Common sense

Ever think that if you could just go back to the old way you used to do things, your life would be a lot better? You’d get back on track, so to speak?

In some respects, we’ll never do that: we’re past the point of living without computers, e-mail, and fancy gadgetry. But in some of the fundamental ways we direct our personal lives, maybe we’re not yet beyond help. Habits change; the ones that change for the worse can be changed back to the way they were.

This train of thought came my way while I was wondering why am I so fat? I’ve never been overweight before. My father passed his slim build down to me, and he didn’t start to put on weight until he was in his 70s, when he had to eat the mediocre, carbohydrate-laced food at his life-care community, where he took to eating…hmmm….yes: two servings of pie after the steam-table dinner.

The other day one of the choir members brought real, true, home-made Napoleons and a genuine home-made cake with actual not-out-of-a-can chocolate frosting. This, in honor of the choir director’s birthday. Well. I not only ate one of the exquisite Napoleons, I had to scarf down a piece of cake, too. Afterward, I could barely waddle out to my car.

Whoa! On the way home, it struck me that when I was a young and slender thing, I would never have touched a Napoleon. Not out of any dietary prissiness, but because I didn’t like sweets. Those things would have gagged me, because they were just too sweet.

About ten or fifteen years ago, I developed a tolerance for sugary stuff. It happened when SDXB and I got in the habit of hanging out at the local gourmet grocery store over coffee. He would order just a cup of black coffee. The store’s plain coffee, however, is pretty awful, even worse than Starbucks’ basic battery acid. So, to get a hit of caffeine I would order things like lattes and mochas. And I would usually be hungry. The coffee was served out of the bakery counter, where 99.9% of the food offerings were…yes! Sweets! So to get something to eat, I’d order some carbs with baked-in sugar, usually things like apple turnovers.

We were hiking in the mountains almost every day, and so I didn’t put on much weight. But I sure didn’t get any thinner. What I did get was a craving for sweets. Once SDXB moved out, I managed to break the daily coffee confection habit, but it didn’t change the fact that now I’ll eat almost anything that has lots of sugar in it.

So I started thinking: What things do I do that I didn’t do when I was young and slim, and what don’t I do that I used to do? And what bearing do those things have on my present state of well-being (or not)? The answers are revealing:

Do now, didn’t do then:

• Sit in front of a computer for hours on end.

Back in the day, we didn’t have e-mail. No one ever heard of a blog. News came on large sheets of paper folded together in things called “newspapers.”

• Eat sweets

See above.

• Drink in the middle of the day.

Not often, anyway.

• Consume the better part of a bottle of wine during the course of a day.

• Park next to the door of any store I went into.

When I got the crip space decal, I got into the habit of using the disabled parking whenever several other spaces were open. This led to a tendency to look for regular spots as close to the door as possible.

• Drive instead of walk to nearby errands.

The grocery stores around here are not in safe areas; I won’t even park my car in their lots, much less walk to them.

• Arrange things for minimal house and yard work.

Desert landscaping and tile floors don’t require much heavy physical work.

• Spend endless hours writing and editing.

The type of writing I do does not require me to leave the house.

• Seem to live in a constant state of chaos.

My life is so gestalt, I never seem to be able to complete a single train of thought. It’s interruption after interruption after interruption.

Did then, don’t do now:

• Walked the dog at least once a day, sometimes more.

Greta the Gershep would walk without a leash, never chased off after cats and other dogs, did not wander into the road. And she was big enough to take care of herself and me. So walking her meant stepping out the front door: no hassles with collars and leashes and shilelaghs to beat off mean dogs and meaner humans.

• Hiked in the mountain preserves fairly often.

• Until Greta got too old to climb up a steep grade, I used to take her to Squaw Peak Park all the time.

• Rarely ate sweet things.

• Parked on the far side of most parking lots and walked to the stores.

Averse as I was to burning my hands on the steering wheel, I used to try to park my car in whatever little spots of shade could be found. Around here, trees exist only on the perimeters of asphalt parking lots (when they exist at all). This required me to leave my car a long way from the door.

• Walked to various errands.

The babysitter was a block away: I would push the kid over there in a stroller. A nice mall with a Penney’s and a Dillard’s-type department store was less than a mile from my house. Because I did a lot of handyperson work around our house, I used to walk up to the Penney’s to buy hardware items. The post office was about a mile and a half away; occasionally I would walk there.

• Did a lot of physical work around the house.

We lived in a historic house that had to be shored up all the time. My husband wasn’t very handy, so I had to learn light carpentry, plumbing, painting, and repair skills. Once I spread, screeded, and pounded several tons of sand and laid 1,350 paving bricks to build a patio.

• Did a lot more yard work.

We had a lawn. I used to mow it, until I finally drew the line and persuaded my husband to hire a yard guy. But I still cared for a pair of two-story-high bougainvilleas and a rose garden.

• Walked all over a university campus two or three times a week.

I was going to graduate school and TAing 50% FTE.

• Watched TV at night.

Nowadays there’s little worth watching on the broadcast channels. I can’t afford cable, and besides, by prime time I’m falling asleep.

• Worked as a freelance journalist.

This required me to get off my duff, go follow people around, and interview them.

• Had enough peace and quiet to read not just the newspaper but also whole magazines (and we subscribed a library full of them).

• Had enough uninterrupted time to conduct telephone interviews, write articles, or grade student papers in single sittings.

Hm. The differences between then and now are that a lot more physical activity once appeared as a routine part of my life; when I was younger I had little or no taste for sweets; I never spent my days parked in front of a computer; and I used to be able to get things done without constant interruptions. I probably was writing more, but I worked more productively and so didn’t spend all my waking hours at it. With no e-mail, communication was by telephone or snail-mail.

An e-mail conversation, in contrast to three minutes over the phone, entails a volley of typing and reading, each entry of which interrupts what you’re doing:

MB [Scottsdale Business Association president], March 7, 9:28 a.m., re SBA: March invoice. [Bill is attached.]

Genesis Toole [Heaven only knows! Someone at Phoenix College; message routed direct to “Trash” but still pings if computer’s sound is on], March 7, 9:29 a.m., re YEE HAW!!!  Please Encourage Student Participation for Bear’s Day 3/7/12!!! A flyer for something in which I have exactly zero interest.

MB, March 7, 9:39 a.m., re Scottsdale Business Association: This is to remind everyone of our breakfast meeting tomorrow morning at 7:15 AM at the Good Egg.  Our featured speaker this week will be Karen from The Gainey Ranch Golf Club, and our featured speaker next week will be George our Financial Planning Expert.  Please be on time and e-mail me if you are unable to attend.

Associate editor, March 7, 9:49 a.m., re. client’s request for a W-9: I assume you’re having [the accountant] send stuff to Copyeditor’s Desk for tax purposes. Is this right? If not, I guess I can fill this out.

Funny, March 7, 9:52 a.m., re. client’s request for a W-9: You don’t need to fill it out. I sent a W-9 for the Copyeditor’s Desk. In 2012 as in 2011, your income will be reported as contractor’s pay for CED.

Associate editor: 9:55 a.m., re. client’s request for a W-9: Thanks. That’s what I thought. Just wanted to confirm.

SC [SBA member; senior loan officer at large mortgage broker], March 7, 9:59 a.m., re SBA meeting: I won’t be able to attend tomorrow – visitors from Chicago are in for Cubs game and golf.  These are guys I went to grade school and high school with, so they know where the bodies are buried!

SCC Announce [Something from Scottsdale Community College, routed direct to “Trash”], March 7, 10:08 a.m., re Adjunct Teaching Opportunities. Irrelevant job ad. [How do they persuade an economist to do 16 weeks of work for $2400? Wouldn’t you think a person with a degree in economics could do better?]

PC Announcements [Something from Phoenix College, routed direct to “Trash”], March 7, 10:09 a.m., re Position Available:  Instructional Designer (Specially Funded) at Phoenix College. Irrelevant job ad.

SCC Announce, March 7, 10:19 a.m., re SCC Planetarium Show, March 10, 2012. Advertisement for upcoming shindig halfway across the city.

KK: [SBA member, event director at spectacularly upscale golf resort], March 7, 10:25 a.m., re Scottsdale Business Association, Sure, sure. Anything to get out of my talk. Too bad, too. I was going to show the “not for the public” pictures from my Montelucia Resort trip last week.  Oh, well. Enjoy the game.    ;>l

In the span of an hour, 11 demands for my attention! Of these, exactly two were worth interrupting the progress of this blog post. That’s an average of one interruption every five and a half minutes.

Well, of course I don’t look at all these things the instant they come in. But still: eventually I have to sift through them seeking the messages that matter, then I have to act on those, then I have to delete all the rest. About a hundred messages a day land in my various in-boxes. Even when the effect is not painfully gestalt, it’s time-wasting. Hugely time-wasting.

Oh well. Back on topic (see what I mean?): So I get a lot less exercise than I did, just as a routine matter. Also I seem to be subjected to a lot more low-level stress, as in the constant barrage of interruption. The paying work I do requires me to stay seated between eight and twelve hours a day. Several more hours are spent in unpaid work, such as writing for an unmonetized blog, commenting on other PF bloggers’ sites, doing course prep, and grading papers.

No wonder I’m fat. No wonder I want a drink by noon.

Now, while it’s true that in my callow youth, I rarely drank at lunchtime, I suspect the total alcohol intake is no more than my ex- and I used to indulge during our glory days. We had wine with dinner every night. He would buy cases of half-bottles, because we realized that if we had to get up and open another bottle, we would quit pouring wine. This meant we each had about a glass and a half of wine with dinner.

However…when he came home from work, we always had cocktails. He would have a Scotch; I drank bourbon and water or Campari and tonic. And since dinner took an hour or 90 minutes to prepare and I was tippling while cooking, I usually had two before we sat down to dinner and wine. So that would add up to two swiggles of hard liquor and about a quarter to a third of a bottle of wine. Often, we had an after-dinner drink: I was partial to Grand Marnier.

Because I can’t afford aperitifs and liqueurs in my present state of penury, it’s entirely possible that I actually drink less than I did in my misspent youth.

In any event, when I ran out of wine and bourbon several days ago, I decided to refrain from buying any more. We could say I’m riding the wagon for Lent.

😉

It occurs to me that a  lot of this stuff is habit. I can’t do much about the time-consuming dominance of computer technology in my life. But I could rebuild those habits that caused me to move around more. And I could get out of the habits of drinking every day and eating sweets every time I turn around.

I started walking the dog as soon as day dawns. Interestingly, if we can fly out of the house by 6:30 or 7:00 a.m., we can get back in time for me to grab breakfast before M’hijito shows up with the exuberantly disruptive Charley the Golden Retriever. And I’ve discovered that I feel a lot better and a lot more positive during the day after a brisk 40-minute morning walk.

And I’ve started parking as far from the door as possible in strip malls. The other day I went over the Trader Joe’s at 20th and Camelback. Left the car parked adjacent to 20th Street, a nice stroll from the store. Then wanted to go to the PetSmart and the Staples across the road. Normally, I’d drive over there, despite the aversive craziness of the parking lot. Instead, I took my life in my hands and walked across 20th, walked to the PetSmart, then hiked around a pile of commercial buildings to reach the Staples, then hiked back to 20th, recrossed the homicidal road, and climbed back in my car. Good! Did the same thing yesterday at the hairdresser’s and then at the credit union.

It doesn’t add very much time to your errand-running, but it does add lots of steps to your daily life. And that sure can’t be bad for you.

So far, I’m down one pound. Not what we’d call statistically significant, but better than another one-pound gain. Now to learn to resist the sweets…

What do you think? Can we undo habits that we’ve fallen into and rebuild old, forgotten habits that were better for us? Can we do it in 2012 without going off the grid?

 

By Friday afternoon, I was so sick! And coughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. The voice was gone—for three or four days it was all I could do to whisper, not because of laryngitis (as in a cold settling into your throat) but because the unstoppable violent cough was tearing up the windpipe. I called a Safeway pharmacist and asked if he could recommend a cough medicine that would work.

“Only one cough medication will work,” said he, “and you’ll have to get a prescription: codeine. Dextromethorphan does nothing—it’s practically useless.”

Roger that, pal! “I’m kind of afraid to ask my doctor for codeine,” I said. “He’ll think I’m drug-seeking.”

“Well, you’ll have to get over that,” he said.

So I called the Mayo and repeated to the gatekeeper lady what the guy had said. When I said “…and the pharmacist said I should ask for a codeine cough medicine,” she took on a real snippy tone and said “uh-HUH!” She didn’t hang up on me but said a nurse would call back. Which of course never happened.

Gasping for air and no longer able to speak above a whisper, I finally e-mailed my son and asked him if he would ask his P.A. friend to write me a scrip for a cough med that worked. Finally, around 6 or 7 p.m., this elicited the desired pharmaceutical. My son went up to the Safeway to retrieve it, where he found that Medicare and Medigap absolutely positively will not cover it. Fortunately, it only cost $20. Wouldn’t have mattered…I’d have paid a hundred bucks for it.

And it worked, just like it worked when I was a teenaged girl and used to get these nasty coughs. And no, it did not poison me and it did not make me high. It did, however, allow me to get to sleep for a few hours.

By Saturday morning the cough was still gawdawful but at least was more or less controllable. Sunday it was still terrible, but less so: the throat started to heal up and the torso hurt less with each heave. It took a half-hour to quiet last night’s regular evening frenzy, but I slept until 4, when after a brief coughing frenzy another dose put me back to sleep. This morning the cough-fest was not so bad that I needed any medication, and by about 9 a.m., lo! it pretty much started to settle down.

Now, this very evening, I can talk! Actual words, in an actual voice! Not a single coughing frenzy all day long, and no doses of codeine since 4:00 a.m. Along about 3:00 p.m. my appetite started to come back. It even occurred to me that I wouldn’t mind a bourbon and water—haven’t even been able to look at my favorite potables for the past ten days.

Obviously, I’m holding off on the boozie-poo, just in case another frenzy strikes this evening or during the night. But if this state of affairs stays stable through tomorrow…gosh, maybe I could have a glass of wine with dinner tomorrow night!

🙂

In the course of double-checking whether it would be safe to take codeine for bronchitis, I found out why Big Brother is so anxious to keep this useful and highly effective antitussive out of our gummy little hands.

The Moron Brigade has decided that drinking cough medicine is THE way to get stoned! Sunovabiche.

Google “codeine cough medicine,” and up come all these sites where groups of morons advise each other on how to get high on the stuff. Idiots like to mix it with Sprite—the resulting tasty elixir is cutely called “purple drank.” This stuff has been popularized by moron rappers and moron athletes, making the only medication that actually works on a severe cough a very hot item on the moron market.

I found not one but two message boards where stupes were trading dosages and recipes. One of the nitwits actually posted the Rx number of her prescription on the freaking Internet!!!

Where’s yore sign, honey?

IMHO, trying to interdict this stuff, or any of the various intoxicants numbskulls and nitwits like to play with, is the wrong approach.

Instead, street drugs and prescription pharmaceuticals should be made freely available, just like alcohol and nicotine.

And, in the same moment the chains go off, legislation should be enacted to take the chains off ERs, insurance companies, Medicaid, and Medicare. To wit: if you make yourself sick or injure yourself by getting stoked up on a harmful drug, then you pay for your own medical care. If you can’t pay, hospitals will be allowed—nay, required—to turn you away. Your health insurer not only does not have to but will be legally enjoined from covering medical bills that result directly from a patient’s drug abuse. Ditto Medicaid: it will not be allowed to cover medical bills arising from drug or alcohol abuse. If you cause a car wreck and harm someone else or damage someone else’s property, your victims’ insurer will cover their bills, but by law you will be required to reimburse that insurer.

You say you’re a turnip? That’s OK. By law, your wages, your welfare payments, your alimony, your child support payments, your Social Security benefits will be garnished until such time as you cough up all the money…which probably will be for the rest of your miserable lifetime.

And if you can’t cover your own care, if you don’t have a credit card or a checking account or a friend or relative who’ll lend you tens of thousands of dollars to fork over to a hospital or the victims of your negligence, will the taxpayer take pity on you? Hell, no. If you can’t pay, you can go to meet your maker, removing one fleck of blight from the face of this planet.

Harsh?

Well, yeah.

But doesn’t it seem just the slightest bit harsh to you that normal human beings can’t get a bottle of the only cough nostrum that actually works because a few nitwits decide to spike their soft drinks with it? Doesn’t it seem just a bit harsh that all of us are underwriting the medical bills and the prison-cell rental for hare-brains who get in cars and pick up weapons while they’re spaced out on dope?

We’re too damn kind to these fools. We need to let them suffer the consequences of their behavior, and make them pay the bills for it.

 

Every now and again, a PF blogger will consider the ramifications of opportunity cost: what it costs to use your potentially valuable time to do tasks that could be hired out to others for a fraction of what your time is worth. Or, alternatively, the amount you can save in the future by spending on a relatively pricey project now. True, all that. I’d like to propose a variant, though: hassle cost.

Hassle cost: the value, y, of time, energy and aggravation spent on something that could be eliminated at a cost, x. If y > x, then it’s worth spending money to get rid of the nuisance.

Problem is, time is easy to value. As for the dollar value of energy spent and aggravation aggravated…it’s anyone’s guess. It’s a figure you may be able to calculate only in retrospect.

Case in point: I expected to feel really bad about cutting down the devil-pod tree. I don’t like to kill a wilted basil plant, to say nothing of a large shade tree. Figured to get depressed whenever I stumble into the backyard. But nay! Every time I walk out there and see that empty space, what I feel is a profound sense of contentment.

♥ No more bushels full of wet strappy leaves to haul out of the pool.

♥ No more wads of devil-pods choking Harvey and sticking out of his little orifice like black fangs. No more trips to the pool store to have Harvey disassembled, disentangled, cleaned, and reassembled.

♥ No more yellow spots to bleach out of the bottom of the pool.

♥ No more dunes of goopy pollen clogging everything that looks like a sieve or a filter anywhere near the damn pool.

There actually is a cost benefit to assassinating the tree. Chopping it down cost about $350. With the city’s new, inflated water rates, draining and refilling the pool cost about $400. Protestations of pool guys who profit from this adventure notwithstanding, the truth is it should not be necessary to drain and refill a swimming pool every other year. Far from it: my ex- has lived in the house we bought just off Central Avenue for more than 20 years and has never refilled the pool. The specific cause of my having to change out the water in this pool is the vegetative material that the tree has been dumping in there. Phosphates. That’s what you get: organic stuff that makes it impossible to keep the pool chemicals balanced. Gives you algae. Lots of algae.

Cost benefit, though, as you can see, is different from hassle cost. The hassle cost of the tree is measured not in hundreds of dollars but in hundreds of hours.

Hassle cost benefit: deep in the positive numbers.

🙂

 

This is worth knowing about: William J. Broad, a science writer at the New York Times, reports that some yoga poses, far from soothing your achin’ back while spiriting you to meditative nirvana, can do some serious damage, ranging from the very painful to the fatal. Take a look at his report. If you do yoga at all, you’ve probably been in at least some of the poses he describes.

Personally, I’ve never felt inclined to stand on my head, nor have I attempted the upward bow. But most of the others—the vajrsana, the extended side-angle pose, downward-facing dog, the cobra pose, the shoulder stand—are things I used to do all the time and still do occasionally. Broad describes neck, back, tendon and vascular injuries and even strokes (among very young people) as direct results of overdoing these basic, simple postures.

Our yoga instructor, who used to conduct classes in my home, often said that if you feel even the slightest pain, you should stop immediately. She urged the budding yogini to avoid poses that were painful or uncomfortable.

Looks like she was right.

So be careful on that yoga mat. Stay out of poses, such as standing on your head or shoulders, that inflict pressure on your spinal column. Don’t push yourself, and don’t get any egotistical ideas about “working through the pain.” The gratification is hardly worth a year or two of physical rehab—or a permanent disability.

Image: Originally posted to Flickr by zivpu at http://flickr.com/photos/57986783@N00/53793280. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.