Ugh... Came down with something awful yesterday and my condition has only worsened this morning. I think it's a chest cold of some sort. I have the symptoms of a typical cold -- sore throat, cough, cloudy-headedness, snot -- but when I cough, it's not a usual cough; it's that deep rib-rattling cough where you can hear the vibrations of the lungs*. It feels like what I imagine a 70-year old who has been smoking since he was 12 feels when he coughs. It sucks.
"Luckily" I think Lil' S gave it to me, as he's been sick the past week, so I probably won't pass it on to him. Just to be safe, however, and to limit S's exposure, I've been asked to quarantine myself in the basement. We actually have people coming over for brunch this afternoon (of all the days), but they're mainly S's friends and colleagues, so nobody will mind if I'm not there. I certainly don't want to interact with anybody right now, and most people prefer not to hang out with the sick dude hacking up the joint. No point in me becoming Patient Zero. It's actually good that people are coming over as they can help entertain Lil' S for a while. It'll take some of the burden off S. She's already annoyed because I can't help out much today. I understand. I'm annoyed that I'm sick too, but there's not a lot I can do about it. I bought some Tylenol Cold which I've been taking, but that just means I'll be sick and out $13.
When I'm sick I just want to sit on the sofa, feel sorry for myself, and watch mindless TV. I'm fighting the urge to do that now. It's just such a waste of time. Even when I'm not feeling well there are better ways to spend my time. Like blogging or reading or watching Russell Wilson diagnose the art of the deep ball on youtube. (Alright, two of three ain't bad.)
Speaking of reading, I've gotten back into The New Yorker after a few weeks of letting unopened issues pile up virtually on my Kindle. Reading a New Yorker article is a bit like going to the gym. It's going to require some dedicated time and focus, so sometimes it's tough to get the motivation to start, but once you do it feels good. Their long-form investigative journalism is really topnotch, and (not to sound too pretentious) it's something different and refreshing from the usual barrage of click-on-me-two-paragraph-Yahoo!-nothing stories in our current media culture.
I read two really good articles in the most recent issue. The first was about sleep and what a mystery it still is to researchers. Still nobody really knows what function it serves. We know we need it, but we don't know why. It's really weird. As some dude name Allan Rechtschaffen said in the article, "If sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made."
The article also explores the question: Why, if sleep is so necessary, are we so bad at it? Again nobody really knows, but there are some possible partial explanations. One is that most people do it with somebody else. Apparently study after study shows that people sleep much more soundly if they have the bed to themselves. Another is that not everybody is meant to be on a typical 10 p.m. to 6 a.m sleep schedule, but we conduct our lives as if everybody is. Not many people are farmers anymore, and yet we are all still on the farmer's schedule for some reason.
My own personal experience is very consistent with these explanations. It took me a really long time to get used to sharing a bed (and S and I still don't do it every night), and I've always been what the article calls an "owl" (the opposite of an owl is a "lark"). I'm always more well-rested if I can get into a groove going to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning and waking up at 10 and 11 in the morning, and that's a bit on the early side. For a few years in grad school, when I was able to set my own schedule, I'd usually sleep from 5 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. It was awesome; I've never felt better or been more productive than I was then.
The only problem with this is that people assume you're on a "normal" schedule (understandably), so sometimes I'd have to meet with people in the morning, and nobody is sympathetic when you tell them that that's actually the equivalent of meeting in the middle of the night. For some reason if you're on an owl's schedule people have a tendency to think you're lazy. There's a bit of an early-to-bed-early-to-rise bias in our culture, even though late-to-bed-late-to-rise is essentially the same thing -- same amount of work, same amount of sleep, same amount leisure -- the clock just says something different.
Interestingly most teenagers are owls, which, according to the article, "is why high schools are filled with students who look (and act) like zombies." (Apparently making the high-school start times later in a district in Minnesota led to a "flabbergasting" rise in SAT scores.) The article also states that most infants are larks, which is unfortunate being that I have a infant son. It's a lot like what Jules Winnfield says in Pulp Fiction about having a vegetarian girlfriend. If you have an infant son who's a lark, that pretty much makes you a lark too.
Anyway, I wanted to touch on another article I read about Aaron Shwartz, the young computer whiz who killed himself before he was to be prosecuted for illegally downloading a large number of journal articles from a digital repository called JSTOR, which he accessed somewhat surreptitiously through MIT's computer network. But this entry is already pretty long and I'm tapped out, so I'll talk about it another time... or not.
Until next time...
*I'm using poetic license here. I don't know if lungs actually vibrate or not. I'm not a doctor. Actually I am, I'm just not a real doctor. The fact that my title is "Doctor" comes up approximately never in my day-to-day life. I normally don't even use it when I'm filling out forms. Once S used it when purchasing airplane tickets, and I asked her not to do this in the future, because I don't want anybody on the plane thinking I'd be useful in an emergency. Unless of course the emergency involved finding the shortest route through a handful of stops, in which case, I'd be precisely the man to talk to.
"Luckily" I think Lil' S gave it to me, as he's been sick the past week, so I probably won't pass it on to him. Just to be safe, however, and to limit S's exposure, I've been asked to quarantine myself in the basement. We actually have people coming over for brunch this afternoon (of all the days), but they're mainly S's friends and colleagues, so nobody will mind if I'm not there. I certainly don't want to interact with anybody right now, and most people prefer not to hang out with the sick dude hacking up the joint. No point in me becoming Patient Zero. It's actually good that people are coming over as they can help entertain Lil' S for a while. It'll take some of the burden off S. She's already annoyed because I can't help out much today. I understand. I'm annoyed that I'm sick too, but there's not a lot I can do about it. I bought some Tylenol Cold which I've been taking, but that just means I'll be sick and out $13.
When I'm sick I just want to sit on the sofa, feel sorry for myself, and watch mindless TV. I'm fighting the urge to do that now. It's just such a waste of time. Even when I'm not feeling well there are better ways to spend my time. Like blogging or reading or watching Russell Wilson diagnose the art of the deep ball on youtube. (Alright, two of three ain't bad.)
Speaking of reading, I've gotten back into The New Yorker after a few weeks of letting unopened issues pile up virtually on my Kindle. Reading a New Yorker article is a bit like going to the gym. It's going to require some dedicated time and focus, so sometimes it's tough to get the motivation to start, but once you do it feels good. Their long-form investigative journalism is really topnotch, and (not to sound too pretentious) it's something different and refreshing from the usual barrage of click-on-me-two-paragraph-Yahoo!-nothing stories in our current media culture.
I read two really good articles in the most recent issue. The first was about sleep and what a mystery it still is to researchers. Still nobody really knows what function it serves. We know we need it, but we don't know why. It's really weird. As some dude name Allan Rechtschaffen said in the article, "If sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made."
The article also explores the question: Why, if sleep is so necessary, are we so bad at it? Again nobody really knows, but there are some possible partial explanations. One is that most people do it with somebody else. Apparently study after study shows that people sleep much more soundly if they have the bed to themselves. Another is that not everybody is meant to be on a typical 10 p.m. to 6 a.m sleep schedule, but we conduct our lives as if everybody is. Not many people are farmers anymore, and yet we are all still on the farmer's schedule for some reason.
[Maybe puritanical '50s sitcoms had it right.]
My own personal experience is very consistent with these explanations. It took me a really long time to get used to sharing a bed (and S and I still don't do it every night), and I've always been what the article calls an "owl" (the opposite of an owl is a "lark"). I'm always more well-rested if I can get into a groove going to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning and waking up at 10 and 11 in the morning, and that's a bit on the early side. For a few years in grad school, when I was able to set my own schedule, I'd usually sleep from 5 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. It was awesome; I've never felt better or been more productive than I was then.
The only problem with this is that people assume you're on a "normal" schedule (understandably), so sometimes I'd have to meet with people in the morning, and nobody is sympathetic when you tell them that that's actually the equivalent of meeting in the middle of the night. For some reason if you're on an owl's schedule people have a tendency to think you're lazy. There's a bit of an early-to-bed-early-to-rise bias in our culture, even though late-to-bed-late-to-rise is essentially the same thing -- same amount of work, same amount of sleep, same amount leisure -- the clock just says something different.
Interestingly most teenagers are owls, which, according to the article, "is why high schools are filled with students who look (and act) like zombies." (Apparently making the high-school start times later in a district in Minnesota led to a "flabbergasting" rise in SAT scores.) The article also states that most infants are larks, which is unfortunate being that I have a infant son. It's a lot like what Jules Winnfield says in Pulp Fiction about having a vegetarian girlfriend. If you have an infant son who's a lark, that pretty much makes you a lark too.
Anyway, I wanted to touch on another article I read about Aaron Shwartz, the young computer whiz who killed himself before he was to be prosecuted for illegally downloading a large number of journal articles from a digital repository called JSTOR, which he accessed somewhat surreptitiously through MIT's computer network. But this entry is already pretty long and I'm tapped out, so I'll talk about it another time... or not.
Until next time...
*I'm using poetic license here. I don't know if lungs actually vibrate or not. I'm not a doctor. Actually I am, I'm just not a real doctor. The fact that my title is "Doctor" comes up approximately never in my day-to-day life. I normally don't even use it when I'm filling out forms. Once S used it when purchasing airplane tickets, and I asked her not to do this in the future, because I don't want anybody on the plane thinking I'd be useful in an emergency. Unless of course the emergency involved finding the shortest route through a handful of stops, in which case, I'd be precisely the man to talk to.
My ideal is to go to bed 11 to midnight and wake up about 8-9. Of course, B's school starts at 8 (an hour earlier than the next closest district and most private schools) which is annoying, but not too bad since I only have to get up about an hour "early." But when I go to CAbi conferences they start most things with a 7am breakfast! Drives me crazy. That is sooooo early to be up, dressed, and ready to learn.
ReplyDeleteLife should start at 10 am. No earlier.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, K & A.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, S said that my comment about us not sleeping in the same bed ever night implies that us sleeping in separate beds is a regular occurrence, which isn't the case. We only do so when there is a special reason to do so, such as sickness (like now) or something to do with Lil' S. Just wanted to clarify.