After it's all over

I just turned in my last paper on Thursday and while I have another final exam, it's a ways off now and feels distant. In any case, I can now start sleeping for eight hours a day and stop drinking energy drinks. I'm free now.

So why did I spend all of Friday sitting around in my room not doing anything? Why do I suddenly feel so harried and lost my desire to do anything.

This might seem like a strange comparison, but it's similar to the way one feels after a funeral.

There's a lot to do for a funeral. You have to go to the funeral home and pick out the type of casket you're going to get, the color, the type of wood, do you splurge on the nice casket or go for a cheaper one (it's your loved one, isn't he worth the expensive casket? But does he honestly care?) You have to call everyone and let them know about the death, listen to a hundred people tell you I'm sorry, while you repeat your rehearsed story of the sequence of events. You have to pick a date for the event and send out invitations, write something to submit to the paper for the obituaries page, find some place to put all the flowers you're getting. You have to pick a church, meet with the church representatives to discuss what hymns will be sung and who's going to carry the casket. You have to answer the phone when they call you about donating his organs answer a series of a hundred ridiculous questions about where in what condition those organs have been. It's quite a headache.

You have to meet at a friends house after the ceremony because they won't let you have the reception in the church basement and you wouldn't want to anyway. You have to tell a hundred people how you're holding up and wonder about what that even means given the circumstances. And then you have to say goodbye to everyone and get down to writing thank you cards for all the flowers.

And then it's over.

Now what?

In a way is like a form of procrastination. You can get yourself really worked up and busy about something that honestly isn't going to make a bit of difference a week later, but which at the time seems very important.

I put off a lot of things while I was busy writing papers during my last week of classes, so many things that I just couldn't think about because I needed to get these things done. And then Thursday night after I was done, I didn't want to think about all those things I'd put off.

All the other exchange students (almost all of whom are staying only for a semester) are leaving soon. I need to think about what I'm going to do next semester, what classes I'm going to take and, more immediately what I'm going to do during the break between semesters. I had about a half dozen people that I'd wanted to write long emails to, but told myself that I didn't have time because I had so much work to do. I had more blog posts I wanted to write. And now that I'm finally done it's taken me three days to work up the energy to write this.

I've started listening to Dale Carnegie's "How to start Worry and Start Living" on my iPod (it's been on my computer for a while, ever since my mother put it on there). In one section he talks about the importance of work, of keeping ourselves busy, in staving off worry and keeping ourselves sane. I'm a big believer in that; even more so when I'm not doing any work. There's something very leisurely about doing a study abroad program that bothers me at times. It will be good when I finally come back home and can get a job.

In the meantime, I have to find something else for myself to do that feels like work to occupy my time and to keep me from losing my mind.

I'm considering rock climbing.

Saying No to Drugs and Yes to Lying in Bed with my Laptop...

During my time sleeping, reading and killing time on my computer while sick, I encountered some of these videos on youtube which inspired me to write about my opinions on drugs:



Whenever I think about drugs of any kind, I like to think about a mantra that my dad repeated to me often, that his dad used to tell him: moderation is the key. It's for this reason that I try not to get into the habit of having a cup of coffee every morning, and drink alcohol moderately when I'm at parties. The main thing is that I don't like the idea of becoming dependent on anything.

This attitude flies right in the face of most of the rhetoric about drugs which the above "public service announcement" is just a small part of. "Just say no to drugs", both implies that all drugs are the same, and that the correct response is to universally reject them.

Some people might have reacted with surprise when I mentioned coffee or even alcohol as drugs. But they most certainly are, in that they both affect the body and the mind in some way, they have side effects (anyone who's suffered from caffeine jitters can tell you this) and they can lead to addiction over time (my father despite his advice complained of headaches if he ever didn't have his morning coffee--a perfect example of withdrawal).

It turns out that even more mundane substances, which almost no one consider to be drugs, in fact, are.



In the above video, Dr. Neal Barnard, the author of Breaking the Food Seduction explains how chocolate, cheese, meat, and sugar all have properties that make them addicting and, essentially, drugs. At the beginning of the video he talks about the opiate effects that sugar has on babies ("how to magnetize a baby"), who are conditioned to the mild sweetness of breast milk, and talks later about other physically addicting foods, which to all intents and purposes are drugs (they make you feel good, they're addicting, they can kill you if used immoderately).

I tend to use the word "drug" rather liberally, which has confused my host mother here. When I was sick with tonsillitis I had to take (or rather still am taking) antibiotics, as well as ibuprofen. When I initially referred to "ibuprofeno" with the word "droga" instead of "medicación" she corrected me. But Dr. Barnard, in his book, also uses the word drug to refer to the medication often prescribed by his peers in lieu of suggesting to patients that they change their diet.

If a person was alcoholic you wouldn't tell them to go see six other different types of doctors, you would work on getting them off of alcohol. But the same thing does not happen if someone is addicted to chocolate, cheese, meat or sugar, even though it is having demonstrable health effects for them. And I'm sure that the "Foundation for a Drug Free World" does not consider cheese or chocolate on their list (though they do deal with prescription medication).

And unlike Dr. Barnard the Foundation for a Drug Free World do not use facts, although they say they do. Take this video:



It turns out that smoking marijuana can have negative consequences for ones lungs over a long period of time (though they're related to the act of smoking it and not so much to the effects of the drug) . But the sort of inevitable spiral into "harder" drugs is a myth; "While it is certainly true that many of those who become heroin addicts, for example, have used cannabis, the vast majority of people in the UK (and elsewhere) who have used cannabis, have never used so-called harder drugs such as heroin or cocaine." So the scenario showed in the video of rapidly moving from marijuana to speed and heroin over a short period is a very rare case, and probably made more likely by the criminalization of marijuana.

And that's the point really, that most of the nightmare scenarios shown in these videos (I don't think I need to post any more but there are legions on youtube) are rare events presented in a highly propagandizing fashion. These tactics are a problem, not because they will erroneously turn people off of all drugs, because they promote an attitude in our society that is more sensational than reasoned and interested in data, and because kids (generally the target audience) will see through these efforts to scare them.

Apart from not presenting factual information there's another serious flaw the videos in their stressing the "they said, they lied". The "they" is presumably the kids' peers. So essentially the message is "all your peers are telling you these things, but they're all wrong" as well as "all your peers are doing drugs".

There's an article on the freakonomics blog that explains why this might be a problem. It turns out that people find suggestions more convincing if you tell them that everyone is doing it. Thus convincing someone that everyone washes their hands will give them the idea that only dirty, unsavory people don't wash their hands when they use the restroom (the example given in the article is stealing petrified wood from national parks). Convincing kids that all their peers use drugs, just makes them think "if everybody's doing it, it can't be that bad".

When I think about how harmful a drug is, I look at its side effects (caffeine's tendency to make me jittery and uncomfortable if I don't eat right afterward) and the long term effects along with the likelihood that I'll get hooked on them. This is why I quit smoking (which I did for a few weeks here in Buenos Aires); it's far more addicting that marijuana or alcohol and the long term consequences of doing it regularly could involve lung cancer.

And when I worry about addiction, it's not just drugs. The internet can be deadly addictive, one of the major culprits for my recent insomnia. Even exercise, normally something that's good for you, can be addictive in a way--my mother used to complain about my dad's sometimes obsessive exercising habits, how he would drop everything if it got in the way of his cycling class. That's why I think these issues need to be handled with greater complexity and not in black/white good/bad sorts of frameworks.

My Buenos Aires Apartment in Sickness and in Health

The temperature has been dropping in Buenos Aires, which has caused my host mother to complain loudly about the cold. She is also constantly telling me to put coats on when I'm already wearing three layers of clothing. I do this out of hard experience with Cleveland weather--you constantly end up going out with a huge coat and end up ruing the decision later in the day when it turns unexpectedly warm. It helps to be prepared.

Despite this, I've had a cold for a few weeks now (I always seem to have a cold). On Tuesday my host mom was concerned (she always is) and this time with reason because I was coming down with a fever. Late Tuesday night it was discovered that I had tonisilitis when we called a doctor to come by the house. The man looked me over, briefly asked me about symptoms looked in my mouth and said "yes, there it is. You have pus, that's the problem. Take antibiotics and get rest you should be fine by Monday". That was it. I paid him 100 pesos for that (which is covered by my insurance fortunately).

This was a bit of a mixed blessing. I had a test the next day which would need to be rescheduled but this now meant that I had plenty of time to work on all that studying when I was stuck at home. And indeed having a computer and internet access means that you are instantly connected to the rest of the world just from sitting on your bed. So why was I depressed after the first day?

For the same reason that my previous five-day weekend had been difficult for me. The same reason that I go to cafes to study even though there's nothing to stop me from studying in my room. I just don't do anything when I'm sitting around in my room and although I keep myself occupied (my host mom mentioned I could watch T.V. or a movie, and then there was the laptop) this was not what I was worried about. I feel unproductive and worthless when the most I can say for my day is that I checked my email a dozen times and played free cell. Meanwhile I have a to-do list a page long with a two items checked off.

At least on the long weekend I had the possibility of going out as something I knew that I perhaps ought to be doing. But here I was on doctor's orders to do nothing but sit around in bed (and sleep sometimes I suppose). The freedom from such obligation is at once oddly exhilerating (I have so much time to get things done!) and feels like an anvil hanging over my head. Because if I don't get anything done...

Kuky, my host mother, took care of me very well, brining me soup and tea to my room, and doing everything she could to ensure my rapid return to health (meanwhile she got herself vaccinated against the flu, afraid that she or her husband would catch it from me--though I didn't have it). Yet her vigilance, while nice, just contributed to my feelings of uselessness.

After a full day of mostly sitting on my computer playing games I decided I needed to get something accomplished and came up with what I think is a rather clever innovation. I took out a piece of paper and wrote "accomplishments" at the top, did 50 pushups and 100 situps and wrote this down on the page. I did some of the ankle exercises that I'm supposed to do for my injured ankle and wrote that down as well. I wrote a blog entry and added that to the list (it was something I was meaning to write about for a while). I wrote a poem and wrote that down as well. I did more pushups and every time I did it felt good to be able to say that I was accomplishing something more in my day (I couldn't leave and go to the gym for fear of affecting people but I was already feeling fine by this point). I figured out that it's much easier to get things done when you're looking at the day as a clean slate than as already filled up with all the things you didn't do yesterday. You're not really going to forget those things, and if you do you can look at the the old list. But just staring a huge to-do list and contemplating the seeming impossibility at chipping away at it seems to be a bit too daunting. I usually try to do something unrelated so that I don't have to think about it.

On my last set of push ups I started thinking, "why am I doing this". I don't know if arm strength is really something that's going to benefit me in any significant way at this point in my life (I don't really play any sport that depends heavily on arm strength). I even questioned the whole purpose of keeping one's body in good shape in the first place--my dad worked out all the time and he died at 54 of a heart attack. There's a certain thrilling romanticism about it, fighting the inevitable, trying to strengthen bodies that are nonetheless steadily and inexorably moving towards collapse.

For those unfamiliar with the second law of thermodynamics, it states that the universe is steadily progressing towards entropy, because heat flows from hot things to cold things, things naturally progress towards disorder and what's called entropy increases. It's easier to break things than put them back together (anyone who' s been frustrated by broken dishes knows what I'm talking about). Yet somehow we keep trying to make things, keep trying to progress and grow things, even though it seems all too easy for everything to fall apart. You spend your whole adult life, twenty years! building your career, your family, stressing about the future, saving for your retirement, dreaming of living someplace more tranquil where there's mountains, just to die in your office chair at 54.

Think about herrings. David Gessner writes about them in his book A wild Rank Place: One Year on Cape Cod. The poor bastards swim upstream, up waterfalls even, facing bears, birds and all manner of other predators and obstacles just to make it to the place they were born so they can spawn. And die.

Yet we need to do work, we can't just sit around playing games, masturbating our time away. We night to fight the current in some kind of way, which is why I can't stand vacation, I can stand staying at home even though I enjoy it. Van Gogh wrote it well in his journals when he said: "Just then I feel what work is to me, how it gives tone to life, apart from approval or disapproval; and on days that would otherwise make me melancholy, one is glad to have an aim." [My italics]

Gessner writes about how like the herring, we have hordes of writers in our society today, swimming out of creative writing and MFA programs with the aim of publishing, and we know that there just isn't enough demand for writing for them all to get published. Like the doomed fish many of them will not make it. I'd love to be published someday and maybe that's part of the appeal of hitting the "publish post" button at the bottom of my screen everytime I write a blog post. I'm casting my words out into the world. And in all probability the only people reading are my family and maybe a few of my friends, so that there isn't any real need to generalize my language, that I could probably refer to people by their first names without anyone wondering who Natalia and Marco (my siblings) are in the context of my story. But the aim of publication (even in a blog) and the desire to create something lasting (of any kind) are important to me and they're what get me up in the morning.

Gessner offers this advice which I have taken to heart "Don't worry too much about the consequences...just keep throwing yourself into things. And think like a herring."

That's what I try to do. So now, ironically after a week of bad health, I feel better than ever.