Tag Archives: Health

A real pisser…

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Six or so years ago I found myself limping around the house, the office, the grocery store, basically everywhere. It wasn’t quite agony, but it wasn’t pleasant. A trip to my primary care doctor and a referral to a orthopedic specialist later, the diagnosis was plantar fasciitis. It’s a problem of the ligaments of the foot, which tends to cause intense pain after sleeping and long periods of sitting, both of which are activities I participate in on a daily basis. The basic fix was some over the counter anti-inflammatory, some icing, staying off the thing as much as possible, and a fancy set of orthotic inserts for my shoes. It’s all part of my look as the world’s youngest 70 year old man.

Mostly the inserts and an occasional handful of ibuprofen do the trick to stave off any further issues. About once a year though I unwittingly do something to aggravate the hell out of the little bundle of ligaments… at which point I’m right back to limping around from place to place and generally trying to keep off the damned thing as much as possible. It seems that this week is that magical time of year.

So if you see me gimping across the parking lot or I don’t stand up to greet you, a) I’m ok and b) don’t take it personally. I once heard it said that getting old ain’t for sissies. The older I get – and the more wear and tear I inflict on myself – the more I’ve come to appreciate that statement. For good or bad we’re all living in bodies that were designed by biology to last 35 or 40 years, seed the next generation, and then make way for them. We’ve pushed that frontier back through the audacity of our science… but the bits and pieces that wear out and break down along the way are a real pisser.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Everything being bad for you. Sunscreen is bad for you. Sun burns are bad for you. GMO crops feed the world, but they’ll make your kid grow a tail. Egg whites are ok. Egg yellows steal your soul or some such foolishness. As much as I appreciate living in an age of seemingly limitless information, I need to break down one cold, simple truth: We’re all going to die. Some will die young. Some will die old. It’s been that way forever and there’s no current way around it. Everything is bad for you. Everything in the world is trying to make you sick and speed you to your grave… As much as I appreciate people who honestly want to live a healthy lifestyle I just don’t have the mental energy to worry about whether the tomatoes at the Amish market was raised without pesticides or antibiotics in a free range, organic environment. Maybe it should concern me more, but it really, really doesn’t.

2. Delmarva Power. Yes I know I can save money on “peak savings” days by turning off my air conditioner between the hours of 2PM and 8PM when demand is highest. No, I’m not going to do that, though. Your job is to produce and distribute power to satisfy demand – yes even on the hot days – so no I won’t be sweating my ass off in my own home on the next 97 degree day so you can avoid lighting off the last few boilers or skip buying energy from a 3rd party producer. I’ll keep doing my job so I can pay the bills, you go ahead and do yours so we don’t unexpectedly plunge back into the 1870s.

3. Manual signature required. We’re in the year AD 2015. It defies imagination that there is still a situation where I would have to print something out, sign it with a pen, scan it, and then send it back to someone in order for something to be “official.” It’s even more fanciful when we decide to send the same document around for electronic signature “so we have both on file.” Two exact copies of the same document. One signed by pen and then sent back electronically, the other signed by ID card and then sent back electronically… both then printed out and stuffed into a manila folder to be deposited in a file drawer and then not to see the light of day for potentially a decade or more. The fact that this is still how we do things is, sadly, not at all a cause for surprise.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. You drink too much coffee. So you say. That’s purely a matter of opinion, but in a world where I’m not allowed to smoke, where all food should be salt-less, carbs are off limits, red meat is the devil, and cake is a hanging offense, I don’t care what your opinion about my coffee intake is. Too much joy has been sucked out of life for me to willingly give up my all-day infusion of warm, roasted, caffeine-laden goodness. Sure, maybe it would extend my life a few years… but is it a life worth living if you’re stuck drinking nothing but water and eating nothing but sprouts and granola? Feels like a decent trade off to me, so you can go ahead and stow your objections to coffee.

2. Primary Season. Every week we seem to find a few more would-be-candidates wandering onto the field of electoral combat. I know it’s primary season here in America and that’s what happens. That doesn’t mean I have to be the least bit interested in anything they’re saying at this point. I’m an educated voter and so far all I can really tell you is there’s a brain surgeon, a socialist, a guy who wants to make us use the metric system, Hillary Clinton, and a bunch of other people whistle-stopping around the country trying to scrape up enough money to stay on the road for another few weeks. There will be more of them before the field starts to winnow – then maybe I’ll start paying a bit of attention. Until then the whole conversation – the left-on-left, right-on-left, and right-on-right hypocrisy – is just too thick to warrant giving them any serious thought.

3. Rain. I spent a lot of the last three weeks complaining that the yard needed rain and was in danger of turning into my own mini-dustbowl. I was wrong. Now that the rain has come and (mostly) gone I’ve been giving myself a crash course of rainwater diversion and storm water management. Talk about things they don’t teach you in school. Well, they don’t teach them to history majors anyway. So far, my plan of attack seems to require a combination of roofers, heavy equipment operators, landscapers, air conditioning repairmen, and possibly a general contractor, soil specialist, and hydraulic engineer. All of these are skills I could probably learn myself given an unlimited amount of time, but as things stand I’m not willing to wait that long to bring good order and discipline to the free flowing surface water that finds its way into the back yard every time more than a light mist falls.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Drink your Ovaltine. I had a meeting last week. That’s not unusual in that the bulk of my professional life is spent getting ready for, attending, or recovering from meetings. This one was special though, because we had a 4-star general spend twenty minutes telling us to eat right, exercise, and get eight hours of sleep a night. A full general. Eat your veggies and get lots of sleep. I have a hard time imagining Eisenhower or MacArthur or Patton spending so much time ensuring their people enjoyed a nice kale salad and got tucked in at night. So do me a favor out there and remember to drink your Ovaltine so you can grow up big and strong.

2. Our big thing. Our grandparents went from riding horses to riding rockets. Our parents built the internet. So far what our generation has done is develop faster and faster methods of sharing pictures of cats with everyone you’ve ever known. No cure for cancer. No flying cars. Just incremental improvements on stuff that’s been around since we were kids. Where’s our big thing? What is it we’re supposed to be doing to leave our mark on the world? I’m as clueless as everyone else I guess, but someone needs to figure this mess out and get working on it.

3. Only when it’s convenient. There are a slew of stories in the press this week about the meteoric rise in Baltimore’s murder rate this month. An AP story weeps that “Now West Baltimore residents worry they’ve been abandoned by the officers they once accused of harassing them.” Well shut my mouth. You treated officers like dirt, sued, and badmouthed them at every turn and suddenly the community is surprised to learn the blue line between civilization and chaos is a little more thin than they realized. I appreciate their efforts to have it both ways – to have a deep and active police presence banging heads and taking down criminals but not the “low level” criminals who are “members of the community.” Sorry folks, it’s a binary system. The law is the law – felonies or civil violations – and when you break that law you recognize that there could be consequences for your actions. For decades parts of Baltimore thought they’d be better off without law and order. Well gang, next time let’s go ahead and remember to be careful what we ask for… because unintended consequences can be a real mother.

Blood pressure…

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The president will deliver the State of the Union address tomorrow night. Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, we mostly know the broad strokes of what’s going to be in it – I’m sure it’s not nearly as suspenseful as waiting for a president to send his hand written evaluation up the Hill once a year, but asking the cable news channels to adhere to an endearing 18th century standard of practice is surely too much to ask.

That means tomorrow evening I have two choices. First, I could watch the speech live and make myself crazy ranting and raving at the television in real time and ensure I’m too aggravated to get anything close to a good night’s sleep. Option two involves ignoring the live broadcast and catching the meat of it in dribs and drabs over the next few days, which would lengthen the duration of annoyance but likely reduce the intensity of my expected opposition to nearly everything I expect to hear.

In any case, it’s a safe bet that my blood pressure will be off the rails for the next couple of days. Under the current circumstances it seems the best I can hope for is avoiding a heart attack, ulcer, or throwing the remote through the screen. That doesn’t say much for my evaluation of the current state of our Union.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. “Being robbed by the rich.” Based on what I see popping up from time to time on social media I should be furious because the money I’m supposed to have has apparently been stolen by the uber-wealthy. A quick look at this month’s bank statement will show without a doubt that I’m not one of them. Somehow I don’t feel like I’ve been the victim of theft, though. I started saving when I got my first job, made some good trades, and got lucky on more than one occasion. I’ve managed to stash a little back for the proverbial rainy day and for the far off day when I’m neither willing nor able to work any longer. Because there isn’t as much there as I’d like isn’t an indication that it was stolen from me so much as it’s an indication that I need to do a better job saving. There’s a vocal little group out there who apparently think the “rich” have snuck into my account and walked away with a bag of cash. Truth be told, I’m far more worried about long term inflation and the devaluation of the dollar than I am the “Wall Street Banksters” raiding me for pocket change.

2. Low grade crud. I’ve been suffering from some kind of low grade crud for weeks now. Some days are worse than others, but mostly it presents as a stuffy nose, occasional cough, and sore throat that sort of comes and goes of its own accord. It’s annoying, but not to the level of being worth having anyone check it out. Whatever’s in there coming and going needs to just go because it has more than worn out its welcome.

3. “Islamophobia.” Rest assured when I use the phrase Islamic terrorist I know exactly what I mean. I mean a terrorist who is either motivated by their Islamic faith or one who is using it as a justification for barbaric actions. Despite what some busybody old bat standing near me in line last weekend thinks, it’s not an indication that I am “Islamophobic.” I most assuredly don’t fear Islam or any other religion for that matter. I use Islamic terrorist to denote an asshat or asshats who claim to use one of the world’s great religions as justification for everything from petty crime, to mass murder, to acts of war. Rest assured, just as soon as a Methodist or Catholic shoots up Mad Magazine because Jesus told them to I’ll be among the first in line condemning them for it. I don’t blame a whole faith for the actions of a few, but I damned well do blame that faith when they don’t rise up in one voice to condemn those splinter elements who are pirating the name of their God for a decidedly ungodly purpose.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Ten hours, 500-ish miles, and three states later, I think I could be forgiven for not immediately checking in to the hotel and sitting down at the keyboard… still, that’s exactly what I’m doing – A) Because WAJTW is a weekly standard that is near and dear to my heart and B) The universe doesn’t stop pissing me off just because I’m on the road. Those two feel like reason enough to sit down and get this done. So, as always, in no particular order, here they are:

1. White Marsh. The area at and surrounding the I-95/I-695 interchange has been under construction since just after the earth coalesced from stardust. There are places where the interstate in that area is at least 20 lanes wide. At the same time traffic flow has never actually gotten any better there. I don’t know if it’s crummy engineering, worthless drivers, too many people trying to cram through too little geography or some combination of the three, but the only time I’ve ever had a good experience traversing that mess is between the hours of midnight and 4AM. For some reason, that strikes me as less than ideal for one of nation’s premier north-south arteries. I’d love to offer a brilliant suggestion for making improvements, but I’ll defer to the hundreds of professional engineers who are working on that never-ending project to come up with something in that part of the highway network that doesn’t suck so hard.

2. Interstate 81. I-81 gets bad press because of the heavy volume of truck traffic it carries on a daily basis. My experience is that 81 may just have some of the most disciplined drivers in the nation. The left lane was kept clear except for passing and even with trucks and passenger cars intermingled, the average speed never dropped much below 70. It was one small slice of the American highway where everyone seemed to know what they were supposed to do. Everyone except the asshole in the powder blue Scion who couldn’t for the life of him find the accelerator but insisted for driving for mile after mile in the left lane. People like him are the reason I’ve not put a push bar on the front of the truck. If I wasn’t worried about scuffing the bumper I’d be too sorely tempted not to give them a helpful nudge in the right direction.

3. Glory days. As few as 4 years ago I use to jump in the truck and drive the 14 hour, 800 mile run from Baltimore to Memphis while only making two stops for fuel and to give back the coffee I’d rented earlier in the day. When I got there I was ready to unpack, make dinner, and enjoy the evening. Today I drove a little more than half that distance, took 2/3 the total amount of time, and made three stops. When I arrived at my destination, I limped to the front desk nursing a bum shoulder and a sore knee and utterly unable to stand up straight. Honest to God, if I remember my 30s for anything it’s going to be as the decade when my body started to completely disintegrate before my eyes.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Eye Exams. In the interest of accuracy, I should say it’s not really the exam that annoys me. It’s the fact that during the exam, the doctor dilates my eyes and then sends me out to the lobby to look at new frames. Have optometrists every really considered the irony of this? Is it, perhaps, their one big inside joke? I have to take my glasses off to try on new frames, so I already can’t see worth a tinker’s damn and then adding insult to injury your fancy drops have go and turn my vision from bad to worse. So anyway, I have new frames coming, but I really don’t have any idea how they look. As far as I could tell when I bought them, they were just dark smudges high center of my face. That’s a hell of a way to pick something you’re going to wear for a minimum of every one of the next 365 days.

2. Cancellations. I need to start keeping track of the number of hours I spend getting ready for things that end up being cancelled at the last minute. While I’m perfectly happy to not have to sit in a random one hour meeting, I’m never going to get back the three to five hours of prep time it takes to get ready for a meeting that’s cancelled. Worse yet, there’s every chance that same meeting will be rescheduled later in the week or the next and that means the prep time involved just doubled. Everyone is busy, but that doesn’t feel like it should be an excuse for piss poor planning.

3. Exercise. Take one look at me and you’ll know this body isn’t a temple, except maybe to Bacchus. With my back out of sorts most of the spring and a good part of the summer, there wasn’t much, if any exercise happening. Doing much more than sitting in a nice hard backed chair for more than 15 minutes at a clip left me pretty hobbled. Now, if only so I can get the doctor to stop scolding me, I’m back to spending time on the bike every night. Sure, I can stick my nose in a book and make it tolerable, but deep down I still think of it as a waste of 45 good minutes I could be using to blog, or work on the next short story, or any of the other things I try to cram into the few hours between getting home from work and collapsing at the end of the night. I envy you people out there who look forward in anticipation to your daily exercise. I don’t think I’ll ever get to a point where I see it as much more than another “must do” activity sucking time away from the things that I really want to spend my time doing.

5AM…

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Because I’m Mr. Glass Half Full, I can see the positive about my internal alarm being so well set that it likes to wake me up at 5AM even on Saturdays. Aside from the chance to see the sun come up – or in this morning’s case to see the sky go from dark gray to light gray – it’s given me the chance to catch up on some blog reading and commenting that I never seem to have time for. That’s basically how I spent the first 90 minutes of the day; reading blogs, dispensing comments, and swilling down coffee at the rate of about 8 cups and hour.

What all this “extra” time this morning didn’t do, of course, is lead me down to the basement to reacquaint me with the exercise equipment I’ve been ignoring since I jacked up my back this winter. Now that it’s feeling better, I’m assured that I can safely get back to that routine… but keeping up with other people’s writing is way, way more fun. I know at some point I’m going to have to get back to that. 5AM (4:30 on weekdays) feels like it’s probably going to be the only available time to make that happen. Sleep is basically the only thing I’m currently doing that I’m willing to cut out of my schedule in order to add something new. If I get up at 4:30, I’ll still manage to get five hours of sleep every day. How much of that do we really need anyway?

I’m sure this all seems like a better idea while I’m sitting here well caffeinated than it will when I’m struggling to understand the concept of an alarm clock at 4:30 on Monday morning. This plan probably won’t survive first contact with the enemy, but at least it looks good on paper… or at least it looks good on paper if you don’t have any expectation of every getting eight hours of sleep. I haven’t had that expectation in a very, very long time.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The inconveniences of middle age. Knee problems. Back problems. Shoulder problems. Wrist problems. Mercifully they all come and go, but I know deep down they’re all there lurking under the surface and waiting for the perfect excuse to put in appearance. I’m really beginning to hate the mornings when I wake up with a sore “something” for no apparent reason. I can see an injury if I were out toting, lifting, or hauling, but an injury from just laying there for six hours? Yeah. That happens more often than I want to admit. It’s definitely a problem I didn’t have 20 years ago… and it makes me a little nervous about what it’s going to feel like 20 years from now.

2. Tharp’s Law. For me, a full work week consists of 40 hours on the job. Now generally, I’m at my most productive – that is, actually generating usable products and service – when I’m actually at my desk doing a little bit of what we like to call analysis. Reading, writing, distilling information from multiple sources into a consistent and coherent thread of an idea. I like to think I’m pretty good at it. When I’m not so productive is when the scale tips and I’m spending more than half my time preparing for, attending, or writing summaries of meetings. This week, it’s been well over half the available time. Therefore, the fundamental truth of Tharp’s Law is as follows: For every hour spent prepping for, attending, or summarizing a meeting, you’ve lost an hour of productive time that you’re never going to get back and in which actual work will never occur. It’s a simple 1:1 ratio and it’s constant as the speed of light (in a vacuum).

3. Third things. Sometimes there are no third things because the first two are exhausting and one of the two makes your wrist hurt.