The Acid Test

In my previous life as a nonprofit finance person, I often employed what is called the acid test to measure the health of the organizations with which I worked. The Acid Test involves taking the business's current assets, subtracting the stock, and then dividing that answer by the organization's current liabilities. Since nonprofit organizations don't have stock, this is really the same as finding what is known as the current ratio, which is just current assets divided by current liabilities. Obviously, you want to see that the organization has more than enough current assets to meet their current liabilities, although in my work I often found that was not the case.

On a personal level, the Acid Test is instead something I use to figure out how bad my acid indigestion is doing to be. I take the petty frustrations that mount in my daily life that I blow out of proportion minus the amount of post nasal drip I experience, and divide that by how well I have eaten that week. This week, I have failed the personal Acid Test. Every evening and a few mornings were torture. This afternoon was so bad that I skipped my site visit to a rustic farmhouse and lighthouse in northern Manhattan so I could lie down a bit.

A few hours of resting didn't help much, so I decided to try some very low impact aerobic activity. I rode an exercise bike at the gym and read an Us Weekly. I was surprised by three discoveries:

1. Camryn Mannheim, actress and author of the bitterly funny book, Wake Up, I'm Fat!, seems to have lost a bit of weight. She's not absurdly skinny or anything, just average. On one hand, I was sort of saddened by this because she was an amazing advocate for social tolerance towards overweight people. On the other, I don't begrudge anyone her health, and she doesn't seem to be freakishly thin, just healthier-looking.

2. Naomi Watts actually resembles a woman who just had a baby. Not that she's obese, but she's not rail thin, either. She looks like what a lot of women look like after they give birth, which I think is cool.

3. Clive Owen's wife is plus-size. How rare is it to see a hot movie star married to a completely normal woman? You always see super hot actresses with shlubby overweight men, but never the other way around. Ever. He told the magazine that none of his co-workers have ever tempted him to stray because he values his wife so much that he would never risk losing her. I adored Clive Owen for his work in Children of Men and Inside Man (or whatever that Spike Lee movie was called), but now he has cemented my admiration of him.

Anyway, hopefully the Pele of my volcanic stomach will go away this weekend and the acid eruptions will calm down.