Laughter is medicine

Need a good belly laugh? Proceed immediately to Trevor's blog. When you stop laughing long enough to type again, leave some comment love.

DASH

It stands for Dietary Approaches to Stopping Hypertension, or something like that. My friend Bitta works at the Mayo Clinic, and she tipped me off to the existence of DASH. It is an existence that will begin to influence the way I live.

See, this past trip to Arkansas I did all the culinary things a trip South requires: ate lots of barbecue, lots of fried whatever, and drank lots of Dr. Pepper. It was glorious.

It was also excessive. In the months leading up to my trip I had been experiencing various physical discomforts that seemed to be symptoms of something. In the early autumn I gave up most caffeine, which I think helped, but some of the symptoms persisted. By the time it became clear that it would be beneficial to seek medical attention, I temporarily lost my health insurance with Starbucks.

Let's be real though. Partially from my dad's example and partially through growing accustomed to living without health insurance for several years, going to the doctor is usually a last resort. So it is that I began feeling some of the discomfort one night at my parents' house after dinner, and I decided to check my blood pressure.

To say it was high might be an understatement. I was freaked to say the least. But, without medical insurance, a visit to the doctor had to wait at least another three weeks. So, I called Bitta to seek her sage advice on life style changes in response to this new discovery.

Thus, DASH became a part of my life. It's really a pretty common sense as far as diets go. But, that's the point of lifestyle changes, right? They are usually not unexpected changes. Just unwelcome. So, for me here are some of the guiding dietary principles:

*Lower sodium intake. Sodium is one of the primary culprits of elevated blood pressure. The daily recommended value of sodium is 1500 mg, but most people exceed this several times over. One of the dictates of lowering sodium is giving up nearly all packaged food. Things I would not expect to be high in sodium, like much bread and cereal, have turned out to be on the black list. Also, no more free food at the Bux. Other than the overpriced oatmeal, there is not much reasonable there.

*Lower alcohol consumption. I won't dwell on this, but I pretty much hate this part. Thankfully I was dry for a month last winter and I know I can do this. Also, as much as I hate to admit it, I feel better when I'm alcohol free.

*Lower caffeine consumption. Also helping me with the alcohol reduction is looking back over the last few months and being surprised at how easy it has been to significantly reduce how much caffeine I drink. Another consequence is that my awake feels more awake, and my tired feels less tired. My sleeping has also improved.

*Drink more water. Obvious, but something I've not been very good at practicing.

*Increased magnesium, calcium, and potassium intake. Still researching what foods will help me do this, but I am also reacquainting myself with the multivitamin.

*Eat moderately. A big help with high blood pressure is weight loss. Eating smaller portions, and selecting healthier options go some of the distance with this. The other part is of course regular exercise. Thanks to a growing group of friends who love tennis, this has been an easier addition to my lifestyle. Come spring, I look forward to getting more hiking in as well.

There's lots of other things to consider in DASH, but those are the most salient for me. The upside has been moving my focus from what I'm needing to give up in order to get rid of something, to realizing how the changes I'm making are adding value to my life. I am feeling motivated about SOMETHING for the first time in a long time.

Then there are the little reminders. There is that wonderful feeling of exhaustion after a good tennis match which helps me realize that while my shots were wild and unruly, I left every ounce of energy I had on the court. There is that satisfaction of eating just enough at a meal instead of feeling like I'm going into a coma from overeating. There is that appreciation of friends who give recipe suggestions, cook sensitively, and respond to my ridiculous requests to play tennis in the cold drizzle.

Life is good and is getting better. It's nice to say that without trying to convince myself. Which is part and parcel with these changes. Stress elevates blood pressure as well, and there has been no shortage of that this past year and more.

To put it as simply as possible, I have been stressed that time keeps passing even though I don't have a clue what I want to do. I'm confident in who I want to be, and even certain things I want to do, but the day to day of making a living and all that goes along with that--no clue.

The merry-go-round spins...grad school, nonprofit work, missions, teaching, translation, writing, etc. I never land on anything for too long. I'm not looking for a permanent fit, but I'm looking for a meaningful occupation. I hope that's not too much to ask.

At any rate, my attempts to let DASH impact my life are in the infancy stages, but I'm hopeful. I'd like the other decisions in my life to follow that same path of hopefulness.

Come, Captain

Coquettishly you come to
me in the
night
A faerie masked in mystery
aloft on gossamer wings
soaked with starlight
Close you hover
gentle caress upon jugular
until secret somethings
gush unceremoniously forth
An outpouring of darkened heart
bleeding confession
costly petition
penitent libation

If I could only catch you
stall this dance
uncertain
Silence this cacophony
unceasing
Fill up what is lacking
in my affliction of
ignorance
Oh! to know your coming
and your going
know it with the familiarity
of tide and shore
Wash over me
wipe away gritty
uneven surface
until
smoothly I flow
into the heart of
the sunset

I am lost upon you
I am lost without you
I have tasted the
gravity sinking through
the vortex
yawning beneath idle feet
I have felt the wind blow itself
to pieces against
the drift of
my wandering
upsetting course set
on
what?

Come, captain this ship
Set the sails, tie the rigging
slip the anchor
for home

"The house rose from its ashes and I sailed on my love of Delgadina with an intensity and happiness I had never known in my former life. Thanks to her I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

I became another man. I tried to reread the classics that had guided me in adolescence, and I could not bear them. I buried myself in the romantic writings I had repudiated when my mother tried to impose them on me with a heavy hand, and in them I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love."

--Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Postcards Without Postage, pt. 4

Dear little one,

I had a strange dream last night that made scant sense, but when I woke I knew it was about you.

From atop a mountain, I saw a dark bank of clouds streaming in from the east. They moved swiftly, heavy with purpose. As they reached the sky above me, they began to hover and swirl. Deliberately and ominously they gathered until they became the sky.

I heard a voice neither cruel nor gentle wail, "Cover your eyes!" Against my will I obeyed, the force of the voice driving into me with irresistible compulsion. As the world went black, I could feel the heaviness of the clouds crashing over me, an inexorable tide of darkness threatening to suffocate.

"Open your eyes," said a whisper in my ear, childlike and wise. Oh, how I wanted to listen to this whisper! But against the heaviness I could only manage to loose my left eye from its imprisonment.

I saw the underside of the clouds bathed in a bright orange glow, the reflection of some great forest fire, trees below singing with elegiac passion within the conflagration. It was terrible and beautiful, and I returned to my darkness with a mixture of regret and relief.

"Open your eyes," came the whisper once more, laden with urgency. Again the heaviness prevented me from complying fully, but this time I opened my right eye.

I once again saw the inky cloud bank bathed in fire, but this time the glow was warm and fading, like the sunset. It was another flame of passing, but it burned with the promise of tomorrow's rising. All beneath was silent in anticipation. It was beautiful and terrible, and again I retreated to the comfort of my blindness.

"Open your eyes," came the whisper a third time, adding gently, "Do not be afraid." These last four words birthed a lightness in me, and pregnant with expectation I opened both of my eyes onto the leaden expanse.

Just as I looked, the heavens broke open and the deluge began. The fire beneath the clouds shone through the rain to create a crystal clear rainbow, its arc crowning the horizon. I began to cry.

And then I woke, crying still. My little one, I am awash in sorrow. How will I not drown? I have sent my prayers for peace flying to the four corners of the heavens, but they have returned bearing no message, no assurance. Though I endure 197 days of silence, will I ever again see the world unflooded by tears?

As my red-rimmed eyes surrender to slumber once more, I am searching desperately for the courage to open my eyes to the sunrise. For I know it is you whispering in the morning, "Do not be afraid."

Distance

When I began telling my classmates in New Jersey that I was moving to Arkansas, the general sentiment was that I was moving a very long distance away. This was certainly true, and probably on more levels than our junior high hearts realized. However, after being asked a few times just how cold it got in the winter, it became apparent that idea of distance was distorted by mistaking Arkansas for Alaska (when you live just a few hours from four of the biggest cities in the country, it's easy to confine everyone else to the geographical periphery...just ask Texans and Californians).

This specter of distance has haunted me since the day I stepped off a plane in Little Rock, Arkansas and had to call it home. As time has gone on and I've grown from a clueless adolescent to an equally clueless young adult, distance has intruded upon every aspect of life and left me just as bewildered as in those first dizzying days of reconciling myself to leaving a home, a life, behind. It has seemingly made everything tangential and derivative. Distance has become the measure of things.

I live in Portland, Oregon. Most days, it is absolutely glorious. The people, the landscape, the energy - they sometimes intertwine in harmony so breathtaking that it reeks of contrivance. But it's just Portland.

Other days, I am reminded of just how far are the places from which I've come. Memories of New Jersey have been rewritten so elaborately that the seams between fact and fiction are impossible to detect. On a spring break roadtrip during my senior year of college, I drove back to visit friends in Princeton. Driving around one day while they were in class, I found myself at a vaguely familiar intersection. I began turning, half from memory and half from instinct, until I found myself in my old neighborhood. At my old school. In front of my old house.

It was bizarre. Everything was smaller and dingier than I remembered it. Yet, I knew those streets. I grew up with those streets, those playgrounds, those comic book stores. I've never felt so distant from reality as I did parked in front of my old house, peering wistfully at the screened porch, waiting for young Ramón to bang out the door to the sidewalk and turn up the corner at Homan toward George's house. I wanted to ask him, "What happened to you?"

I was a stranger in front of the very places where my memories are staged. My self. My history. How can I be a stranger to my own history? A stranger to myself? These are the types of questions that have driven me to write self-absorbed pseudophilosophy or check into an unreflective stimulus response life driven by appetite. Once in those places, I often despair of ever getting out.

I think about the distance between people too. I grew up around my dad's family in New York, and while the roots of familial love are thick, there is no denying the distance between me and my cousins. Our lives have gone on without each other for 15 years now, with sporadic appearances at weddings and funerals. They all have memories together - watching the new generation of cousins growing up and watching the titis and tíos growing older. Each time we see each other again, the love is deeper but the relationship is thinner. I don't understand it.

Most of my dearest friends, those whose history with me is gritty and unpolished, live far away. Because my rootlessness has attracted me to other wanderers, some of them have begun what seems to be a mass migration to the far flung corners of the globe. As I find my life switching tracks from that international train, the geography between us becomes reflective of deeper estrangements.

Don't even get me started on graduate degrees, careers, houses, marriage, and kids. In my less rational moments, it seems that they have been building their dream lives while I have been caught snoring in the bleachers. A weary, uninspired spectator.

But this is no game. A good friend and coworker at Starbucks would sometimes playfully ask, "Ramón, what are we doing here?!" It was funny in the way that only those piercing truths can be funny - two educated men nearing thirty, pouring lattes and eating shit with a smile for any asshole customer who can pay 50 cents for a coffee refill. In that interaction, the distance between a person and an object can be measured in the negligent toss of a credit card toward a stained green apron behind an infinitely wide counter. He and I can't even joke about it anymore. It's not funny anymore.

Something is at stake in bridging the distance between people. By indulging in my little outburst of profanity above, I have succumbed to the same vampire detachment that bit me at work. Now I am objectifying a living, breathing person. Now I am the one biting.

There are two people in my life with whom I'd like to be closer, but it feels like they are pulling me in with one arm and pushing me away with the other. I only know this feeling because I am quite adept at the maneuver. Even recently, there are people I have invited into my life only to become emotionally withdrawn.

What a mess! I feel hurt and rejected by the ones pushing me away so I withdraw from the others and feel detached and lonely. What gives? Why am I letting myself become controlled by pain and the fear of pain? I know these lessons, we've been over this before. What are we doing here?!

I remember the feeling of utter isolation I had when I discovered that we don't actually see or touch anything. "It's all electrons," I was told. What I "see" is the brain's reception of light particles bouncing off of objects. Of people. What I "feel" is the force of electrons repelling each other as they grow nearer. I almost cried thinking that I had neither seen nor touched any of the people I loved most. They had neither seen nor touched me.

I cursed electrons. After all, these were ludicrously tiny particles standing between me and the reality of my loved ones. But, ah, the paradox! It was my electron-laden neurons that carried the signal to my brain that I was seeing and feeling. What good is getting to the reality of things if I am trapped inside my body? If I am only electrons?

There is some thing between us that is both much smaller and much more vast than negative particles. Distance seems too limiting a description, and yet it fails to convey the mind-boggling expanse. I am trying to wrestle with this paradox and I am losing. I'm not sure I would want to win if I could.

I often struggle to find meaning in a holiday season so entangled with consumerism, and so it is almost by surprise that tomorrow is Christmas Eve. This year I think meaning has found me.

In my faith tradition, the accompanying story is one of displacement, hardship, and labor. An impoverished Jewish peasant couple scandalized by premarital pregnancy scour the periphery of the Roman Empire for a resting place, any place, to begin the hard work of bringing forth new life.

Babies are born every day, and it is never easy. But according to the story, something more was born in Judea that night. Wrapped in swaddling cloth was the wailing confession of the measurable and the ineffable.

We are not self-contained objects, isolated from one another. We are not far removed from reality. What has seemed so far has been revealed to have always been near. Love is born in that revelation, and love beckons to us who are far off -- we who feel hurt, rejected, withdrawn, and afraid.

To us love whispers, "Draw near."

The setting sun

I went on a short hike in Olympia with McHaley today. The trail wound down from a little parking lot just off the road to a rocky beach on the east side of a small cove along the Puget Sound. We were surrounded by lush vegetation and then all of a sudden - tada! Water. Beautiful water.

Looking to the right, the Olympic mountains loomed in the distance, craggy and snow stained. They do not tower, in the normal sense of the word, but their rugged indifference provokes a certain admiration. I love the Olympic mountains.

Looking to the left, the sun was slowly sinking beneath a thin clutch of wispy clouds, caressing the water with the subtlest hues of a sunset palette. Fire and water dancing beneath the wailing seagulls.

We talked about life--family; friends; places we've lived; places we'd like to live. We are kindred spirits of a sort, two wanderers learning in different ways how to make a home. It's not exactly a task with measurable goals. How do you even know when a place first feels like home? I imagine you just look up one day and realize this place feels just like that other place I called "home" did. Despite having no control over this process, it still feels like hard work.

As we talked, I watched the sun descend toward the hills with lazy confidence. I want that confidence. I want to live life with the steady rhythm of the sun rising and setting each day, no matter which place I am trying to call home.

I want to stop clutching at my increasingly outlandish notions of grandeur, as if the days were sand slipping unhindered through my hands.

See, I want to savor the feel of life flowing unfettered between my fingers, to let each grain tell its unique story until there is nothing left to hold.

Then I will stand at the water, gaze upon the mountains, and know the certainty of the sun in its setting.