Mawidge

The difference between me and my wife is that when I get rid of one of the two piles of stuff sitting on the floor by my desk, I am pleased with myself for having done so and she still sees that there's a pile of stuff on the floor.

It's little teeny things like that that keep it interesting. I feel like I accomplished something but did I really?

Our political discourse

I know my last post was pretty serious, because it's a serious matter that's not being covered properly by the media, but here's an example of a more general kind of problem. This is an actual headline on USAToday.com:

Gay marriage advances: Overdue justice or 

moral chaos?

Are those really the only two options? How about 

Driving to Work: Safe and On-Time or Fatal Multi-car Accident?

Dinnertime: Delicious and Nourishing or Deadly Poison?

Football Game Score: 287 - 286 or 0-0?

Sitting in your chair: Reading a book or spontaneous combustion?

I know someone who is what might be called a black and white thinker. This means that whatever happens is either great or horrible. Nothing is just okay. I don't think that this is a calming way of approaching life, in fact if those were the only 2 alternatives I'd be a nervous wreck. Every decision is between spectacular success or absolute disaster, so how do you get through the day?

Personally, I think there are very few absolutes. Even the commandment about not killing can be mitigated in cases of self-defense. (A side note, and this is not my original observation, if one of the commandments is "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," isn't the killing one kind of redundant?). The lack of absolutes doesn't prevent me from having a clear cut moral code, but it does require that I put a bit of thought into which side of the line things fall.

Whoever wrote that headline, and it doesn't matter because this is just one of many examples, is engaging in sloppy, facile thinking in every way. Aside from the black-and-whiteness of the thought, is it really a choice between overdue justice and moral chaos? Is it not possible to have both? You don't have to look much further than the headlines coming out of Libya or Egypt to see that it's entirely possible for overdue justice and moral chaos to coexist.

Again, I don't want to pick on this poor writer, even though that is exactly what she is, but the problem isn't the headline; it's the false choice it presents. I feel like this kind of discourse is damaging to out being able to cooperate and make wise decisions about major issues. The gay marriage issue is a deeply felt one, not one that lends itself to simplistic so-called analysis, and most of the biggest questions we face are not stark, clear choices. If they were, we wouldn't be agonizing over them.

Wisconsin protests. Nothing humorous here.

This is an unbelievable scene and an incredibly important moment for the so-called middle class. The Wisconsin public employee unions have already agreed to every wage and benefit cut that has been proposed. The only issue here is staving off the destruction of the unions themselves.

I've been involved with a decent number of union negotiations on both sides of the table and I saw enough to know that whatever faults unions may have, the vast majority of union workers want nothing more than fair compensation for a day's work. If the unions help them get that, more power to them. Employers have almost all the power on their side and some sort of counterbalance is necessary.

If you want to order a pizza to send to the protesters, go to badgerbites.com and order a pizza from Ian's delivered to 115 State St. in Madison. I have it on good authority that Ian's is the best pizza in Madison and that it's really appreciated by the people who are spending all day at the Capitol.

Tales of sorrow and whoa

The word on the street is that it's harder to make new friends when you're an adult than it is when you're in school, and that the friendships you make are not as deep in some way.

My observation is that this is generally true, and I've been curious as to why (aside from the obvious combination of close proximity to lots of people of similar age and background and copious unstructured time that makes college so ripe for making friends) and the thing that occurred to me was that adults have too many stories.

There's nothing wrong with stories, of course. Someone who collects and retells stories skillfully can be marvelous company. But when teenagers and young adults spend time together, they don't have many life events to recount, so their conversations are centered in the here and now, which is a shared experience. The shared experience aspect is part of what really binds young people together.

Adults, on the other hand, are constantly referencing things that happened earlier in their life that they believe to relate to what's going on now. New experiences may be new for adults, but not in the same way because we tend to want to put things into context.

At this point, when I spend some time with someone who I am just getting to know, I often leave the encounter with the feeling that we haven't bonded in any way; all we've done is share information. This generally feels disappointing and even wrong, like all I've done is entertain and be entertained instead of actually relating.

Another problem with the stories is that you eventually run out of the good ones, and that part of you gets tired of the story, even if it's a good one. I get this to a lesser extent in classes if there's something that I always tell every class, but at least those stories usually have some pedagogical value. In regular conversation, it's not a good feeling afterwards, and I immediately start inventorying to try to make sure I don't tell the same story again next time, because I am terrified of repeating myself.

So the problem then is how to proceed beyond all this. Say I'm at a point in my acquaintance with someone where I've probably used up most of my best stories. Now what? Even if I'm a good listener and really think about what the other person says, how do I respond without relating it to something other than whatever's currently going on? Is that even possible, or am I buried under the past?

More on this later.

I meant to say "Hi" back

There's a cartoon I like, I think it's a Far Side, where a cow looks up and says, "Hey, this is grass! We've been eating grass!" This speaks to me, and not just because I like cows (and grass), but because it crystallizes the importance of always knowing what the hell it is you are doing.

By that I'm not talking about competence; I mean literally, what are you doing right now and why? I feel fortunate in that by nature I initially take everything at face value. This has its disadvantages, of course, in that when I pass someone in that hall and they say "Hi" it takes a moment of conscious thought for me to realize that I'm expected to respond. However, it all but totally prevents me from taking things for granted.

I recommend this as a general way to approach life. It makes boredom all but impossible, because to some extent you teat everything, no matter how familiar, as if you're seeing it for the first time.

So as I sit here tonight, tired after getting about 2 hours sleep last night (don't ask), and I suddenly realize I have to go to work in the morning and talk about math for 4 hours straight from 8:20 to 12:20. And before I get around to thinking about how much I enjoy what I do every day, my initial reaction is "Really? Math? I'm going to talk about math for 4 hours straight tomorrow? Why in the world would anyone purposely do that? And whatever am I going to say?"

But I'll show up at school tomorrow, notice that that's where I am and I'm sure I'll come up with something. And I can't help but think that the fact that I started with "Really? Math?" is part of what makes the whole thing interesting and worthwhile for me and the students.

Advice worth every penny you paid for it

Just thought I'd share something I wrote to my daughter in college. She seemed unhappy over not being able to put enough time in on both her English paper and her Bio midterm to do well on both, so here's what I told her:

One of the lifelong skills one acquires during their college years is how to judge time trade-offs. People never have enough time and/or energy to do everything they want, nor to do the best possible job on everything they absolutely need to do. There are no right or wrong answers. Allocate the time the way that makes the most sense to you at the moment and NEVER look back or beat yourself up about making the choice you did. You do the best you can with the time and energy you have. Once the crunch is over, only then assess what you did and what you could have done differently.

Honestly, I have no idea if I'd be able to follow that advice myself or even if it's right. It was worth saying something though, and this didn't seem like it could hurt. It reminds me of something I like to repeat here every so often. It's a decision-making tool that I use regularly when faced with a choice that's not particularly clear cut.

It's a simple principle, really. If you can't figure out what the right thing to do is, assume you're going to screw it up and look at the anticipated consequences. If you're going to be wrong, which mistake would you rather make? This is a logical and even somewhat calming way to approach things. Learned it in business school in a problem-solving class.

None of my best friends are vegetarians

I was going to title this starting with "some," but then I realized that it wasn't true. I certainly know and like people who are vegetarians, but none of them would remotely qualify for best friend status.

I bring this up because my quest to eat without salt has helped me understand why vegetarians are so annoying. Really, there are two reasons. First, many people become vegetarians for moral reasons, and whenever you do something for moral reasons you run the risk of becoming sanctimonious about it. The distance from "I don't eat meat because I think it's wrong" to "Eating meat is wrong" is not as great as one would hope. Fortunately, vegetarianism has become mainstream enough (it was decidedly not so when I was growing up) that few feel the need. Not even all Vegans are superior about it, maybe because Vegans realize how difficult it is to be a Vegan.

Clearly my cutting out salt is for my own personal benefit and not because I'm taking any kind of moral stand, but this brings me to my second point. To eat for a day in America and not consume 2,000 mg of sodium is very difficult. I've been doing it for a week now, and I can tell you that it is constant work. You pretty much cannot eat anything that any other human being has prepared without your oversight, and anything from a package requires scrutiny. For example, I had some soup for lunch that I'd made in the crock pot yesterday, and I wanted something with it. I was so gladdened to find that Trader Joe's Oyster Crackers have on 80 mg of sodium in a handful I practically wept with joy. Well, not really, but I did very much enjoy eating them.

Where the vegetarianism parallel comes in is that everything I eat and therefore much of what I do revolves around counting how much salt there is in any given food. Vegetarians are in a constant state of counting protein. Grams of protein, complementary proteins, protein in unexpected places (you think vegetarians eat lentils because they really like them? Seriously? No, they have a lot of protein. Not to diss lentils. I like them fine, but none of my favorite foods are lentil-based). This kind of thinking has a way of taking over your life and therefore your thought processes, and once that happens, you start wanting to talk about it all the time. All the time. And in an obsessive way, not a pleasant or interesting way.

Did you know that low sodium say sauce has 600 mg of sodium in a teaspoon? Cheddar cheese 200 mg in an ounce while swiss cheese has only 60? Do you care? Why in the world would you care? But when you're the one doing it, it's not very hard to get all caught up in this, and if you know vegetarians you know that they talk about their latest ingenious protein complements (especially when there's more than one vegetarian in the room). Here's the scoop though; nobody else wants to hear it. Nobody cares what amino acids you've managed to combine and nobody cares that I managed to make decent tasting marinara sauce with no salt, and they really don't want to hear how I accomplished it.

So if you hear me bragging about my cooking inventiveness or opining on the overabundance of salt in every processed food there is, do me a favor and slap me.

Hoop dreams

I used to play basketball a lot. It was really a key part of my high school and college life. I met and/or got close to several of my close friends playing basketball with them. In fact, I first spoke with my closest friend from college because he purposely elbowed me in the mouth the first time we played.

My friend is tall and thin and I am neither, but I always enjoyed rebounding and was good at if for my height because I was good at, as they say in basketball parlance, "using my body." Roughly translated, this meant that I was good at pushing people out of my way by using parts of my body other than my hands. When battling with anybody 6 inches taller than me, this becomes especially important because the only advantages I have are density and a lower center of gravity.

So after the, I don't know, third, tenth, fiftieth time I'd hip-checked this guy out of bounds to get a rebound away from him, he turned around and whacked me in the mouth with his elbow. He didn't loosen any teeth or make me bleed, but it ended the game. I went looking for him later and learned that he worked at the library in the evenings, so I walked up to the desk, stood there, and gave him a huge smile. Wearing a mouthguard. We've been best of friends since and that's the truth.

Truth in advertising

Here's an article from one of my favorite supermarket pastimes, Entertainment Weekly.

Violence in Super Bowl commercials.

I'm glad someone else is noticing. I used to really enjoy Super Bowl commercials, but in the past few years they have gotten increasingly mean and violent. I mean, how many times and in how many different ways can you see a guy get hit in the crotch and still find it even slightly funny (Usher's split is whole 'nother thing, and let's not talk about the violence Lea Michelle inflicted on America The Beautiful).

That's probably why the Volkswagen Darth Vader commercial was the favorite ad this year. It was sweet and funny in its own surprising way, relying on nothing more than an original idea and a well produced spot. Doritos and Pepsi should take note. Once everyone expects this kind of crap from them they can take two paths- either escalate the violence and maliciousness or come up with something new and different.

Excuse the salty language

I am what doctors call prehypertensive. I took a bunch of Latin and I think the Romans would be appalled at the double prefix. What it means in real life is that I almost, but not quite, have high blood pressure. This runs in my family somewhat. There are a few ways to lower your blood pressure . You can lose weight and exercise, both of which I am trying to do at the moment, you can eliminate alcoholic beverages, which I am not trying to do at the moment, and you can reduce the amount of sodium in your diet. The maximum amount of sodium you should consume on a daily basis is 2000 mg, AKA 2 g.

Your diet does not normally contain a lot of pure sodium because this is what happens if pure sodium comes in contact with water:


So most of your sodium comes from salt. So let's say you decide you're not going to use the salt shaker at all. You should be fine, right? Well, for example, say I have a fairly normal adult breakfast of a bowl of Kellogg's Raisin Bran (we'll talk about fiber some other time), a snack of plain, nonfat yogurt, and lunch of a turkey sandwich with a typical serving of 3 oz. Dietz and Watson (or Empire if you prefer) turkey breast on whole wheat bread with lettuce, tomato and a bit of mustard with 1 oz of potato chips. How much sodium do you think you've consumed?

Well, raisin bran has 280 mg, 4 oz of milk has 50 mg, a yogurt 120 mg, 2 pieces of bread 350 mg, 3 oz turkey 600 mg, 1 teaspoon of mustard 100 mg, and 150 mg for the chips. That's 1650 mg and it's now about 1 PM. Gonna keep it under 350 total the rest of the day? Good luck!

Switching to the reduced sodium turkey and chips would save you 350 mg, but you're still at 1300 well before dinner. And substituting one of those "Healthy Choice" frozen lunches will give you anywhere from 600-1000mg. And having a reduced sodium canned soup would add another 450 mg. Peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat? 650 mg. So basically, if you're looking for the prepared food people to take care of this for you, you're screwed.

You would think there would be enough people trying to reduce sodium that there would be people making things to cater to them. And you can find salt-free things in the supermarket. What's I find strange is that there are very few genuinely low sodium items. Soup is the perfect example. Look in the supermarket and there are probably 200 different kinds of soup on the shelf (again, why one needs that is another story). Maybe 1/3 of them are reduced sodium, but they're reduced from such a ridiculously high level that they're still loaded with the stuff. Amy's has their "light in sodium" line, which typically has 300-400mg, better than the turkey sandwich, but aside from that I dare you to find something in the frozen entree aisle with less than 600 mg.

So I have now entered that strange world of people who have to prepare all their own food from scratch. Before processed foods helped people decide they were too busy to prepare their own, this was not nearly so much of a problem, though if you do a nutritional profile on most recipes you will see they are also very high in sodium. It's just that you can somewhat control how much salt you add. You can buy cookbooks to help you, but is anybody really going to buy a cookbook published by the American Heart Association? Think flavorful is tops on those people's minds? There is not a single low sodium cookbook by a professional chef or cookbook writer.

So I'll keep you posted on my progress. Today, I had oatmeal for breakfast and pan-fried no-salt-seasoned chicken breast on a thin sandwich bun for lunch. So I'm at abut 300 mg. Good, because an ounce of Doritos and 4 tablespoons of salsa is another 650 mg. And pizza? Don't get me started.

Soup or art?

I bought some soup at Whole Foods. Yeah, I know it's stupid to buy soup. Soup is the easiest thing in the world to make. You put a bunch of whatever you have lying around in a pot with some liquid, boil it for a while, and keep adding stuff to it until it tastes good. At least that's what I do.

This soup says on the label "From Our Test Kitchens." Wait a minute. Test Kitchens? They're selling soup from the Test Kitchens? I mean, isn't that where they're supposed to, you know, test stuff before they sell it to the general public?

I have to look more carefully at the labels. I want soup from their actual kitchens, not the place where they're testing stuff out. Now I don't know if I even want to try it.

It's a good thing I got fired from a job. More than once, actually, especially if you count being fired by my dad, though that was different because it was really personal.

I think my outlook on things would be warped had that never happened. I sometimes wonder if my outlook on relationships is warped because I was never broken up with. I'm serious. Somehow, I got through the whole dating thing while always being the one to initiate a breakup. Part of this was because I was pretty shy with girls when I was a teenager and didn't go out much, and of course I sometimes asked girls to go out with me and they said no. But I never had the experience of immersing myself in a relationship, only to have it torn away from me, so I can only imagine what it would be like.

I bring this up because it's Groundhog Day, and that movie makes me think about the importance of getting out of one's comfort zone from time to time. I'm not knocking comfort zones, they're, well, comfortable. In fact, they're probably the most comfortable of all zones, hence the name. And it certainly makes sense to stay within them much of the time. But at the same time a comfort zone is a trap, because all of the best stuff as well as all of the worst stuff can be found outside of it.

I think that's why I like winter and going for walks in horrid cold weather. It's just so intense it makes you feel alive. Chilled and uncomfortable and maybe even miserable at times, but very much alive, and whenever I have a day where I don't have something like that I feel cheated. Doing something, almost anything, for the first time has that same kind of intensity.

This explains quite a bit about the way I teach. As I've gotten more experienced, I've become less dependent on lesson plans. Not because I think lesson plans are bad. When I'm teaching a new class, like AP Calc, I need lesson plans, but not for anything else I'm teaching this year. This means that the classes are for the most part improvised, which is exciting because I never know quite how they're going to play out. I know that there are very good teachers who have everything planned out to the tiniest degree, and that works for them. I'd be ready to slit my throat after a week of it.

I'm sure being broken up with would be awful. But an awful lot of great art has come out of brokenheartedness, so it must have something going for it. Oh well, too late for me on that one,  I think. I'll have to draw my inspiration from a frigid wind, or trying to answer some kid's out-of-left-filed question, or even from the process of trying to create an original thought. Yeah, that'll work.