Baby, don't fear the Reaper

I've been remiss with the blog, but I think once we get settled into the new house, I'll work out a new routine again. In the meantime, I'm still going through the random papers on my office floor. Yesterday I found a copy of "Fatness, Fitness, and the Moral Universe of Sport and Physical Activity," which appeared recently in the Sociology of Sport Journal. I found the title interesting because of my own struggle with weight and eating despite my interest in physical activity. I can fence a bout to 15 points, I can hike 12 miles, yet I'm about 25 lbs. overweight. The paper focuses mainly on the autoethnography of an anorexic female English athlete.

In the authors' introduction, they note other researchers' claims that "So inactive and unhealthy are they [today's children] that high-profile scientists and doctors are prepared to announce that today's children will die before their parents." The authors of the current paper "dispute that... there is any likelihood of a sudden and dramatic decline in Western life expectancies..."

And yet, an April 22 report in the Seattle PI notes that life expectancy is in fact declining in certain U.S. counties. (For full article, see "Life span shorter in parts of U.S.") While the decline may not be "sudden and dramatic," I think the authors of the first paper are perhaps a bit optimistic about the average human life span. There is average life span and maximum life span, and most species have very few members ever reach their maximum life span. What makes humans think we'd ever stretch our average to meet the maximum? I think we've hit a wall for our average life span.

If diseases due to obesity, smoking, pollution, etc. weren't moderating our average life span, something else would. I get it, people: We don't want to die. But c'mon, let's face it, no matter how healthy you eat, how much you exercise, how kindly you treat the planet, the Grim Reaper's gonna get you in the end. There are no deals to be made. I don't advocate unadulterated gluttony, but are you really going to make the most of that extra week of life in your 80s that you've gained by denying yourself some pizza and beer?

Kangaroo dreams

In an effort to post to my blog, clean up my new home office, and catch up on reading interesting papers, I randomly selected one of the academic papers that currently litters my office floor as the focus of tonight's entry.

Ever wonder what a dream of yours meant but felt unable to grasp its meaning? The paper "Case studies of the attainment of insight in dream sessions" in the March 2008 issue of Psychotherapy Research examines how people gain insight, using "dream work" as a model. A person's attitude toward dreams in general, her readiness and motivation to explore a specific dream, the client-therapist relationship, and the perceived importance of the dream. If you have a competent therapist, you believe your dreams are worth examining, and you have the courage to explore them, you will achieve insight into your dreams.

It's not very scientific, but I strive to understand my dreams when I remember them. It pays to heed them, I believe. Shortly after I finished my graduate program last year, I interviewed for a job in public affairs at a government facility - a well paid, prestigious position. I was scheduled for a follow up interview when I had a dream of a woman who had to wear a kangaroo suit for her night job, pretending to be a kangaroo in a zoo inside a mall. She asked me to bring her a cup of coffee and a guard stopped me from handing her the coffee. She was just trapped in a cage, pretending to be something that she wasn't. The next day, I withdrew my application for the government public affairs job.

Now, prior to the dream, there already had been things about the job that I didn't like, and my gut instinct had been that it wasn't right for me. But the conscious mind has the bad habit of second guessing itself; after all, the job had lots of perks, too. My subconscious knew it wasn't right for me and saw that job as being trapped in a cage, pretending to be something that I wasn't.

Sparrow welfare

We've been in the new house for a little over two weeks now but I think it will be a while before life feels normal again. We're still not done with cleaning the apartment and taking away the bits we'd decided to donate to Goodwill.

While the apartment remains in our possession, we've also kept the bird feeder up for the birds. We finally resorted to offering them a packaged seed mix rather than the shelled sunflower seeds that we usually give them. I'd been feeling guilty knowing that we'll be taking away a food source that they've relied on for the past two years, but I enjoyed watching the birds come to the feeder too much not to have it at all.

A free article at ScienceNow, "Birds on the Dole," offers a scientific look at whether backyard birdfeeders help or hurt local avian populations. The study, done in the UK, found that the extra food helped birds better survive winter, breed earlier, and produce more offspring. The authors, however, were careful to show the downside of offering birdseed as well.

My conclusion? Everything has pros and cons. We could feel guilty because we feed the birds or because we don't feed the birds. I'd rather just enjoy the birds being birds. We humans aren't very good at just being.

The sound of grump

I've been in a randomly grumpy mood today, a bad reaction to too many days unpacking, I believe, as well as, probably, a mild case of food poisoning. Anyway, I always like to curl up with a good line-up of horror movies when I feel this way. Poltergeist, The Mothman Prophecies, The Ring... Could it be the darkness speaking to the darkness in me? Could it be the need to sneer at someone's misfortune? Or could it just be the soundtrack?

A study in the April 2008 International Journal of Psychophysiology found that subjects physically responded to "happy" and "sad" music with markedly different diastolic blood pressure, activity of facial muscles, and even changes in the skin's ability to conduct electricity. The study found that rhythm and tempo alone were not enough to induce these changes.

Wish they'd do a study on "scary" or "anxiety-inducing" music. There are some excellent movie soundtrack samples from which they could choose... Jaws, Halloween, 28 Days Later...

Mmmm... mush

Have you ever faced a creative task to complete where the harder you tried, the more creatively frustrated you became? Well, that's my dilemma with today's blog entry. My day has been quite mundane, full of chores like cooking and loading the dishwasher, and all the academic journal abstracts that I've reviewed this evening seem so far removed from my life right now. I have a collection of chocolate-related studies that I'm looking forward to reading, but for now... time to let my brain go mushy tonight.

Sign him up for etiquette lessons!

I'm feeling a bit more settled in the new house this week (i.e., we've got my computer up and running here now) but my "office" for now remains a nearly-empty room strewn with lots of papers, thanks to tax time. Good thing I remembered into which box I'd packed my tax forms.

Speaking of natural habitat - a room strewn with papers being the writer's natural habitat - I could only shake my head when I read "Shock at polar bear's carp kill" on the BBC RSS feed today. Zoo officials at the Berlin Zoo put live fish in the moat inside the enclosure of Knut, the polar bear, and - gasp! - he fished several from the water and killed them. Hmmmm. I guess they forgot to tell the bear that the fish were for appearances only. You know, like silk flowers in the living room.

A German newspaper then reported that the bear "senselessly murdered the carp" because he pulled them from the water and played with them but did not eat them. I guess zoo officials also forgot to teach Knut basic table manners: Don't take something if you're not going to eat it. And don't play with your food.

Oh, wait. Right, he's a bear. Not a five-year-old.

Good bear.

Bad PR.

Red footprints from the past

Moving to the new house has stirred up memories from my youth, which was the last time that I actually lived in a house, all things considered. Since the age of 18, I've lived in dorm rooms, apartments, and a condo.

The house has walls that are ever-so-slightly off-white. They fool the eye, in fact, enough that you'd believe they are white, until you look and compare the true white on the ceiling and the walls. On the one hand I want to paint to make the place my own; on the other, the white walls and light wood floor make the place feel open. I've grown to like white walls, maybe because I see them as a clean slate for artwork. Maybe simply because I've lived too many years in places where I wasn't allowed to paint.

An article in the March 2008 Health focuses on color and mood, but it seems to rehash a lot of what's already known. Blue calms. Red stimulates. Yadda yadda. Funny, even with a bit of Internet and database research, I can't find anything on how white affects mood.

Anyway, finally being a homeowner myself now, I can understand why my parents wouldn't let me paint my bedroom the way I wanted when I was a teen: black-and-white checkers with red footprints going up the wall and across the ceiling. Soooooo three decades ago!

Neither here nor there...

...is exactly where I am right now. We are mostly moved to the house, except for some furniture and all my office stuff. I look forward to having a real desk at the house instead of the $30 K-Mart particle board piece of crap that I've used for the past 5 years, which is still in one piece only because I re-nailed it together every time it collapsed - that happened anytime I tried to move it.

Caffeine happens

How do you know when you've had too much caffeine? Lots of joke pages on the Web offer clever comments like

* You don’t sweat, you percolate.
* You don't tan, you roast.
* A cup of coffee before bed doesn’t keep you from falling asleep anymore.

My husband tells me that he knows I've had too much caffeine when he can see daylight under my feet. (I jump up and down when I'm wired. Also do it when I'm cold, but that's a different story.) I used to say that two cups was my limit (that would be roughly 70 mg/day, I think) but in reality, on most days I usually end up drinking some iced tea or an afternoon cup in addition to my usual two morning cups of Earl Grey. I know I definitely have a limit well within the 38 to 400 mg per day range. This is the range that "appears to maximize benefit and minimize risk" according to a March 2008 Nutrition Bulletin paper on the impact of caffeine on mood, cognitive function, performance and hydration.

But seriously, how can you tell when you've had too much caffeine? The Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research suggests that you need to cut down on caffeine when:

* You've become frequently restless, moody, anxious or irritable.
* You're having trouble sleeping.
* You're taking certain medications, like some antibiotics and herbal supplements, which can heighten the effects of caffeine by interfering with the body's ability to process the chemical.

Now, my problem today happens to be that I haven't had ENOUGH caffeine. All my tea stuff has been moved to the new house except for the kettle, so I couldn't have my usual two cups of Earl Grey this morning. And I have a headache that I recognize as a sign of caffeine withdrawal. Interestingly, the thought of drinking coffee or Coke doesn't do it for me right now. Maybe really I'm suffering from L-theanine withdrawal? It could happen. Either way, I need some tea.