bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • The paper rules.

    This is what I mark my weight on every day.

    Photo 72

    Mark made up the chart, and the "rules" at the top.  

    It's like this:  I am supposed to begin doing something to bring my weight back to the middle whenever any of the conditions described in the rules are met.  I cannot return to normal behavior until the running average of five measurements in a row crosses the midline again.

    This is great, except that I have not gotten around to defining "normal behavior," nor the positive and negative types of "doing something."  Right now "normal behavior" is "more or less eat what I want" and "doing something" is "eat less than I want."  (I have only slipped into the land of underweight-must-eat-more once.)

    I really won't feel that I'm doing this properly, and proactively, until I've figured out what "normal" ought to include.

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  • This is what maintenance looks like. So far.

    Maint012409

    (Image courtesy of SparkPeople.com)

    This morning I weighed in 2.4 pounds higher than goal, a couple of days after a big nibbling day (and takeout Chinese—read, "lots of salt"—the night before).  

    It seemed as good a day as any to put things in context.

    Is it harder to be maintaining than it was to be losing the weight?  I have been considering that question for a few weeks now, and I am not at all sure of the answer.  For one thing, the time of weight loss (May 13–November 15) is receding further and further into the past, and I am having a hard time remembering how it felt.  For another thing, I am not sure that I have been maintaining for long enough to get an accurate picture of the difficulty.  It has only been a bit more than 2 months—a third as long as I spent losing.

    Don't forget, too, that there were two other ways of being (leaving aside pregnancies for now).  There was also maintaining my high, unhealthy weight (a.k.a. "not trying to lose right now") and there was trying to lose and failing.  I spent an awful lot of time doing those.  Trying to lose and failing was hardest of all.

    Some things are easier and some things are harder.  When I was losing the weight and succeeding, it was easy to know what I should do.  Every morning I woke up and I had a goal that, while it took effort to achieve, was at least easy to understand and fairly straightforward to plan.  Maintaining has been a little harder to figure out, but it has pleasures that are still new and exciting.  

    While I was losing, I knew that to succeed I would have to plan very carefully, to try new things slowly and to pay attention to how my body responded, so that I could find out what would work and what would not.  Truly, I know that my maintenance will be more successful if I continue that careful planning and charting, trying new things slowly and paying attention to how my body responds; but I've really slacked off on the careful experimentation.  I have been reactive rather than proactive.  I guess it's been kind of exhiliarating to eat toast for breakfast pretty much whenever I feel like it.  I'm kind of giddy.  It's the honeymoon phase, I suppose.  Sooner or later I do plan to start systematically adjusting my diet, to try to bring it under tighter control all the time, rather than letting the weight spike up and then controlling closely for a few days until it comes back within limits.  (Notice the spike right at Christmas!)

    The one thing that deep down worries me:  I have said before, it was almost as if the serenity towards calorie restriction, and the "easy" weight loss, came out of nowhere, a gift from above.  The thing is, I don't really think I can count on being able to repeat the performance.  

    I am also aware that someday my semblances of self-control might evaporate as mysteriously as it appeared, and I'll start gaining weight and eating too much again.  Truly the best guesses I can make as to the source of the sudden apparent willpower are (a) divine favor and (b) my insulin level dropping slowly over a couple of years past  a certain threshold,  triggering rapid weight loss and suppression of cravings.

    If it's (a), well, you've read the book of Job, right?  

    And if it's (b), that means that I ought to continue being vigilant against carbohydrates and especially refined carbohydrates and sugars.  I've already experienced a few times since I have been maintaining that, once I start in on the "white" carbs or on sweets, there is a temptation to keep going, much stronger than the temptation to have that first bite.  I have noticed, for example, that my after-dinner chocolate-bar fragment has been getting bigger!  What if increasing my carbohydrate intake is slowly bringing my blood insulin level back up towards that invisible threshold?  If I cross it again, will I begin suddenly to gain weight as rapidly and as effortlessly as I lost it?

    There's been a lot of "Well, my weight is in range, so it's okay if I have some of this."  Fudging, if you will.  Sloppy thinking.

    I don't really want to fudge.  I want to be in control of myself, and in touch with reality.  I look like a normal person (well, except for the extra skin!), but I am not a normal person.  I am a formerly obese person.  

    I have the disease of obesity, but I control it with diet and exercise.

    This is the way I must think of it.  It has to be the same as if I were a diabetic, a diabetic who manages without injectable insulin only because she carefully controls her diet and maintains an active lifestyle.  The diabetic will not be "cured" and cannot let her life go "back to normal," because  her symptoms will reappear.  No matter how long her string of successful days, days in which she functions near-identically to a normal person, she is still a diabetic and still must keep a diabetic's eye on her diet and her physical activity.  It is the same for me.  I have a disease, but I can control it.  If I don't choose to control it, it will control me, and might even kill me in the end.

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  • The political football.

    We all knew the Mexico City policy would be reversed, no?  It has not showed up yet at whitehouse.gov, but the media has assured us that President Obama rescinded it on January 23.  So, for the next four to eight years, your tax money and mine is now permitted to be allocated toward foreign non-governmental organizations which perform and promote abortions as part of their holistic family planning and population control missions.

    (I'm so tired of the "but the money doesn't have to go to pay for abortion, it can go for other things including things that prevent abortion."  Money is fungible.  The point of the policy is clearly not to prevent abortion or to reduce it, because as everyone has observed by now, there is no way it can do so, at least not on its own.  The policy per se provides for the US to be neutral — to decline to provide money for foreign abortion-as-international-family-planning-aid — and because money is fungible, you can only do that by declining to give money to people who perform and promote abortion.  And pressure matters.  Thousands of people (rightly if you ask me) boycott Nestle because of aggressive baby-formula marketing, despite the fact that Nestle also puts some of their profits into poverty reduction programs world wide.  They do good stuff; that's no reason to take the pressure off them, in fact it's an argument for continuing to keep the pressure on.)

    When President Clinton rescinded the MCP on January 22, 1993, pro-life activists are reported to have taken the choice of the date as a slap in the face.   When President Bush reinstated it on January 22, 2001, did they take the choice of that date as a signal of warmth towards the cause?  I suppose we are to take it as something different from a "slap" that President Obama chose to rescind the MCP on the day after the hot-button date, the one that would have been the "slap."  

    I am not sure about that.  On the one hand, the result is the same.  During Republican administrations the policy is in place and the U. S. is neutral towards abortion as family planning/population control.  During Democratic administrations the policy is rescinded and the U. S. is willing to send international aid to fund abortion as family planning/population control.  Flip.  Flop.  Flip.  Flop.   

    Looked at with as critical and dispassionate an eye as I can muster, it is certainly interesting that, in an age when issues like the economy and health care and education and the state of the Middle East are all larger than life, this one teeny tiny piece of foreign policy has been among the first items to receive the full attention of incoming administrations, three times in a row.  

    Anyway, back to the date.  Can we assume that the date was January 23 and not January 22 "on purpose?"  Is it a gesture at all?  Is it a gesture without any meaning at all?  Do you think President Obama thought it was meaningful from his end?  

    I subscribe to the theory that, when politicians who support legal abortion, or who belong to a party that supports legal abortion, make any move at all in the direction of protection of the unborn or acknowledgment of their humanity, the pro-life moment should celebrate that and let them know that the effort (however small) is really appreciated.  

    A gesture of waiting one day to do what was to be done anyway is a pretty small crumb.  Microscopic.

    Still…  if the pro-life movement took Clinton's 1/22 action as a slap, not just a rescinding of the policy but a deliberate nose-thumbing, maybe it's fair to say, "OK, it's a piece of foreign policy, one we expected, it's not meant to mock American activists or as a specific response to the March for Life or anything like that.  It's not like we don't already know that President Obama's not on our side."

    And yet… this football, this little thing, is always one of the first things on the table.

    That, not the date per se, that is significant.

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  • Safety shower.

    Organic chemist Derek Lowe writes about two recent laboratory deaths, including one in which using the safety shower might have made a difference.

    Whenever I read about safety showers that were or weren't used, I always wonder whether the shower had a curtain around it.  Are people more likely to use it in an emergency if there's some semblance of privacy?  I think they would.  

    "Don't be silly, Erin," you may be thinking, "what dummy is going to think twice about using the safety shower if they've just poured acid all over himself?"

    The guy I shared a hood with in college organic chemistry lab, for one person.    He spilled a test tube full of sulfuric acid on his jeans.  The  safety shower was right next to us, yet somehow he felt more comfortable running down the hall to the men's room to take his jeans off.  

    Then, of course, he was trapped there with no pants until some other guy in the class happened to walk in.  I was, of course, not there, but I can imagine the conversation:

    PANTSLESS DUDE:  Psst!  Hey you!

    OTHER DUDE:  Uh, do you need some help?

    PANTSLESS DUDE:  Um, can you get me a pair of scissors? 

    Because he did come back to class to finish his reaction, wearing a pair of jeans that was half boot-cut and half short-shorts.  

    He wasn't a dummy exactly, although he got a lot of ribbing for this afterward, as he should have; but he was also very lucky, because that could have ended quite poorly for him.

    Also while I was an undergraduate, I interned at a chemical plant in the South that shall go un-named.  When I arrived, the hot gossip topic was a female technician (it's relevant, hang on) who had recently been released from the hospital into a new, desk-centered job.  (The other techs wouldn't work with her anymore, they were so mad at her for ruining the long string of days with no lost-time incidents, so nobody was going to get the safety bonus that had been only days away.)  

    What'd happened?  She'd gotten sprayed all over by a leaking tank.  The safety shower was literally steps away — as were several male co-workers.  She climbed down out of the scaffolding and ran back to the women's locker room to shower.  The lengthy exposure seriously injured her; likely it would have been a minor incident had she stepped into the shower and removed her clothes.  

    But, you know, "don't strip in front of your co-workers" is a hard taboo for some folks to get past.

    Yes, yes, the thing both of these people should have done is forget modesty, hit the shower, and save their skins.  But… safety managers have a job too, and if there's anything that is part of the job of managing safety, it's taking human nature into account.

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  • Food, yuck.

    It's kind of funny how you can get started on the wrong foot and then it goes all the way down hill, very fast.  Or, maybe, on the wrong food.  

    Yesterday a friend asked me for I-can't-stop-eating advice.  The timing was kind of funny, because I'd had an I-can't-stop-eating day.  Yes, it still happens from time to time.  I'm learning, though, that even a whole day of constant eating doesn't have to continue.  All I have to do is stop.  It's imperative to remember that what happened at breakfast a few hours ago, all the way up to the saltine cracker I just swallowed a second ago, is all in the past and does not have to control the future.  Yeah, it can make the future a little more difficult, but it doesn't have the final say about whether to follow it with ANOTHER saltine cracker.  I have the final say.

    So what happened yesterday? 

     Hannah and Melissa came over with all their children, and we made our first stab at "doing" school together with all three families.  It went really well!  BUT it wasn't good for me food-wise (and that's my fault, not yours, H., and M., really, I'm not trying to drop any hints.)  

    Melissa had made sure her 4yo brought a treat to share with my 5yo to help them be happy with each other today, and it worked stunningly well, but also several fragments of those Blueberry Pop-Tarts found their way down my gullet.  And Hannah had made a beautiful salmon loaf for the children (don't laugh, they loved it), flat in a baking dish so it would get all brown and crispy on the top, and full of cornmeal and peas, and while I behaved well at lunch eating my modest serving on top of my salad greens, I also gobbled bits off the children's plates, even bits that were sopping in barbecue sauce.  And for tea-snack there was high-quality cheddar cheese, plus apples, plus crackers and cookies.  Ergh.  I mean, Yum!  I mean, ergh.

    I told myself at 4:30, "No problem, I'll just call that my dinner, let it all digest, and wake up good and hungry in the morning."  But then I had to skip my workout because MJ refused to stay in the YMCA child care while the boys were in swimming lesson.  And I felt too crummy about that to make dinner, so I promised the children french fries.  And then Burger King was out of side salads, so I ordered a Whopper Jr. with everything and some fries, of course.

    Do you know what?  I felt so crappy last night.  I had an awful headache and a sour stomach.   When I do this to myself, I try very hard to lie there and remind myself, "This is what french fries feel like.  This is what french fries feel like."  And really, it wasn't the fries.  It was a whole day full of a lot of nibbling on a lot of carby stuff, some of it refined and some of it not, but in general far too much.

    This morning I remembered that sensation.  I still had it like a lump in my gut when I first got up.  I had a cup of coffee and put some steel-cut oats on to cook for the children, and while they had theirs with brown sugar and cinnamon, I had a small ramekin-full, plain with cream, and also an egg over easy  and a big glass of tomato juice.  I felt so restored by that somehow. 

     It always feels so good to get back on track.  And it is so worthwhile to sit with that good feeling for a while and remind myself, "This is what having had a good breakfast feels like.  This is what a good breakfast feels like."

    Getting back on track, for me, is less about abstaining from the bad stuff than it is about filling up on the good stuff.  And, crucially, noticing how good I feel.  That motivation carried me over through lunch; even though the kids, told to make their own, had splattered the table with pepperoni slices, saltine crackers, sliced bananas and sliced oranges… I wanted nothing more than a big salad, which I filled up with avocado (a whole avocado just for me!  heaven) and turkey and chopped apple, and vinaigrette the way I like it (1 part Dijon mustard, 1 part red wine vinegar, 2 parts olive oil, plenty of salt and pepper).

    I'm sitting with MJ on my lap, I'm drinking a hot cup of my favorite herb tea, and I feel so much better.

    Isn't it funny how hard we make it, sometimes, to do what not only is good for us, but what feels good too?

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  • I’m probably reading too much into this here.

    Despite having voted for someone else, and having serious misgivings about the policies I expect to come out of the Obama administration, I hoped I'd enjoy watching the Inauguration.  

    And I did. I did enjoy it.

     (I'm glad we watched Internet video and listened to NPR audio — the children were spared the distraction of having to hear the jeering at the outgoing president.  I try to keep expectations of respectful behavior towards anyone high in our home.)
    One of the highlights was the performance by Itzhak Perlman, Gabriela Montero, Yo-Yo Ma, and Anthony McGill, of a piece arranged for the occasion by John Williams.  Wow!  That's star power!  We were really sorry that our audio didn't match up with our video while we watched that, because we felt we couldn't appreciate their musicianship quite as well with their fingering not synced with the music.

    The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama’s oath of office at theinauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.


    The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday’s ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president’s swearing in (which had problems of its own).


    “Truly, weather just made it impossible,” Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. “No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t a matter of Milli Vanilli,” Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because the duo did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts.


    How cheesy is that?


    OK, so it was cold.  Nobody expects string instruments to perform well in such extreme conditions.  So why try to pretend that thy can?  

    We can give the new president his own super-secure Blackberry channel, and we can't put four musicians in a heated tent with a camera feed straight to the Jumbotrons and MSNBC?

    Image.  Image.  Image.

    Remember this the next time something seems too good to be true.

    “I really wanted to do something that was absolutely physically and emotionally and, timing-wise, genuine,” Mr. Ma said. “We also knew we couldn’t have any technical or instrumental malfunction on that occasion…."


    Have some cake, Mr. Ma.  Eat it too.

    And what a lost opportunity here:

    Mr. Ma said he had considered using a hardy carbon-fiber cello, but rejected the idea to avoid distracting viewers with its unorthodox appearance.


    Let me get this straight. &
    #0160;We     could have had a real performance in real time, the technology exists, but it was rejected in favor of a faked performance because reality with better technology would have been too distracting.


    Damn that reality.  Gets in the way of a good show.

    I think a carbon-fiber cello would have been cool.


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  • Today is a day of penance in the dioceses of the United States.

    Fast and pray.

    For the small people who enjoy no legal rights of their own.

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  • Schooling, right and wrong.

    Megan McArdle asks [some of] her readers, which was more formative — undergrad, or grad school?

    I thought about how I would answer as I scrolled down, and then I passed one commenter "M. C." who wrote,

    Undergrad built me up. Grad school tore me down. 


    And that's exactly right.  


    I am grateful for my undergraduate engineering education, almost in a liberal-artsy kind of way:  Not because it got me a great, well-paying job (I never attempted to deploy it for this purpose), but because it taught me to think a certain way.  To attack life as a problem to be solved, to assess quickly the information I have and don't have, to figure that even if I don't solve the whole shebang, maybe I can make a little bit of progress and at least get partial credit.  What's the problem?  Well, what do we know about it?  What tools do we have?  Has someone solved this problem before?  How did they do it?  What is essential and what is missing?  Can we make any assumptions?  About how long should this take?  How much is it going to cost?  Well, if we don't know, what's a reasonable guess for the range it'll fall in?  

    It's not the only way to be, but it's a way I like being.  

    I felt so comfortable there, like it was the right place to be.

    And I am grateful for the wake-up call that was graduate school, too.  The hey-I-don't-really-want-to-be-an-academic part was, shall we say, crucial.  That's where I was when I discovered I was in the wrong place.  Oddly, it seems, the right place for me was the wrong place, because I had to really be there to figure out that I wasn't supposed to be there.  So, that's all right then.

    There was high school… there was engineering school… there was grad school.  And there is this school.  In this school I am the teacher, and I am learning, too.  It is a great cliche to say that the students teach the teacher, but it is true, too.  (And it is something I learned for the first time in graduate school:  you don't know a subject until you have taught it to someone else.)   

    I feel comfortable here too.  It is also the right place to be.

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  • Where’s my “restart” button?

    I was sure that the sluggishness I've felt all morning was coming from being cold and hungry.  I've now eaten a turkey sandwich and some apples with peanut butter (OK, really it was a few mouthfuls of peanut butter gouged out of the jar with a butter knife, and a few bites of kids' abandoned apples for a chaser).  I've now had a long, hot, environmentally incorrect shower, and am dressed in wool from head to toe.

    I still want to lean over and go to sleep. 

    Sluggishness begets sloth, which in turn begets more sluggishness.  Yesterday was a long and busy day.  This morning, still tired and unwilling to face the prospect of schooling just quite yet, I went for the Nature Video Option  ("Mom!  Mom!  Did you know there are WORMS that live in water that's EIGHTY DEGREES CENTIGRADE!")  Now lunch is over.  I can plausibly get another half hour of dozing, since I always make the children play downstairs or outside for a little while after lunch anyway.  

    The hot shower has already been tried.  I think I'll try making another pot of coffee, and then make a list.  I'm not sure what I'm going to put on it yet.  First things first.

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  • And other good wishes.

    "On the occasion of your inauguration as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America I offer cordial good wishes, together with the assurance of my prayers that Almighty God will grant you unfailing wisdom and strength in the exercise of your high responsibilities.  Under your leadership may the American people continue to find in their impressive religious and political heritage the spiritual values and ethical principles needed to cooperate in the building of a truly just and free society, marked by respect for the dignity, equality and rights of each of its members, especially the poor, the outcast and those who have no voice.  At a time when so many of our brothers and sisters throughout the world yearn for liberation from the scourge of poverty, hunger and violence, I pray that you will be confirmed in your resolve to promote understanding, cooperation, and peace among the nations, so that all may share in the banquet of life which God wills to set for the whole human family (cf. Isaiah 25:6-7). Upon you and your family, and upon all the American people, I willingly invoke the Lord's blessings of joy and peace."

    –Benedictus PP. XVI


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  • Why so gloomy, everyone?

    I watched the inauguration, with my kids, and I enjoyed it.   *gasp*


    I figure these things:


    (1) Even though I don't love our new president's politics, I do love our country, and I love the Constitution and respect for it, and I love pageantry, and I love the peaceful transfer of power.   So what if Dianne Feinstein was in charge?  I can deal.  

    (2) My kids know I didn't vote for the guy. They know I hoped he wouldn't win. I want them to see that I respect the President of the United States, and in general, people I disagree with.   I just cannot hold anger or resentment in my heart towards the masses of people who are truly overcome with joy about this election.  I want to be happy for them, and hopeful for the country.

    (3) I've gotta pray for this man daily — for his conversion, mainly, and also for wisdom, and that's gonna be a whole lot easier if I can nurture some real, not pasted-on, good will.  

    (4) I know there are some possibilities coming up which are very threatening to the cause of life. He has said he will do some things we don't want him to do. However, he has not done them yet. There is time yet to hope and pray, and I think there are some signs of hope.   Let's keep them coming.

    (5) God's ways are not our ways. At least one good thing for the cause of life has already come out of this election, and quite possibly specifically because Mr. Obama was on the ticket. Remember Prop 8? 


    (6)  One last thing —  I am sure Aretha Franklin can wear any hat she wants.  

    Oh, and here's a link that, if you ask me, sets the right tone:  A thoughtful pre-Inauguration reflection, from a pro-life Democrat — here at American Catholic.  There are a few comments, worth reading.

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  • Things I said during the inauguration, transcribed.

    What I said, some to Hannah, some to our 8- and 9-yo boys, who were made to watch the inauguration in lieu of the American History we usually study together on Tuesday mornings:

    There's the man who was president when I was a little girl.  And the man who was president when I was in high school.  And there's the man who was president when I was in college.

    Look at all the people waving flags!   That's beautiful.

    You know what?  That lady can wear ANY HAT SHE WANTS.

    Itzhak Perlman?  Yo-yo Ma?  John Williams?  "Simple Gifts?"  Cool!

    That Bible he's using right now, to put his hand on?  That's Abraham Lincoln's own Bible.  We'll get to learn more about Lincoln later this year.

    I don't care what your politics are, this kind of pageantry — the transfer of power — it really, really is an amazing thing to watch.  And don't you think both Bush and Obama have been remarkably graceful in public over the past few weeks, considering?  

    Joseph Lowery totally kicks Rick Warren's butt.  Wait a minute, did he really say what I thought he said?

    Yes, you've heard that song before.  It's The Stars And Stripes Forever.

    Don't complain.  That wasn't so long as political speeches go.  Wait till I make you read Washington's and Jefferson's inaugural addresses and see what you think.
    What my son said:

    Mom?  Is it true that Barack Obama is our first Hawaiian-African president?

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