"Of course, we're diabetic now."

The other day I was in a used bookstore looking through the D&D section. The next set of shelves over contained the store's used DVDs, and through the shelf separating us I could hear a man talking with a married couple. He was giving advice to the couple about, now that they're retired, where they should go to enjoy their retirement. The conversation centered around casinos for a bit, and then the single man suggested the couple take the Napa Valley winery tour, or if they didn't want to go that far, at least spend the day visiting Columbia Valley wineries, taking the bus tour so they didn't have to drive themselves.

The husband said, "Oh, we'd like to, but we can't. Of course, we're diabetic now.."

Metabolic Syndrome is the name given to the rise of type II diabetes in the United States. Consensus among medical professionals is that the skyrocketing rates of type II diabetes is cause by the overwhelming amount of simple carbohydrates in our diet. Simple starches and carbohydrates such as flour (all purpose flour is 70% simple carbohydrate) and sugar causes the body to produce insulin, which in turn produces visceral fat. Your pancreas is already trying hard to balance out your sugar management, which the presence of so much fat makes difficult; eventually, your cells become resistant to the insulin, and diabetes emerges.

The more visceral fat you have, the more likely you are to develop metabolic syndrome. Although it is also more rare, you can also develop metabolic syndrome without much visceral fat if your body develops a resistance to insulin, which can happen if you do nothing but sit on your butt all day.

I know I seem to be on a kick about this, but I'm getting older and I'm seeing the consequences of a lifetime of this crap on myself. I'm fighting back: I'm lifting weights regularly, and knocking most carbohydrates out of my diet on the weekdays. I've stopped drinking calories. No more soda pop, iced tea, or fruit juice. I still can't stand coffee straight, but I've halved the amount of sugar I use, and now get maybe 30 calories of sugar -- a quarter of a can of soda -- from two cups of coffee each day.

There is no alternative to changing your diet in order to lose weight. I don't miss potatoes much, I don't miss rice at all. When I get down to 16% body fat, I'll think about adding those back to my diet. Right now, at about 23%, it's out of the question.

Despite my sedentary occupation, I don't want to someday have to say, "Of course, I'm diabetic now."

Religion as meme: the example of the Pacific Islands

The other day I was listening to an interview with Sarah Vowell, who had written a book about Catholic Missionary programs to Hawaii and other Pacific Islands in the 19th century. Vowell's book explored why the missionaries were so successful in converting the islanders to Christianity. There were all sorts of "maybe this was the reason," and "maybe that was the reason," but neither one ever ventured forth with a modern explanation, which is simple: maybe the islanders' belief system was memetically weak.

Christianity has spent most of its existence defining itself in opposition to something else: Judaism, Roman paganism, continental animism, Crusader-era Islam, and so forth. It has evolved an enormous collection of public rituals and private rites that inhabit the brain of the believer, putting up defenses and inoculating the mind against alien ideas.

In contrast, there's little evidence of any kind of zealous proselytizing for one faith over another within the Pacific Islands. The abstract animism and power worship of the Islanders had never evolved the kind of defenses Christians had, and certainly had never been so evangelical to devise either offensive strategies or active countermeasures.

Christianity wiped out isolated island faiths in the same way that rats wiped out isolated island species of birds and reptiles, and smallpox the locals.

Date Night does not usually start with medical crises. Not usually.

Well, okay, not a major crisis. Not like Monday. But as Omaha and I were driving up the freeway into Seattle for dinner, the start of our date night, she suddenly snapped her laptop closed, put her seat back, and started making that clicking sound with her throat.

"Aw, crap. Really?"

She didn't respond. That's the start of a seziure. I slowed the car down, put the laptop in the back seat, and drove off the next exit, prepared to pull over if she actually went full grand-mal.

Fortunately, it was a very mild epileptic "event" and by the time we actually got to the restaurant she was talking and able to walk without assistance. It was still over an hour before all the circuits in her brain lined up again and she was able to complete a coherent sentence, but she was able to order dinner without appearing disconnected.

By the time the performance began, she was all back together again.

Date Night does not usually involve hanging out with teh gays discussing the Holocaust. Not usually

Our date night was to attend Falling In Love Again and For A Look or a Touch, two very different musical presentations about life before and during the Nazi era in Germany.

Falling In Love Again featured the full chorus behind an on-stage orchestra, while in front dancers from Spectrum Dance Theater performed the Tango and other provocative dancers. They sang many popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s, including "Mack the Knife," "Love For Sale," and "Falling In Love Again," some in the original German, some in the English versions known to have been popular in Berlin at the time. The settings was, of course, a gay cabaret in the 1930s, and the story conveyed was about the vibrancy of Berlin's nightlife prior to the coming of the Nazi party.

All in all, this was the kind of song-and-dance that the Seattle Men's Chorus is known for, with small singing groups, brief solos, a wide variety of music, effective use of the chorus as visual effect, and lots of ribald humor

For a Look or a Touch was a "musical drama" about two real men, Gad and Manfred. Gad lived until the late 1990s; Manfred died in a concentration camp in 1942. They had both been 19, and in love, in 1942, when the Nazis came and took Manfreds's family away. Manfred was given a choice: to run away with Gad, or to go with his family as they all went to the camp. Manfred chose his family. Gad survived, but homosexuality remained a criminal offense after the war and he was unable to ever speak about his guilt until very late in life. Because he was unable to speak about it, he refused to revisit it, and it wasn't until late in life that he learned just how horrific the camps had been.

The Seattle Men's Chorus was again a major component of the piece, especially as Manfred's ghost recounts the horrors of the camp. It was neither gratuitous nor maudlin, but it was especially harsh, in an appropriate way. Dressed in prison rags, the chorus provided voice and counterpoint to the orchestra (now down in the orchestral pit), as Manfred and Gad sang and spoke their way through Gad's guilt and redemption.

Omaha went to read the exhibits in the foyer after the performance, but I went to talk to some of the chorus. I had to ask, "Why was there smoke?" Because there was a very light smoke in the theater. Both said it was to give the scene that otherworldly, fantasy feel of a ghost visitation story. It was so light, however, that I kept wondering if something was wrong with my new prescription, now only a week old.

I learned that one special effect failed due to a burned-out stage light, but the piece about how the Nazis had "improved" upon crucifixion with the mechanical crane, and used it exclusively on those who wore the pink triangle, in which a member of the chorus was slowly hoisted and silhoutted in a side-light, was especially horrifying and effective.

For a Look or a Touch isn't a nice piece, but it is about redemption, the complicated kind of redemption that comes with survivors' guilt, with acceptance of your survival. It's very sensitively mixed in with that gay-tinged adulation of one's glory days, when, as the libretto went, "night was for more than just sleeping," and for how the ones who died young will always be young in our hearts. Beautiful boys, surrendered old men, and a shared sense that life could have been better, but failed. It's very effective, and if you have a chance to see it, please do.

Footnote for "For a Look or a Touch"

The costume sleeves for the cast featured the pink triangle meaning "segregated from society for homosexuality", a pink bar above it indicating "multiple offenses," and a black dot below it indicating "punishment brigade" (an assignment that was usually a death sentence). All of these were explained in the historical display in the lobby. Some also had a red dot beneath the black one, but nowhere in the literature was there an explanation in English for what the red dot meant.

It means "Has attempted escape."

My curiousity has been satisfied.

Structured Procrastination and Autopilot

A friend of mine recently pointed me to an essay, Structured Procrastination, in which the author extolls the virtues of GTD by structuring how he puts this off.

To that, I'd like to add my own method, which I got from somewhere else and modified to my satisfaction. It's called "Autopilot."

Autopilot is fairly standard GTD. Buy a pocket-sized notebook, some moveable pagemarks, a good pen and a decent pair of scissors. Put a pagemark on one page along the top: that's your first list of to-do items. Put a pagemark on a different page along the side: that's your page of long-term projects. If your notebook has a pocket in the back, put a few spare pagemarks in there.

Unlike traditional GTD, you never "move" to-do items around. You use the notebook as you would regularly, taking notes on un-marked pages. If you have tracking pages (I have one for exercise, one for weight, and one for my cats' diet, since we're still figuring out what they eat), put pagemarks on the bottom for that. When you find yourself bored or available, find the first page and scan it for undone items. Either you'll see an item that can be done, or can be put off, or you're never going to do. Do it, strike it, or skip and go to the next item. If you get to the bottom of the page, go to the next page.

I use a hand-drawn square as an icon indicating "to do." I only ever used these on pagemarked pages.

That's it. Once a day or so, convert your notes into action items. Once you've cleared a page, use the scissors to cut off the upper-right-hand corner. That makes flipping through the notebook to "incomplete" notes pages easy.

As long as things actually get written down in my to-do list, they get done nowadays. Somewhat remarkable.

Racha Queen Anne: Did it go downhill, or do I have rose-colored memories?

Omaha and I stopped by the Racha Noodels and Thai Cuisine at Queen Anne, which used to be one of our favorite restaurants when I worked in that neighborhood. It's still fine, but I think our tastes have changed.

Omaha noticed immediately that very few of the patrons were of Asian cast, which is always a warning: if a restaurant describes its ethnicity, but its patronage does not, reconsider eating there. Racha seems to cater to the upper-middle-class whites who live in Queen Anne, and not to, well, people who grew up eating Thai food.

That would explain the clash-of-cultures "New York Steak Curry" mash-up I had. Great steak doesn't need that much extra flavoring; it's supposed to be an experience on its own. This steak was pretty good, but it was disappearing under the massamun curry flavoring. There wasn't a whole lot of vegetable with it, either, which annoyed me.

Omaha reported that her yellow curry with chicken was fine, but otherwise unremarkable. Conversations from the tables around us indicated that the resataurant was full of people going either to the Seattle Men's Chorus event at the opera house, or to the Arthur Miller play "All My Sons," showing in the theater next door.