The journey of 10,000 steps begins with a pedometer

The word pedometer, also known as a waywiser, began sauntering through the English language nearly 400 years ago, though devices that measure the number a person’s footsteps have been around longer than that. It’s taken me some time, but I finally have one, securely clipped to my waistband to record every step I take. I won the device by going to a health fair at work sponsored by our insurance provider. By uploading my step count, I can win more prizes; sadly, none of which are dark chocolate.

I am happy about the pedometer for two reasons. First, I like the idea that my school and insurance company are focusing on health rather than sickness. And second, I like being rewarded for taking care of myself. I wish the rewards included reduced premiums for making good choices, but then the yearly salary of the company’s CEO – over $14 million – wouldn’t be so healthy. And like all insurance companies, mine is all about that kind of health.

Not my pedometer or your father’s pedometer. More likely your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather (if he happened to be from southern Germany).

Besides making me happy, the pedometer reduces my paranoia a bit. I have a terrible habit of reading about medical horrors. In the age of the Internet, this is a very bad habit indeed. I have instant access to what is killing me, and you’d be surprised about how many germs, bacteria, viruses, syndromes, and diseases have it in for me. And now, chairs.

For millennia people have turned their backs on chair and mooned them – yes, mostly behind layers of clothing, but still. And do you think chairs just take it sitting down? If you answered yes, you’re right. Most chairs just sit there, though the occasional chair may swivel or rock. However, if you answered yes, you’re also wrong, because now chairs’ evil intentions have been revealed.

Sitting four hours or more at a time negatively affects insulin levels, good cholesterol, fat-burning ability, and bone density. Long-term sitters have shorter lives, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how much you have saved for retirement. (Don’t take my word for it – about the chair sitting, not the retirement – take these words or these ones or these ones, but please put them back when you’re done.) So those lush, comfy recliners with cup holders and places for your remote calling you to sit back and relax are really just electric chairs covered in fabric. This saddens me because I always thought I had a good relationship with my rocking recliner where I write most of my posts. I’m pretty sure I have spent months of my life in that chair, never realizing those were the actual last months of my life. This concerns me. Not only will I die younger than I would have, but I will die out of order.

Several websites on the oracle known as Google recommend 10,000 steps per day to maintain health. That’s my aim and I better get to it. So far this morning, I’ve managed 57 steps from bed to bathroom to kitchen to chair. Only 9,943 to go.

 Photo courtesy of anagoria at Wikipedia.

Furniture for life

Do you worry sometimes that your coffee table will not protect in case of an emergency? Or have you considered what you would do if you were innocently drinking coffee in your living room while watching the news that the zombie apocalypse had arrived, and just as the weather guy came on trying to hide his delight that another snowstorm was on its way, a zombie broke in with a gun? Finally, is it your considered opinion that every piece of furniture should serve more than one purpose, and the main purpose should be saving your life?

If you said yes to any or all of the above questions, I have two things to say to you. First, you may need professional help. And luckily for you, I profess to help others, so you could say I’m professional. Second, if you hurry, you might be able to get a piece of furniture that is easy to clean and, unlike your side table, can protect your life.

What am I talking about, you ask? That’s a good question, and it is one people frequently ask me. If you must know, I’m talking about the bullet resistant home defense coffee table offered on Craigslist. I copied the text of the ad below and cannot take credit for the double “think”ing or the exclamation point.

This coffee table is not only modern and will look great in your home but it can save your life. Bullet resistant acrylic 1 1/4" think (sic) x 24" wide x 48" long. As you can see we tested it out at 15 feet and the only think (sic) that could penetrate it and come out the other side with less than deadly force was a tactical slug. Please email for price!

For those whose home decorating style preference can best be described as Modern Paranoia, this is a must-have piece of furniture. Of course, if the person/zombie trying to shoot you while you are lounging in your living room is using tactical slugs, I think the bullet can penetrate the acrylic. Every time I read the ad, I get a bit confused. Is a tactical slug the only thing (think) that can penetrate with less than deadly force? Just in case, it wouldn’t hurt to wear your bulletproof loungewear around the house. If you are reading this blog, I assume you have some.

If you would like a sofa to go with your coffee table, you can now order a bulletproof sofa with a hidden gun safe underneath the cushions. Go here to learn more about it.

Clearly it’s time for me to find a new recliner, perhaps one with a hidden grenade launcher that is released when I pull the lever for the leg rest. Of course, then I would have to have an armored TV in case I accidentally launched it when that weather guy came on.

Village vacancies

They don’t make idiots like they used to. Once upon a long, long ago, in the late 1400s, an idiot was an ordinary person who lacked an education, someone without professional training, a layman in the church, or simply a private person. Clearly, idiocy was nothing to be ashamed of, and during the day the word hobnobbed with people like the author of the alliterative, allegorical poem Piers Plowman (who may or may not have been William Langland) and John Wycliffe who along with others translated the Bible into Middle English.

After a hard day of being charitable, however, the word would head to the nearest pub, have a few pints, and start calling everyone in sight a fool. That’s how Chaucer uses the word in the Wife of Bath’s prologue in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer and others used the word idiot both in this sense and in the sense of being mentally challenged. These three meanings were used concurrently until the end of the 17^th century when the kinder meaning moved out of town. From that time on, the number of self-proclaimed idiots decreased dramatically, until the advent of the Internet and YouTube.

From the beginning, the word worked as both noun and adjective. The highly quotable Victorian poet, Lord Tennyson, verbified it in the phrase “Much befool’d and idioted.” I rather like it as a verb because it expresses the feeling I get from my fellow-drivers who have an inordinate interest in my bumper and try to inspect it while traveling 60 mph or who pull in front of me, curious to know whether or not my brakes still work. After any time on the road, I come home feeling idioted out.

I don’t consider myself an idiot driver; my skills in idiocy lie more in the why-did-I-wait-until-now-to-do-what-is-due-today type of situation, or the you-already-know-what-your-foot-tastes-like-so-why-do-you-keep-putting-it-in-your-mouth situation. Plenty of people have these problems, but the wise ones keep quiet about them. The others, like me, create blogs and wander around the Internet village broadcasting their idiocy. I am a private person by nature and back in the Middle Ages would probably have been called an idiot by my friends. At this point in my life I am advancing beyond my own middle age, wandering around the Internet village, unashamed, speaking to strangers and telling my secrets. Every village needs an idiot or two, and I’m here to fill the vacancy.

Addendum: No Comment

As a blogger, I’ve never wanted to be one of those drive-by likers, the ones who visit hundreds of blogs per day, indiscriminately liking posts in the hopes of getting liked back. I don’t always comment on posts that I like, but I occasionally try to write something that is spelled correctly, even if it doesn’t make sense.

These days, however, WordPress (which is easily flummoxed by what I write and thinks you will be too) will not let me comment when I want to. Over half of the comments I try to post are denied. I get the message that you see below.

 Sorry, this comment could not be posted.

If you are a blogger, you probably consider this good news. But I warn you, no system is idiot-proof. I will find a way to comment and flummox you again. Only because I think it’s good for you and helps build character.

To blog or not to blog

To blog, or not to blog; that is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler to make readers suffer

These posts and arouse outrageous mention

In the comments section and cause trouble,

Or opposing, end this scrawl today, to write

No more; and by to write to say I end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

My posts are heir to, ‘tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d …

As you can see, I write a lot like Shakespeare, especially the parts that are his very own words, which I will put back later. I promise. I took them off an obscure website, so I don’t think anyone will notice. And no, I’m not plagiarizing; I’m merely borrowing. I learned that from my students, who often borrow entire essays.

In case you haven’t noticed (because you can rarely make it through my posts, and believe me I empathize: it’s hard for me as well), I have a lot in common with Shakespeare.

• He was born brilliant, and I was also born.

• We both had early lives.

• He managed to write 30+ plays (comedies, tragedies, and romances) and about 154 sonnets; I manage to write a now weekly blog.

• He liked hoop earrings, and I do too.

• He was a bard; I have been barred (due to excessive punning).

• He was from Avon; I have used Avon. *

• He was buried after his death, something I am planning myself. Not the death, the sequence of events: death, then burial.

Eerie, isn’t it? If I didn’t know better (and I rarely do), we could be twins, separated merely by talent, gender, legacy, facial hair, and about 450 years.

*Hi Miss Avon Representative: If you would like to give me free beauty products because I inadvertently advertised for you on my blog by using your company’s name, please feel free. I believe your products will make me look young and beautiful again. I also believe in unicorns. Just ring the bell.

If you are one of those I-can’t-look-away-from-this-train-wreck kind of reader and happen to have arrived here at the second ending of this post, both relieved and horrified, go here to see a 1960s “Ding Dong, Avon calling” commercial.

Is it 2013 or, well, 1984?

I’m not paranoid. Really. I’m just very wary, chary, leery, and highly caffeinated. I take after my Big Brother that way. He feels compelled to spy on me all of the time because you just never know about those older teachers who live in the Midwest and teach English to foreigners. Foreigners who come from foreign countries and are foreign. And since you never know about those Midwesterners or other Americans or other people in the world, based on super-secret, too-critical-for-anyone-to-be-told-so-don’t-ask national security reasons, highly trained cryptologists need to monitor e-mails, phone calls, and Internet usage of all users, including LOL cats. (There’s a special clause that covers cats.)

Of course, text messages also can and must be intercepted. So specially trained agents spend hours reading texts from potentially dangerous teenagers who write indecipherable messages like: wuzup…your L8!!!! NGL im bord…this moveez a wot! WUWH¹

By now the NSA (National Snooping Agency) knows more about you and me than our own mothers or even than we do about ourselves. Remember that story you told about your boss? Oh, you forgot already, well, not to worry, it’s all been recorded and soon to be stored away in Bluffdale, Utah. I am not bluffing. Real name, real story.

Meanwhile cryptological experts sift through all our data looking for snarky references to Big Brother’s clubs like the NSA and the TSA (Touch, Scan, Annoy). Then they flag you. And the you I’m referring to is me. The me that reported a theft by TSA agents in New Orleans who kindly recycled my iPad because they knew it was time for me to get a new one. Now when I fly, I get body-scanned. Often.

Earlier this month on my trip to Texas, I was scanned three times: once in Wisconsin and twice in Texas. According to the TSA agent in Houston, I moved. Actually I think it was because I asked why I was selected to be scanned again. The whole procedure is something out of Star Trek: Stand still and don’t say a word or we will radiate you! And yes, I realize I could opt for groping instead, but that too is something out of Star Trek: To boldly go where no man has gone before….except my husband and not in public.

Afterward I complained to the agent, fully expecting to be taken away, have all my body cavities searched, and be put on a no-fly list. It didn’t happen, but you’ll have to excuse me for a moment while I speak to a NSA representative.

Hi! How are you? I didn’t mean a thing by my comments to the TSA officer. Really. And I love my new iPad. Please pass my thanks to the officers in New Orleans. By the way, could you do me a favor? Last month, around the 4^th or 5^th I deleted an email with Aunt Edith’s secret fowl sauce. My goose is now cooked, and I need something to cover it ASAP. It was the only existing copy of the recipe. Sadly Aunt Edith died last week, but of course you already knew that from the email that Uncle Willard sent me. Thanks a bunch, and remember I’m nothing if not patriotic.

Now, where were we? Oh, yeah, once upon a long time ago, reasonable people drafted a reasonable document called the U.S. Constitution. Just to make things perfectly clear and reasonable, they included amendments. The Fourth Amendment mentions that U.S. citizens have certain rights:

…the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be searched.

Since the U.S. government can access all of my personal and professional information and everything I say or write electronically, what probable cause do its representatives have that warrant searching my person? Like the great majority of people, I present zero threat. I know it and the government knows it. In order to appear fair, TSA must consider all of us as potential terrorists: guilty until scanned.

Are you bugged by all of this? I am, and I bet you are, too. In fact, I know you are. All us of are bugged now, continually, and by our very own government.

This is a rant.

¹Translation: What’s up? You’re late. Not gonna lie, I’m bored. This movie is a waste of time. Wish you were here.

Want more wary, chary, scary, leery stuff? Read this New York Times opinion piece or this story on AOL.

A child after my own brain

Brain disorders run in my family. People are often surprised to hear this because they didn’t even know that we had any brains to disorder.

I diagnosed the disorder, Foerster’s Syndrome, after reading about it in a book. As a diagnostician, I rank up there with the best – probably a full colonel or possibly a general. Once I am given the symptoms of a disease, I have the uncanny ability to discover it in either myself or my loved ones. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve saved my life by catching a disease early.

Just last month I narrowly escaped a serious problem after reading an article about a man with a runny nose who mistakenly thought he had allergies. My nose happened to be running when I read the story, so I realized I probably had whatever he had. And what he had was a leaky brain. Every time he blew his nose and even when he didn’t, brain fluid leaked out. Please stop for a minute and re-read that last sentence. Brain fluid! Leaked out! Of course, the first thing I did was tell my husband that I loved him but I wouldn’t be able to do anymore housework. I needed to spend my last days savoring life and the box of dark chocolate truffles in the cupboard.

Miraculously within a week and most of the box of truffles, I recovered. My brain stopped leaking and I went back to finding excuses not to mop the kitchen floor.

I’ve diagnosed a number of family members with Foerster’s Syndrome, which causes compulsive punning: my husband (moderate), brother (severe), brother-in-law (chronic) and me (egregious). Due to excessive exposure, both of my children are allergic to puns, which thankfully does not cause their noses to run. When the punning becomes excessive, they themselves run, taking their noses with them, but that is a different problem, one I’m still trying to diagnose.

My despair over not having a child who can put up and pun up with me vanished last week, however, when we visited family in Texas. Three conversations, all with my grandchild, convinced me that the brain disorder would not die with me.

The First: My grandchild discovers that Uncle Harley’s grandchildren call him Pawdaddy.

“That’s because his dog has paws!”

The Second: My daughter mentions to the child that the eggs are excellent.

“That’s because they’re eggs—cellent.”

The Third: My niece shows the child a picture of a tarantula taken at their ranch.

“It must be a ranchula.”

My daughter is still trying to recover from the pain and shock. I, however, feel delighted. A child after my own heart. A child after my own brain.

Photos: Paw Egg Tarantula

Deep in the spleen of Texas

Now and then a person’s ears need some loving, so this week I took both of them to Texas for a vacation. They are now happier than a dog with a dead skunk. Everywhere I take my two ears, I hear people using Texas’ most personal pronoun, “y’all,” which like the humdrum pronoun “you” can be either plural or singular. (Note to you grammarians and punctuationists out there: I know some of you write the possessive for Texas with an extra “s” as in “Texas’s most personal pronoun.” However, I don’t like it and if I see it I’m likely to ask you to move your “s” elsewhere.) My heart’s been soothed hearing people speak proper and without those accents the Yankees are so fond of.

I have been traveling with my daughter and grandchild visiting family in Houston, basking in hot and humid weather and enjoying every minute of it. That’s what Wisconsin’s 9-month winters will do to a person.

Houston is a great big old city built on a bayou. Unless you are from the South, you may not know that “bayou” is a fancy name given to rivers and ditches to make songs more interesting. Just imagine if the refrain in Hank Williams’ song Jambalaya “Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou” were “Son of a gun we’ll have big fun at the ditch.” It just don’t sound right and kind of makes your toes stop tapping right in the middle of the song. And yes, that “don’t” is there on purpose, thank you very much.

Our last few days of vacation, we have been staying in Katy, Texas which is just down the road from Houston. We were able to make a run up to San Antonio, but we never made it to the heart of Texas, which approximately 5500 people swear is Brady, Texas. (That’s the population of the city and please don’t tell their mommas about the swearing.)

Houston has set up home near the Gulf of Mexico and southeast of the heart of Texas, so I believe it’s appropriate to consider it the spleen of Texas. Spleens store and filter blood, and Houston does the same with oil, which is pretty much the blood of our nation, so the analogy seems to fit.

I have never lived in Houston myself, but if I did and if I had a son, I would name him Billy Rueben just because it would tickle me every time I thought of my sweet Billy Reuben living in the spleen of Texas.

Today we return north. I sure do hope they didn’t have summer while we were gone. I’d hate to miss it.

Photo: Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries.

Planned fascination

According to my husband, I plan to be fascinated at 9:30 a.m. this morning. I’m going to be vaccinated, but since he heard “fascinated,” I’m sticking with that. So, in a few hours, a shiny, sharp needle will be sticking in my arm transferring some of the varicella zoster virus (VZV) into my system.

It won’t be the first time I’ve had VZV in my body, although I have no recollection of that first encounter. Sometime before age eight, the crazy chicken that carries the virus got inside my house, pecked me all over my body, made me itch like crazy, and forced my mother to cover me in pink dots. It also left a small scar on my forehead as a memento. That’s what my mother told me. (Not exactly the part about the crazy chicken, but the part about the itchy sores, dotting me with pink Calamine lotion, and the scar.)

Almost everyone my age (calculate 114.71 Fijian dollars into U.S.) had the chicken pox as a child, due to the fact that we all breathed. Those that didn’t never got the disease. The rest of us inhaled and exhaled everywhere we went and then hung out with friends who not only snorted milk through their noses but also coughed and sneezed at will without covering their mouths or noses.

Now all of us (yes, we put the “us” in “virus”) are at risk of reactivating the VZV that has been lurking in our bodies all these years. The virus is like a tiny egg that the crazy chicken laid in our bodies all those years ago, just waiting to hatch and peck us again, only this new crazy chicken can cause extreme pain and nerve damage.

The CDC reports that the vaccine can cause redness, itchiness, soreness, and headache – much like watching reality TV. But I will not chicken out or scratch my plans. (Forgive the puns; I’ve been cooped up all week due to the 50-degree weather in Wisconsin.)

Once I’m fascinated, I have a 50-50 chance of avoiding shingles and/or reducing nerve pain and damage. I think it’s worth a shot.

Needle & Chicken

Classless in Wisconsin

The calendar and thermometer have been arguing about whether it’s really spring here in northeast Wisconsin. The calendar, who happened to major in English, has already written this year’s story and insists that we are just a Memorial Day away from unofficial summer. The thermometer, a math geek, sees the world in numbers, and kindly pointed out this morning that the number at 6 a.m. was 36 degrees. My heart is with the calendar, but my feet side with the thermometer.

Be that as it may, could, would, or should, my school semester has ended, the papers and tests have been marked, and the grades put in. Now that I am no longer teaching, you could say I was “classless.” (And you would not be the only one to say so.) For the next two months I plan to read, write, loll around, dither, wander and meander, and practice retirement.

However, since I believe that you’re never too old to learn something new, or too young to learn something old, or even too new to know now what you didn’t know then, I am looking into summer classes that I will not only enjoy but will also be able to apply toward maintaining my certification credentials.

(The 56-word sentence above, masquerading as a paragraph, gives me secret pleasure because while I don’t allow my students to get away with that kind of writing, I let myself get away with it. We teachers get our pleasures where we can.)

I found one writing class, which satisfies both my interest and my certification needs, but I have been hoping for another. So far I haven’t found anything, but I did create a wish list of classes I would be interested in.

Risk Management and Interplanetary Scandinavian Studies

Therapeutic Zoological Phonemes in the Writing of Dr. Seuss

Urban Uterine Ultrasound Graffiti

Astro-Psychology of Real and Unreal Estate

Obstetrics Music Performance

Electrical Entomology

Microscopic Macro Studies in Micro-Linguistic Microcosmic Microwave Microchips in Microbiology

Slavic Plant Pathology and Philosophy

Genealogical Genomes in Gender Genuflection

Ethics of Folkloric and Gnomic Engineering

Bovine Dance Studies

Collaborative Dolphin Engineering

Chicana/o Environmental Accounting Literature

Art History of Post-modern Horseshoes

If I can’t find anything else this summer, I guess I will have to wait until next year when I am classless once more.

Classroom Photo

If you can’t say something nice …

Imagine you are at the Westminster festival in London in May of 1306 to watch King Edward 1 knight his son, Edward of Caernarfon. You need to be a man for this scenario to work, so if you are a female, imagine that your take-home pay is as much as your male counterparts.

Everyone imagined up? Good, let’s proceed.

While you are enjoying your third cup of ale, a big, burly man calls you nice. Enraged, you try to punch him in the jaw, which is both stupid and foolish because he is twice your size. Your aggression proves to everyone within bowshot that you are, in fact, nice. Back then, nice meant stupid or foolish.

But don’t feel bad. Edward of Caernarfon, destined to sit on the throne in 1307 as Edward II, was deposed after twenty years for being nice, too. The nice things he did included military defeat at the hands of the Scots, murderous revenge, scandals, plotting, and lavish living, among other royal entertainments.

For several hundred years, that four-letter word nice insulted and disparaged people by calling them foolish, wanton, lascivious, fastidious, cowardly, and showy. Then by the late 1700s, nice changed its wicked ways, stopped going into bars to start fights, got a respectable job as an bookkeeper, and starting calling people refined, cultured, and respectable. Suddenly nice was finding other people agreeable and pleasant.

Some words at 700 still look hale and hearty; nice does not. His hair is thinning, his belly’s thickening, and his feet are flattening. He mumbles a lot and has begun to call everything and everyone nice. It doesn’t feel right to me, however. It’s a little too nice, if you know what I mean (and I think you do). Do you hear that hint of sarcasm when he speaks? “How nice,” he says in his treacly voice, when he really means, “How mediocre or bland.” It’s a short road from bland to vapid to stupid.

Maybe he’s making a comeback as an insult instead of a compliment. It would make for what some may call “a nice story.”

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year-struck

old age and other jokes I know

humor