I’m bad at vacations. My photo albums are filled with pictures of me on various beaches with piles of papers in my lap and a pen in my hand. On a boat in Jamaica, bouncing over nearly perpendicular waves, one friend strapped on a life jacket and another prayed while I tried to correct proofs. Before cell phones and e-mail, my trips began by mapping out the nearest FedEx office and the hotel’s business center. Once the Internet arrived, I could work everywhere—yippee. That meant I was always in two places at once: feet in the sand, head in the office. Last Christmas break in St. Barth’s, when I should have been dancing on a table (I would never), I decided to pitch a story to a newspaper—on December 19. Fa la la la la.
If you believe the studies and the statisticians, I’m setting myself up quite nicely for a cardiac event. “People that didn’t take any vacation repeatedly were at a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease,” says Brooks Gump, Ph.D., a Falk Family Endowed Professor of Public Health at Syracuse University, citing his research based on a large epidemiological trial. The study was conducted on men, so I’m probably totally fine.
