Sit and Die

When I was in public school in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s the major social concern that was being taught was “Smoking Kills.” Some of my teachers were drug users so this was before “Just Say No to Drugs.” AIDS was just a plural form of a verb so by all means, children, experiment sexually. But they had these lessons on the horrors of smoking where my teacher would smoke a cigarette then exhale through a white handkerchief and pass around the yellow-brown gooey tar that would be lining our lungs if we smoked a cigarette. They had just started putting the Surgeon General’s warnings on the sides of cigarette packages. They showed films of people with mouth, throat or lung cancer speaking through a tracheostomy speaking valve. We drew class posters with slogans like “Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.” It became a reflexive action to be repelled by anyone who smoked. It was this generation of indoctrinated children in California that voted to ban smoking in all public places.

Not only did they warn us students to never, ever smoke, they sent us home with tricks for getting our parents to stop smoking. I was advised to go home and hide my mother’s cigarettes. I did so. I suffered. I was advised to save my mother’s life by cutting her cigarettes in half. I did so. I suffered. My mother gave up cigarette smoking some years later and she made little “no smoking” signs to post in the bathrooms and on the dining table so visitors could suffer. My point is that I learned what every person interested in world domination knows: influence the young if you wish to enact social change.

So imagine my gut reaction to the magazine headline “Sitting is the New Smoking.” Cigarettes kill people. Now I risk life and limb by sitting down? According to the article in the AARP magazine “Sitting: Hazardous to Your Health” by Elizabeth Pope “Sitting for long periods increases the risk of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and early death.” I immediately envisioned children going home and hiding their parents’ chairs. I could imagine children drawing class art for the mural, “Have a seat – if you want to die!” Some youth slides into the seat on the bus ahead of the old lady and tells her, “Grandma, I’m just doing this for your own good.”

The high school kids who wait for the bus on the corner by my house smoke like chimneys but the stigma they can’t live down is if they are overweight. The president’s wife has as her social cause the fight against childhood obesity. My “the medium is the message” sensibilities notice the children’s art hung by the salad bar restaurant of evil sweets and cupcakes being run over and whipped by bicycles and jump ropes. I suspect they show grade schoolers the clip from WALL*E of all the humans who have sat so long in their hover chairs in space that they’ve lost all their bone mass and have become human elephant seals. A February 7 web-article from The Editors by Joe Kita says that businesses are posting signs by the elevators that say, “Burn calories not electricity – take the stairs” and just by posting the signs stair usage is up 35 percent. The advertisement that goes with that article is for woodway.com’s office treadmill. At the push of a button your desk’s surface raises and a treadmill slides out so you can walk while you handle business phone calls at work. The other image I gawked at was that of two women in business suit dress, right down to their high heeled pumps, having a meeting while sitting on Pilates exercise balls. Work those core muscles while you work!

Believe me, I’m watching my step these days -- counting them actually, since I got the high tech pedometer for Christmas. I take walks outdoors, I pace while I talk on the phone, I stand at the counter to do certain office tasks. But it still comes down to this: smoking is an unnatural activity for human beings with potentially lethal consequences. One chooses to smoke (at least at first). Sitting is something we're, well, designed to do. As Harold Hill recommends to Miss Marion in The Music Man, "Miss Marion I'd discuss anything in the world with you. But couldn't we do it sitting down? You do sit? Your knees bend?" So when did the blame for obesity fall upon the all-too-natural action of sitting? I know, I know, it's the sedentary lifestyle represented by sitting. Just don't be too shocked when in twenty years the current crop of government schooled children manage to ban sitting in all public places.

Bite

My first clear dental memory is being four or five years old and studying my abscessed molar. It had been extracted and, since the Tooth Fairy was a major source of income at that time in my life, I had insisted that the tooth be put in a jar of water so I could put it on my nightstand and exact a big payoff. Surely the Tooth Fairy would fork over extra coinage for my pain and suffering and the opportunity to collect such a gloriously hideous specimen with pus and bloody roots still attached! I think I got a whole quarter. It set the stage for my future dental health to be both disturbingly bizarre and expensive.

In grade school I wrote an essay on how I thought the worst job in the world to have would be that of a dentist. I didn't like putting my fingers in my own mouth and the thought of having to spend the workday with my fingers in somebody else's mouth was totally repulsive. I had a lot of time in grade school to consider this because I had cavities, extractions, and numerous adjustments of my space maintainers which pulled me out of some of the best parts of my class day. In my college years I had to have my four impacted wisdom teeth chiseled loose from my jaw. The oral surgeon said his fingers hurt for days afterwards from all the pounding and hammering he had to do. My perspective on the event put it around #4 on my life scale of painful experiences. In my thirties I had three root canals and an insanely expensive bridge installed. The bridge was made out of some substance (we'll call it Wonderdentium) that I was told would outlive me. My life expectancy was brought into question when it broke two years later and I could make it go "sproy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoing" with my tongue as if it were a diving board.

I should make it clear at this point that I don't hold any malice towards dentists, hygienists, oral surgeons, endodontists or periodontists. They have done their best with what I gave them to work with. They have had to deal with the oversized teeth in the undersized jaw, the super-tight jaw muscles preventing me from "opening wider," and the saliva glands that can nail a dental assistant within a six feet range ("careful, she spits.") Without the valiant efforts of dental professionals I'd have teeth that looked like a picket fence after a tornado hit it and probably suffer any number of health infirmities because of the inability to chew my food. In an earlier century I would not have lived past fifty and my teeth would have easily contributed to whatever else did me in.

Still, when in consultation with my endodontist and my dentist this week, I was informed that my body was reabsorbing the anchor tooth for my bridgework, I was seriously tempted to just bite somebody. My family consoled me by taking me out to a BBQ restaurant and letting me gnaw on a 1/2 rack of ribs. I have had two bridges anchored on this tooth and two (count'em TWO) root canals on it. It is so stressed that apparently my body is just eating it from the inside out. It will have to be extracted sometime this year. I'll lose the bridge. I'll have to have a bone graft on my jaw. Then they'll see if my jaw will accept implant screws. I'll have to have two screws crowned and possibly a crown on the back anchor tooth giving me more crowns than most royalty. As I think of the coming two years of oral surgery I'm having trouble not grinding my molars. Oh, well, maybe I'll lose weight on the liquid diet and end up able to bite through steel cable like Richard Kiel's Jaws character.

New Year's Aspirations

I can't make New Year's resolutions because of the word "resolution." In this context it means a "fixed purpose or determination of mind," (Webster's 1828) or "determining upon an action or course of action, method, procedure, etc." (Dictionary Online). To make resolutions I would have to believe, like the poet of Invictus that "I am the master of my fate: the captain of my soul." As a Christian I have come to grudgingly accept that I am not in control of my fate and my soul has been redeemed by someone else. So it is an exercise in futility for me to "resolve" that this year I will do this, or that, or change myself. I'm not here in 2012 for my own self-improvement projects. When the Westminster Catechism asks "What is the chief end of man?" the correct response is: "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever."

So rather than make New Year's Resolutions that are doomed to failure as life unfolds over the course of days and weeks and months, I do have New Year's aspirations. That word, "aspiration" stems from the same lovely, breathy, root as inspire. Even in 1828 Webster said it meant "breathing after; an ardent wish or desire, usually for what is noble or spiritual." Today it has synonyms like longing, aim, ambition, or goal. If my aspirations can line up with glorifying God and enjoying Him forever, I believe the Holy Spirit might show some support for the activities and I stand a better chance of actually achieving something worthwhile.

I have three aspirations for 2012. The first is to read through the Chronological Bible. I started this last year with the goal of reading through in a year. I read, but too slowly to get past the prophets. It was silly of me to set a timetable, even though there is a lovely one in the back of the book that tells you how far to read each day. Rather than abandon the project as a failed resolution, I've decided now to see if I can read through the Chronological Bible in two years. Like graduating from college, it make take some extra semesters for me to complete the required work.

My second aspiration is to return to playing a keyboard instrument. I took eleven years of piano when I was in grade school and when I graduated High School I was a good pianist. Not great, not gifted, not extraordinary, just able to plod through sight-reading just about anything and making it come out as pleasant music. I held onto a semblance of ability until my children started school and then I let piano playing go and once you stop a muscle-memory activity you retain the memory but not the muscles. I think music is one way in which humans both glorify God and enjoy God and playing an instrument works a part of the brain that is worth keeping healthy. I'm old enough now to occasionally struggle with arthritis so I will have to start back at the very beginning, taking my feeble left hand and my dominant right hand through finger exercises and scales on an electronic keyboard before I have either the strength or the dexterity to try playing ivory-laid wooden keys.

My third aspiration is to organize into formats that can be appreciated by grandchildren and great-grandchildren I may never meet, the visual documentation of the lives of my family. I managed to scrapbook 2009 last year. But there is a daunting amount of photos before and since 2009 that still need to be "dealt with" and now I have come across boxes of Super 8, BETA Max, VHS, etc. video that needs to be upgraded to digital. Not to mention the chest of archival family photos I have secured that need to be scanned and digitially recovered. I like finding (as Madeleine L'Engle puts it) the "cosmos in the chaos." My mother's memory is no longer up to the task of sorting out who's who. Even scrapbooking technology has gone digital and you do photo books before you worry too much about sticking a print onto paper. I am going to get a digital camcorder and hope I can find software for video editing that doesn't consider my computer too obsolete. It may seem a narcissistic or uselessly historical hobby but I find a special enjoyment in God's creation through photographs, both artistic and documentary.

Take the photo that accompanies this blog for example. To you, it probably looks like blobby colors. I was walking around the Madonna Inn this summer on our anniversary trip and over a patio table was this lamp from the 1960's that was exactly like the lamp that I had in my bedroom as a child. It had always looked like big candied fruit chunks stuck together. The best angle I could get of the lamp was to zoom right up into its innards. Only when I did so did I notice that there was a spider's web and a large, healthy spider operating in a candy-colored world. I was charmed by the idea that this little arachnid lived in a whimsically stained-glass-like world, luring its prey in like a witch with a house made of sweets. The photo of that spider in the web-covered plastic hunks is what exploring a New Year is all about: looking at life and finding the unexpected story. That's what I aspire to do.