Tag: differences

Fridaz Wandering Thoughts

I’m reflecting on life lessons again as 2025 closes. These are the important lessons I keep returning to.

  1. All food is not the same.
  2. What you can eat and works for you is unique to you.
  3. Your body will change based on what it’s taking in.
  4. You will also change as you age.

Observing our society, we in the U.S. don’t do well with teaching, learning, or sharing these lessons. People will often say something like, “Well, that’s what my parents always ate, and their parents for that matter, so it’ll be fine for me.” The attitude assumes you’re exactly like them. It also assumes the food you’re consuming is exactly the same food they consumed twenty years ago or more. A good chance exists you’re not exactly like them, even if you are their spitting image.

Odds are high, too, that the food being put before you is different from what they were eating. Genetic modifications of our foods are more common in this century. More chemicals are utilized in the growing and processing systems. The end results are often highly processed food.

I’ve noticed that I can’t tolerate the food and quantity of foods that I could in my youth. But it’s not an even change. My metabolism has slowed. Some foods still work great, and I’m happy to eat them. My body treats certain other foods as hostile invaders. Cheese, for example. Much as I love it, my biome is less happy when it comes in. And coffee. I’ve cut way back on coffee and cheese, to name two victims of my changing body.

I learned another clear lesson early: sodium is my body’s arch enemy. I’m constantly on guard against it. Sodium is linked to high blood pressure.

That translated to hydrating more and using less salt, and being on guard against sodium in processed foods.

But I was mystified. So many others easily and often ate processed foods. Salt was briskly shaken over their meals and yet, they didn’t have high blood pressure.

It was only later that I learned about my Vagus nerve’s reaction to how sodium is handled as part of my parasympathetic nervous system. This is why others can eat sodium without problems while my body tells me to leave salt alone.

I’ve compiled more understanding of the Vagus nerve’s role. Such insights are valuable. But our bodies are dynamic. Paying attention and learning about changes aids me when I wonder about gaining weight or energy levels. It’s empowering and useful in this age to have the Internet to help me grasp the root of these changes.

They really didn’t address our bodies and food in much detail when I was educated. We were taught about food groups, balance, and the food pyramid. It wasn’t explained at all that people’s bodies react differently. That was left to us to learn for ourselves.

My education was over a half a century ago. I hope the system has changed and more people are learning these things. This is why I write about them for me, in the hope that others find it helpful.

Have a happy and healthy 2026. Cheers

4

Sunda’s Wandering Thoughts

I’m currently contemplating making arrangements for my wife and I to go the the Oregon coast for a break. You know the thinking: get away from it all. Take well-deserved time out from the usual routines. My injuries and medical matters curtailed many of our travel plans this year. Beyond that, the burden of caring for me, cleaning the house, and well, doin’ everything, was shoved onto her shoulders for several weeks. She held up well but she could use some downtime.

The thing is, it’s winter. Snow could come at any time. And we’d be driving through the mountains, often on winding two-lane highways. She no like. As a naturally anxious person, travel heightens her anxiety. Blend in additional risks like driving on snowy, icy weather, and she’s hanging over the edge.

In that way, she’s my polar opposite. I’m a calm and relaxed traveler and driver for most of the time, taking things as they come. When driving, I do get impatient with other drivers and vehicles. I allowed the impatience to take over when I was middle-aged. Now, I gently coax it back into its shell.

So I’m up in the air about what to do. Stay or go. Probably plan it and make reservations, and then buy the cancellation insurance in case the weather is too daunting.

6

Saturday’s Wandering Thoughts

I’ve been thinking about spiders the last few days.

I don’t love or hate spiders; they’re another critter inhabiting the spectrum of our existence. I’ve been thinking abut them more because we don’t kill spiders in our household. We co-exist with a decent size population of them, including black widows. The biggest thing about all these spiders is that we end up with a lot of spider webs. I sometimes clean the webs away, which often displaces some. I don’t kill them as they run away from the cleaning, but I do apologize to them. No one likes being forced to move from their home.

Anyway, I turned on the kitchen light last night and headed for the sink. A windowsill rests just above the sink. A spider sitting on the window sill bolted away, as if I’d frightened them. About a quarter inch long, dark brownish with red legs, I don’t know what kind of spider they were.

Maybe the light spooked ’em, I thought, completing my task (which, not surprisingly, was washing the cats’ food bowls). Watching that spider tear along the window’s length prompted me to wonder again, how well does that spider see? I had the impression that despite eight eyes, they were running blind, maybe yelling, “Run away! Run away!”

Spider vision preoccupied me the night before. While cleaning away webs on the front porch, a spider dropped from the ceiling to the floor and scurried away. This was a ‘daddy long legs’. We have about seven hundred billion living around our house, I think.

That drop was about eight feet. Well, when the spider was dropping from the ceiling to the porch, did they have any idea of what was below them? Think about the courage that must entail. “Well, can’t stay here, gotta get out of here, so I’m just letting go. Wheee.”

Yes, I know that since they have so little weight and mass that they don’t have issues with gravity as we do, but still, dropping like that when you don’t know where you’re going?

Made me think of paratroopers in WWII.

Of course, on the other hand, spiders proably never learned to fear dropping to the ground. Not like us speaking before a crowd. Before we speak in a public gathering, we often absorb what people say about speakers. Lot of times, it’s mocking and casual insults. Listening to those things indoctrinates a fear of what they’ll say about us while we’re speaking, or how we might mess up and OMG, embarrass ourselves.

I conducted brief online research about spidey vision. Which reminds me; when Spiderman was created, why didn’t he grow eight eyes and eight limbs? How was he just limited to his spidey sense, making webs, and being a creepy crawler?

Articles I read about spiders confirmed what I suspected. Spider vision varies and often isn’t real great. Their hunting and nesting roles, along with their socializing skills and hunting style, guide their vision development and how the eight eyes generally function. (BTW, not all spiders have eight eyes.)

That spider may have kind of running blind, depending on those factors, but it was’t totally blind. Their running blind is more like if a human with vision problems who need corrective lenses might be running if they weren’t wearing those lenses.

Now I can imagine a spider with glasses sitting in a web, talking with another spider about how glasses improved their life.

Like other creatures, spiders present complicated and fascinating life form variations. I still don’t understand why they terrify so many people. Yes, they have venom and can bite and others can die from those bites but that’s not all of them.

I guess that’s another matter which I need to research.

11

Monday’s Wandering Thoughts

First you must learn how the human body works in general, and what’s expected of it. Then you learn what your body can do, and its exceptions and variations. Then you’re often forced to understand how the body of those you love and support works differently. Few of us have a body that doesn’t come with quirks that split us away from being ‘average’, which becomes specially true as you age, because it changes again. What you could once do or eat is suddenly — and sometimes, dramatically — different.

1

Depressing Dreams

The first found me alone, waiting for my wife. She’d been with me and then went off with her friends without saying anything. Her absence deeply aggravated me. As time passed and she didn’t appear, I began collecting papers. Don’t know what they were in RL but they were real and meaningful to me in the dream. At one point, I thought that I would kill one of her friends, blaming her for my wife’s absence. Although I wrote up plans, I knew that was wrong. I wasn’t going to kill anyone else. Maybe I should kill myself, though, the dream me thought.

My wife returned, bubbly, happy, late. Outraged stirred me. Her friend saw my notes and said, “Oh my god, he’s planning to kill me.”

I threw papers aside. “I’m not. Don’t you understand? I was on the verge of killing myself.” Sobs hit me with that declaration.

My wife was stricken. She stared in shock for several long seconds, and then she was gone again. That infuriated me but the dream ended.

I was at work as some corporate drone. I complained to my boss and co-workers that I felt useless, underemployed, and dissatisfied, and that it was draining me. My boss responded by trading me to another company. As the trade was completed, I expressed disbelief, and then was told to go to my new place of employment, which was in another city.

I went there with two other people, who already worked for my new employer. Arriving, I was given a desk and equipment. I complained, though, excuse me, what is my role? Who is my supervisor? Do I supervise anyone? I was answered, “What do you want to do? What have you done in the past?”

I tried answering, enumerating my different positions, employers, etc., which just seemed to depress me. I finished by saying, “You moved me to another city. I don’t know if I want to move. I don’t know if my wife wants to move.” Someone suggested, “Maybe we can get her a job,” and then chatted about that.

The dream ended with nothing resolved.

0

The Towel Dream

I found myself as a young man at a wide, flat river. Dark as a winter night, the river didn’t reflect any light.

It was a cold day. Swimmers filled the river. They were heading downstream. I was not a swimmer, but walked among them as they came out of the water, giving them towels, talking to them and encouraging them.

Three swimmers caught my eye. One female, two males, all young, one black, one brown, one white, nothing extraordinary about them. Like the other swimmers, they wore swimsuits, and these weren’t anything special. Yet, watching them, I thought, keep an eye on them.

Seeing them leaving the water, I rushed to get them towels. All the towels were blue or gray; I wanted different colors for these three. I thought different colors would highlight them and help me keep watch on them. I ran around asking for other colored towels, and then demanded those towels. At last, red, yellow, and white striped beach towels were brought to me. I hurried over and gave the towels to those three.

Someone else with towels asked me what I was doing, etc. I explained that I wanted to keep an eye on those three. The other queried, “Why?”

“Because they’re special,” I explained. And then I knew, “They’re not part of this world. That’s why I wanted to give them special towels.” I gathered insight that the blue and gray towels muted people. Colors brought them more alive, bringing out talents. I said, “They’re shapeshifters from somewhere else, but they don’t know it. They can be anything, but the towels are keeping them unaware.”

After saying that, I took in the rest swimming by or toweling off and wondered, why don’t we give them colored towels, too?

2

Tuesday’s Wandering Thought

The differences between them are growing after almost half of a century being together.

The Jack Spratt nursery rhyme goes, “Jack Spratt could eat no fat. His wife could eat no lean. And so between the two of them, they licked the platter clean.”

It feels to him like they’re living in a modern version of that, with heat substituted for food. She needs the high heat. He’s fine barefoot and in a light sweater, the heat at 66 F. They put the heater on for her even as she dons more and more layers of clothes, and he strips down.

It’s like, “Mike S doesn’t feel the cold, his wife could feel no heating. And so between the two of them, he sweats as she is freezing.”

0

Differences

I was thinking about how different people think, how approaches vary, from the balls out risk-everything, take no prisoners approach to the more cautious haste makes waste angle. Each of us develop preferences. We evolve and refine these from watching and listening to us, and then addressing our approaches based on our results.

I remember a philosophy class I took decades ago. The professor was a good friend. We regularly socialized outside of class before I ever took any of us classes. He and I were of very like minds, and I expected the class to be similarly aligned.

Most were. These were University of Maryland classes on Okinawa. Most attendees were military members or dependents. In this class, one woman, a security police airman who was a few years younger than me, was fearless about stating her positions.

I found her positions pretty shocking. For fun, she and her friends liked to drive around at night and deliberately run over animals. She yearned for days like the ‘wild west’, where if you thought someone was guilty, you called them out and shoot it out.

Those were two of the more extreme examples of how her thinking diverged from mine. The final part, however, was how she declared herself to be a good Christian. While I could appreciate and understand someone having views different from mine, and accept (with much disgust) that they thought so lightly of life that they killed for fun (and regaled us about how she and her friends thought it was so funny), I couldn’t grasp how she reconciled her views as a Christian with these attitudes toward killing and justice.

I still don’t.

And as I think of Donald Trump, and all that he’s been shown to have done, from his marriages and affairs, bankruptcies, attacks on others’ service to the United States, repeated lies and empty boasts, I think of his supporters. Like that woman in my philosophy class, I do not understand how they reconcile what they see, hear, know, and believe. I try to understand, partly from intellectual curiosity as well as trying to satisfy for myself that I’m not missing something, that I’m not living in a silo. I also try to understand it from a motivational point as a writer, feeding my characters.

Reality can be stranger than fiction, but I imagine that many of them don’t understand me and wonder how I’ve come to be a progressive liberal, because they think I’m destroying the nation, if not the world. Possibly somewhere, there’s a novelist trying to understand how I think, so they can feed their character, too.

 

5

The Difference

He used to tell himself, “I’m feeling lucky today.”

It happened a few times a year. Feeling lucky, he’d rush out and buy lottery tickets.

Nothing was ever won. He began re-thinking his process. He wasn’t buying tickets because he felt lucky, but because he was feeling unlucky, and was hoping he could change his day, his status, his life. Once he understood that difference, well…it made a huge difference in how he lived.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑