The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for July 2007

What I Listened to Today

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I had planned on going to bed well before the witching hour but a double dose of the news has left me wired so here I sit. I made the mistake of reading about people who murdered children and that upset me so I am trying to just mellow out. So as a bonus you get another post to read.

Here is an incomplete list of the music I listened to today.

Faithfully
Journey
Porcelain
Moby
Cat’s In The Cradle
Harry Chapin
Drive On
Johnny Cash & Willie Nelson
King for a Day
The Thompson Twins
The Other Side
Aerosmith
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles
Once In A Lifetime
Talking Heads
Greenbacks
Ray Charles
Are You Lonesome Tonight?
Elvis Presley
All Along The Watchtower
Jimi Hendrix
Who Wants To Live Forever
Queen
Rapture
Blondie
So What
Miles Davis

Shopping Carts

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When I was a boy I used to love it when my father would ask me to “take a ride” with him. It usually meant that he had some kind of errand to run and wanted a little company. In a house full of a zillion sisters and a mother it was important for the boys to stick together, or so I thought.

More importantly it was a chance to engage in what my son now calls special daddy and Little Jack time. I have vivid memories of climbing into the car and looking out the window as my dad drove. When I thought that he wasn’t looking I would stare at him and try to imitate his gestures. Decades later I have them all down. When the family gathers I can bring down the house with a five minute impression of him, but I digress.

Usually these errands found us in one of three places, Builders Emporium, Gemco or the supermarket and that brings me to the heart of the matter; shopping carts.

Yes, that is right the ubiquitous shopping cart. The four wheeled dolly that we all use to transport the items we purchased from the store out to our automobiles.

One of the things that I learned from taking a ride with dad was that after you finished emptying your groceries into your car you had to return the shopping cart to the store or to the shopping cart parking lot depot. I can still hear my father explaining that we returned the cart because it was the polite thing to do.

Unfortunately it seems that at some point in the last thirty years the polite thing to do is no longer considered necessary. More often than not I find myself navigating parking lots that look like they have shopping cart measles. Just pulling into a parking space can be tricky because if you are not careful you’ll end up hitting a shopping cart that was left there by someone else.

Still I always try to do the polite thing. When I no longer have need of the cart I take it back to the appropriate space. If there are people waiting for my parking space this sometimes creates an issue. Nobody wants to wait for me to return the cart. Instead of smiles they will honk and roll their eyes. Sometimes colorful words accompany the honking.

Maybe that is the new polite thing to do. I don’t really know anymore.

He Is Not Really Dead

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The latest issue of Newsweek has an interesting article called Back From the Dead. Some of you may be aware that I spent seven years working as a CPR and First Aid Instructor so these sorts of articles are of interest to me.

This is a story about what happens when your heart stops: about new research into how brain cells die and how something as simple as lowering body temperature may keep them alive—research that could ultimately save as many as 100,000 lives a year. And it’s about the mind as well, the visions people report from their deathbeds and the age-old questions about what, if anything, outlives the body. It begins with a challenge to something doctors have always been taught in medical school: that after about five minutes without a pulse, the brain starts dying, followed by heart muscle—the two most voracious consumers of oxygen in the body, victims of their own appetites. The emerging view is that oxygen deprivation is merely the start of a cascade of reactions within and outside the cells that can play out over the succeeding hours, or even days. Dying turns out to be almost as complicated a process as living, and somehow, among its labyrinthine pathways

I find this to be fascinating. Not unlike so many others I have wondered what happens when you die. Where does your mind go? Do you feel any pain? Do you have any understanding of what is happening? Do you go off into the next whatever with the words, sounds and noises of those that were around you?

Becker’s interest in mitochondria reflects a new understanding about how cells die from loss of circulation, or ischemia. Five minutes without oxygen is indeed fatal to brain cells, but the actual dying may take hours, or even days. Doctors have known for a long time that the consequences of ischemia play out over time. “Half the time in cardiac arrest, we get the heart going again, blood pressure is good, everything is going along,” says Dr. Terry Vanden Hoek, director of the Emergency Resuscitation Center at the University of Chicago, “and within a few hours everything crashes and the patient is dead.” It took some time, though, for basic research to supply an explanation. Neumar, working with rats, simulates cardiac arrest and resuscitation, and then examines the neurons at intervals afterward. Up to 24 hours later they appear normal, but then in the next 24 hours, something kicks in and they begin to deteriorate. And Dr. James R. Brorson of the University of Chicago has seen something similar in neural cells grown in culture; deprive them of oxygen and watch for five minutes, or even much longer, and not much happens. “If your car runs out of gas, your engine isn’t destroyed, it just needs fuel,” he says.

Cell death isn’t an event; it’s a process. And in principle, a process can be interrupted. The process appears to begin in the mitochondria, which control the cell’s self-destruct mechanism, known as apoptosis, and a related process, necrosis. Apoptosis is a natural function, destroying cells that are no longer needed or have been damaged in some way. Cancer cells, which might otherwise be killed by apoptosis, survive by shutting down their mitochondria; cancer researchers are looking for ways to turn them back on. Becker is trying to do the opposite, preventing cells that have been injured by lack of oxygen from, in effect, committing suicide.

It’s a daunting problem. “We’re asking the questions,” says one leading researcher, Dr. Norm Abramson of the University of Pittsburgh. “We just haven’t found the answers.” Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that apoptosis couldn’t be stopped once it was underway. It proceeds by a complex sequence of reactions—including inflammation, oxidation and cell-membrane breakdown—none of which seems to respond to traditional therapies. Becker views cell death in cardiac arrest as a two-step process, beginning with oxygen deprivation, which sets up the cell for apoptosis; then the heart starts up again and the patient gets a lungful of oxygen, triggering what is called reperfusion injury. The very substance required to save the patient’s life ends up injuring or killing him.

I truly do not fear death. How can I fear it? I don’t really know anything about it. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t want to die. When I said that I want to live for a thousand years it is because I have so many interests. There is so much to do and so very little time.

To quote my grandfather I’ll fight for every last breath because I can and because I am. It doesn’t have to make sense to you, but it does to me.

My children are a huge part of my interest in living. It is not just because I can’t imagine not being there for them but because I am intensely curious about who they are going to become. When they grow up who will they be. What will they do and with whom?

Anyway, I think that the article is quite interesting. Give it a read.

Pressured into Parenthood- A Guest Post

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Friends I am pleased to offer the first ever guest post here at The Shack. Ambivalent Imma is the author of the post below. It is tangentially related to an old post here called Does Having Children Prevent an Active Sex Life.

I think that she makes some good points and that it is definitely worth reading.

Maybe you weren’t sure that you really wanted a child. Or maybe you were sure that you really didn’t want a child. But everyone was insistent—your parents, in-laws, family, friends, co-workers, the Jewish community as a whole, which considers it the solemn responsibility of every married Jewish couple to help rebuild the Jewish population after its decimation in the Holocaust. So here you are, responsible for providing a child (or more than one) with the love and care to which every child has a right. How do you feel, considering that you weren’t sure you wanted a kid in the first place?

I admit it: I’m selfish.

We had a delightful marriage. We did whatever we wanted whenever we wanted, within the limitations of our budget, work schedules, etc. Why would I want to have a baby and turn my life upside down?

Sigh.

First, I lost my place at the center of my husband’s world to this charmer who couldn’t even let me get a decent night’s sleep.

To make matters worse, our parents lived out of town, and our siblings weren’t available either, so we had absolutely no family support system whatsoever.

The result was that, while some of our friends could leave their kids with their parents or siblings and take some much-needed time away, we had to sharply curtail our “outside” activities for well over a decade because of the cost of babysitters.

And, to boot, it turned out that our kid had social, emotional, and learning challenges.

So while one of my girlfriends could brag about how her darling toddler sat quietly in a Chinese restaurant contentedly gumming bits of steak, our own child not only wouldn’t eat, but wouldn’t sit down or stay still, either. For several years, we could only take our kid to fast-food restaurants. Seriously, where can you go with a child who’s still throwing lying-on-the-floor-kicking-and-screaming temper tantrums well into elementary school?

Until our child was old enough to stay home alone, I honestly felt like a prisoner of my own kid.

And while one of my girlfriends used to go on and on about how well her little genius was doing in school, ours spent years in special-ed.

The teenage years were terrible, of course. Teenagers are generally a royal pain in the butt, and ours was no different. But, for me, that lack of difference was not entirely a bad thing. Already in early elementary school, our kid was a defiant know-it-all who honestly believed that I had little to teach her/him because he/she knew everything. It wasn’t until our child became an adolescent that I was finally able to say, in all honesty, that our kid’s behavior was typical of a child of that age.

I once told my therapist—back when we could afford one—that, while my kid and I certainly had our moments, for me, motherhood was an enormous amount of work for very little reward. There are some things that you can’t say even to your best friends—and that was certainly one of those things. Before the days of the Internet, the only way you could actually say some things without fear of repercussions was either to write them in a diary and pray that the person about whom you were writing would never find it, or literally to pay someone who was professionally obligated to keep your words confidential.

My particular sympathies go to ambivalent parents who ended up having a kid with disabilities. Parenthood is already a challenge, even for enthusiastic parents, some of whom have been known to have an additional child, or more than one, even after having a kid with special needs. But adding the difficulties of caring for a child with disabilities to the question of whether you wanted a kid to begin with is a recipe for extra frustration. Top that with the insistence of some that you go ahead and have another child anyway, and you get—in my case, anyway—one angry mom.

Everybody says it: “Enjoy it while it lasts. Kids grow up so fast.”

For me personally, the opposite was true. As far as I was concerned, my kid wasn’t growing up nearly quickly enough. I couldn’t wait for my child to move out, so that I could finally have my life back.

Not even among other mothers of kids with disabilities did I ever hear anyone admit to anything that radical.

Our kid is now an independent adult. I’m happy to say that we managed to have some good times together as she/he got older. I’m also relieved to inform you that, somehow, he/she has managed to flourish despite my dubious parenting. We’re very proud of our kid’s accomplishments.

Even so, I can’t help but feel that I lost over a decade of my life.

Back when I was in the throes of heavy-duty parenting, I would have given my right arm to have had a place to vent anonymously and get feedback from others going through similar situations. Having passed that stage of parenthood already, I’m not a good person for the job, but if some other soul who’s currently in a situation similar to the one I described would like to start a blog for parents in this position, I think it would be a real public service.

Urine For a Tale- Or Pissed Off About Peeing

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Blogging is a wonderful thing. You get involved with all sorts of interesting people and all kinds of interesting stories. It is an ever changing adventure because you truly never know what is just around the bend. There is always a new story to tell and new blogs to read.

One of the aspects that truly drives me is the interaction with the readers and other bloggers. Blogging is voyeuristic. There is a certain interest in reading about other people’s lives and in seeing their comments on your own. It is a real learning experience in which you receive an education about how others live their lives.

In March of ’06 I published Teach Your Boy to Pee Like a Man. It was a simple post that featured Peter Potty, the Toddler Urinal. As you can see it is a real product. Sadly, Shack Enterprises is not responsible for this one, but stay tuned because our inventors are always working hard to come up with new and exciting products that improve your lives.

Anyway as it is close to18 months since I wrote this one I had basically forgotten about it. Like a good post it lay there hibernating in cyberspace patiently waiting to be called upon. And sure enough the call came.

This morning I was notified that a reader named Ali had left a very long comment in which he took me to task for my position.

Here is an excerpt: of his lengthy comment:

To my own, peeing while standing is a nasty actions, also it does not feet a man’s character, that’s like you imagine a respectable man standing up still some where, his penis is out and his piss line in front of him! Who made the rule that males MUST stand up while urinating? And don’t relate it to the nature, potentially many things are natural as an ability; one can bring it out (gun), aim and kill, but he has choosing power, although he has the ability, but he may not do it if he is sane; one can just bring it out, aim and piss, but does it mean he can not do it in a way but that?

Why stand to pee? Why aim? Aiming is for the time when you are distant to your target and can’t be close to it, but when you can be close to it, and if you are sane, you prefer being close to your target than aiming to the target. So sit down and be relax, the name of the place you are doing that in, is rest room! And why you waste your time and energy in cleaning bathrooms? You can save it for more useful affairs by reducing the need of bathroom to be cleaned!

Let’s take this slowly.

You said “that’s like you imagine a respectable man standing up still some where, his penis is out and his piss line in front of him!”

As a father and a son I have had this very important conversation. There are some helpful safety tips to bear in mind.

  • You should always hold your penis when urinating so that it doesn’t flip and hither and thither. It doesn’t matter which hand you use, just whichever one is comfortable. BTW, I still have nightmares about how Captain Hook does this.
  • Stand close to the urinal, but no so close that you suffer from sprayback.
  • When urinating outdoors remember to urinate with the wind and not into it.

There are many other rules that I could list, but that might impede the flow of the post and derail this stream of thought.

You also said “Why aim? Aiming is for the time when you are distant to your target and can’t be close to it,“

My friend, any woman can answer why aiming is important. Of course if you have a sense of humor you probably already know how much fun it is to leave the toilet seat up or intentionally dribble some water on the seat. There are few things that are funnier than hearing the middle of the night squeal of pleasure when she discovers the gifts awaiting her in the dark bathroom.

You also suggest that standing to urinate is not relaxing. Au contraire. Here is a simple test that you can use to prove otherwise. Drink a six pack of beer and then force yourself to wait several hours before answering natures call. I guarantee that you will find that standing fills you with a mighty sense of relief.

As I mentioned Ali’s comment was quite long and involved. It also alerted me to the existence of a terrible organization that is clearly devoted to emasculating men. It is called MAPSU or Mothers Against Peeing Standing Up.

Forget the War on Terror, the War in Iraq and all other wars because now is the time for men of conscience and shlongliness to band together to eradicate and destroy this fowl organization. (Side note, fowl is intentionally spelled in this manner. There is a reason that they call them hen parties).

The good news is that I already know there are other bloggers out there who understand the import of this. You could always take a look at Pee Like a Man!
or Embarrassing Technology Malfunctions.

To quote Forrest Gump, “That is all I have to say about that.”