my neighborhood liquor store. I always ask the clerk if anyone’s won the lottery lately. This evening he told me that last week, some guy, the same guy, won almost every day, including $10,000. And this guy only buys one or two tickets a day. Now that is luck.

Anyway, I’m not impervious to these promotions. I just might do a modified Slim-Fast regime for a few weeks. It’s my second favorite liquid diet, after Pinot Grigio.

To enter online, click here. There's one online entry per person. You can enter as many times as you like via snail mail, provided the entries are mailed separately. The sweeps runs through June 30.