Category Archives: slice of life

Muscles store energy now?

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“I wanted to talk on the subject of science with you.”

OK, this is kind of weird. I just took a walk and this time walked up two long, steep hills, one atop the other. My pulse stayed around 120 for much of it and only reached 130 near the top of each hill.

I know this is not really international news, but there are reasons for my surprise. Only a couple weeks ago I crossed the first of these hills and slowed down to an amble because my pulse reached 135. That is around the upper limit before I trigger my lifelong exercise asthma. Also because of that asthma, I never did sports as a kid, and my lung capacity never developed fully. A couple years ago it was around 2/3 of normal for a man my age (50 years old at that time). And back in 2005, before the illness that changed me, I would stop twice in a hill shorter and less steep than this. I felt like my heart just couldn’t take the strain of climbing it all in one go.

I am so old that I have to warm up before my warm-ups. And yet for each passing month – if not week – my pulse seems to get lower and lower. That is a bit bizarre, I think.

***

Or perhaps not. After an hour’s walk, I came home and wrote the previous part, then set off again. This time my pulse was normal, and went all the way to 135 before I rounded the first hill. So it is not my heart. Somehow my muscles seem to store energy for the expected challenge, but when I then throw an unexpected challenge at them, they need the help of the rest of the body.

I wonder how the muscles can store up energy like that. There are probably books about it, but I don’t even know what to look for. I know all energy in the human body comes from burning the four food groups: Sugar, fat, protein and alcohol. But I was under the impression that they have to be burned within seconds of the actual energy use, not used to “charge up” muscles in advance.

I guess this explains why I have to walk longer and longer to burn the same number of calories. My body charges up the muscles beforehand (perhaps while I sleep?) and then releases this energy during the first hour of walking. I wonder how they do that. Actually, I wondered so much that I asked Google: How do muscles store energy? It provided links to sites about ATP and glycogen, but they were pretty random. I don’t think Google really understood the question…

My best guess would be glycogen, since ATP only lasts for a few seconds at best. I know glycogen (“animal starch”) is stored in muscles and broken down to glucose during exercise. But that does not really explain it to me: Glucose still needs oxygen to burn, and that oxygen must come through the blood. But the blood already contains glucose. That is what my doctor is worried about, the 6.1 mmol of glucose that is always in my blood, even 12 hours after eating.  Why then would the muscles need to store energy in the form of something that becomes glucose?

I mean, if glucose is a scarce resource in muscles,  if it is the bottleneck and not oxygen, then diabetics should be world champions in sports. There is no sign of that, to put it mildly.

I suppose it would make sense if muscles have some bottleneck in how fast they can absorb glucose from outside. Sugar molecules are not all that big, but they are a lot bigger than oxygen, so it may be that absorbing glucose is slower. So while the supply of glycogen lasts, the muscles need only import oxygen, but afterwards they need to import both oxygen (fast) and glucose (slow). But there is no mention of that in any of the articles I have read, this time or before when I read about physiology. It is as if no one has ever asked themselves why the pulse is low during the first part of exercise. That just cannot be: Humans are too curious for their own good, much of the time. So that leaves me with the notion that the answer is totally obvious to anyone except me.

Please tell me, since Google won’t.

Dreams and life

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The last several days something has happened to my dreams. I half remember them, especially  during the weekend when I don’t have to hurry in the morning. And they are… repetitive. I mean, I dream a sequence, and then I dream it again, but with some variation. And then I dream it again, with yet another variation. If I were to sum the dream up briefly, all the replays would be the same, but they are not. They are different in detail. I don’t think they go on like that all night. These are short sequences, so all the replays take place within one dream.

In the story I am still writing, the main character spends every night in a wide awake dream. The dreamworld he returns to is persistent: His day there is the night of his birth world, and the other way around. He goes to bed in one and wakes up in the other. But the Dreamworld quickly becomes the one he feels at home in: As he says, he was born into his first world by chance (that is what he thinks), but coming to the Dreamworld was a result of his own choices and efforts.

I don’t think this will happen to me, and I also don’t think I was thrown into this world by chance. I just mention it because I write about dreams and then a change seems to be happening to my own dreams. It is not for nothing that we often use the word “dream” in a less literal meaning. Dreams extend into our waking life, and our waking life into our dreams – even when the two are very different, as they usually are for me. So also now: All three sequences this morning was about airplanes, which I haven’t ridden for decades.

I did think back to one of my rare plane rides some days ago, however: I remembered how beautiful the clouds looked from above, much more so than from below.  How do you explain that, dear orthodox Darwinist? Did we evolve from particularly high-flying birds, or on very high mountain tops? Or is it a social construct? Was I raised by angels, subtly taught the beauty of the world from on high? Well, perhaps that is not so far off…

 

Pigsty continued

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To the casual observer, it looks like nothing has changed in the east half of my living room. It still looks like a disaster zone. But in fact, each Wednesday I have filled a plastic shopping bag with old, visibly worn-out clothes and another bag with old floppy disks, CDs and DVDs, and thrown both in the garbage. On days without rain I used to carry off comic books, but there were so many rainy days that I got out of the habit. Still, somewhere around half of the comic books I brought with me are given to the used-book shop, along with some paperbacks.

There is just such a huge amount of random stuff that even if I do this each week, you can barely see it. Also, I am starting to hit the things that I still think I may read again, despite years of proof to the contrary. Perhaps I shall have to carry them into and out of yet another car before I realize that I am better off without them? That would be a pity, but it would certainly fit the pattern of my life.

Well, the important thing is that I continue to move forward.

Still alive, still alive…

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Woke up with just a sore throat and improved from there. Was at work a bus or two later than usual, but otherwise normal day. Took a one hour walk in the evening. (Did not do that yesterday.) Pulse was a bit higher than usual, a sign that the immune system is probably working on something, but the difference was not very big. Then again my pulse has been unusually slow lately. Even for me, I mean. So it was more like in the old days now, I guess. Like this spring before I took up the habit of walking an hour a day. Well, most days.

I have been thinking more about psychology and religion. But when I try to write, the topic grows and becomes unwieldy and I stop a ways through. I guess that is OK. A shop should not have all its goods in the window, and a man should not tell everything he knows. So this for today, then.

Viruses and ghosts

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In the movie The Rebirth of Buddha, hospitals are plagued by the ghosts of people who died there and refused to accept their fate.

Today, after eating a small piece of chocolate, my throat began to get irritated. I had to constantly cough and swallow just to keep breathing, or so it felt. I tried to wash it away with water and then eat something, but it just didn’t go away. I started to get really worried. At this point, other symptoms had already joined in: I was getting weak, my heart was beating fast, I was shaking and my face was flushed, my eyes were dry, I was queasy and my bowels were upset, I even developed a headache. It was like my body was breaking down all over, all of a sudden. I started to think: No! I don’t want to die! And then I remembered something.

The place I was when the symptoms began used to be a hospital, many years ago.

In the movie The Rebirth of Buddha, there is a memorable scene at the hospital, where Sayako (the main character, well, except for the Buddha) can see the ghosts of patients who walk around, bothering doctors and nurses and fellow patients in their attempt to get painkillers and other forms of comfort. They all don’t want to die, and being materialists in life could not accept the fact that they were dead. So even now they are haunting the hospital, thinking that they are patients there and it’s all about them.

Could it be? That some long dead patient had returned to its hospital and found some kind of resonance with me? Stray spirits are attracted to people who resonate at the same wavelength, so to speak: People with the same habits, viewpoints, attitudes, feelings and interests. Well, that’s what Happy Science says. That doesn’t sound very happy, but the happiness is that you can save yourself and sometimes even the stray spirits by reflecting on yourself and seek to live a life of selfless love. When the stray spirits notice this, they will either flee from the growing Light in you, or begin to reflect on themselves as well and be saved.

Christianity generally seems to assume that possessive spirits are all demons, not ghosts. This corresponds to the notion that the dead are sleeping, unaware of what goes on under the sun, as the Bible says. Of course, just because they are sleeping does not mean their dreams may not resonate with ours… if only in the form of a morphic field. Be that as it may, the New Testament certainly implies that not only mental illnesses but sometimes also physical may be created or made worse by the influence of spirits.

This may sound like pure superstition unless you consider that the mental equivalent to these stray spirits are complexes, or mind parasites: Essentially tiny split-off parts of the same stuff that personalities are made of. In some cases, people literally have multiple personalities, usually one more dominant than the rest but not always. In “healthy” people the other personalities never grow to more than a rudimentary level, but they can still mess up things pretty badly. This “complex” theory is a pretty respectable branch of psychology, first championed by C.G. Jung.

Consider the placebo effect, in which supposedly ineffective pills or injections cause substantial health benefits. And equally nocebo, where harmless treatments cause illness and in some cases death when people believe in them. A wrong diagnosis can sometimes become self-fulfilling, and the patient dies before the error is found and corrected. Likewise, someone may recover from a serious illness due to misdiagnosis, although this may be less common.

Even though I did not think about it at the time, I was aware that I was in an old hospital building. Judging from the symptoms, it seems likely that I have contracted the illness my coworker had last week (he has now returned). He is still not able to speak normally due to his vocal cords being  affected, and had various other symptoms including fever. So it could simply be that I have the same virus.

But in either case, body and soul are tightly integrated. In this life, they cannot be separated. In the next life, they probably can. But I am in no hurry to find out. Still, if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take: It certainly beats it wandering around bothering the living!

Actually, I should probably not bother the living even while I live. But at least reading my journal is voluntary!

***

(Incidentally, my throat is still irritated, but the other symptoms are gone for now.)

My Galaxy Tab and I

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At least my Android tablet is sexier than I. And yet I am the one people get to see more often.

It’s three weeks since I got my first Android tablet, last year’s model of the Samsung Galaxy Tab. As far as I know, their second generation Galaxy Tab 7 isn’t out yet. Even if they make one, I am not sure whether I would upgrade. It depends, mainly on whether the screen is radically improved without gutting the battery life. Running Honeycomb (the tablet version of Android) on more or less the same hardware is not really an improvement, in my opinion.

That said, I am fairly impressed with the old model, except the screen resolution is just a little too coarse. It would take only about 20% more pixel density to get rid of the slightly blurry and uneven text and pictures in the current size. It is good enough as is, just lacking the “wow” factor.

So, with this attitude, I must be using it a lot and dragging it with me everywhere, right? No, I have barely used it these three weeks. And only taken it out of the house two or three times. Basically I use it as a wireless access point, and that’s that. Occasionally I get up and wander into my living room just to get out of my boss chair, and use the Tab to catch up on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. It is very well suited for those, and the Android apps for those services are all quite good. Oh, and Tumblr too.

So why am I not going steady with Tab? The short answer is: “I already have a mobile phone.” The 7″ fits in a coat pocket (or a purse, not that I have that) but not in a shirt pocket. And the overlap is almost complete. The Tab is better for reading (it is the size of a softcover book, only thinner, and the weight is similar. The phone is better for phone calls and for having in your shirt pocket. I actually receive phone calls very rarely, but of course the day I leave my phone at home, I get an important call.

My employer has invested in some high-end (Jabra) Bluetooth headsets that we familiarize ourselves with as part of our tech support job (at least those of us who specialize a bit toward Android), and I believe one of those would actually make the Tab *better* than my cell phone for calls. Using the headset for the calls, it should be possible to look up things on the Tab at the same time. I haven’t tested it though.

Honestly, I can see a potential in work for this size of tablet. Eminently portable yet with enough surface to read documents, look up data or search the Web. Add the fact that they are *phones*, and you basically have an office in your coat pocket. Or purse.

But if I started to carry this thing with me everywhere, I would leave my cell phone at home. Having Internet access at home is how I (and you) can stream my record collection over the Internet anywhere, anytime. I would not deprive my friends and family of that without good reason, would I? ^_^ Well, perhaps a little…

Walky days

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I am getting quite familiar with these stretches of bike- and pedestrian road, a feature that is particularly common in and around Mandal where I live.

Today before dinner I took a walk to the tune of 775 calories. That’s up from 750 yesterday. Fine for weekends, but a bit long for weekdays, I think.

Yes, I am still walking most days, ideally an hour or so, although lately it has been longer. See, the alternative is to run, as I mentioned before. Walking, even rapidly, is not enough to get my pulse up in the training zone. (In fact, it has been dropping even lower since last I wrote about it. Now it is like 105-110.) I have to break into a run frequently just to convince my body that I am not simply ambling across the kitchen floor.

Basically, I have become immune to walking. -_-

I walk for an hour, and my pulse is like “what? I was supposed to react to this? Nobody told me that walking was supposed to count as exercise now.” But it is! Numerous highly respected publications recommend it! But evidently they recommend it for the average American, who is a mound of fat on stubby little legs or something. (Disclaimer: I have never been in America, but I had a friend who stayed there for several months, and there was a lot more of her when she returned.)

So if I had a body mass index of 29 (overweight a little below obesity), walking for an hour would have been epic exercise. Perhaps I should even asked permission from my doctor first. But because my BMI is 24 (“normal” a little below overweight), walking for an hour is just maintenance, or business as usual. What am I supposed to do, run? That would take some getting used to, since I only have done so for minutes total in my adult life. And teenage life. And late childhood.

I think, in fact, it was my learning to not run that made my asthma disappear sometime around the age of 10-12. I always thought it was some kind of miracle or I just outgrew it, one or the other. But I didn’t. I still have it, and it is called exercise asthma. Evidently it is not an allergy. The only thing that triggers it is exercising hard enough. So I have avoided this for four decades now. My muscles are very, very surprised when I try to run. I can do so for some steps, which is fine since that is all I need to pop the pulse up in the training range. I have to repeat this pretty often though if I want the kind of pulse I used to get from just walking, less than half a year ago. But it looks ridiculous.

In fact, it probably looks ridiculous just walking all over the place almost every day. The first quarter of an hour or so goes through the same part of the town each day, so I am sure the kids have already noticed. Kids are good at that. So when I am walking briskly through the neighborhood, I imagine the kids looking out and saying: “It’s Walky!“

Dentist and hubris

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Today I went to the dentist. Somewhat to my surprise, after all these years, he asked where I worked. What’s up with that? It’s been a decade, if not two. Perhaps he had been reading my journal here and could no longer control his curiosity. Probably not though, since he first asked whether I was employed, before he asked where. It has nothing to do with employers’ dental plans, because we don’t have them in Norway. (Possible exception for boxing and similar sports where teeth are likely to fly. American-style football also comes to mind. Anyway, it is not normal. We don’t have public dental coverage either – each of us pays for ourself.)

The pay was fairly moderate this time, because there were zero holes again. I felt pretty good about this, although a bit surprised. I live mostly on carbs, after all, since I can’t eat more than small amounts of fat without getting ill, and really hate eating meat and fish. Not so much for religious or ethical reasons, although those don’t help exactly. It is just icky. That leaves carbs of various kinds, neither of which are known to be loved by teeth. (Except the indigestible sugar xylitol, which is known to protect teeth but can upset digestion in larger doses. I don’t eat much of the stuff.)

I felt pretty proud of my achievement even so, and as I posted on Google+, decided to celebrate with Pepsi and chocolate.

The soda tasted disgusting. That is not a property of Pepsi generally, but this particular bottle was not their best, it was one of the worst I have ever tasted from that brand. And then I broke my tooth on the chocolate bar.

OK, not really, it was already broken, it is the usual one which breaks every few months (or roughly as often as I buy some new gadget, which led me to the conclusion that “every time I buy a laptop, God breaks one of my teeth”. This one would be the retribution for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, although I am not sure whether it actually broke before or after… but in any case, it came out now. On the bright side, I didn’t swallow it. It has a longish metal pin on the root side, so that would have been very risky.

So, it seems I will be back sooner than expected, and pay more than expected. The chocolate was good, though. I stopped halfway through so as to not get sick (there is fat in chocolate), but it was quite tasty. My hubris, not so much, I guess.

Update

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I’m fine (so far – dentist appointment tomorrow). I am just not in journal writing mode.  Also, I rediscovered the online comic “Dumbing of age“, which is one of several reboots of the classic masterpiece “It’s Walky!” -It has the same characters but in a slightly different setting. It works pretty well, but the original had a certain charm that has been fading with time. I am not sure whether any of my current online friends were met on the Walky forums. I think not, but I am not entirely sure. It did lead me to other comics where I eventually made a bunch of friends. (Some of which are married to each other these days.)

So yeah, I guess it is kind of nostalgic. Although I guess I have changed so much more since then than the comic has.

Anyway, I am fine, as far as I know. Two of my two coworkers are not quite so lucky, so I have had a little fun at work. But our job is a bit secret – not top secret but just a bit – so that’s it for now.

Still adding a little to my latest fiction, but nothing to write home about right now.

Dream of being people

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I dreamed that I was a small group of people waiting to board a train. Somewhere around seven people, I think. But I was not all of them at once – there are still limits, even in my dreams! My consciousness moved from one of them to the next, seeing the situation through their eyes, through their minds. Each of them had different things on their mind, different feelings, different priorities.

It is rare that I dream like this (I think – I don’t remember nearly all my dreams). I have had similar dreams in the past, even since my youth: Dreams in which I move from one of the characters into another, like a spirit possessing one person and then another.  I have even wondered, many years ago, if this was what I would become when I died – a spirit that would flitter around possessing living people. I sincerely hope not!

Anyway, I have no feeling of evil in these dreams. It is simply a way of changing viewpoints, something many authors do regularly in books without being demons.

But it does kind of bring home the point that, no, I am not a body. There are people, even among my online friends, who seem to sincerely believe they are bodies. That’s pretty weird. At the very least you should think you are the software that runs on the hardware of the brain. Preferably the coder who writes the software that runs on your brain. You could have any of a lot different bodies and still been you. Sure, the body adds flavor to your personality, but it does not decide who you are going to be ten or twenty years from now. YOU decide that. That is a scary thought, isn’t it?

But I suppose if you have never been anyone else, even in your dreams, it may be easy to never realize the difference between you and your body. Oh well, you’ll find out when you look down on it someday, I guess.