The stickers make it look cooler than it is. It’s actually an aluminum table that folds up nicely for camping.
Found it on Craigslist. It would have taken me just as long to find rush-hour parking for my van, I swear!
September 5, 2014 Filed under Stress
My city has a separate recycling mechanism for plastic bags, relative to the standard throw-it-in-the-can method we used for everything that has a little symbol on it.
There are free dropoff points for plastic bags around the city, and if you feel like a good samaritan, you can haul your bags out there and stuff them in.
This is approximately eight months’ worth of plastic bags for three people.
Some of it was wrapped around vegetables from the supermarket. Some of it was peeled off the lids of yogurt and soup and sour cream containers. Some was used to transport cables, or batteries, or zipties, or bread, or bars of soap. There are bags in here from restaurants, hardware stores, pharmacies, gas stations. A surprising amount of it was packing material that arrived in the mail.
One night I stuffed it all into my bike trailer and pedaled it out to the recycling kiosk outside the Safeway.
I don’t know where it goes from there, but I hope at least that it stays out of the ocean.
The big bucket back at the house remained empty for about two days. Then I received a piece of junk mail – a catalog – wrapped in plastic. The plastic went into the bucket.
Enter a period of psychological stress, and your organs release a steady river of hormones, telling the cells in your body to burn more energy. After a few days of this feedback, your cells begin sending signals to all the mitochondria living inside them, telling them to divide, increasing energy capacity. This is important because when the energy production system is bottlenecked, little chemical packets called “free radicals” are released inside your cells, especially from the struggling mitochondria. Free radicals are damaging to the DNA in your cells, including the DNA of your mitochondria. So having enough mitochondria to avoid a bottleneck is important.
Unfortunately, this is a paradox. When your mitochondria are overworked, it’s like running an engine too hot. Free radicals are the equivalent of smoke coming out of the engine compartment. To address the problem, your mitochondria reproduce by dividing, making more to share the load. … But some of your mitochondria have been damaged by running too hot. When they make copies of themselves by dividing they pass the damage along to their offspring. Eventually, there are more damaged mitochondria inside your cells than clean ones, and the whole operation of the cell becomes degraded because of the extra resources this consumes.
As the mitochondria decline in efficiency, the cell will shift across the spectrum of genes it can express, to devote more resources to mitochondria recycling. This reduces the cell’s effectiveness as part of a functioning organ. (Stem cells and heart cells do not divide their mitochondria, and therefore are not directly under the influence of this cycle, but they can still suffer from the decline of other organs.) Each cell also has a feedback loop of signals inside it, designed to detect this degradation. When a cell in your body realizes it has dropped below a reasonable efficiency level, it commits suicide, removing itself and its damaged mitochondria from your collective internal gene pool.
Yes! Your own cells sometimes kill themselves because they can’t keep up.
Here’s what this means for you, on a human scale: When you pass through a cycle of stress, part of you dies off while the rest of you decides to repopulate, spreading slightly less efficient mitochondria throughout your tissues, resulting in a subtly decreased energy level. You really begin to notice it in middle age.
This effectively cannot be reversed, because you can only work with the genetic supply of mitochondria that you have. Your best hope for renewed health is to maintain a higher set-point for energy capacity, via a higher standing population of your current mitochondria, so that when you are pressed into high-stress situations, you do not logjam your energy supply chain and create damaging free-radicals.
In other words, sufficient sleep, complete nutrition, and consistent aerobic exercise places your body into its most long-lasting mode. It delays the onset of virtually ALL late-life diseases. This may seem like common knowledge, but now you understand why it is so…
And why there is absolutely no product, service, or diet that can turn back the clock. Your very best outcome is to slow it down.
December 18, 2011 Filed under Stress
Oakland has its appeal, and for all the danger and grime I actually enjoy living there. But I hear stories about bears wandering along the shores of San Francisco Bay and I have trouble picturing it. They were all long gone before I was even born, and it never even occurred to me that they had been there.
I was thinking about it, and I started to wonder:
How much more can we lose, from generation to generation, and forget about, before we actually start to suffer, irrevocably, from the cumulative loss? Will we eventually reach a point where we will live our entire lives without ever seeing animals other than pets and livestock? The very idea of animals surviving independent of humans will seem absurd, since all the independence was bred out of them years ago.
What will we miss? Can it be described? What will each of us do?
I imagine one of my grandchildren standing in a grassy field. There are no birds, so to relieve the silence, she plays some music on her phone. There are no animals to encounter, so to relieve the loneliness, she starts texting one of her friends. All the plants look like the plants everywhere else, so to relieve the visual boredom, she starts playing a puzzle game. “Nature is boring, granddad. Why were you so into it, anyway?”
Today was another day of writing and resting. The only eventful things were 1. an injury, and 2. waffles!
First, the injury: I was standing in front of the big wall-mounted heater in my motel room, trying to heat up my butt, and gazing distractedly at my iPad. Without looking up I decided to walk over to the chair and sit down.
KER-JAB !! “EEAAAAAGGGHH!!” I rammed my bare leg into the teeth of the gear on my recumbent. The pain was intense. Six little puncture wounds, covered with grease. I hobbled to the bathroom and scrubbed as much of the grease away as I could, then changed into my long underwear so I didn’t bleed all over the inside of my sleeping bag.
It healed surprisingly well. Here’s a photo from few days later:
OUCH
Next: Waffles! Toledo had a waffle house just two miles from my room, so I decided to risk riding on my mortally wounded bicycle to get there. I had a chocolate-chip waffle and watched Jon Stewart make funny faces on the iPad. An easy day, after all those days of hard riding.
Oh Mr. Stewart, you rogue!
I made some phone calls and formed a plan: I would limp the bike over to the Avis rent-a-car establishment in the morning, four miles away, and rent a minivan. Using that I could blast through the remaining 600 miles of my route and get to Elmira in time to catch Erika disembarking from her plane at the airport. Then: Thanksgiving!