Occam's Razor

The worst thing about going to the doctor is not when they tell you that you have incurable cancer. It’s when they put you on the scale. I don’t want to know how much I weigh so I don’t peek, but doctors care. They are obsessed with weight, body mass indexes and other warning signs like blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

It seems that once again I have succeeded in taking off weight and then slowly but incrementally putting it back on again. Here I am hardly unique. In fact, it is hard to find the case of someone who after taking off large amounts of weight doesn’t put it back on again.

Permanent weight loss after decades of being overweight or obese most of the time is actually quite hard. Given our ever-expanding American girth, it seems like Mission Impossible. It is made harder by the tons of disinformation about healthy eating and weight loss out there, plus the heaping doses of guilt you absorb. You would think with all the money spent by the National Institute of Health they might have a study that would indicate the most effective ways of losing weight and keeping it off. Even if there were such a way, most doctors operate on the illusion that weight loss is handled through a one size fits all solution. “Eat less and exercise more,” is basically what they will tell you.

In fact, I had been eating less and I get plenty of exercise. While I get vegetables and lean meats on a daily basis, I clearly have been eating too many carbohydrates, which my body promptly turned into fat. This comes in part from exercise, which burns blood sugar and makes me crave carbohydrates. The Dark Chocolate M&Ms addiction has also contributed to my carbohydrate problem. Anyhow, my cardiologist felt the need to give me a stern lecture about my weight last week.

“Look doctor,” I told her. “I’m good at taking weight off. Like most Americans, I have done it lots of times. The only problem is keeping it off. I don’t want to waste my time with another trip to Weight Watchers when their success rate is as miserable as anyone else’s in the diet industry.”

This doctor though was prepared. Cardiologists see lots of overweight and obese people. They deliver this lecture dozens of times a day. Apparently this practice got so sick of not having any real solutions for their patients that one of the practice doctors decided to do something about it. He thoroughly researched the problem and then set up a clinic down the hall from their office. “If you want to take weight off and keep it off, go see them,” she told me. So I did.

Of course, what I really wanted was a diet where I could literally have my cake and eat it too. Every dieter wants a painless weight loss plan. We particularly want one that requires us to eat lots of easily processed sugary carbohydrates. Of course, no such plan exists that actually works. Lots of plans, including Weight Watchers’ newest one, wants to convince you otherwise. Weight Watchers has a relatively new “Fruit is free” plan. Their market has always been “eat what you want, just a lot less of it.” The new plan lets you eat as much fruit as you want but ups the points on everything else. You can lose weight if you follow their plan. But more than likely because your carbohydrate addiction craving has not really been solved, you will put the weight back on. It’s not bad for their business model. You reenter the program, take the weight off again, and their cash registers go ching.

Thus I found myself yesterday talking to my new diet coach at The Healthy Weigh Now down the hall from my cardiologist. While the doctor in charge and the nurses and coaches there actually work for the cardiology practice, the program they are following is really the Ideal Protein plan. No fruit allowed on this plan, or pretty much anything in the way of carbohydrates. Not much in the way of calories either. The plan is 900-1000 calories a day. It’s no surprise then that those who follow the plan take off weight, and quickly. Women lose on average 2-3 pounds a week; men 3-5 pounds a week.

This plan stuffs you with vegetables, but also “ideal” proteins. To burn fat, you must first use up sugar in the blood. The body will then turn to muscles for energy and finally resort to burning fat. Their “ideal” protein supplements keeps your muscles from losing muscle mass and convinces your body to instead burn fat. And so it goes if you can stick to the diet.

The first twenty-four hours has been a bit challenging but not too difficult. I find myself mildly hungry for much of the day, but that should pass in a couple of days. “Meals” though stretch the definition. Two out of three meals come from their prepared food packages, which are often powders combined with water. There is a daily snack from one of their approved snacks. All emphasize protein. Dinner consists of eight ounces of lean protein and certain vegetables. There are also numerous vitamin supplements, olive oil, fish oil and lots of water to drink. The food categories so far taste better than I thought, but calling a half glass of fruit flavored high protein “juice” a breakfast is a bit much. Just follow the protocol, they tell me, and those pounds will quickly disappear. “You will soon be punching new holes in your belt,” they assured me. It just works.

And I am confident that it will make me lose weight quickly. So I have really only one question: will my body rebel and I find myself at a Dunkin Donuts scarfing down boxes of French Crullers, the food I would prefer to eat?

If so then comes the real challenge: keeping the weight off for good. Here is where the plan will hopefully succeed where others have failed, as I transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 and eventually all the way to Phase 4, with a doctor and coaches weighing and watching and adjusting and advising all along the way.

When I can pass a plate of brownies at the dessert bar without instinctively wanting to reach for one of them, that’s when I know I will have succeeded.

She took her final exam today, the very last exam for her very last class in a journey that consumed five years (two in community college) and three at Virginia Commonwealth University. “She” would be my daughter, age 23, who now merely needs to wait for the mail to get her diploma for a bachelor’s degree in English. Despite some prodding, she doesn’t want to attend her own graduation.

Which means she is mostly home now and we will continue to pay the rent on what will likely be her empty room in Richmond through the end of July. She needs to find a job but if her experience is like mine it may be a year or two before she finds a “real” job, assuming there are real jobs for people with English degrees. There are a few of them out there, and I am not talking about “do you want fries with that” jobs at the local Burger King. A real job for a while though might be working at a Costco or Wegmans, where they pay a living wage, which would be great because I don’t want her to get too attached to her old bedroom. Rather, it’s time for her to move out once and for all.

It’s hard to say how long that will take but I’ll lay odds somehow a year from now she will still be inhabiting her bedroom. Young adults today are painfully aware of the true cost of living, which is much higher than it was when I was a youth. This may be because so many things are assumed: the car, the smartphone, health insurance, high speed Internet and they are used to mom and dad paying for them. I don’t care if $12 an hour really is a living wage these days; that probably won’t buy you all of the above, even with a roommate or two.

What she wants to do is goof off, sleep late, stay up all night and when not distracted by things on the Internet write the great novel that probably won’t get sold, at least not without a whole lot more pain and suffering. Fortunately she is a bit more realistic now and is sending out random resumes, which suggests intent to find a job but not necessarily serious commitment. She could live a lot cheaper, assuming she lived alone, by settling in Richmond where she just finished her degree. But the jobs would pay a lot less and she seems happy to be home on a more or less full time basis. She actually cleaned her room and removed heaps of trash off her desk the other day. Either she is trying to get her life in order or she is planning to start a new burrow. Time will tell.

We’ve suggested some employers that might hire English majors. A friend at my church works for Motley Fool, and they hire English majors. Except she knows nothing about personal finance other than living on our money and making her allowance stretch until the end of the month. She wants to learn less, although I have provided a couple books on personal finance as a “gift”. The headquarters of Learning Tree in nearby Reston is near us. They teach mostly leading edge technology courses to people whose employers have deep pockets. They need people to write content for their web pages and course curriculum. And I have another friend whose office is always willing to hire college graduates, providing they want to learn the business of making specialized contact lenses. She worked there briefly out of high school and found it didn’t agree with her. I doubt she would want to give it another try.

Still, it is an accomplishment having a degree of any kind, and getting a degree in English is more interesting than it seems. She wrote a thesis on arguably the world’s worst English poet, William McGonagall. She learned a lot about Old English, and obscure Scottish literature. She interned at a Richmond publishing house and worked with female prisoners at a local jail teaching creative writing. Mainly she had the university experience, such as it is today, minus the fun stuff like sororities. She is not social enough for that stuff. She had the usual mixture of brilliant and mediocre professors, ate in the dining halls, learned that parking tickets cost real money, and that you can have really crappy roommates.

We learned that college education today is very expensive. Once we entertained the idea that, as parents with one child, we could send her to a private university. What a crazy idea! Her bachelor’s degree took a year longer than we budgeted. We paid for two cars, only because she wrecked the first one driving home with a homeless kitten. The expenses added up quickly. The nearly final total according to Quicken:  $116,238.05, or $36,238.05 more than the $80,000 I thought we were going to spend. And these are just the direct costs. It’s amazing anyone can afford to get any kind of degree these days. At least she graduates debt free. We were her scholarship fund.

Parenting is not over. Now comes the coaching phase, followed by the nagging and heaping on the guilt phase if necessary. The job hunting is still poor, and bad in particular for English majors with lackluster GPAs. At least here in Northern Virginia the unemployment rate is relatively low, but the mere hassle of commuting around here will probably ensure that she calls someplace far away from here home eventually.

A new adventure called real life awaits her. “What’s it like, dad?” she asked me some weeks ago. “Well, it’s not a lot of fun. But you get used to it.” And really, that’s about the most honest thing you can say about adulthood. I wish you the best, kid, but it’s time for you to cut the apron strings and fully direct your own life. Hopefully, we gave you enough of the tools to make your life meaningful but for the most part the rest will be up to you.

Sorry Razor fans for being a bit remote this week. Life has taken me places I didn’t want to go, like Bay 18 at Fairfax Hospital’s emergency room and subsequently room T275 Bed 2. The only good part of this story is that it wasn’t me in that hospital bed. It was my wife Terri. Last Saturday around 3:30 p.m. she had a seizure.

I was down in the basement putting a second coat of paint on the walls of our rec room. I was subliminally aware of my wife upstairs from her humming and the sound of her pushing one of those Swiffer cleaner mops across our kitchen floor. Then abruptly I heard the loud sound of a bellowing seal, or so it sounded. “Whoop, whoop, whoop,” was the only way to describe it, sounds of a body parts hitting solid walls, then a huge thunk as she hit the floor. I dashed upstairs to find the door barred by her body. With considerable force I pushed her body out of the way and wedged myself between the door and the wall. I found her face down on the floor, twitching, something like bile coming out of her mouth and incontinent. She was bleeding from a cut above her left eye, and the swelling was rapidly turning her forehead into a grapefruit. If I hadn’t been on heart medicines, I might have joined her on the floor myself from the shock.

I remembered some advice to take deep breaths, then quickly reached for the phone and dialed 911. Did she have a heart attack? She was breathing, sort of, through a small opening in her mouth obstructed by her tongue. Her face was turning gray. The operator had me turn her on her back, not an easy maneuver in so small a space. To facilitate her breathing, I found I had to wedge some fingers into her mouth. She was getting grayer and her forehead was growing larger.

Amazingly, within five minutes two ambulances and a fire truck were at our door and a squad of EMTs was in the house. They asked questions about her medical history (no previous history of seizures), medications she was on (I babbled some of the few I remembered, but she is about a dozen), her conditions (quite a few there too) while they stuck things into her arms, put an oxygen mask over her face and tried fruitlessly to bring her to consciousness.

“Take her to Fair Oaks Hospital and I’ll follow,” I said knowing she preferred it to Reston Hospital. She stabilized a bit. I gathered her stuff, failed to find her list of prescriptions, grabbed my cell phone and began a comedy of errors. I followed the wrong ambulance down the parkway, which abruptly turned around. Ohmigod, I thought, they must be taking her to Reston Hospital because they can better treat something that had just developed. I did a U turn with the ambulance which cleared all the lights while I waited at them. At Reston Hospital’s emergency room, I found an ambulance parked outside but they had no record of her. I ran back to my car and drove as fast as I could back down the parkway to Fair Oaks Hospital’s Emergency Room. No, she hadn’t come in there but since it was in the Inova network they checked Inova’s other hospitals. The ambulance had delivered her to Fairfax Hospital fifteen miles away, Bay 18. The EMTs could not reach me because neither of us had thought to provide my cell phone number. Despite the heart medicines my heart was racing, but the traffic wasn’t. I was stuck in stop and go traffic on I-66, finally showing up at Fairfax Hospital’s emergency room around 5 PM, three emergency rooms and ninety minutes or so after the incident. Some pissed off looking employee at the emergency room desk finally gave me a sticker to go into the emergency room, perhaps because I knew her room number.

She was groggy but conscious and tethered to the usual medical equipment. What the hell had happened? There were no obvious answers. She just remembers waking up in the ambulance and had no memory of the incident itself. The important thing was that she was alive and seemingly stable for the moment. The nurses were working on other cases, but I did meet the EMT who explained why they took her to Fairfax Hospital (better heart care). Nurse Kelly came in occasionally, and eventually we met the emergency room physician. The doctor agreed with my diagnosis (she had a seizure) but we had no idea what caused it or if it might recur.

Six hours in the emergency bay eventually landed her in a bed in a hospital room on the second floor of the main hospital, where other people with swollen eyes seem to congregate. The swollen eye was a red flag to the emergency room personnel: had I been beating her up? She was asked this repeatedly. (“It’s okay to tell us. You will be safe.”) They even asked her again while I was in the room. It must happen so often that is it unusual to come in with a black eye from a simple fall.

Two nights in the hospital, lots of expensive tests, scans and blood draws. No concussion, no blood on the brain. That was good. Concerned phone calls and emails to and from family, including our daughter in Richmond who came up Monday after getting a pass from her professors. Getting lost in hospital corridors and in the parking garage and getting dinner from a vending machine. Arriving home around midnight to a freaked out cat, but at least one who had been fed. Our friend Mary came over, cleaned up the mess and put things away. The force of my wife’s impact on the floor dislodged a light globe in the basement. Sunday involved trips to and from the hospital, phone calls and emails, and eventually flowers and cards. My iPad let her communicate with far-flung family and friends.

She was released Monday afternoon and since then it has been mostly a round of doctor visits and more tests. She was told not to drive, feels reasonably weak but otherwise seems normal, just with a face that looks like Elphaba Thropp from Wicked plus a black eye that would make a prizefighter proud. And so it will go for most of next week or two. She did make it to work for a few hours on Thursday only to discover that she really wasn’t well enough to be very productive at work.

There are no answers so far, and there may never be any. We are not sure when or if she can drive a car again, or if her life will be fundamentally changed from now on.

I am grateful to have my daughter home for a bit. She ferried my wife around to most of her appointments, which let me get to work and try to keep up on my busy agenda there.

Life feels more fragile, more ephemeral, more due to the whimsy of an unseen god that is toying with us. This is an incident we hope will work itself out in time and normal life may then resume again. Or not.

No answers. Just ambiguity.

Life is conspiring to keep me close to home this year. It seems a bit weird. Between vacations, mini vacations and business trips, it’s rare to go more than a couple of months without spending a few nights at least a few hundred miles from home. Not this year, at least so far. Here it is April already and I haven’t even ventured across the Potomac River to Maryland to see my father. No jumping from Eastern Time to some western time zone, unless you count the move to daylight savings time. This is due in part to apathy but mostly due to cutbacks in government travel. The sequestration started to squeeze long before it went into effect. We could all see it coming. One of the first management dictates was no traveling anywhere, at least not without special high-level authorization. So no snaking through the security lines at Washington Dulles with the business laptop in my carry on bag. Lots of extra conference calls and Webex sessions instead, trying to do the same work but just a lot less productively. It’s all about being squeezed.

My wife (who never goes anywhere on business) is actually traveling more than me this year. She has had one trip to Boston, and another one to Las Vegas in July, both for pleasure. Looking at my own plans for travel, the closest I have come to scheduling a trip will be a June trip to Louisville, Kentucky. It won’t be for business, but for the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I went four years ago and had a great and spiritually uplifting time. It seemed time to do it again. I plan to drive.

So it is close to home for me this year, at least unless plans change. What I am discovering is that while home is a place where you spend so much time, you tend to largely ignore it. It’s there but you don’t see it. Instead, you spend your time either at home or just around it involved in dull chores like trimming the hedges. Or you spend it going to the same places over and over again: work, the gas station, the supermarket, the superstore and maybe once a month the local Silver Diner for breakfast. All those places in between, although I have lived in my neighborhood nearly twenty years, are rarely if ever visited.

The best way to experience where you live is to ditch the carbon-emitting automobile. Feet or a bicycle are preferred. Neighborhoods need to be encountered slowly, not passed through. So it is here in Oak Hill, a suburban oasis, but a place where few go anywhere without an automobile. Maybe that’s why we are overweight. So best to put on the walking shoes and amble our local neighborhoods instead. Sometimes I find I prefer to listen a podcast while I walk. A lot of the time I prefer to look, listen and smell. There is much to take in. The wind rustling through the trees. A cluster of mosquitos captured in the sunlight above the creek. The rustle of a squirrel in the underbrush. Occasionally you see the unexpected. The other day along a path by our local creek I watched three deer moving rapidly through the woods. Often I am conscious of my own shoes hitting the pavement, or my elevated breath moving in and out of my lungs. There is the occasional squeal of a child in a backyard playground, or the soft crunch of a car coming down on its shock absorbers as it pulls into a driveway. Depending on the time of year I may feel the numbness of cold air on my throat (forgot the scarf) or sweat on my forehead and under my armpits. Mostly while outside you get the intense feeling of the life that is all around you, and of the connection of everything in your environment. It is curious we have houses where except for a cat or a plant we deliberately seal nature out.

This neighborhood called Oak Hill is home but at least for me it doesn’t quite feel like home. Home still feels like Endwell, New York, where I spent my youth. I may have lived twice as long in this house as I did in Endwell, but my house feels transient. It’s a way station to my next station in life, which probably is not back in Endwell, but someplace else, a retirement villa around Boston perhaps. This may come from simply living in Northern Virginia. It is constantly changing and growing and thus it feels more transient than permanent.

I really should not feel that way. Where I live has few downsides (hot summers and traffic are about it) but lots of plus sides. It has lots of ethnicities, great and varied restaurants, culture, arts, entertainment, theater, world-class newspapers and more educated people per square mile than most other places on the planet. This area has kept me engaged and employed for more than thirty years. This area should be home to me. It should be where I want to spend the rest of my life.

And yet I know I will be leaving. I don’t know when and I don’t know why, but I am just a long-term visitor. I still think of Endwell as my home, but the more I see the place as an adult the less I want to live there again. It’s more the idea of Endwell than the actual place that attracts me to it. It was a place where I felt happy and have good memories. My real home may be my next home, or the one after that. Or maybe I am just a gypsy and that’s why I really don’t mind traveling regularly. Perhaps home is not a place, but a state of mind.

It turns out that I am a pretty good date, at least if I am dating myself.

It used to be highly unusual to find myself sans spouse or other co-dependent. That was before my wife started going to conventions and my daughter went off to college. I don’t hold those long weekends by my wife out of town in Boston, Las Vegas or sometimes right across the river in Silver Spring against her. (This weekend it’s Boston.) She doesn’t hold my extended business trips so I can see a friend or sibling against me either. Four years ago, I disappeared for close to a week to attend the general assembly of our denomination.

We still take vacations together. And of course there is all that togetherness at home, often coming together over dinners we each prepare separately but at least consume at the same time. Otherwise during the evenings she is more likely watching television and I am upstairs on the computer. I don’t know how typical our marriage is, but it strikes me that ours is less engaged than many.

With her conventions, I find I am more frequently finding myself home alone for days at a stretch. Well, not completely alone. Our cat Arthur remains a full time occupant. He provides companionship of a sort, but mostly we inhabit separate worlds during the day, except at feeding time or when I am slathering steroid cream in his ear. Which leaves me to be my best friend. This generally suits me fine. There are certainly friends I could visit locally, but more and more when these opportunities arise I am finding that I prefer my own company. I’m not lonely, just alone. And it’s okay.

Thus last night I found that I was taking myself to the movies. A review of Oz, The Great and Powerful will come. I know some people who feel weird going to a movie alone. I’ve never let that stop me and in truth my taste in movies often differs from my wife’s taste anyhow. When I go by myself I always arrive just in time to avoid the obnoxious ads but to see most of the trailers. I also avoid the overpriced popcorn and find a nice comfy seat near the back of the theater, preferably away from the speakers. I have my smartphone for entertainment if the trailers fail to amuse. Last night I found myself in Theater 6 at the Reston (Virginia) Bow-Tie Cinemas, back in the same row where some six months earlier I had seen some other movie with a good friend. It obviously did not make much of an impression on me as my mind was elsewhere. Fortunately, Oz turned out to be a fun and engaging movie.

Perhaps the single life becomes quickly old, but when it returns in these periodic bursts I find that I welcome them. I have all the comforts of home because I am home. I find a certain freedom in not needing to accommodate my wife, or my daughter who when she is home can easily sleep past noon. And so I had Broadway music on at 9 a.m. and only the cat seemed a little miffed by the noise and went to sleep downstairs.

I have been taking these four days and three nights alone at my own peculiar pace. It’s a good time to watch movies on DVD that I have seen many times before, simply because there is no one occupying the TV room to compete with or object. I don’t believe in take out food, but when I am home alone I can be lured into indulging, even if take out means a six inch steak and cheese sandwich from Subway. Last night after the movie I felt in the mood for a snack. Alas, after ten p.m. the Baskin Robbins was shutdown, as was the Dairy Queen. The bakery at the Giant Food was still opened. It worked.

This life suits me very well, at least for a few days. I exercise when the mood strikes, but mostly I indulge my hobbies, which over this three day weekend has mostly been about serving a few customers with my software consulting services. Last week I successfully rehosted a client with a forum of over 100,000 posts, a major challenge as it turned out because his search tables were corrupted, which meant the database extract could not be imported. I ended up surgically snipping them out of the 600 mb file using text editors and the Unix split command, then rebuilding the search index manually. I upgraded software for three clients; in one case removing dozens of plug-ins that were causing performance problems. It’s kind of geeky but it put a few hundred bucks in my PayPal account, and no one objected. It also kept me out of strippers’ bars and red light districts.

Music has been playing from the stereo, music that neither my daughter nor my wife would enjoy much if they were here. I indulged in waffles for breakfast one morning. I slept deeply at night, which is not hard if you are home alone and there is no spouse in bed to distract you. I walked for exercise with podcasts to distract me. At the gym I put in an extra fifteen minutes of aerobics and lifted a set of weights. And it was good.

Tonight though the wife returns from Boston. My momentary days reliving my bachelorhood will abruptly end. Likely after she settles in trash TV will be coming out of our entertainment room tonight. So it will likely remain until her next convention when I plan to take myself out on a few more dates.

Six and a half years later our three-year-old rescue cat Arthur is now pushing ten years of age. His age is just an estimate, but the veterinarian that examined him estimated that he was born in late 2003. He came to live with us in September 2006. It took him a whole year to get fully housebroken. This was perhaps not too surprising given that he probably had been mostly living on his wits the first years of his life.

Arthur the cat (2012)

A video of Arthur

Picked up off the street in Lovettsville, Virginia, our domestic shorthair cat made his way to a no-kill cat shelter in Loudoun County, Virginia and eventually into our house and into our hearts. Affectionate with people by nature, he was not completely domesticated. He remains unusually skittish but after a year of occasional naughty episodes like peeing in our vents he fully settled in. He seemed finally completely at ease when the carpets were ripped up and replaced by hardwood floors. No more scents of deceased cats to torment him. We marveled at his relative youth when we got him, for we were used to aging cats that often threw up more than they digested and were more than a bit senile.

At around ten years old though, there are signs that Arthur will not live the nineteen and a half years his predecessor Sprite did. Arthur has become an expensive cat, attested to by $1400 in medical bills racked up in the last couple of weeks. His symptoms were perhaps not surprising to long term cat owners: vomiting, diarrhea and sneezing. Various veterinarians have puzzled over him. Pills were tried and special cat food was put in his dish but they did little. Eventually it seemed just part of his nature, something to endure. Because otherwise Arthur seemed happy, eager to sit on our laps, happy to be perched on a chair and looking outside the front window in the mornings and anxious for daily commutes in and out of our screened in deck via his special kitty door. He purred easily, never was the least bit malicious (unlike our late evil cat Squeaky), never considered escape and never shredded the furniture. He enjoyed being fussed over him and we fussed over him a lot.

It’s hard to know when a cat is really sick. One way is when their habits suddenly change. That was what triggered the start of $1400 in veterinarian bills to make Arthur whole again. Arthur was nothing if not habitual, and he did not come out to greet me when I came home. I called and called and he eventually showed himself, but wholly spurned the dinner he usually scarfs down. His water had hardly been touched, and he was losing weight again. Moreover, he was usually quiet and rarely purred. There was plenty of diarrhea, however. The truest sign of this sick cat was the moribund tail lying flat on the ground. It is usually extended behind his back and curled up toward his head. I scheduled a trip to the vet for the following morning and wondered if he might be dead before I got him there. Our wily cat that can usually sense a cat carrier a dozen feet away did not object when I gently put him in it and took him to the vet.

Shots for hydration. Shots to stimulate hunger. Shots to cool an enflamed butt, because his bowels were enflamed. Newer, blander cat food to try, plus a day in the cat hospital being monitored and getting blood work. He ate well at the vet, perhaps due to his shot. But mostly there was an urgent request from the vet to get him an ultrasound. It was likely one of three things: a tumor, a general lymphoma or irritable bowel disease.

He came home, survived another night while looking ever weaker and more dispirited. The following day he was seen at the local Southpaws where for $600 or so he had his belly shaved and an ultrasound performed on his GI tract. A tumor was thankfully ruled out. A thickening of the bowel walls was noted, but it was impossible to say if it was a lymphoma or the IBD that was causing the diarrhea, although a kitty colonoscopy for another $600 could probably rule out one of these. Another shot in the butt to calm things down was followed by more water injected under his fur. And there were pills. A pill developed for people with cancer to stimulate appetite. Another to get rid of his diarrhea. And one twice a day pill to calm his inflamed intestines: a steroid.

Lots of pills, lots of shots, lots of bills but his progress seemed marginal. He mostly didn’t want to eat, so it was hard to get pills into him, even when put in his food. As anyone who owns a cat knows, pilling a cat is generally not an option. Mostly Arthur was listless and out of our faces. His food and water seemed mostly untouched and he kept losing weight. So yet another trip to the vet was scheduled, this one for $200. More shots. More hydration. And suddenly we had a cat that was ravenous and would not stop eating. And one who purred again. And one who sat outside our door in the mornings again, and looked out the window after finishing his food, just like old times.

And so it went for a day or so, and there was great rejoicing, until his appetite ebbed again. Getting pills into him via his food on time became problematic. Arthur was in a better place, but still struggling. And there he remains today, a subject of considerable concern.

He is aging and he is struggling. He will probably need to be on pills the rest of his life. Right now we wrap them in cheese in hope they will get consumed. It works, for now, but history suggests it will not work for long, and cheese may not be good for him. The root of his problem is likely an allergy, but to what? We have no way to know. We try different prescription foods and see if it has an affect on his explosive sneezing. Or maybe it may be something environmental that we could not possibly know.

It seems crazy to spend $1400 on a cat, and we will likely spend a lot more than that over the course of his remaining life. He is such a plain and ordinary cat to look at, but such a total sweetheart in person. He is constantly sweet (or when he cannot be, at least inoffensive), constantly gentle, full of good heart, honest and naturally endearing. If this is the start of his decline, it will be a sad process to witness every day. Meanwhile we hope for the right combination of food, environment and medicine so that this ultra sweet cat can simply go on being his sweet, inoffensive and endearing self.

Arthur, we love you. It may not seem like it but we are doing our best for you. Stay with us. We will do our best to keep you safe, healthy, warm, hydrated and loved.

The blog’s theme has been updated! This won’t be obvious to those of you who subscribe to the blog via email or view it in most newsreaders, but if you visit the site you will notice the newer look.

I hate to call it a “new” look because I have been using variants of this same look since the blog began in 2002 as a MoveableType blog. I like sidebars and I plead guilty to filling them with self-promoting crap. It’s okay; I pay for the hosting space. In general I prefer darker pages and I prefer shades of grey to whites and colors. When I go with a theme I tend to stick with it. I like my little Rodan’s “The Thinker” image attached by my posts and pages, although I changed it slightly for the new look.

Still, any WordPress theme can get moribund over time. This one needed updating because it was designed for version 2 of WordPress, and WordPress has been on version 3 for years. This meant occasionally jury-rigging the themes to match version 3 features. This blog finally moved to WordPress in October 2007, which is how long I’ve had the same theme. Five and a half years later it is now using a MidnightBluePlus theme. Naturally it did not look out of the box quite the way I preferred. So I used the power of my editor and Firebug to tweak things in a preview mode until I had it all looking perfect.

Delving into the deep corners of WordPress gives me renewed appreciation for this elegant blogging platform. The best software is software that does what you need it to do, but no more, yet is easily extensible when you need it to be. WordPress is “just good enough” for blogging and any lightweight content management solution. If you need a small site it’s a perfect solution. If you need to host hundreds or thousands of pages, WordPress is not for you. You need an industrial strength content management system, like Joomla or Alfresco. WordPress is also elegant in the sense that it is easy and fun to tweak. You can get a plug in to do just about anything. It is also incredibly popular. Wikipedia says that 22% of new web sites are in WordPress.

With this upgrade I was able to put a few dynamic applications I wrote wholly inside of WordPress. The movies, comments and post list tools that I wrote can now fit inside a WordPress page, thanks to the Allow PHP in Posts and Pages plug in. This makes the whole presentation so much more seamless.

So hopefully the new theme gives the site a little pizazz and seems a little more professional. Enjoy.

Willy, will you just go away?

Pretty much every day one of my Facebook friends, sometimes multiple Facebook friends, is posting a picture of Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder from the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, released in 1971) who is imperiously but smirkily telling me some perceived truth about the universe or human behavior. Willy never makes me laugh. Instead, Willy makes me want to slap his face silly, and I like Gene Wilder. He’s been the star of some of the funniest movies ever made, including The Producers and Young Frankenstein. He has got the crazy, manic but funny guy down cold. In fact, he owns this peculiar market. I’ve seen his Willy Wonka movie and it’s a decent one. It’s not the sort of children’s movie that you usually get in theaters and is delightfully subversive and naughty.

Forty two years later, Willy’s been wonked by pretty much anyone with a cause who wants to lord their superiority over your human weaknesses. Yes, you can create your own on the Willy Wonka Meme Generator site, plus you can view 267 pages of memes others have created by applying subtitles to the same Willy Wonka photo. In fact, I created one of my own to capture how I feel about these memes:

Willy Wonka wants to passive aggressively piss you off

Now granted, I can be imperious too. Unlike some of the posters of these Willy Wonka memes, I am comfortable with the notion that I have imperfections. The impression I get is that many of those posting these Wonka captioned photos are that you want to lord it over us that because you feel you are our better. Only you cannot say so directly, so they let Willy tell you instead in his smirky, smarmy and captioned way. They “Share” it on FB as a joke, you see, but not because they actually mean to point fingers at you personally. Ha ha! It appears to be more likely they have some contempt toward some group not at all like them because they don’t do what they do, and they know better.

You can scan the WW meme site for plenty more of these, but among those that I have seen in Facebook personally are from vegans castigating people for eating meat, gun nuts, anti-gun nuts, Christians, anti-Christians, atheists, Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, very skinny people upset that there are fat people out there without their ability to control portions, drunks, the abstemious — you get the picture. In case you don’t it won’t take you too much viewing of the WW meme site to figure it out. To put it politely, there are people out there with an axe to grind and hurt to inflict, and they are really quite upset and would prefer to hack away but they’re too nice. So they need a passive aggressive solution and use Willy Wonka to speak for them instead.

Which means, of course, that these posters are just as flawed as the people and groups they are indirectly skewering. Which is sort of the point of this post. We all have flaws. None of us are perfect, unless you count sons or prophets of God. So just by posting these Willy Wonka pictures, you are acknowledging a deficiency in yourself that you are probably too blind to see in yourself.

So here’s an idea: just don’t do it. Stop it. Or at least qualify your jabs. “I’m doing this to annoy you and people like you, but I acknowledge that I am not the fount of all wisdom.”

Vegans, acknowledge that you are pretty darn uppity about your eating habits. Acknowledge that being a vegan is not just about what you eat, but it’s an all-consuming lifestyle to you. You want everyone to be a vegan and you secretly think that anyone who is not is at some level indirectly cruel. (BTW, you don’t have to make every other Facebook post more Gospel about why being a vegan is so morally superior. We get it.)

The same goes for the rest of you. Gun nuts: not all of us who are for gun control want to live in a society where only police have guns. We just think that maybe having semi-automatic weapons with extended clips that can fire thirty shots in fifteen seconds is a bit too far when our founding fathers had inaccurate and slow to load rifles that depended on sparks from flint to work. Gun control nuts, acknowledge that there are plenty of responsible gun owners out there who don’t feel the need to turn their basements into arsenals or carry their assault rifles into Safeways in Charlottesville, Virginia. Christians, we unchurched understand you think we are going to Hell. We’ll take our chances. Atheists, as an agnostic I tend to sympathize with you guys, but you are as annoying and dogmatic as a born again Christian.

The bottom line is there are a lot of hurting people out there, so don’t keep piling it on, m’kay? And let’s put Willy Wonka back into his chocolate factory where he belongs and get him out of our meme generators.

Another birthday rolled around yesterday. For once the first of February felt like it should: bitterly cold and snowing. I am not much on celebrating birthdays, which is probably why I scheduled an outpatient procedure on my birthday. Specifically, I had a colonoscopy, a distasteful but necessary procedure for us insured humans age fifty plus. This being my second time, I knew what to expect. When I had my last one at age fifty, I could get it done in a local surgical center. This time, because I was subsequently diagnosed with sleep apnea, it meant going to the hospital instead. It also meant arising at three a.m. to down a second dose of medicine guaranteed to empty your digestive track, not to mention spending the day before at home on a liquid only diet, trying to make a bottle of white grape juice substitute for solid food.

Happily the procedure went well. One reason I was repeating it after only five years instead of the normal ten years is because polyps run on my mother’s side of the family. She never had a colonoscopy and as a result due to a huge polyp had to have part of her large intestine removed. Sure enough, yesterday my gastroenterologist found a polyp, but it was easily sliced off and removed. By ten a.m. I was home eating solid food none the worse for the experience but with lovely color photos of my large intestine showing the emerging polyp.

That’s kind of how it should go at age 56. You have given up chasing immortality and have made peace with conforming to the practices of modern medical science instead. Few men or women my age can credibly claim they have the strength and stamina they had when they were in their 20s. Perhaps I could get the illusion of it if, like some foolish and better moneyed people my age, I ingested steroids and got shots of HGH (human growth hormone). Along with the HGH, regular injections of testosterone probably would make me feel manlier. Marketers think they know what I need and lately it’s been testosterone supplements. I can rarely go to a web site without seeing ads telling me about the benefits of testosterone therapy. I remain skeptical. Estrogen replacement therapy for women has proven to have more minuses than pluses for most women. I doubt testosterone supplements and shots are without serious risks as well. Perhaps it will keep my hairline from receding, or suddenly make me attractive to women half my age, but I doubt that is worth any of the potential complications.

Or perhaps I should do what has worked so well for my father, age 86, still reasonably healthy and walking around. Perhaps I should simply give up on the silly pseudo science, ignore the multitudes of marketers of immortality and pragmatically get regular exercise and regular checkups instead. My father has been battling precancerous melanomas for decades, but he is still alive. This is thanks to regular trips to the dermatologist, which often results in skin removal or replacement. It doesn’t appear that I have inherited that particular condition, but it does look like I have my mother’s tendency toward polyps in the large intestine, so I best better bear the indignity of these colonoscopies every five years.

I also inherited her family’s tendency toward tallness, narrow throats and a large uvula, all of which contribute toward a tendency to snore and which eventually lead to a diagnosis of sleep apnea. For a whole year now I have been sleeping with the aid of a BPAP machine. It regularly fills my lungs with air, even when my body would prefer to stop breathing for a while. For a month or two using the machine was more torture than restful until I figured out how to put the mask on properly so it did not hiss at me during the night. Now the BPAP allows me to get genuinely restful sleep, and many nights I sleep like a baby. Waking rested gives me more energy than any shot of testosterone is likely to provide.

Maybe there is something unmanly about depending on regular checkups and medical science. Real men in their fifties, if you believe the ads, are supposed to be climbing mountains, roping steer, running marathons and bedding women in their twenties. What most real men my age are doing appears to be quite the opposite, at least according to my observations: eating too much crap and limiting their exercise to changing cable channels with their remote controls. I confess to eating too much crap myself, but I also eat plenty of healthy food, and since 1981 I have been getting regular aerobic exercise. My health is obviously not perfect, but it is better than most men my age. I can’t seem to go see any physician without getting blood drawn, so I have constant opportunities to tweak Vitamin D deficiencies, check my cholesterol or measure my triglycerides.

So at age 56 I remain a work in progress. I am realistic enough to know I won’t live forever but stubborn enough to insist that as much as feasible I will enjoy those years that remain. If that means sleeping with a BPAP machine for the rest of my life or having to endure the indignity of having my colon probed every five years, so be it. At least I am still here, in reasonably good health, and with (I hope, no guarantees) much more good life ahead of me. My testosterone levels may be receding like my hairline, but with luck the next thirty years of my life will be happier years with less heartache and struggle.

I’ll keep my physician on speed dial to make it so.

January 1^st means I spend some time pondering my usage statistics for the last year. I spent some time on this last month when the blog officially turned ten years old. I’ll try not to repeat myself too much. Measured by direct web traffic, 2012 sucked. Measuring subscriber usage and social media usage shows a different story. Unless noted otherwise, my reference is Google Analytics.

Overall 2012 Statistics

• Total Visits: 26,766 (72.8 per day), down 45.2% compared with 2011
• Total Page Views: 34,704 (94.8 per day), down 61.5% compared with 2011
• Percent of New Visits: 87.96% (89.13% in 2011)

Overall, web traffic is obviously down substantially, roughly in half since 2011. There are lots of reasons for this, but the most likely reason is that I am posting less often. This likely makes this site less interesting to search engines. Overall there were 107 posts in 2012 versus 127 in 2011. There are likely other reasons. My posts are less topical, as topical posts are likely to get more hits. Remember that these statistics measure traffic principally driven from search engines. Content on other sites is considered more interesting. I also strongly suspect that Google keeps refining their algorithms for measuring legitimate traffic too, and this is reflected in lower statistics. This blog is affected by a general trend where search traffic is diminishing but syndication and social media usage is increasing.

Most Viewed Posts

1. Eulogy for my mother (18,980 page views) (#1 three years in a row)
2. Blog home page (8,631 page views) (#2 three years in a row)
3. Danger: Wal-Mart Customer! (5,870 page views) (#8 in 2011)
4. Craigslist Casual Encounters: Now officially a complete waste of time (5,459 page views) (#4 two years in a row)
5. The Root of Human Conflict: Emotion vs. Reason (4,764 page views) (#5 two years in a row)
6. You Porn: A Traveler’s New Best Friend (4,056 page views) (Was #3 in 2011)
7. Sharon Mitchell: Porn Saint (3,524 page views) (#6 in 2011)
8. Queer as a Three Dollar Bill (3,139 page views) (#7 in 2011)
9. The Illusion of Time (3,078 page views) (#9 two years in a row)
10. The Id unleashed at Craigslist Casual Encounters (1,642 page views) (#10 two years in a row)

The list of top popular content proves to be remarkably stable from year to year, continuing to mirror human nature: interests in death, sex and weirdness seem to be themes that interest casual browsers. The one exception is my essay on emotion vs. reason, originally written in 1997, which has some sort of bizarre staying power.

Top Tags

1. Civil War (373 page views)
2. Obesity (170 page views)
3. W&OD Trail (164 page views)
4. Battle of Chantilly (136 page views)
5. Battle of Ox Hill (130 page views)

Top Category: Best of Occam’s Razor (187 page views)

Top Browsers:

1. Internet Explorer (27.46%, was 35.54% in 2011)
2. Chrome (25.08%, was 17.27% in 2011)
3. Firefox (22.00%, was 27.36% in 2011)
4. Safari (17.76%, was 15.13% in 2011)
5. Android Browser (4.27%)

Overall Chrome is gaining most of the browser usage. Safari is getting marginally more traffic. Both are gaining at the expense of IE and Firefox. Safari traffic likely is due to lots of iPhones and iPads out there. As Android-based smartphones and tablet computers begin to proliferate, their browsers are showing up.

Busiest month: March (3,954 visits)

Slowest month: June (1,461 visits)

Mobile visits in 2012: 3466 (vs. 3904 in 2011)

%Mobile Visits of Total Visits:  13% (vs. 8% in 2011)

So much for Google Analytics. Lots of you are reading this blog via various newsreaders and content syndication mechanisms. Here is where I can document real growth. Feedburner reports:

• 83 subscribers as of December 31, 2012 (vs. 66 on December 31, 2011, an increase of 20%)
• Average number of subscribers per day: 70.02 (vs. 63.23 in 2011)
• Average hits per day: 198.62 (vs. 196 in 2011)
• Average number of click-throughs per day: 10.40 (vs. 7.81 in 2011)

I started tracking social media usage in March. It’s a bit too early to infer any meaning from those numbers, except they are relatively modest overall.

I am also tracking the site’s web traffic on quantcast.com. I’ve only been tracking it for a month or so. Their expertise seems to be in matching web traffic with user demographics. It gives me insight into your characteristics as a group. In general I attract a younger but highly educated crowd: ages 18-34 with a disproportionate number of you having a graduate education. Statistics are available for your browsing.

More in 2014.