Entry 607: On Health, Private and Public

I started doing a new diet in which I only eat within an 8-hour period of each day; I don't eat anything the remaining 16 hours. It's commonly referred to as the 16/8 diet and is a form of intermittent fasting. I don't love that term, because to me you have to refrain from eating for at least, like, a day before you can say you're "fasting," but that's what people call it, so that's what it's called. I'm doing a specific type of 16/8 diet in that I only eat two meals a day roughly 7.5 hours apart -- so, like, I'll eat something at 12:30 pm and then I'll eat something at 8:00 pm, and I won't eat anything at any other time. It's technically closer to a 16/0.5/7/0.5 diet.

Why am I doing this? I just want to do something. I ate like shit on the cruise, and even before that I had relapsed into some bad eating habits -- too much snacking, too much salt and sugar. Working from home, I'd frequently swing by the cupboard and shove a fistful of Goldfish crackers into my mouth or house a sleeve of Ritz. And my nightly bowl of granola had morphed into bowls of granola to where I was polishing off half a bag of Michele's Cherry Chocolate in a sitting. That was not good for my waistline (too much fat and sugar) nor my wallet (close to $7.00 per bag). So, I felt the need to do something, and a few people (including my sister) swear by intermittent fasting, so I decided to give it a go. 

The truth is I don't think which diet you pick really matters that much. I mean, I read some stuff that says eating only two meals a day is a good way to go because it gives your body a chance to metabolize food into energy, and it trains you to function while being a little bit hungry, and that all makes sense to me, but it could just be BS. It seems that so much of what you read about nutrition is either based on one study that gets overly hyped only to be refuted a few years later (eggs are bad, eggs are good, milk is good, milk is bad, milk is good again), or it's just a new way to sell us what we already know. Because there are really only three principles you need to know for eating healthy:

1. Eat primarily protein and vegetables
2. Stay away from added sugars and salts
3. Don't pig out

That's it; everything else is noise. It's so simple in theory, but so difficult in practice -- and that's why people need regimented diets. It's not the mix of food that matters; it's the bookkeeping. For me, 16/8 is appealing because I like eating big meals, I drink a lot of coffee in the morning so I don't get that hungry anyway, it stops my snacking, I can still eat "what I want" for the most part, and it doesn't require much thought to implement. That last one is why I've never been interested in "points" diets. I have enough stressful decisions in my life, I don't need to fret over whether or not I can eat a 15-point bag of soy snacks with lunch.

Anyway, it's going pretty well so far, but it's only been a week, and I have no idea if it's "working." I'll report back in a month or so and let you how I'm feeling and how my waistline is looking.

In other news, as you probably heard, a judge overruled the federal mask mandate on public transportation. This doesn't bode well for future court rulings by Trump appointed judges, and according to experts I trust, it's judicial overreach, but I'm fine with the mandate being gone. Bad process, okay results. I don't feel personally aggrieved being compelled to wear a mask -- I'm mostly fine with it -- but I don't think mandates are good policy, politically or public health-wise. Politically, it's just not smart for liberals to tie their identities to a rule that annoys so much of the country (including many other liberals). As for public health, it's not clear to me that masks do all that much to prevent spread in the first place. They are probably efficacious in certain controlled settings, like, say, hospitals, but in airports or metro centers where half the people are wearing translucently thin pieces of fabric around their chins, I don't think they do all that much. For what it's worth, my kids' school has been mask optional for over a month, and I haven't received notice of a single Covid case among the students since then.

Also, the pro-mask-mandate folks only have one measure of public health: disease transmission. If that's the only criterion, then of course we should all wear masks all the time. But there are other aspects of public well-being, and these are often given short shrift by the pro mask crowd. For one thing, masks make people irritable and resentful, which leads to an increase in hostility and confrontations, and masks make it harder to resolve such things because you can't always hear what people are saying and you can't read their facial expressions (you can't defuse situations with a smile). For another thing, masks are a major part of a fear-based response to Covid that now outweighs the severity of the disease itself. Yes, getting Covid is bad, but so is living our lives in fear of getting Covid (and training our kids to be scared). It's not good for our mental health. Covid anxiety is now worse than Covid.

At least this is the case for most of us, given current strains of Covid are unlikely to make vaxxed and boosted people any sicker than a common cold. There are of course folks who chose not to get vaccinated (that's on them) or who can't get vaccinated or who have comorbidities that make it dangerous to get Covid even if they are vaccinated. But a lot of these people probably aren't traveling even with a mask mandate, and if they are, they are still free to protect themselves. They can still wear a mask -- even though masks are better at protecting others, wearing a good surgical-grade mask does provide you some protection -- and they can wear a face shield. This to me seems like a more reasonable, sane way to go about things rather than making everybody else do something they hate.

The sad part is that even though I suspect this point of view is shared by a lot of liberals, it's super hard to find it represented in mainstream, left-of-center media. You are more likely to find tripe like this article -- on the main page of my WaPo feed, under News, not even Opinion -- "Whoops of selfish delight" by Robin Givhan. This is a shockingly bad article. For starters, the very premise that wanting the mask mandate to be lifted is selfish is flawed, because, by allowing others to remove their masks, you are accepting the same risk of exposure for yourself (and your family) as everybody else. Cheering for a rule in which only you could remove your mask would be very selfish, but that's not the case. So, what we have here is not selfishness; it's a different collective risk calculus and a different prioritization of public health objectives.

And the article not only doesn't mention any other public health objectives, it doesn't even acknowledge that some might exist. Instead it links to another article about the racial and class disparities of pandemic life, even though this doesn't in any way strengthen the author's argument concerning the mask mandate. It's completely inapt. I mean, does she think it's only rich whiteys who loathe the mask mandates?* If so, she should patronize a few establishments in a diverse neighbor. I do that on the regular, and I see people of all colors and income levels wearing or not wearing or kinda wearing masks. There doesn't seem to be any correlation with race or wealth at all.

*I doubt she thinks that. I think she just wants to inject an element of racial justice into this story, because there's a certain type of person -- overly represented among WaPo readers and writers -- who thinks the only credible way to address a societal issue is through a lens of power differentials. This is a big part of the book I'm currently reading Woke Racism by John McWhorter. It's a bit over the top in certain parts, but still an interesting read.  

Another thing that undercuts the author's premise is the video in it. Those are some pretty weak "whoops" (of selfish delight or otherwise). It opens with a flight attendant singing in celebration about the ruling (and if anybody has standing to speak on a mask mandate, it's somebody whose living is potentially effected by it, no?), and then it shows a few clips of scattered applause and cheers among passengers. The vast majority of the people onboard are clearly just sitting there unmoved, because they either didn't hear what was announced or they don't give a shit. It's not like the entire plane rose to their feet to give a standing ovation.

Then the article ends with legal stuff, which is the best part, but still, not really here nor there. I guarantee you the vast majority of the people cheering on planes were not well versed on the jurisprudential ramifications of the announcement. They are just annoyed with their masks and responding to somebody who said they can take them off. I don't think it's any deeper or more sinister than that.

Until next time...

Entry 606: Cruisin'

The big family cruise for my father-in-law's 80th birthday came and went. It was... fine. I enjoyed it, and it was good to spend time with everybody as a family like that, but I'm not super eager to hop back on another cruise ship anytime soon. It's kinda a weird concept: Hey, let's all hang out on this floating resort. It's not as nice as a regular resort, and there's a pretty good chance you'll get motion sickness at some point to boot!

The motion sickness is a really thing too. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Those ships are so big you don't even notice it! Nah... I always noticed it. It didn't always bother me, but I always noticed it. And weirdly, I handled it much better than S. I'm the one who gets nauseous at Hollywood Studios, and she's the one who lived at sea for a semester in college. But somehow she was really starting to feel it toward the end of the trip, and I was pretty much good to go. The first night was brutal (the choppiest night of the trip by far), and then after that I acclimated to it. Lil' S2 got it the worst. He would have to lie down from time to time because he felt seasick.

He still had fun though. We all did. They had a water park, a pool, a gym, a spa, a mini golf course, and a bunch of lounges and bars. The nightlife looked pretty cool -- so much live music. You could just pop in on somebody playing the piano Billy Joel style, or an '80s cover band, or a salsa club, or a variety show, or what have you. I didn't really partake because I went to bed very early by my standards, usually around 10:30. Everybody in S's family is fast asleep an hour and a half before that, including S and the boys, with whom I was sharing a very small cabin, so when they woke up (very early) I pretty much had to wake up too. Once I got up in time to watch the sunset, so I did, but it was cloudy and not very beautiful at all.

Actually the final night we were there, we did do something at night. S, her sister, and I went to see a comedy show -- some woman named Thea Vidale. It was terrible. We literally walked out after 10 minutes it was so bad. I looked her up online afterward, and I think she was pretty funny once, but she mailed it in big time when we saw her. (To be fair, she did like ten shows total the four nights we were on the ship.) She was doing what's known in the NBA as "keep getting dem checks." She just rambled with little point and no punchlines. Her whole shtick was being an overbearing vulgar loudmouth, which gets old super quickly if there's nothing clever undergirding it. I knew we were in trouble when she came on stage and sat down in a chair. It's never a good sign when you get the standup who doesn't actually stand up.

The best thing I did on the ship was get a deep tissue massage. It hurt so good. I don't know how a 97-pound woman can make her arm feel like a rolling pin flattening your muscles, but this massage therapist did it. This wasn't one of those relaxing "aah that feels good" massages -- those aren't my type. I like the massages that dig deep into your soul, confound your sensors of pleasure and pain, and leave you feeling sore the next day. The only problem with it was that she made me feel guilty for having knotty muscles -- like, she'd feel tightness in my back and tsk-tsk and say something like "can tell you don't soak in tub enough." It reminded me of that Seinfeld episode in which Brad Garrett plays an auto mechanic who chastises Jerry for not taking care of his car.

The worst part about the trip was the cost -- not of the cruise itself, but of everything else. It's "all inclusive," with the exception of espresso drinks, seltzer water, alcoholic beverages, soda, arcade games, casino games, bottled water, sushi, surf & turf, internet service, spa treatments, photos, souvenirs, shore excursions, and service gratuity. If you want any of those things, you have to pay separately, and they are not cheap nor are they high quality. I dropped $65 on internet for the trip, and I could barely check my email it was so slow. I gave the kids $10 each to spend in the arcade and it didn't even last them 15 minutes. That's how they get you.

The second worst part of the trip was the shitty country music they played nonstop in the main dining area. God, I loathe that pop country garbage: My whiskey's brown, my truck's a Ford, got some country girls to come on board, them country girls all flock to me, cuz my gee-tar's hot and my land is free... It's my least favorite musical genre by far. Here are my top-5 in order from most to least tolerable. 

5. Weird experimental avant-garde shit
4. Punk/metal in which the leader singer screams all the lyrics, especially insufferable if the members of the band are straight-edge and/or vegan
3. Easy listening, Kenny G stuff -- I heard an interview with Kenny G and really like him, so I listened to some of his music on YouTube; it's not good
2. Gospel -- once I took a Lyft to the airport at five in the morning and my driver listened to a radio show called "Praise Jesus" at 100 decibels the entire way; it was absolutely brutal
1. Pop country

Mainly I dislike pop country music because it's an aural atrocity, but, I will admit, another reason is that I associate it with people I would probably not want to hang out with. People who defend Deshaun Watson but hated on Colin Kaepernick, who think "Let's Go Brandon" is the cleverest slogan ever created, and whose attire consists primarily of cargo shorts and tee shirts with stylized American flag iconography. I actually was a bit worried that this type of person was going to be overly represented on the cruise, but they weren't really. They were definitely there, but almost every type of person was there. It was a pretty diverse group. Lots of old people of course, but also lots of families and seemingly lots of single people. It wasn't just a bunch of straight, cis whiteys either. There were a good number of Black and brown people onboard and seemingly a strong LBGT contingent as well. I guess people from all walks of life want to party on a floating skyscraper.

Plenty of kids around too. The hot tubs were filled with teenagers by 9:00 pm. Lil' S1 made a few friends, because of course he did -- some little boy named Magnus or something like that who is apparently a YouTuber. They met at the water park and then hung out at the "Kids Club." That's actually the best part of the cruise: They have a place you can dump your kids. It would have been really nice if I had a wife who could stay up past 8:30 in the evening.

One funny moment happened when both my boys were in the hot tub with a few other kids, and I got in it with them and Lil' S1 gave me a strange look and said, "Uh, daddy, I think the adult hot tub is on the other end," and pointed to the other hot tub which happened to only have adults in it. Then he put it to a vote, and I got booted from the "kid" hot tub by unanimous decision. One of the kids in there was, like, 13 too. He seemed too old to be hanging out with a 9-year-old, but he was by himself, which really matters. Kids are so much nicer to other kids when there is nobody around they are trying to impress.

The best thing about a cruise, in theory, is that you get to vacation during your travel time to destinations. In practice, this didn't work out so well for us because our destinations, Honduras and Mexico, didn't really feel like destinations because we got such little time there. We didn't even make it to mainland Honduras. We spent a few hours on the island of Roatán. Our guides (a couple dudes with a van) were cool, and they took us to a zoo of sorts, where the kids got to pet a sloth and hold a macaw and stuff like that -- things that surely would have been illegal in the states. Then we went to a chocolate factory (very different from Willy Wonka's), and then went to a lookout point and snapped a few nice pics.

The next day we went to Mexico. We docked in Cozumel, and then took a ferry over to the mainland (Playa del Carmen). We went to a nature park called Xcaret and swam/floated down this "river." It was cool, but it was super rushed and really expensive, and S's parents are too old to do anything too active anyway, so they basically just sat on a bench the entire time. Also, the ferry ride was kinda long (45 minutes each way) and super choppy, which is exactly what we didn't need at that moment. Thankfully, Lil' S2 slept both there and back or he would have been really suffering, I think.

Oh, and I lost S's water bottle. That might not sound like that big a deal, but it was this expensive, hard-to-find water bottle that "purifies" the water after you put it in. I mean, it's probably total BS -- what does it even mean to "purify" tap water? -- but somehow pointing that out to S only made things worse. She couldn't get too mad at me though, because after we finished the river at Xcaret, she wanted to go to lunch, and I insisted that we look for her parents because the guide told us to meet them afterward (the whole scene was very hectic). She was hangry and already walking with the kids toward the restaurant, but I made her stop and wait while I looked. Lo and behold I found the guide who took me to her parents, who were in fact waiting for us. If we had listened to S, we would have totally dissed them. So, you know, you win some, you lose some.

Alright a few pics and then I'm out.

 

Until next time...

Entry 605: Math Problem

Short entry today, which is unfortunate, considering I didn't post anything at all this past weekend. I'm not abandoning this blog (I can't let down my double digit readership); I've just been really busy of late, with very specific things, not just, like, life or kids or whatnot. I served as a judge at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament last weekend (I wrote nearly 2,000 words about it here, if you are so inclined to read about it), and then we are leaving early tomorrow to visit S's parents in Tampa and then take a cruise to Honduras and Mexico. It's a big family to-do for my father-in-law's 80th birthday.

I'll admit I was quite apprehensive about the idea of a cruise a first. Floating in the ocean, in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from civilization, just doesn't strike me as very relaxing. I'm not a grandeur-of-the-open-sea type of guy. But after having some time to warm up to the idea and looking online at the amenities on the ship and the excursions you can book when you dock, I'm excited for it -- or at least I'm not totally anxious about it, which is probably the best I can hope for at the moment. I'm sure once it's actually in progress I'll really enjoy it -- that's how these things seem to go.

It's pretty late and I have to wake up super early tomorrow (like 4:00 am early), but before I go I want to share the latest math exploits of Lil' S2. The other morning before school we had the following conversation. 

Him: Daddy, how many 60s are in 400?

Me: Well, let's see, 6 times 60 is 360, so it's 6 with a remainder of 40.

Him: Oh, okay, then there are 16 hours and 40 mins in 1,000 minutes!

Me: Is that... [Can't do arithmetic in head quickly enough, pull out calculator on my phone and punch in 1,000 / 60 and get the answer 16.666667] You're right! How'd you figure that out!

Him: Well, you helped me with last part. I know that there are 10 100s in 1,000, but if you only take 60 instead of 100 then you have 40 left over and 40 10s is 400. So when you told me there are 6 hours and 40 minutes in 400, then I knew it had to be 16 hours and 40 minutes in 1,000 minutes.

Me: Woah! Good job!

That is some advanced reasoning for a six-year-old, and I'm not just saying that because he's my son. I'd be willing to bet a substantial portion of the adult American population could not figure that out, even if I gave them 400 / 60. S and I have been trying to figure out a good way to nurture this math talent. We want to send him to Mathnasium (Lil' S1 has been doing it for a while), but his reading skills aren't strong enough to handle the word problems yet. I think this hurts him in the classroom as well. I don't think his teachers recognize his natural aptitude in math because he can't always follow the written instructions, so he gets things wrong. I guess we need to teach him to read better to improve his math skills.

Alright, now I'm done.

Until next time...