Photograph

Stranger. 1981. Alexandria, Virginia

Proof that aging hurts decision making? or Preconceived Notion Confirmed?

The title of the New York Times article is "Aging: Growing Older Is Found to Hurt Decision Making" By Eric Nagourney.
"As they grow older, even people who seem perfectly on top of things may have trouble making good decisions, a new study suggests."

I suggest that this study is idiotic.

"The researchers based their findings on a series of tests given to two groups of healthy people, one ages 26 to 55, the other 56 to 85. The goal was to see how well the older volunteers used the skills often demanded of them when making decisions in real life about activities like investments, insurance and estate planning.

“Such decisions would be a challenge even for young adults,” the researchers note in the current Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. But when age is taken into account, they said, along with the abundance of shady marketing schemes, the challenge becomes even greater.

Even someone with high intellect and good memory, the study said, may be undergoing changes in the prefrontal part of the brain that affects behavior. “The first manifestation of this cognitive decline may be exercising poor judgment and decision making in many important real-life matters,” the study said.

The researchers, led by Natalie L. Denburg of the University of Iowa, used a gambling-style test in which people draw from four different decks of cards. Two decks, not to mince words, are for suckers. They give short-term rewards but long-term losses. The other two decks do the opposite.

Most people draw a lot from the bad decks first and switch. In the study, many of the older participants stuck with the bad
decks."

Wait a minute. What exactly is the connection between deciding to stick with the "sucker deck" and decreased ability with decisions in real life about activities such as investments, insurance and estate planning? Do you mean that a 27-year-old who switches from the "bad deck" to the "good deck" is therefore better at estate planning?

Oh well. I suppose my inability to follow the rationale must be because of my age.

Valentine from Phil in the Circle

Good Bye Art by Phil Hansen. Genius.

Maxed Out or It's time for Norman Cousins and The Marx Brothers

A couple of weeks ago I visited a blog I like, Simply Left Behind , found out about the movie Maxed Out. Watched it. I think you should too.

Alternatively, maybe it's time to read more Norman Cousins (Remember his formula for health - laughter?) and watch more Marx Brothers.

So many articles, So little time

Today in The New York Times, Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler by Mark Bittman - This article is dense with information, not just about the horrendous treatment of animals, but about implications more far reaching - oil, climate change, starvation worldwide, individual health (duh). It's a short read, a must read.

Yesterday in The Washington Post, not one, but four articles about aging issues. Three in OUTLOOK Their G-G-Generation A special section on aging boomers:
How long will they work?
Who will care for them? Q&A
Will they die alone?
One in Metro - Guarding Health, And Independence: As Populations Age, Localities Tailor Services to...

Got enough Stuff?

Imagine having so much stuff that you've got to rent someplace to store the excess. Egads.


My friend Kara recently sent me a link to Beth Terry's blog Fake Plastic Fish. Beth is committed to living without excess plastic. Amazing.

Oh so scientific

In my day tattoos were considered, for lack of a gentler word, disgusting. Welcome to 2008. Julia's goodie-two-shoes, childhood friend Stacey took herself to get a dinner-plate size phoenix tattooed on her back on her 18th birthday. They're all doing it - blonde, pony-tailed soccer girls, jocks, preps, emos, you name it, and, as it turns out, Scientists and 57-year olds.

In August, Kristara and I travelled with Julia to San Francisco to escort her to college. We stayed for a week. It was my birthday and Kristara decided she wanted to give me a tattoo. Our first stop was a tattoo place in the Castro where, it turns out, walk-ins are welcome but there's no time for them. They called their other store on Haight. Sure thing. Rob had time. We drove on over and sat around and waited while Rob ate his burrito and rice in it's Styrofoam take-out container and visited with his girlfriend. He then humored me, this lady old enough to be his grandmother, getting a purple star, no larger than a dime, tattooed on her wrist.

I was flush with pride. Ecstatic. It was only my first. But enough about me.

Ever visit The Loom? It's science writer Carl Zimmer's blog. Among other fascinating things you'll find there is his gallery of Science Tattoos. They're fabulous - organic compounds, mobius, formulas, a microscope, a capsacian molecule, lots more, all with short, interesting explanations. The ruler, pictured above, is that of Mikey Sklar. He says he uses it a lot at Green Acres Hot Springs, described as an environmentally friendly bed and breakfast in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. If you've got a science tattoo yourself, Carl Zimmer welcomes it to his set of 131 and growing.

I'd send pictures of mine but something tells me a dancing Snoopy and befuddled Woodstock just aren't gonna cut it.

Two Poems by David Budbill

David Budbill. Very cool man.






TOMORROW

Tomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeds
poking through
our skulls.

Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.

Drunk on music,
who needs wine?

Come on,
Sweetheart,
let's go dancing
while we've
still got feet.


WINTER: TONIGHT: SUNSET

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

through the woods, then out into the open fields
past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky.

"TOMORROW" and "WINTER: TONIGHT: SUNSET" by David Budbill, from While We've Still Got Feet. © Copper Canyon Press.

This isn't what I'd planned to post about today

I'd planned on writing about me today, and my kids, then adding a relevant poem. Duh. But first I checked my e-mail, as is my custom, and read The Writer's Almanac, as is also my custom, and I was struck by this piece about William Somerset Maugham.

Who would have thought.

And I quote:

"It's the birthday of William Somerset Maugham, (books by this author) born to English parents in Paris, France
(1874). His early childhood was comfortable and happy, but his mother died when he was eight and he never got over the loss. He kept three pictures of her next to his bedside for the rest of his life. His father died a few years later, and he had to go live with an unaffectionate uncle. He developed a terrible stutter
and became incredibly shy. He later said, "Had I not stammered I would probably ... have gone to Cambridge ... become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature." Instead, he read voraciously and eventually began to write fiction. Maugham decided to study medicine,
because he knew his uncle would disown him if he admitted that he wanted to be a writer. After medical school, he became an obstetrician, and got a job making
house calls to deliver babies in the worst slums of London. He stayed up for hours every night to work on his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), which was about the extreme poverty he had witnessed as a doctor. The book was successful enough to allow him to quit his job and devote his life to writing. He went on to become one of the most popular authors of his lifetime, writing many plays, essays, short stories, and memoirs. He's best known for his novel Of Human Bondage (1915), based on his own childhood. He once read the book on the radio, and when he came to the passage describing the death of the main character's mother, he broke down weeping and was barely able tocontinue.
Maugham said, "Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother."
And, "Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.""

Snow Daze or I'm only trying to keep you informed.

Student calls administrator's home to question lack of snow day in spite of snow. Wife thinks kid shouldn't be calling their home and leaving a message, takes offense. Wife calls the student back and leaves him a one-minute screamer. Student posts wife's message on internet. Not surprisingly, it ends up on YouTube is removed sometime after the link is included in washingtonpost.com and the item is included in all matter of tv shows.

Washingtonpost.com publishes article - "Va. Student's Snow-Day Plea Triggers an Online Storm", by Michael Alison Chandler, Wednesday, January 23, 2008. It generates many comments.

I'm just the messenger.

Still orphaned, the child lives on no matter how old we are

In Orphans’ Twilight, Memories of a Doomed Utopia in the New York Times.

Hey, what about us! Do we get ink for being in the Oldosphere?

See the article in the NY Times yesterday - In the Fatosphere, Big Is In, or at Least Accepted by Roni Caryn Rabin? I think it's time she identified us. Are we in the Oldosphere? Elderosphere? Oldfartosphere?

My mother, by the way, wanted to be in a rock band called the Grateful Living. I suppose she wasn't the first to come up with it, but at the time it seemed hella clever.

The Works or In the days when it was okay to eat hot dogs, how did you order yours?

When I was 19, I wrote my parents a letter explaining that I’d be dropping out of college to go to “the school of life”. I thought I was very clever. My parents apparently got a chuckle out of it, so much so, that after my mother died I found the letter amongst her stash of adorable things that her children had made.

The school of life I attended basically consisted of moving to New York City and living with my boyfriend Don. We were not the most committed couple you’ll ever meet - once we got to New York, our relatively crummy relationship lasted no more than another six months, just enough time for us to spend the summer in an apartment in the Village and then land a "garden" apartment on the Upper West Side.

Looking out our apartment window in the Village, across what seemed like an entire block of undeveloped land, I could see the sign for The Fantasticks. One summer day an artist scattered reams and reams of typewriter paper all over the empty lot. It was art. It was the sixties.

I got a job at a boutique. I don't know what brought me to 116th Street and Broadway, across from Columbia that afternoon, but I was there and a Help Wanted sign hung in the window so I went inside the tiny, hip clothing store and got the job. My boss, "Auntie", was the concentration-camp-surviving Aunt of the owner who lived somewhere in Jersey. She had a faded, blurry, purple tattoo on her arm, a visual reminder, as if she needed one. She sat on her stool behind the cash register. I sat in my chair. We spent our days together.

If I had time, I'd often walk the thirty blocks up Broadway to work. Grab a hot bagel from Zabar's. Same routine going home. Heaven.

Slow forward to 2008, this morning and the e-mail from the Very Short List about The Works by Kate Ascher. Here's what they have to say:

"If you end up buying Kate Ascher’s excellent, handsome oversize book The Works and place it amid other, similarly sized coffee-table books in your living room, we’re betting, guests will zero in on it immediately.

The book gives a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the intricacies of New York City’s infrastructure — how electricity flows to millions of people; how traffic patterns develop and are managed; how gas, electricity, sewage, water, and subway tunnels all coexist peacefully deep underground; . . . . You don’t need to live in New York to appreciate The Works — it will give you an entirely fresh understanding and new found respect for how your city or town operates. "

How am I gonna resist Amazon 1-Click on this one? How are you gonna resist it?

And one more thing about The Works. That's how my father and I always ordered our hot dogs.

Slowing Down? Nah.

I've been thinking about what Naomi said in response to my January 15 post, Slow Down Week or Slow Down Life... "a good thought, a useful notion. but can i do it in new york city? whizzing all around me...we need a slowdown support group. . . ."

It occurs to me that I don't think there's absolute virtue in slowing down at all. To me, it's about being engaged, fully present, striving for genuine contentment.

I thought about you, Naomi, living in New York and I felt a twinge of envy. There's no place else I'd rather be than in New York. It's where I feel most alive, fully engaged, most like myself, comfortable in my own skin.

Ultimately, for me, the essence of Slow Down is an awareness of self - of what makes me right in my own skin. Awareness of what I am doing, with my time, my activities, my life.

It's not about speed or altering one's personal tempo, but attention, engagement, happiness wherever we are, lazing in a hammock or scurrying about the city.

As usual, a poem comes to mind, this one by Philip Appleman. To me, it's always a little bit like Spring in New York City.

Nobody Dies in the Spring

Nobody dies in the spring
on the Upper West Side:
nobody dies.
On the Upper West Side

we're holding hands with strangers
on the Number 5 bus,
and we're singing the sweet
graffiti on the subway,
and kids are skipping patterns through
the bright haze of incinerators,
and beagles and poodles are making a happy
ruin of the sidewalks,
and hot-dog men are racing
their pushcarts down Riverside Drive,
and Con Ed is tearing up Broadway
from Times Square to the Bronx,
and the world is a morning miracle
of sirens and horns and jackhammers
and Baskin-Robbins' 31 kinds of litter
and sausages at Zabar's floating
overhead like blimps--oh,
it is no place for dying, not
on the Upper West Side, in springtime.

There will be a time
for the smell of burning leaves at Barnard,
for milkweed winging silky over Grant's Tomb,
for apples falling to grass in Needle Park;
but not in all this fresh new golden
smog: now there is something
breaking loose in people's chests,
something that makes butchers and bus boys
and our neighborhood narcs and muggers
go whistling in the streets--now
there is something with goat feet out there, not
waiting for the WALK light, piping
life into West End window-boxes,
pollinating weeds around
condemned residential hotels,
and prancing along at the head
of every elbowing crowd on the West Side,
singing:
Follow me-- it's spring--
and nobody dies.

"Nobody Dies in the Spring," by Philip Appleman, from New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996. © University of Arkansas Press.

Arithmetic

Julia sent me this video. She knows I love math. When she was about five I showed her an elementary algebraic equation and she seemed to follow it. In retrospect, I suspect she didn't get it at all and was merely being polite, waiting until I was finished so she could run off to play. It turns out, she hates math. My excitement when trying to explain anything to do with numbers to her was always inversely proportional to her despondence.

She calls me once in a while to ask me about some mathematical construct or symbol that she's considering including in a poem or essay she's writing. One of my favorites is factorial, indicated by the symbol !. 5! is 5 factorial or 1x2x3x4x5. I like to think of it as a very excited, gleeful 5! Julia recently phoned to inquire about sines and cosines. As I launched into an explanation, I could feel her eyes glazing over, 3,000 miles away.

Julia sent me this video. She knew I'd enjoy it. Truce.

E-mail from Me to Julia

Dua - Yikes. So much work. Sorry I didn't call you back tonight but I had hours of schoolwork to do and knew I shouldn't get on the phone. Dinner was okay - crab cakes, spring mix salad, browned roasted potatoes, string beans with mushrooms and onions that I picked off the top of some brown meat with gravy, little cupcakes (yummy), m&ms (Halloween colors), lightly, oh-so-lightly salted peanuts, a green apple (I would have preferred red) at the hotel front desk, one chocolate chip cookie and one oatmeal cookie at the second hotel front desk. Sheesh. Not a bad night at all. No grapes though, although I wouldn't know what to do with them anyhow. Is your computer running on-line? I love you and miss you. Mom

Creationist museum auctioning 40,000 year old mastodon skull

You can read about it at CNN.

I'm confused.

What is your mindset?

Ever heard of the Beloit College Mindset List? I encountered it for the first time yesterday while blogomeandering. Seems Beloit comes up with an entertaining and illuminating list attempting to identify the worldview of incoming freshmen/women, truisms, realities of the world for someone age 18. (Julia goes to a women's college and all the freshwomen are called freshwomen, something that hadn't occurred to me before, in spite of my bra-burning in the 60s.)

I came upon the Beloit List at TrogVision: The View from the Cave, where I also read, and I quote, "Let's remember, as some professor told me in law school: Money+family=litigation." True dat.

Back to the list - #7 of 70 is "They have grown up with bottled water". You can read an article, Bottled Water Isn't Healthier Than Tap, Report Reveals at National Geographic News. Among other points, in case you don't feel like reading it, is that some bottled water is simply tap water. On second thought, why don't you take a quick look at the article, but before you go, one more thought -

Consider the "mindset" as described by Beloit's list for someone who turned 18 in, let's say, 1940. Computers did not exist, hell, electric typewriters didn't exist, nor did fax machines, SUVs, Teflon or 8-track tapes. MasterCard and Visa had not entered our world and George W. Bush wasn't born yet. What was the norm?

Imagine the enormity of changes in the world that someone 85 years old has encountered, endured, survived. Yet, often, all we see is the old person, frail, unyielding, set in their ways.

Egads.

More Food

Jerzy and Kristara were sick today and wanted comfort food. They gave me a list and off I went to the grocery store and, among other things too disgusting to mention, I got a cantaloupe from Guatemala, black cherries from Chile, organic bananas from Ecuador and frozen organic blueberries from Canada.

I disapprove of my own purchases.

Food

I'm thinking about food. Nothing new for me. I've been thinking about food for most of my life. When I was a kid our household was always filled with food - dinner together, all seven (or eight, if Ruth was there) around the dinner table, each in our assigned seat. I sat in between Ruth and my mother, across from Josh. Josh liked to play "Look!", his mouth filled with partially chewed food, opened wide, Look!. He drove my mother crazy. JeriAnn sat at the other end next to my father. I suspect she was his favorite.

We ate meat and vegetables and rice or potatoes every night - capons roasted to perfection, moist on the inside with crispy skin; roast beef with "natural juices" (blood?); when in doubt, inch-thick sirloin steaks. And only real butter - lima beans swimming in pools of butter; broiled flounder in lemon butter; corn-on-the-cob not complete until our chins shone with butter. My father had meat delivered from the city periodically. He ordered smoked hams from a company in Vermont. They'd never mailed hams before. To this day they have a thriving mail-order business.

In summer, when the fruit market was open, I'd go with my father to buy flats of black cherries, blueberries, peaches and whole watermelons. We'd frequent the fishery, our purchases wrapped up in newspaper (We called the local paper the fish wrapper.) and go to the delicatessen where the owner made me tasty treats of herring and cucumber piled onto a cracker.

We ate food. Lots of it.

In the late 60s my brother Josh introduced me to Macrobiotics. I got the cookbook, bought brown rice, mung beans, aduki beans and tamari, and I was set. I drank carrot juice at the health store on Broadway. I suspect I was macrobiotic for about a week.

My brother Jeff, on the other hand, taught me the wonders of the cheese steak hoagie, a midnight summertime treat followed up by a A&W root beer float - thick, cold glass mug filled to overflowing and delivered by a carhop on a tray to hang on the driver's-side window.

In college I studied Biology, with special interest in Biochemistry and Nutrition. In those days we had Adelle Davis and Euell Gibbons to lead us to nutritional rightness. I kept chickens for eggs; grew vegetables in short Vermont summers; ground wheat berries into flour to make bread; made my own tofu, mayonnaise, humus; cooked on a wood stove. We ate wisely, naturally, deliciously.

Enter the 21st century. My kids counted the days until Taco Bell opened down the street. They eat there several days a week. They "eat fresh" at Subway routinely; Popeye's for fries and "chicken strips"; Chipotle; Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's pizza; all matter of "soft" drinks (They call them beverages.) and chips; and boxed, bagged and frozen meals cooked in the microwave.

Forget the fact that their pizzas were homemade when they were little - organic whole wheat crust, organic tomato sauce; that I made their pancakes from scratch with 20-grain (that's right, 20-grain) flour I mail-ordered from Walnut Acres; their french toast with 9-grain bread.

Jerzy loves to make pancakes from a mix she buys packaged in a plastic container - all she does is add something, shakes and pours. When she and Julia are sick, they both crave frozen Pizza Rolls for comfort.

And now I'm primed and ready to rant about cloned animals that the FDA, in its infinite wisdom, says are safe for consumption (NY Times article here). And about the billions of dollars that drug companies spend for cholesterol lowering drugs, even though it's not clear that cholesterol is the ultimate culprit, in the midst of a culture that promotes heart disease and diabetes through over-consumption and under-activity (NY Times article here).

I'd like to go on and on about the Ingredients labels on packaged foods, that they've lost their usefulness, and simply feed the frenzy of food fads. Do you know what we see when we glance at the ingredients? We look at the carb count or the total fat and sat fats. We don't glance at the ingredients at all. If we did, and if we weren't inured to the fact that what poses as food is actually a mix of processed (What exactly is processed?) natural and artificial flavors, weird colors, scary chemicals, and is not actually food at all, we wouldn't take a bite or a sip.

I'd like to rant about these things, maybe make references to Michael's Pollan's new book again. But I won't.