You Are What You Eat, part 2

I'm really not doing great at keeping continuity in a series, since part 1 of YAWYE was way back here in April'09, and not even well-written. But hey. I'm under no contractual obligations here. That's the beauty part.

SO. This is what I want to say to the world today.

Let's say you are going to build yourself a house to live in. All I give you for building materials is pudding cups; the little plastic individual serving ones covered in a little sealed foil.

So you build a house out of them, somehow. Then someone drives by as they inevitably will and the gust of wind knocks down a wall, de-stabilizing the roof and collapsing the entire structure. You rebuild, cause you have confidence in your method as I assured you these were reliable and safe. Surely it is a fluke that it didn't work last time. It rains. You are soaking wet and freezing cold as pudding cups afforded you no protection and were nothing even close to water-tight.

And on and on the story would go.

When you eat, you are giving your body the cellular tools with which to build itself. Eat garbage, and you give your body no option but to construct itself - your very organs, nerves, muscles, bones, brain, hair, eyes - out of garbage. The cells cannot be as strong, resilient or effective against the storms of life (bacterial, viral, genetic, toxic, etc.) as they could have been, built out of better ingredients.

Every cell in your body has a limited lifespan and, when it dies, will be replaced. Based on this process and rate of cellular replacement, you will have what more or less amounts to an entirely new body, bones included, over the course of 10 years (cells other than bones take approx. 7 years).

Why do we not regenerate to be newer and nicer over time then? Mistreatment, conscious or not, accelerates degeneration, and weaker, damaged cells constitute the replacements. Any and all mistreatment of our body contributes to the damage and oxidation, including smoking, drinking, environmental pollutants and toxins, dietary toxins, dehydration, insufficient sleep or sleep of compromised quality, emotional and physical stress, insufficient nutrition, insufficient exercise and oxygenation and certainly more.

Building stronger cells, I argue, is like building your house out of stone or brick. A strong wind of virus is less likely to level your house. A rain of nerve malfunction can be kept at bay. A landslide of cell mutation may be resisted, overcome and corrected.

A house of pudding cups is powerless against such onslaughts.

Degeneration will happen whether you like it or not, whether you live perfectly or not. We are mortal. But we can help or hurt matters tremendously. May I plead with you to build yourself out of worthy materials! Those french fries or hot dogs will be with you longer than you thought, and not only on your belly! They may be supplying the materials for the liver your body is currently working on, or brain, or heart! Those of us with children, may we take seriously the influence we have in establishing eating habits, and supplying the fuel and building blocks of our children's bodies.

Know that I preach to myself as well, lest this sound accusatory.

I say this for your blessing, not your cursing!

Be well, and do the good you know to do. Today.

The Generation Gap widens

I am feeling age creeping in. It is a little weird sometimes.

The generation gap is widening.

I say and do things I associate with my parents and even grandparents, with frequency.

At Christmas this past year, I found myself with an uncharacteristic desire for cheesey holiday clothing and/or jewelry. What's happening to me???

I am mostly unaware of, and even fearful of many new technologies. I don't know how to use them, nor do I often even understand their purpose. We have had an ipod for a couple years. I've never used it. I don't know how to turn it on.

Did I just say that?

I do own a jump drive now, however, and have used it... once...

I am getting more moles and freckles. What is up with that?

My makeup has much more of a purpose now. Concealer has become a near and dear friend.

I am concerned about my bedtime, and consider 9pm a perfectly reasonable and sensible bedtime, and 5am a common time to start the day, not end it.

I don't understand a goodly portion of what the young people are saying these days. The slang is beyond me. I have given up on it. After approx 3 wildly failed attempts that ended in public shaming, (in particular, one time when I described myself as a SAHM, which I understood to mean stay-at-home-mom, but I was shocked when I was informed that Urban Dictionary by the way, ahem, says that means sexy and hot Mama. This was not what I was going for in my public self-description.) I am resigning myself to datedness and old faithfuls, like 'you go girl' and the simple and universal adjective, "Cool!" in place of other confusing misnomer synonyms like sick, gross, wicked, bad etc. Is diseased the next description of something really desirable and attractive? How about loathesome? malicious? painful? heinous? odious?

"Wow! Where did you get those shoes?!?! They are nauseating!"

Would that give a new twist to that little catch phrase about "throwing up a little in my mouth just now"? Would that then be a good thing? Something was SO amazingly nauseating, you actually threw up in your mouth a little. I'm happy for you.

Super. Sounds like we're on a good road here, folks. Definitely want to keep on it! See where it takes us!

Not me, however. But you go right on ahead. However, if I give you gifts that you don't like, I really can't be blamed, because the last time you saw it and said you didn't like it, I misunderstood that you DID in fact like it.

This reminds me of a Scripture passage, however. Isaiah 5:20 says, "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil..." I think of that verse every time I hear these opposite-day adjectives.

I don't have a sweet clue what music is trendy anymore. Most of my favorite musicians are no longer living. And I don't mean Kurt Cobain. Much more obscure usually, many never did a professional recording.

When I go to the store with the humorous idea to buy clothing, I hold items up in the air with a confused, furrowed brow, unsure of even how they are to be applied to my body, let alone how to coordinate them with other things. It looks like a drape of fabric to me that I would have as much luck with as a sari. What happened to holes for your head and arms that were pretty self-evident and needed no explanation? While I love the creativity and variety, I miss understanding what I'm looking at sometimes.

Other clothing and styles that I wore in grade school are back in again. I've been around long enough to see the cycle.

*sigh* I need a young person to adopt me and give me little masterclasses to keep me at least partially in the loop. My five-year-old and mother-in-law are failing.

Another sign of true aging: I don't care that I'm out of the loop! Be gone, Oh Loop! I'm more and more ok with nerdiness.

Reverting to the Classics

If you notice an absence of modern colloquialisms from this blog, the reason is that I feel ill-equipped to use them. I am not in enough contact with users of such language. My mother-in-law and 5 yr old are not on the cutting edge of current slang, thankfully. However, these are the people with which I have the most interaction, so I have found myself at an embarrassing loss a few times recently, to the point that I think it best if I simply leave them to the teenagers and hip young adults.

I have publicly embarrassed myself once by calling myself a SAHM, which I understood to mean Stay-at-Home-Mom. HOWEVER, when others began laughing and pointed out that they understood it to mean sexy and hot mama, I was more than a little embarrassed. I also joked with Chris about the 7 year itch, as we are coming up that anniversary, and was again left with head hanging when I found out what is apparently the real meaning of that. There were others as well.

So I give up. I'm going to stick with good old standard English, thank you.

A New Leaf

I didn't plan it this way, but contemporaneous with this turning to a new decade seems to be the opening of a new era for me.

I am simplifying and pursuing purity in ways and at levels I haven't before.

A purging of possessions is part of this. As I reflect on materialism, and attempt to pull up at least a couple of my madly entangled, profoundly and shamefully deep roots out of the world and its stuff, one thought was this: in looking at people who seem to 'have it all together,' I considered their disattachment to stuff.

Maybe, they have fewer things to keep together. That would make the task much more do-able, non? I could have it all together, if that only meant a couple things.

My mom would corroborate this line a thousand times over if you asked her: stuff takes time. What I mean by that, is that possessions require time from you. If I didn't own this computer, I certainly wouldn't be blogging right now. Every item that needs dusting, putting away and/or cleaning after it is used, organizing - takes your time, and it mightn't sound like much, but I promise you, it adds up remarkably.

I know a lady whose husband was quite the pack rat, and she lamented to me that after 20 yrs of marriage, she felt she had lost an entire phase of her life to shoveling stuff. That is how she spent the last 20 yrs, with nothing to show for it. Move the junk, try to organize it (which she found impossible as it was simply too much), give it away, throw it away, whatever could possibly be done so as not to live in utter chaos.

I don't want this life. Now, I am not saying that my house is so junked up, but the principle applies on many levels. I often find my mind is racing, in a thousand undetermined directions, too much to pray and meditate on the Lord as I would like. I have described it as 5 radio stations going at the same time, none of which are properly in tune. I hate it. I don't want that lack of mental clarity and inability to find the stillness.

I want to pare down, distill the truly valuable in life, how I truly want to spend my time, (not how it gets spent by default or without thought to its passage), and live deliberately, thoughtfully, with beauty and value.

So, I am trying to thin down possessions, bad habits, bad food, all the while believing that less is, and will be, more. More contentment, more health, more peace, more time, more happy.

flushing diamonds with dung

Many posts are simmering. I will complain in this one about how youth is wasted on the young.

I have been SOO discouraged from encounters with teens lately. One was complaining about how school is useless and boring, how it is so ridiculous that they are learning about World War II. "It's over," she argued with annoyed indignance. "It's done, it's in the past. It isn't happening now, so why would we need to learn it? " *rolls eyes*

I was so blown away I was speechless to even argue with her. Why? Goodness sakes, where do I begin? There are so many reasons. The utter disrespect and cluelessness as to the pain and suffering of so many people, and the people who put themselves in the line of fire for someone else so she could be leading this comfortable affluent life. The self-absorbed world of these teens, while I will likely get comments saying, oh they all are that way, you were too, or whatever, is making me nuts. Ya, Girl, you're right. Who needs education. Pffh.

I talked to another guy who recently became active, we shall say, with his girlfriend, and was kinda proud of it. His cocky demeanor nearly made me vomit. HE was not spared the earful of my first individual. He was willingly oblivious to emotional and spiritual impact on either of them or any potential physical repercussions. Throwing away precious gifts of purity. A completely topsy turvy value system to my perspective. No no, this short term physical thing is TOTALLY worth potential parenthood, disease, emotional disability and spiritual corruption! Sure, why not! Sounds great. Who needs God, who needs health or wholeness.

Then there is the plethora of little people (who am I to talk, I know :P) I see on Facebook, people I know in our community here, who play with sin. Walk the tightrope, dabble in this or that, and then come and play church. I am not even sure if they know what they are doing. I feel certain they don't understand severity or implications of their actions. SO much is bound up inside me when I see this. I am successfully containing all manner of screams, running over and shaking them and falling on the floor with tears, begging them to heed wisdom. That's what I'm doing on the inside.

I've also had more MS activity lately, which very effectively drives the point home to me of the tremendous value of the strength and energy (and TIME) in youth. That it is cluelessly taken for granted and wasted on video games and flirting with sin is just bringing me to the edge of psychosis.