The carpet in the lobby may be stained, and I may have had to wait twenty minutes for the truck to actually arrive, but the rental price was right. The Budget truck started well and drove smoothly, but with nothing in its cargo bed, any minor perturbation on the payment made the cargo hold rattle and my teeth grate. Happily, once the 10-foot truck was loaded with cargo, and with our GPS moving me southward toward Richmond, the rattling ceased.
If only I could say the same for the signals coming from my bladder. Loading the truck largely by myself was hot and sweaty work. I kept drinking glasses of water to quench my thirst, but on the two plus hour trip to Richmond, it all decided to come out, requiring frequent pit stops. While my wife and daughter sailed ahead in our daughter’s Honda, I ended up spending time at places like a Virginia Welcome Center on I-95 instead. At least I got to park in the truck lane for a change.
The truck’s cigarette lighter apparently wasn’t working, so the GPS was running on its battery. As I approached Richmond, it warned me of its low battery. I turned it off and followed signs. Once fully downtown I turned it back on and hoped it had enough juice to get me to the townhouse on West Marshall Street where my college bound daughter was to take up residence. I made it just barely. My wife accidentally left her cell phone at home, and I hadn’t written the address down elsewhere. Whew!
My wife and daughter were waving at me from down the street; I went too far and had to double back. Richmond doesn’t believe in many two way streets, so there was some jockeying and red lights to deal with before I parked the truck in front of my daughter’s new abode. Two young men, her new roommates, were ready to greet me and to help haul her stuff inside.
I was nervous about my daughter rooming with guys, but I shouldn’t have been. Mark prefers to spend most of his time in his room with the door shut. Occasionally you can hear his dog yapping and scampering through the floorboards. David was genuinely glad to see Rosie. They got along when first introduced the month before, and I knew he was safe because he was the son of a friend of my wife’s from work. Both seemed impossibly young (did I look so young when I was 21?), but David was a bit on the scruffy side. Both were quiet types, which meant this parent didn’t have to worry about loud boozy parties and drugs from the residents of this house.
Boxes were unloaded, torn open and in many cases their innards were assembled into things resembling furniture: a sort of a desk, steel shelving that would also act as something of a room divider (since my daughter got part of a large living room for her “bedroom”), and something to go behind the loo to hold toiletries. There was also a bed frame to assemble, a foundation encased in plastic and large plastic containers full of the accoutrements of living. Walling off the living room violated the rental agreement, but we were allowed to put a pole across the width of the room, some eleven feet, to provide some semblance of privacy for our daughter. This required some innovative amateur engineering. The steel shelves provided some privacy and storage space. Two long PVC pipes held together with a pipe connector had to be carefully cut, lowered into place and held level with a rope connected to a ceiling hook. Black sheets stitched together with a needles and thread went over these low-tech curtain rods, providing a virtual wall. Eventually the boxes were disposed of, the floor was vacuumed and our nearly twenty one year old daughter tried to settle into her first new bedroom in more than seventeen years.
A few blocks away is her real destination: Virginia Commonwealth University. Her townhouse and neighborhood turned out to be in better shape than I anticipated, given my exposure to too much substandard campus housing. The kitchen looked nearly new. The neighborhood was full of townhouses, most of which were rented by fellow students. However, turn the corner and there is a rougher looking commercial neighborhood. Turn onto Broad Street and you find more than a few scruffy homeless types smiling nicely while begging for spare change.
The sun was steadily sinking when we finished. Before leaving, we made time for a last supper of sorts. Bringing David along, we found a local pizza joint. It had Formica-topped tables and a counter where food was ordered. We ate greasy pizzas and chatted. Over dinner, our daughter’s parents (me being one of them) expressed our nervous worries in a seemingly endless series of nags and reminders, while David smiled and remarked how familiar it all seemed to him.
With dinner beginning to digest, we were back at her new townhouse and giving her hugs goodbye. We took deep breaths and started the engine of our rental truck. As we left, we watched her through the front window of the townhouse. David was already chatting with her, easing her nervousness. David, we could tell, was a good young man. He would find a way to take her gently under his wing, but as a peer, not an authority figure. David, we could see, was her bridge into the next phase of her life.
It was hard not to reflect and fret a little as we drove back north on I-95 to Northern Virginia. Speaking of fretting, our cat Arthur was not happy to be left alone all day. He stared at the door waiting for Rosie to come in. We let him sit on our lap and talked to him, but he seemed to know that his well-ordered world had been disturbed too. To bring some predictability to his life, he went back and sat on his special spot on the living room carpet. Wearily I returned the rental truck to a dark rental lot, putting nearly $50 in gas in it and dropping the keys in its after hours box.
Before bed, a shower was required, no matter how tired I was. I was returning to something that used to be normal: a house where the lights went off when we went to bed and where our daughter naturally fell asleep when we tucked her in. It felt momentarily weird, then gratefully normal.
Each day since we moved her in on Monday, we have fretted a bit about her. We have checked up on her on occasion with an email, but we are also feeling more settled ourselves in our new empty nest. For the truth about childrearing is that if you love them, at some point you have to send them packing. We did, with a lot of love, some stifled tears and great gobs of money.
The house is definitely quieter, and we will treasure those weekend and semester breaks when our daughter deigns to visit us. Nevertheless, we will also be appreciative to have our own couple space again. For the truth is that no matter how much you love your children, you don’t own them. At best, you only rent them. The rent is very high, and the work to raise them is often hectic and at times overwhelming. You know you won’t have turned out a perfect young adult, but perhaps on reflection you can say you did pretty well. You realize, it’s okay to have this loved, cherished and sometimes annoying person spend a couple decades with you and then let them go. It may feel more traumatic than natural, but it is natural.
The parenting role is never entirely over, but a transition is underway which is ultimately good for both parent and offspring. It is as it should be. The new silence in our house is a bit peculiar, but it feels sort of welcoming and well deserved.
I plan to sleep in very late on Saturday.
August 26th, 2010 at 08:46pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
one comment
Tags: Parenting, Young Adults
Our dining room is stacked with purchases and things encased in plastic. Our truck rental reservation is made, although it’s unclear to me whether an actual truck will be available on Monday. With so many college students moving into dorms and apartments, rental trucks are in short supply. We have purchased most of the items needed for our daughter to move to Richmond, Virginia and emptied our bank account in the process. The university’s checklist still has some unchecked spots. The whole application process at Virginia Commonwealth University is confusing and convoluted, meaning that only yesterday was our daughter able to sign up for classes. Because of the incessant delays, most of the classes that she wanted were already filled. She has no appointed adviser yet to guide her, and all the orientation slots are now full. She could call the undergraduate advisor for her department, but this involves her waking up before the sun goes down, something she is loathe to do. In short, procrastination on both her part and on her university’s part is costing time, money and opportunity. It is making this nervous father fret.
Procrastination drives me nuts, which is why I feel like I live my life in constant turmoil. Unfortunately, my wife and daughter are both chronic procrastinators. My wife can quite easily enter into a mindless mode where time, space and pressing deadlines disappear for hours at a time. When she emerges, I often get a predictable, “My goodness! I lost track of time again! I meant to do X, Y and Z.” I cannot complain since she was this way when I married her, but I was sort of hoping my daughter would not pick up her habit. Alas, she has, although I was pleased that she took initiative on a few things in her life recently, like arranging with her doctor for the shots she needed to be admitted. (Naturally, it happened at the very last moment.)
None of this should be a big deal since she will be twenty-one next month. Yet despite two years of community college, she still is challenged by logistics and life’s complexity in general. Perhaps I contributed to it through a process of learned dependence. Perhaps she needed to fail at things a few more times than she did. Instead, her left brained dad did a lot of her organizational thinking (and nagging) for her, with my wife adding her nervous worries periodically as well.
This all should change on Monday when we pack most of our daughter’s stuff along with a new bed, desk, printer, sheets and much of her other random detritus and move them (along, hopefully, with her) to a townhouse a couple blocks from VCU. She will wall off and inhabit much of the living room, while two young men will inhabit the upstairs bedrooms. All are quiet types. One of the young men is essentially a hermit, emerging only to go to classes. I suspect that she will fit in well with them, once she gets accustomed to her new urban abode. While lately her focus has been more on World of Warcraft than university, an event in her life this seismic is finally achieving a grudging priority. For the first time since she was about three years old she will sleep regularly somewhere else. Like it or not, life is changing for her.
It will be changing for my wife and me as well. The truth is that emptying the nest is both liberating and scary for all involved. I have been doing the parenting thing for two decades and it is now second nature to me. Come Tuesday morning, only silence will come from her bedroom. Our cat Arthur is likely to be puzzled and eventually pissed. When we are out, our daughter provides him with reliable amusement, at least when she is awake. In time, Arthur will likely half forget Rosie, and he will be more in our faces.
Some part of me will be glad for one less occupant in the house and the additional privacy. Some eighty percent of the reason things get disorderly in my house will suddenly disappear. Some other part of me will be concerned that something dreadful could be happening to our daughter. She has a cell phone but she is sporadic about carrying it around or keeping it charged. In addition, she will be two hours away. She could disappear and we might not be able to find her. It will be challenging not to call or text her just to see if she is okay. Since she is not mindful of things like cell phones, unanswered calls or text, contacting her may just cause unnecessary anxiety. Perhaps I need to adopt a policy of not trying. Even if I can resist temptation to call her up, I doubt that my wife can. It’s going to take a couple weeks before we relax.
Our daughter will likely go through similar feelings. Except for her new housemate, whom she met only once and the undergraduate advisor I introduced her to, she doesn’t know a soul in Richmond. As she is introverted by nature, it will probably prove challenging to make new friends. At first, she will probably feel lonely. I know I felt that way when I started at college. Fortunately, I got a very compatible roommate so it did not last long.
I am betting that her loneliness phase won’t last too long. Instead, it will soon be, Living here is a heck of a lot better than at home! There is no need to drive five miles or more to be anywhere of interest. Instead, walk a few blocks or less and community surrounds you: age twenty something people, most of them reasonably intelligent, with all the temptations and richness of a university around her.
I expect we will see her on some weekends, perhaps every weekend. Once I had a car, I tended to come home every other weekend. It worked out great. One weekend to enjoy the city as a single man, then one weekend home with family where my laundry was mysteriously was cleaned and all this wonderful and tasty food was plentiful and freely available. I found that institutional food (and later my own cooking) could only be ingested for so long before my body rebelled. My guess is that once our daughter finds a small group of friends she will be away more than at home on the weekends. Once our anxiety is lessened, we may think about her absence less and less too. At some point, it will seem normal.
On Monday, we have to get sweaty, pack her up, haul her stuff 120 miles south and then leave her in a strange city. Our bodies will course with a mixture of feelings. She will be back home for extended semester breaks and following graduation she will probably want to move back in full time. Nevertheless, she will also have had the experience of living apart from parents. Except for paying for that part of her life, I suspect she is going to like it, even if it means she has to wash her own dishes and bus her own table.
In the end, so likely will we.
August 18th, 2010 at 09:02pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Adolescence, College, Growth, Young Adults
(This was written on July 29, 2010.)
I am traveling east to west today. We are chasing the sun at 37,000 feet, making something close to a beeline between Washington Dulles International Airport and Seattle, Washington. Our 5:25 PM flight actually left the ground sometime around 7:30 PM, delayed by a combination of a recalcitrant cargo hold motor and cells of thunderstorms. But finally we are aloft and chasing the sun. Twilight is slowly unfolding outside our window. Perhaps by the time we arrive in Seattle around 9:45 PM it will finally be fully dark. Meanwhile the view outside the jet’s window shows a sky still somewhat light but with the ground largely shrouded in darkness. At 37,000 feet, the low stratus clouds hovering over the Great Plains look like waves of sand on the beach and sit far, far below us.
Technically this is the start of our vacation, but flying commercial rarely feels like vacation. The view is interesting but there are too many people too tightly pushed together in this fuselage, waiting for what seems like an interminably long flight to finally finish. Then perhaps my vacation will really start, but I know it really starts after a long sleep because I am already starting to feel the jet lag. It will take a day or two to get used to west coast time.
I leave at somewhat of an inopportune time. Some part of me wants to still be holed up in my office at work, answering email, listening to teleconferences, chatting with coworkers and grabbing a salad at the cafeteria. At least these days my work seems more like play than work. It wasn’t always this way, of course. The first few years in this new job were challenging as I adapted, not always without friction, to a new agency. Moreover, this is my first managerial position, and there was much for this neophyte to learn. Managing, I have learned, is more art than science. An effective manager is also a good people person, which I am not. I am learning strategies to cope with this deficiency. Now, finally, six years or so into the job it is finally coming all together. I feel a bit like a bewildered conductor with a talented but temperamental orchestra that is finally making the excellent new music that I wanted to hear. It is a nice feeling.
Seemingly gone are the old animosities that I felt but which were rarely not articulated. Perhaps after six years you finally become part of the furniture. Perhaps that is what it takes to finally feel the respect you feel is your due. Or, more likely, perhaps I have finally earned the respect that I craved. Now doors open and things happen. My big picture ideas that I felt were so important and have national impact are now on the cusp of fruition. It is a satisfying feeling.
Most of us search for relevance, perhaps in part to feed our own egos but also to feel that our life might have some tiny sliver of enduring value. I know that like most of us I will never achieve greatness. The odds are too large so trying is probably counterproductive. That doesn’t mean that individually and collectively we cannot all do good work. “Think globally. Act locally,” says the bumper sticker. That has been sort of my professional model all these years. Do your best to optimize that part of the universe that you can control but add touches of audacity, vision and perseverance. That’s really all any of us can do. In reality, no one achieves greatness alone, but only through other people. That is certainly the case with me. My contribution is largely one of leadership and perseverance. Others largely did the heavy lifting.
I can rail about global warming, the likely extinction of mankind, and the countless stupid ways we are mismanaging our country and our world. I can contribute to the dialog (this blog is part of that effort) but in the end I must acknowledge that my influence will be marginal at best. We are all within the swirl of larger forces. However, in the tiny area of life within my control, I can still aim and maybe just hit the bullseye.
I am also within a few years of Retirement Number One. I do not have to retire in 2012, but I could opt for a retirement. I already know that Retirement Number One would only be a stepping stone to my next and likely more part time job, which will be something not too dissimilar from the IT work I already do. I do sense though that I my professional life has crested. The view is nice and satisfying, but in the future I will have to set different and likely downsized criteria for my satisfaction and fulfillment. It might involve inspiring community college students who, I have learned, seemed largely inured to inspiration. In many ways, that would be a harder professional accomplishment and perhaps more satisfying. However, whatever large-scale impact I am to have on the world will shortly come to fruition. It remains to be seen whether my strategy will bear the fruit that I think it will. Time will tell.
So I feel wistful. Even if I choose not to retire and stay working until a heart attack fells me at my desk, things would still change around me. Bosses and coworkers would retire. Organizational dynamics would change. New problems would emerge that might be beyond my management ability. I would like to keep my professional life exactly where it is indefinitely. Yet, it cannot stay this way. Life moves too quickly. Too many chess pieces are in play. I know that others will follow in my footsteps and likely be just as competent, if not more competent, than I have proven to be. They too deserve the chance to stretch and to make the world a better place. Part of vindicating your success is to time your departure before the law of averages strike and you screw up something major.
Vacation is about relaxation, about seeing new places, and looking at life from a different perspective, like the suffused rose glow outside our window now alighting the atmosphere. I will get that in the next twelve days out here in Washington State and Oregon, and you will read some of it here. I look forward to tuning out the work side of my brain but right now, at 37,000 feet, it is not yet possible.
Tomorrow though, our latest adventure in the Pacific Northwest begins.
July 30th, 2010 at 12:34pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010, Travel |
no comments
Tags: Work
In honor of Fathers Day, this father is taking the day off.
However, keeping with the theme of Fathers Day, here are three father related blog entries worth your time if you haven’t read them.
June 20th, 2010 at 02:56pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Fathers, Fathers Day
I prefer to live under the delusion that I am indestructible and can stay forever young. This is delusional as I am 53. Anyhow, just in case I might be incorrect, I have been practicing some preventative strategies. For example, I have been eating healthy and for more than thirty years, I have been getting regular vigorous aerobic exercise. I get annual physicals and endure the indignities of colonoscopies and prostate exams. I apply sunblock more or less religiously before going outside in the sun. I largely abstain from caffeine and alcohol; drugs and cigarettes go without saying.
It all worked rather well until the last few years when various hitherto unknown health issues surfaced. These included various foot and nerve ailments and, more recently, a heart condition. Surgery and physical therapy have done a lot to help my foot and nerve issues. Now I struggle with periods of light headedness and occasional episodes of shortness of breath, likely caused by my irregular heartbeat.
Alas, there is no instant cure for an irregular heartbeat, nor is a cure a given. For the last few weeks I have been taking 25mg of a beta-blocker called Metoprolol to see if it will reduce my irregular heartbeats. To find out, in a couple weeks I get to wear another twenty four hour cardiac monitor and hopefully the results will show improvement. Based on how things are going my cardiologist will probably adjust my mediations again then repeat the cardiac monitor in other few months. I am getting the feeling that I have a condition that I will have to deal with for life, and that I will be ingesting Metoprolol or something like it every day until I die. It appears my delusions of indestructibility require modern medicines unknown to our hearty pioneering forefathers. In short, I am not exactly a triumph of natural selection but rather modern medicine.
Some part of me wonders if I might actually be healthier if I weighed more. It is true my blood pressure and cholesterol levels were higher when I weighed more. However, neither did I have an irregular heartbeat. It wasn’t until I dropped twenty pounds and lowered my blood pressure that these heart issues became manifest. Nor did I have fainting spells when I weighed more, perhaps because I retained more fluid when I had more fat. My blood pressure is now predictably in the normal range, but often borders on the low range. And since I had a fainting episode that put me in the hospital, I know my blood pressure can get dangerously low. So now I am encouraged to raise my blood pressure, at least a bit. I am one of a small number of Americans who are actually encouraged to add salt to their diet to help me retain water and thus raise blood pressure. So I sit here at 35,000 feet on a flight between Denver and Washington DC sipping Bloody Mary Mix to make sure I get a generous allowance of daily sodium.
To reduce the likelihood of fainting, I have been advised that I should avoid all diuretics, which includes not only alcohol but also caffeinated products. It’s good that I have tended to follow my teetotaler of father’s example. It is likely the absence of these products kept me from fainting for the first 53 years of my life. Yet chocolate is one diuretic that so far I have chosen not to give up. I am not sure that life is worth living without regular doses of chocolate. Chocolate helps make a lot of life endurable.
Still, two hospitalizations in three weeks as a result of experiencing low blood pressure symptoms have left me wary. Three weeks ago, I nervously boarded my first airline flight since my fainting episode. Oxygen levels and air pressure in general tends to be lower at 35,000 feet. I had visions of myself gasping for breath and then passing out on the aircraft, with no way to get to a hospital if I needed one. Fortunately, this was a specious worry. Today I am flying home after a week in Denver. However, perhaps because Denver is much higher in altitude than San Antonio, I have been experiencing some worrying symptoms. The mile high city has never has before made me feel this way before in many, many other trips. I also find myself occasionally hyperventilating. Today, for example, I started hyperventilating in the shuttle I took to the airport, perhaps because the driver did not turn on the ventilation. At the airport I also found myself often breathing deeply, as I waited through two and a half hours of flight delays. I assume some combination of my new heart condition and periodic vasovagal symptoms are at work, in spite of the beta blocker that I am on.
While beta blockers are supposed to help smooth out irregular heartbeats, like all drugs they have side effects. One effect I am already noticing is that they are lowering my heart rate, which probably triggers the hyperventilation. After all if you need oxygen and your heart will not beat faster, all you can do is breathe more deeply to compensate. I also notice that when working out, I can no longer push my heart rate much above 120. This means it is harder to do intensely aerobic or anaerobic exercises. I am not sure I could sprint for more than thirty seconds while on this drug. On the other hand, beta blockers can have some positive side effects. They can reduce or eliminate social anxiety and stage fright. They can also reduce the fear/flight response. Soldiers who face combat are sometimes given beta blockers.
Hopefully these drugs are helping me. At least at 300 feet above sea level (where I spend most of my life), I have noticed a marked improvement. But apparently it will take some time to find the right combination of drugs to travel with impunity again. I find this disturbing.
My hope is that some sort of drug and exercise regime will at some point have me feeling like normal all the time again, so I can go back to believing I am indestructible, with a little chemical help. It appears that like most fifty-something adults, I will need to redefine “normal”. So like many others my age, while I make slow progression toward a healthier and more normal future, it is likely that it will be a future that will never quite be what it was.
Looks like I’m mortal, dammit.
June 13th, 2010 at 09:14pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
one comment
Tags: Beta Blockers, Heart disease, Hyperventilation, Lightheadedeness, Metoprolol
So I am sitting in a conference room in Lakewood, Colorado. My laptop is purring away and I am enmeshed in the business of making money. But since I have internet, I have GMail open in a tab in my browser window. When I checked it periodically, it was full of the usual drivel, which are mostly various political campaigns and organizations grubbing for money or asking me to sign a web petition.
This time the subject of the email nearly gave me a heart attack. In big capital letters my father was announcing he was getting married.
I have nothing against marriage, being married nearly a quarter of a century myself. What you do not expect is that your father, after fifty-five years of marriage and who will turn eighty-four this autumn would be getting remarried. While certainly not immoral or illegal, it feels deeply unnatural. It’s like snow falling in Miami. If something bizarre like this ever happens to you, you will probably react a lot like I did. You sort of sit around dazed for a while not comprehending the news and wondering if this is some sort of late April Fools joke.
Once the initial shock wore off, I found that I was overcome with a mixture of feelings. There was a vague sort of happiness for my father. After all, who doesn’t want their parent to be happy, particularly in old age? There was also a touch of concern. Just how well does he really know this woman anyhow? Then there was my selfish side manifesting itself. If he dies married to her, will she inherit everything? Would his estate eventually end up with her children and grandchildren? There was also a touch of anger: how dare this woman come between me and my father! Maybe he would be happier being married, but the chances are his marriage would perturb our close relationship. Would she control him to the point that my relationship with Dad became wholly superficial? There was also amazement: why on earth would anyone want the hassle of getting remarried at his age? Does he want to be sexually active in his eighties? I had never broached the subject, of course, but I sort of assumed at age eighty plus, even if the desire was there, the ability to perform probably wasn’t. And there was a certain amount of relief. When it is his time to leave this planet, I won’t necessarily need to be at his side for days or weeks at a time watching him slip further and further into the void. His new wife will have the bulk of the duty.
That my father wanted to get married again was not in itself a surprise. My mother was hardly resting in her urn in the cemetery five years ago before he was checking out the many available widows at his retirement community. In fact, within months of my mother’s death, he had proposed to a woman a floor below him. She liked my father, but she just wanted to be friends. So friends they were. Yet I suspect that much of my Dad’s interest in her was the wan hope that friendship might eventually yield love. Of course, it never did.
Years passed and he finally figured out that he was wasting time. Otherwise, he seemed very happy. Unlike me, he is naturally affable and sociable. In a retirement community of thousands, it seemed he knew everyone’s name. So I wasn’t too surprised when he started dating Marie. Maybe I should have put two and two together when over the winter he took her to California to meet his sister, but I didn’t. I finally met her a few weeks ago, but I assumed she was just a girlfriend, some arm candy. She seemed nice enough, but I hardly had a chance to form more than a superficial impression of her. And now my Dad and this Marie woman are going to get married! They are scouting for a new apartment in their retirement community. I am warned there will soon be furniture to excess. Maybe this is as close as I will get to my share of his inheritance.
In truth, my father has been undergoing a late life renaissance for a number of years. Overall, I have been impressed with his ability to squeeze so much joy from this time of life. He was also fortunate to be a reasonably healthy and mobile male in a community where the men his age had mostly died off. If they had not died off, they were on their last legs. Still, I figured when I am his age, I might be principally dwelling on death. Instead, he is reveling in life in his retirement community, joining clubs, ushering at church, and even taking up square dancing. The square dancing thing took me for a jag. I come from a family of Dilberts with no hand eye coordination, but here he was with a Square Dancing for Dummies book, a weekly practice session and soon he was dancing with the dames.
I keep wondering, how will he surprise me next? Will he take up smoking, even though he never put a cigarette to his mouth? Will he start drinking, although the closest he came to drinking was sipping communion wine? Marie is apparently Irish. The good news is that means (unsurprisingly) that she is Catholic, still an important criteria for a spouse for my devout Catholic father. The bad news is that the Irish in general have a propensity for booze. So there might be plenty of alcohol at their wedding, date TBA. And he will probably be dancing for joy whilst my siblings and I are likely to be hanging on the sidelines and queuing up for carrots at the vegetable tray.
And then there’s his wife to be, my future (and the word is so hard to say aloud) stepmother. Here I am at age 53 and the last thing I expected to happen to me at my ripe age is in a new relationship with a stepmother. Should I call her Mom? I don’t think Marie would expect me to, and I hope she does not because Marie is probably all I will be able to muster. Thus far “Mom” has been reserved only for my biological mother (may she rest in peace) and my mother-in-law. I call my mother-in-law “Mom” only because I know she likes to hear it and she thinks of me as her son, somehow. I haven’t the heart to tell her I don’t think of her as my mother, never have and never will. However, I am pragmatic enough to realize that calling her “Mom” does do a lot for maintaining a harmonious relationship with her.
Stepmother?
For the most part my siblings have not weighed in on this impending nuptial. I suspect most realize what I do: there nothing we can do about it anyhow and if we tried to interfere it would only generate bad karma. So if it makes Dad happy in his golden years, why not give him our blessing? So I will, but not without stifling some of my negative feelings.
I am not the only relative feeling some shock. My niece posted yesterday on Facebook, “My grandpa is ENGAGED?!?!?!?!” Exactly! It’s like the earth decided to rotate from west to east all of a sudden. Whether this remarriage is ultimately good, bad or indifferent, my boat is being rocked. I don’t have to like it, but I have the feeling I best get used to the turbulence.
June 9th, 2010 at 09:39pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Elderly, Marriage, Remarriage, Senior Citizens
My blog seems to be on something of a health kick lately. This is because over the last year I have been dealing with more than my usual number of health issues. It’s not just me. This week, my mother in law complained of chest pains. Doctors found a blockage near her heart and put in an emergency stint. She then suffered a heart attack that was followed a day later by another and worse heart attack. She was technically dead for ten minutes until they finally managed to restart her heart. She is still in intensive care and is delusional, a condition I saw my own mother go through since she also suffered from congestive heart failure. Her long-term prospects look dubious, but she is about eighty years old. She is fortunate to be alive in any condition, because she made lifetime habits of smoking and not exercising. My wife plans to fly out to Phoenix tomorrow to be with her mother. Her return date is unknown. If all this close-to-home health news were not enough, one of my sisters called me today to tell me that she has been diagnosed with the onset of adult diabetes.
So feeling my mortality, I am focused on healthy living, as are many other people including First Lady Michele Obama. Obama is busy planting a vegetable garden on the White House lawn, demonstrating healthy eating and fitness, and working to end childhood obesity. This is long overdue but of course, this being America, there is fierce resistance. The processed food industry is all up in arm about taxing nutritionally empty foods like soda that give us sugar highs and put us prematurely into the hospital. I heard one C-SPAN caller the other morning (a self professed Tea Party member) dreadfully upset that “big government” was trying to regulate sodium in our food and was thinking about raising taxes on nutritionally empty foods like sugared sodas. To me these are “better late than never” proposals, but it makes other American hopping mad. I wonder if they also object to nutritional information on packaged food. Apparently, it is more important to be nutritionally ignorant and cause millions to die prematurely and deal with wholly preventable diseases than it is to increase the size of government. You have to wonder if the nutritionally empty crap these people are likely eating is affecting their judgment.
I avoid “reality” TV shows but about a year ago, while stuck in a hotel room, I watched an entire episode of The Biggest Losers, which now has many international spinoffs. As with most of these “reality” shows, it seems to be much more about fostering unhealthy relationships between fellow contestants than losing weight. The more weight your team loses, the “better” you are doing. The grand prize of $250,000 would certainly be nice to win, but at what price? In any event, in addition to the constant sniping you can watch contestants downing protein shakes, dehydrating themselves, working with personal trainers and engaging in the vigorous cardiovascular exercise they ignored most of their lives.
If you are obese, losing weight is usually vital for your long-term health. If you are overweight, it is also a good idea. Still, losing twenty, 40, 80 and in some cases more than 100 pounds is not by itself healthy. First, if the calories you are ingesting are not nutritious, you are not being good to your body. Second, as I discovered, dehydration can result in syncopes (fainting spells), falls, concussions and even death. No wonder Biggest Loser contestants in case they should they end up in the hospital or drop dead sign forms disclaiming NBC from all responsibility. Perhaps the most likely thing that will happen when you lose weight is that soon after the cameras are tracking your progress, you will quickly rebound, putting back the weight you gained and often more, such as happened to actress Kirstie Alley. Arguably, if you were just going to gain it back, you might have been better off not dieting in the first place.
Granted I only watched one episode, but what I saw on The Biggest Losers appalled me. Not only does the extreme competition glorify sniping at fellow team members (hardly the sort of harmonious living the Dalai Lama would encourage) but extremely rapid dieting almost guarantees that you will gain back the weight. A real competition for The Biggest Losers would not emphasize how much weight contestants lost per week, but track the contestants on how long they maintained a healthy weight, ate sensibly and followed a moderate exercise regime. The show should reward those who took off lots of weight in a sensible manner: by taking off a pound a week. They should reward those who have also successfully kept the weight off. This, of course, would make for very uninteresting television, but seeing how others did it would be very instructive to the sixty percent of us either overweight or obese.
How do people manage to lose and keep the weight off? My last post is perhaps instructive, but my method is but one of many. Methods that work will be tailored to the personality of the person and work with their eating and exercise preferences. Like alcoholism, I see obesity as a lifelong disease. I will forever be at risk of being overweight and obese. It is only through incorporating effective eating and exercise strategies into my life in a natural way that I will succeed in my real goal: being at a normal weight and remaining at a normal weight. Of course, I want all this, plus I want to be fit, to have a healthy heart, get optimal nutrition and never have to worry about high blood pressure or high cholesterol. I want to pass away gently in my sleep sometime in my nineties. I’ve kind of figured out this means I won’t be eating many French fries or getting double cones at Baskin Robbins.
In sum up, The Biggest Losers contestants are almost predestined to be tomorrow’s biggest gainers, an inconvenient fact that the producers will not bother to highlight. What we need is much more clinical research into the best techniques for losing and maintaining a healthy weight. In addition, we need research on staying optimally healthy while spending our working days in office buildings typing on keyboards.
I would like to see billboards highlighting people who have taken off significant amounts of weight and have successfully maintained a healthy weight for five, ten or more years. These billboards should come with URLs to websites so people can learn more about how they did it. Like Miss America contestants, these real Biggest Losers should tour American classrooms and give public lectures spreading their gospel. Maybe this way, along with reducing sodium, calorie and fat content in our foods and restaurants and encouraging fitness both at home and work, Americans will revert to being fit and healthy again.
I would not waste your time looking for useful tips on how you can weather our obesity crisis by watching The Biggest Losers. Instead, you might want to make an appointment with your physician.
May 15th, 2010 at 05:43pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010, Sociology |
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Tags: Exercise, Nutrition, The Biggest Losers, Weight Loss
About a year ago, I wrote that I would periodically keep you abreast on my journey of weight loss and healthier living. (Actually, I wrote this mostly to remind myself so I would not slip.) Based on previous attempts at dieting, I discovered a truth: taking weight off is relatively easy. Keeping it off is harder. So how am I doing a year later? How am I doing after about nine months of Weight Watchers, giving up Weight Watchers because I wasn’t learning anything new and am now all on my own? Did I balloon to the size of Orson Welles (or for that matter Kirstie Alley)? Did I make it back to the same weight I was at when I was married and was a skinny thing? Did I yoyo back and forth? What great wisdom have I learned that I should share with the rest of the world?
A year later, I find myself within a couple pounds of where I was when I left Weight Watchers. That part is good. When I weighed myself on Monday, I was one pound above what is considered a healthy weight for my height. That part is not ideal, but being one pound overweight is better than being twenty three pounds overweight, which is where I was when I began my journey in January 2009.
So I can say I succeeded, with an asterisk. My goal was always to take off a chunk and then maintain it, since that was where I had failed many times before. The asterisk means that I slipped a bit. Over the holidays, I indulged too much, exercised too little, and not coincidentally, I also picked up five pounds. I knew what to do (start counting using Weight Watchers points again) but it took me a month or so to find the wherewithal to do it. When I did, it worked reliably again and the pounds came off. Yet, once I lost the few pounds I put back on, I found little incentive to keep reducing. Getting back to the weight when I was married continues to be an elusive and perhaps not very important goal.
Nevertheless, maintaining a near healthy or healthy weight for a year is a genuine accomplishment. I went back to some bad habits, but not all of them. When I wasn’t counting points on a sheet of paper, I had a good idea how much I could realistically eat and not gain weight.
I am usually fastidious during the week. For example, for breakfast this morning, I had one cup of Cheerios with skim milk and a cup of blueberries. This carried me over nicely until lunch. I packed a banana and a cup of grapes to have with lunch. When I eat at the cafeteria at work, four times out of five I am getting a soup and salad for lunch. It’s nearly automatic. My sweet tooth will not wholly be denied. I try to fit in one chocolate treat, which often means a bag of Dark Chocolate M&Ms, a favorite. My salads are quite low fat and full of healthy vegetables. I skip salad dressing and garnish the top with just a little cheese. Dinner, at least when I am eating alone, often consists of an entrée of from the diet part of the frozen food aisle. Lean Cuisine gets a fair amount of my business. Many of their entrees are quite tasty and reasonably healthy. (I particularly enjoy their Shrimp and Angel Hair Pasta, one of the best diet entrees ever, except for the sodium.) Their main value is portion control. I may supplement it with some bread, add in a banana or some other fruit. If my sweet tooth calls, have a 1-point Weight Watchers Fudge Stick.
On the weekends, I am more lax. On my Fridays off, my wife and I still engage in the fatty practice of breakfast at Silver Diner. Once or twice a month doesn’t make it a bad habit. Instead, it’s a treat. Otherwise, I have given up most restaurant eating. Recently, someone at work has been leaving out chocolate Easter eggs and I confess it is hard to pass them by without doing some grazing. I do binge at times, but not egregiously.
Over the last year, I have also been challenged by other physical problems. It is hard to follow Weight Watchers when you are having vein or tarsal tunnel surgery, and two hospitalizations these last two months hasn’t helped either. It is much easier to be good when your life is not topsy turvy.
My doctor is still not happy because my cholesterol level is still elevated, but not dangerously (110 bad cholesterol). He would like me to eat a lower fat diet than I do, but my diet is markedly lower in fat than it used to be. It would be difficult to excise too much more fat from my diet, but if driven by necessity I am sure I could. In my near future, I may end up on statins or other drugs to reduce cholesterol. Over the last eighteen months or so, I have also developed an irregular heartbeat. It is likely though that dieting has reduced heart problems rather than caused them.
My exercise is reasonably consistent, but at a lower level than when I weighed twenty pounds more. When I ate too much, I tried to make up for it by exercising more. Exercise is still a good idea, and I typically hit the health club three times a week as well as walk up many staircases. While beneficial, if you want to maintain a healthy weight, excessive exercise has no particular advantage. If anything, burning those calories makes you want to eat more. One of the lessons I have learned is that although you need enough exercise, you do not need to go overboard. If you are concerned about having and maintaining a healthy weight, calories matter more. In general, Americans consume far more calories than we need. I have trained myself to demand fewer calories than I used to. If you are struggling with this problem, I suspect you can too.
So here’s to me and my mostly successful first year, and here’s hoping a year from now if I write about my adventures in healthy living and weight loss again, I will at least be where I am now. Perhaps I will find the impetus to take off another fifteen pounds and literally be the man I was when I was married. It would make a good goal for my 25th wedding anniversary in October.
May 12th, 2010 at 07:38pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
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Tags: Exercise, Health, Weight Loss
Why is it that cigarettes come with prominent labels from the Surgeon General warning us about the unhealthy consequences of smoking, but not fast food?
By now, even smokers acknowledge that their habit is unhealthy and could kill them. For some reason we have not yet acknowledged the same is also true about most fast food and, increasingly, most of the food served at restaurants of all types across the United States.
As bad as cigarettes and tobacco products are for your health, arguably the unhealthy food sold at fast food restaurants is even worse. I am not advocating that you give up KFC and take up smoking instead, but if you had to choose between eating healthy and smoking versus a fast food diet and not smoking, arguably the former the healthier choice. Maybe all the antioxidants from a healthy diet would reduce your likelihood acquiring cancer from smoking.
As unhealthy as fast food is, you would think that fast food restaurants might be getting a clue. You would think that maybe they would be working to make their foods if not healthy, at least less likely to kill you. Instead, there is evidence that they are going the opposite direction. The latest really bad idea from the fast food industry comes from KFC, which invented a new “sandwich” so unhealthy that if he weren’t planted six feet under The Colonel would doubtless blanch. It’s called the Double Down Sandwich.
KFC’s original marketing germ was probably something like, “We need to invent a new item that emphasizes our core product and is different, saltier, greasier and thus more addicting than anything we have thus far developed.” The result was the Double Down “Sandwich”. I put sandwich in quotes because hitherto a sandwich has always meant some food (generally proteins) placed between two slices of bread. Instead, KFC replaced the buns with two fried chicken breasts and placed between them layers of bacon, cheese and one of KFC’s special sauces. The result is an innovative “entrée” with enough sodium to wholly cover your daily need. Of course, this assumes that you are not already salt sensitive, which many Americans are, in which case it will raise your blood pressure and possibly cause hypertension.
The good “news” about the Double Down Sandwich is that if you are not salt sensitive and you are a big believer in the Atkins diet, maybe you can lose weight eating one of these things. Granted one “sandwich” does have 540 calories, which means for most women three and a half of these a day (and nothing else) would satisfy your calorie requirements. With two chicken breasts it is packed with protein. Unfortunately, your body does not need a huge amount of protein. One grilled chicken breast a day is all the protein your body needs.
But hey, without the buns, it’s low carbohydrate, right? Well, that’s hard to say. So far, I haven’t been able to find the “nutritional” information beyond the calories, sodium and fat count (32 grams, which is about the total fat per day you should have on a low fat diet, 10 grams of which are saturated). However, the chicken breasts are slathered in KFC’s secret coating then vat fried, so there should be plenty of carbohydrates there. Cheese has carbohydrates as well, and their secret sauce is likely loaded with them in addition to the fat. So maybe Dr. Atkins would not approve.
Nor is this “sandwich” by any means the most egregious fast food entrée out there. If you have the stomach for it, check out some of these “entrees”. Taco Bell, for example, has a “salad” with 1490 calories, 60 grams of fat and 2540 mg of sodium. Restaurants have become clever by hiding their lack of nutrition under the guise of healthy food.
The Double Down Sandwich is notable because it is so in your face. I am sure there are some who can look at a picture of it and start salivating. Most of us though will instinctively recoil. It looks evil because there is not even a hint that there is something healthy about it. Adding a bun would be an improvement. Even if it were your standard bun made from white flour, at least it would have some modest nutritional value and the bun would contribute minimal fat and salt while helping to fill you up. Instead, KFC replaced the arguably healthiest part of its sandwich with something even far worse: two fried chicken breasts.
Now it is true that you can order a grilled chicken version of this “sandwich” with “only” 460 calories and “only” 23 grams of fat. For some bizarre reason, the grilled version though comes with more sodium: 1480 grams worth. However, don’t expect your Double Down Sandwich to serve chicken from free range chickens (although considering one “sandwich” costs about $5 you might assume as much). No, KFC like most fast food vendors gets their chicken from 52 facilities and 18 suppliers across the country that follow standards set by the National Council of Chain Restaurants and the Food Marketing Institute. This means before your chicken was turned into a Double Down Sandwich, it likely spent its brief life in dark, dank and poorly ventilated poultry houses eating feed full of antibiotics. These antibiotics might in turn be lowering your resistance to many antibiotics. Perhaps the cows that supplied the cheese were pasture fed, but I wouldn’t count on it.
So print this entry out and cut out that picture of the Double Down Sandwich. This way, if tempted to eat fast food, particularly at KFC, a glance should dissuade you. It should make you take a beeline toward a Whole Foods store instead. Having said this, I expect the Double Down Sandwich to be a runaway success for KFC. Just as most American smokers for decades liked to pretend cigarettes were somehow natural and healthy, most regular American fast food consumers are the same way. They will be salivating as they approach the KFC. Doubtless, they will be buying the Double Down Sandwich instead of the garden salad because the Double Down is “real food” unlike that yucky green stuff. KFC stockholders will likely be very happy as well and now that they have upped the ante, and the McDonalds and Burger Kings of the world will be looking for “innovations” like this and wondering how they can out-grease it.
May 10th, 2010 at 04:44pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
no comments
Tags: Fast Food, KFC
There are many good aspects about having only one child. There are also certain aspects that are not ideal. For one, as an only child, your child has no older siblings to emulate. I was the fifth child so when my turn came for college I knew what to expect. I was both happy and scared at the thought of semi-independent living. As is often the case, I found college transformational, both academically and personally. College forced me to step outside my comfort zone. By the time I got my degree, although I had no job prospects, I knew I could hack this independent living thing.
Most of us baby boomers could not wait to leave Mom and Dad. If my daughter is a typical example, the situation is wholly reversed now. I went straight to a four-year college. She went to community college. Her choice kept her educational expenses low. There was no off campus housing that could compete with the comforts of home. Here the Internet and phones are free, and she can eat what she wants even at 4 a.m. If she leaves a mess in the sink, while her parents will complain she will blithely tune us out. She is largely tone deaf to our pleas, a habit acquired from twenty years of living with us, seventeen of which have been spent in her bedroom overlooking our front lawn.
Eventually though the community college experience has to end and if you want a bachelor’s degree, you have to go to a real college. This means a big life transition. She sporadically worked with counselors and got lots of conflicting advice on what courses she needed for her goal of being a high school English teacher. Over time, she narrowed her choices of college to one: Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. It helped that they were not too picky. If you had an associate’s degree from a Virginia community college, you were pretty much guaranteed admission.
Deciding to go to VCU and actually engaging our daughter in checking out the campus were two different things entirely. Like many of her generation, she seemed content to drag her feet. She also likes to sleep days and stay up nights. I am frankly amazed that she has almost earned an associate’s degree at all, as most of her time seems to be spent playing World of Warcraft in the wee hours rather than studying. With minimal nagging, she did manage to apply to VCU online. Some weeks later, this caused her to receive an invitation to Transfer Student Day at VCU. She seemed to realize she had no more reason to drag her feet. So on Monday, we drove two hours south to Richmond.
I was expecting to be underwhelmed by VCU, but the campus pleasantly surprised me. It sits on the edge of Richmond’s modest downtown. VCU is actually split into two campuses. Unless you are a medical student, you spend most of your time on the Monroe Park campus on the western side. The campus immediately made me wistful. It was the sort of university I wanted to go to but didn’t quite make it to. I went to the University of Central Florida, which at the time was primarily for older adults struggling to get a degree while working a full time job. It was a commuter’s university. VCU was in my mind a proper college campus where most students were full time, lived nearby, and either walked or biked to class.
It took a while to find a parking garage and we had to ask a few strangers to point us to the Student Commons. Traffic cops assisted the voluminous students (many of whom were bicyclists) across streets. Bikes were everywhere and seemed to be the preferred mode of transportation. The VCU students looked normal. This is in marked contrast to the many community college students I have taught over the last ten years, who often looked like zombies. The Student Commons was clearly the center of academic life on the campus. We acquired a map at an information booth and started scouting the neighborhood, which pulsed with an invigorating academic beat.
When your daughter is twenty, you cannot really tell her what to do, but you can nudge her a bit. Since she wanted to be an English teacher, I knew she would spend most of her time in the English Department. The idea of actually visiting to the English Department had never entered her brain. However, I took the time to study the VCU web site to find the one person on campus that would probably be the most use to her: the undergraduate advisor for the English Department. We actually found her at her desk across the street in the Hibbs buildings. She looked busy, but not too busy to spend fifteen minutes or so advising a new student. I wisely decided to leave the two of them alone, but I did hear snippets of their conversations out in the hall. I listened as my daughter somewhat unwittingly found herself increasingly engaged. She learned things no one else had told her, like she needed to transfer her advanced placement courses, and that she could get her master’s degree at VCU in just three years. I smiled to myself. Score! This is why God invented fathers.
Back at the Student Commons, we also found an off campus housing office. On campus housing is quite limited, so most students live off campus. But where to live? Neither of us had a clue. While I had passed Richmond many times on I-95, I had never really been in Richmond before. Where are the good neighborhoods? Which neighborhoods should be avoided? A young man with a large map of downtown Richmond patiently lead us through the various neighborhoods and highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of each neighborhood. How to find a roommate? My experience of using bulletin boards had morphed into online bulletin boards. He showed us the site, and gave us tips on registration.
The actual Transfer Day event was somewhat anticlimactic, as we had already gotten most of the information we needed. Nevertheless, we did speak to two other students working on getting their teaching credentials and learned from them a lot about academic life. Student life includes a lot of theater, which I knew would engage my daughter. Before leaving back for home though, we toured the various neighborhoods where students found housing to see if any spoke to her.
Richmond is a prettier city than I expected, full of old townhouses and Victorian houses, most of them very well maintained in spite of being mostly shared by transient VCU students. If it wasn’t for all the obnoxious statues to dead Civil War generals, most of whom were slaveholders, I might consider living in Richmond myself.
Since returning home my daughter has resumed staying up nights and playing World of Warcraft, but I also know she is thinking harder about her future. Before Monday, VCU and higher education was something of an abstraction. Now it is something she has experienced first hand. She now has to sift through a number of choices and deal with some difficult logistical issues, just like the rest of us adults. Slowly, and very reluctantly, she seems to be growing up at last.
April 29th, 2010 at 11:25am
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2010 |
no comments
Tags: College, Community Colleges, Virginia Commonwealth University, Young Adults
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