goodandevil

The Good | Charitable Charities

Cystic Fibrosis is a genetic defect that affects glandular processes on the cellular level. It leads to deteriorated lung function and impaired digestion, as well as the chronic inflammation of many important organs.

Fortunately, not many people have the disease. While it’s popular among its class of illness, total United States patient counts number in the tens of thousands, usually between thirty and forty. For all the cancers and AIDS victims out there, that doesn’t seem like a huge base of people to work with.

Extra-fortunately, there is a single organization out there that works at such a feverish pace, and on so many levels, to treat the disease on a symptom and cure level, that you’d think they were out to treat the common cold.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation at http://www.cff.org/ is not only a great informational resource, with everything from reports and charts to live video lectures question and answer sessions, but also finances and monitors drug programs, provides need-based assistance for disenfranchised patients, and consistently ranks among the top charities in terms of both its business model and its efficiency in taking donated monies from the site and special events and making sure it goes toward the medicine.

Recently it was revealed in tests that a new compound has been developed which appears to correct the basic defect caused by the illness, in certain individuals with a particular mutation. I’ve lived for almost a quarter-century with the disease, and while I’m blessed to have what seems to be a mild case, I owe it to those less fortunate than myself to spread the word when we’re so close to doing what so few diseases get to do, and that’s to avoid the rat race and business end of things - a.k.a., “There’s no money in a cure,” as they say - and finally reach an endgame.

Please consider donating this holiday season.

The Good | What Do I Do With All This Luck?

One of my more annoying habits, I hear, is that I always make the distinction between luck and fortune. I don’t buy into the Conversations with God books wholeheartedly, especially when the book’s “God” character and in real life the author himself say not to, but one of them includes a section where the former talks about being blamed for only the really yucky situations in life.

To paraphrase the idea, when someone wins the lottery or meets the partner of their dreams, they say to themselves, “Boy, am I lucky” but when a tornado ends a hundred lives it’s called an “act of God.” In other words, the being assigned as the figurehead of all Love is an evil rock monster, and it is the benefit of this mysterious force known as chance that allows anything good to happen in the world.

That’s not awkward at all.

Anyway, I borrowed the general notion because it made sense to me. I never explain it like that to people, though. I don’t even bring God into it. Luck sounds frivolous, and fortune sounds more grounded, like it’s a result on at least some level of your choices and your circumstance. If lightning struck twice, it was because you were carrying a rod. That’s the basic idea.

Today I won a gift card at a video arcade, was treated for no real reason to my favorite meal at one of my favorite wing restaurants (which we generally avoid for frugality and health reasons), and even got to window shop with the card for all sorts of goodies I’d never get for myself. It’s the sort of day you wish would happen, especially on a nasty day, and it happened to me, on what was already a fairly good day.

I won’t say “Why me?” That’d ruin it. I’ll enjoy it. I am enjoying it and I have enjoyed it. However, a part of me remains curious if I can’t help but be in shock and lose some of the value of it all. If the goodness keeps on rolling, is there a way to not take it for granted?

These are all things that add and cannot subtract, and therefore usually act as bandages. I have the outstanding fortune to not have to worry about going hungry, so it’s not like I wake up some days with the possibility of food being taken away, or being forced to eat things I don’t like. At this point, too, it’d be hard to take away money or prizes. Most everything I own is a gift.

Perhaps I should take my own advice and not question it. I just don’t want to forget today when I need today more than I needed today today.

The Good | Squashing Your Fears

This year in my family we decided to adopt some of our own Thanksgiving traditions sticking around the house as opposed to putting ourselves through a weekend of travel floating to other people’s traditions.

Part of the parade was to plan and prepare a multi-course healthy meal on a relative budget, but doing it efficiently (versus hours and hours of roasting, for example, with a giant conventional bird - tonight was all about the breasts) and as a family.

It was as successful as I could’ve realistically expected, but there was one food element in particular that stood out: the pumpkin soup.

The basic ingredients aren’t all that snazzy. It includes onions, celery, chicken stock, heavy cream, and of course pumpkin, in puree form. The magic happened in the arc of its little story. When I took my first taste, I was dismayed. The kitchen was a little hectic and everything sounded good in concept, but the taste was kind of flat. A bath-like, tap-watery almost exclusively cream taste, although not as good as that sounds.

Maybe it needs help, I though. The recipe called for nutmeg but we choose not to get it, but cinnamon would serve a similar purpose so I threw some in there. It was sweeter, but that just was a mask. Nothing was full-bodied about this at all.

After it simmered a while I tasted again. It seemed better with concentration, but it still was hard to identify as any of its constituent ingredients.
Then it was time to serve it. We ladled it in bowls, spooned a dried cranberry and apple relish in the center, and topped it with a couple of rosemary leaves.

That took just a few seconds and a few second later it was on the table ready to eat. Taking a spoonful of the deep ocean of soup, near neither the relish or the garnish, I found it to be absolutely delicious. Restaurant quality, that I would choose to order. Well-rounded in every way.

Was it love? Context? Who knows, and that may be the point in itself. Sometimes you won’t get to know why a thing works. You just make sure that while it’s still around, you appreciate that it does.

The Evil | Picking Your Kids Up At the Bus Stop

As a bit of background, I don’t live anywhere posh but I’m certainly in a suburban neighborhood. The people here more or less own their homes or are well-to-do couples having children a little later in life. Everyone’s hurting on a relative scale, but in the absolute my subdivision’s citizens have farther to fall than many.

What’s more, while access to what you might want for Americana or just familiarity is miles away, we’re a mile or so removed from anything besides one main road and natural preserve. I certainly haven’t heard of nearby child predators on the local news.

So why pick up your kids from the bus stop in your car when you live right down the street? Obviously there are safety concerns, and playing the odds is never a good idea when it comes to protecting children, but then why is it that besides the waste in gas - and this was happening at four dollars a gallon, too — it feels so colossally blunderous as a decision to make?

I hope and pray that it has nothing to do with laziness, and if it was just one weird guy doing it out of obsessive compulsion, then you know what? It can slide, we’ve all got weirder eccentricities. When seven or eight parents are doing it simultaneously, blocking roads and interrupting traffic patterns, smelling the air up from idling and honking at each other once the first person gets impatient - well, let’s just say I lose my tolerance for what is not immediately obvious to my understanding.

Your house can literally be seen from the stop. If you’re the last line of defense, walk there yourself. Better yet, realize there are many far less safer places they’re going to be outside of your field of vision - school, for example - where they don’t have your protection and stop hanging on their neck. Some of these kids look fifteen. They’ll be driving themselves soon. They don’t need the kindergarten cop treatment.

The Good | Self-Preservation

I once put forth an analogy to a friend of mine. If life is like playing a video game, with its set levels and challenges, and certainly its time limits, then Heaven or any sort of afterlife is a similar experience except you have all the cheat codes.

Both are great adventures and great experiences, in concept. As people we are partially sustained by the novel, and we inevitably find ways of seeing what we once called bad experiences for the rewards they contain. It may be hell at the time, but it’s the game that’s playing, so we play it and ride the roller coaster for what it is.

By the same token, the afterlife may be less experiential, but the notion that our will is made timelessly instant seems exciting from out here, usually when we’re in the least amount of control. Maybe I’d like to take a bath in a tub full of jasmine rice (I wouldn’t, but stick with me. Get it? Stick? That’s starch humor.) It may be impractical in life, but after I’m gone, kazaam it’s there.

Except the point of being there would render it not nearly as awesome as we think it would be from here. It would hold a totally different meaning. So while enjoyment is extended in other ways, it can’t compete in others with the attraction of risk and feeling we perceive with the senses we have on Earth.

All that prefacing was simply a lead in to this: When you were at your happiest, did you fear death? When you were at your saddest, did you embrace it? In either case did you know what you were dealing with? Do you think you could?

It amazes me that for all the exposure, and all the relative detachment, that we cannot become desensitized to death. That same friend told me that a Samurai studied death his whole adult life - an interesting perspective when you spend that time preparing for the moment that will both end and define your physical existence as you know it. Was it wasted time? In a strange way, was his experience made richer?

The Good | Making It Yourself

Do you know how to make furniture? I didn’t, and then my temporary interest in reading an actual self-improvement blog aggregator lured me into the inspired ingenuity behind multi-purpose homebuilt “hack” furniture. When called upon to invent crafts in a class, I tapped those inspirations for my own and learned the history and physical science behind the design and construction of furniture. Am I genius? Was the project successful?

If we’re being literal, no by at least ten or fifteen points and yes, very much so. Academically it was a huge success but for me it was also a great personal success. Aside from enriching my knowledgebase, it proved to me once again that I need only to stick my toes in any given water to be able to adapt to it on an entry level and better yet find an appreciation for it.

We’re obviously very complex creatures, and the routines in our lives can feel controlling. In many ways they are, but difficult as it is to break them, occasionally it can and must be done. While breaking that routine, it makes you feel more human to apply yourself to a novel purpose and realize you’re still giving it your own spin, your own taste, and your own approach.

It doesn’t have to be a rote skill, either. It’s simple wish-fulfillment. Practice makes better. If you’re uncomfortable talking to the opposite sex, you probably don’t do much talking to them. You can argue about cause and effect until you’re blue in the face, but the fact is 95% of the smooth people in the world used to be you. Then they talked to girls or boys or men or women, and they made huge fools out of themselves but figured it out through experience.

This is a basic technique, a basic feature of the human condition, and yet it’s put to the least use.

Live, and, learn.

The Good | Knowing Your Own Rules and Living By Them

Self-awareness is a pretty broad topic, but there’s one section of it that I believe could benefit everyone if they observed it themselves with greater scrutiny.

The way most people appear the live their life, they are not quite sleepwalking, but not quite awake either. They do what they think is best given what they know, but all too often they’ll be confronted with situations that they’ve seen a hundred times before and act like they never learned a thing from it.

Is it a memory access issue? Attention span? It’s both and it’s neither. Were anyone to stop and think before making a decision, they could find it within themselves to know and to analyze their own history, their own present, and make informed determinations about the future. Anyone who says that’s too hard hasn’t tried.

I myself don’t apply it on any grand scale. I try to, out of self-preservation, but that doesn’t make me good at it. I do use it in relatively petty ways to streamline my life to a fit that I’m comfortable with.

As an example, I don’t find myself to be unattractive but I have a crooked nose, a smile that falls off to one side, and a busted up eye. On my best day those characteristics could throw off someone’s appraisal. Aside from that though, I don’t think I’m that bad-looking. I would never expect anyone to believe it but I could be 100% objective in this department.

Anyway, I know the ways in which I look bad because I’ve seen it. The eye is a usual culprit but somewhat relatedly a puffy cheek on the same side means if you take a picture of me from one ¾ perspective, I look decent, and if you take it from the other, I look sort of like an abomination consisting of Clay Aiken, Peter Lorre and medium eggplant.

Armed with this information, I say to myself, “Geez, you have the capability of looking pretty friggin’ nasty.” So what do I do?

I don’t make funny faces.

Don’t get me wrong, I love being expressive. It comes naturally to me and it’s part of my job. But I will never push it too far, and certainly not in front of a camera, because I can so easily appear ugly and the last thing I want to do is leave an indelible mark in anyone’s memory of the one view of me they had where I looked like an rotting sea creature.

A weird example, to be sure, but apply it to something serious in your life and I guarantee you’ll see the wisdom.

The Evil | Did People Hit Each Other for Pseudo-Free Booze in the 50’s?

Today I attended a wine tasting at a local produce market. Given that the bottles stayed under twenty dollars, the quality was pretty fantastic. What’s more, the only cost of the whole thing was a five dollar cover charge, which also netted you a thick, very solid wine glass with which to sample.

As a result everyone and their two favorite cousins descended on this place like a herd of, well, people. Paraphrasing what the company representative shared with a tentative consumer, “There are two recession-proof industries. One is entertainment, the other is alcohol,” and I saw today that he just may be right. There must have been five to eight hundred people through this place in an hour, in no more walking room total than you’d find in just the combined cashier areas at your local superstore.

That’s all well and good; I do not like crowds and I like drunk crowds less. I watched my company get forcefully jabbed and I myself actually had my hand slapped away despite me being decently tall and holding all my hands up away from everyone to save on space. It was a pleasant opportunity though, and gave us a good excuse to shop for fresh herbs.

The major issues are two-fold, though. There are many items we intended to purchase today, but with such crowds there was no feasible way to get access to the products. They made five dollars minus the cost of the glasses in an attempt to bring in business, but they couldn’t pull in any business past a cap because no one could reach anything and make it out alive.

Did they think people would get a positive impression and return? That’s a bit of a gamble. My relative, who received information about the event from me, knew just that it took place today and yesterday. How are they to know if it happens with any regularity? She actually remarked that if she was ever going to consider returning, she might be dissuaded simply by the fact that “today might be ones of those days where they’re doing the wine tasting.”

The second fold is far simpler. Don’t let kids in, or if you will not or cannot limit access, encourage people not to bring them. I’m not a big person but I’m obvious, and were it not for my relative lankiness I might not have even gotten the moving-around part accomplished. Forget the concerns about alcohol. I barely considered it. Any kid at the age I saw in there today, 8-12ish, is going to get trampled. Absolutely destroyed. It’s only learning if you stop the second time from happening after you learn from the first.

The Good | Learning New Tricks

If someone’s known me for any length of time, they know my stance on singing: I like to do it, but it doesn’t make me very good at it. No, not even with practice. My parents have simply been as fun-loving and supportive as they have good role models, so I grew up not just around quality music that predates me, but also around people who actually burst into song because they enjoyed it all so much.

That said, I’ve always wanted to be a good singer. Not professional-quality, though I’d love to get voice lesson. Not even Idol or cruise ship good. Just ‘ringer-at-karaoke’ good. That would work for me. Am I there? That remains to be seen - though I did just do a sporting job at some local karaoke - but certainly I’m farther along the road to that goal than I have been in the past. Mostly it’s come from singing along to good music that demands a lot from you (in my case, the Phantom of the Opera original cast recording), and some of the following tips I’ve collected.

1. Make a “Tsst!” sound, described as a leaky tire, using just your tongue against your teeth. It seems like an imitation of someone with a strong lisp, but it’s actually more about the teeth. If you’ve taken a deep breath before forcing it out though the space between your teeth, this is said to strengthen your diaphragm.
2. Similar to the advice of Frank Sinatra, see yourself as an instrument. Play it note by note, and don’t waver. That will come naturally later and you’ll fall into a style. Anything else right now when you’re first starting will be mimicry and throw you off from the meat of understanding what you’re doing.
3. Much as I’m sure you conduct your blogging affairs, visualize an audience to whom you’re singing. Make it big, and make them care. Then, make it good. I didn’t realize the effect this could have until I had to sing in front of a big group again.
4. Don’t force it out. See how powerful you can get while making it feel as if it’s not taking near the effort that you think would be proportionate to that sound.
5. Keep your tongue slightly concave at the base of your mouth except when absolutely necessary to properly articulate sounds (like “L” for example). This helps build resonance and takes out some of the artifacting you can do if you’ve got a strong accent or manner to how you form words.
6. I haven’t seen this corroborated anywhere in print, nor practiced often by professionals, but it works for me like a charm: For high notes, tilt your head down. For low notes, tilt your head up. I’m assuming it’s mostly about strain and air access.
7. As a warm-up exercise, stretch up and then out as far as you can and hold it for a length of time. This should open up the chest a bit, leading to better breathing and more space for the sound to bounce around in.
8. Overemphasize consonants but only really sing and extend vowels.
9. It’s arguable but I’ve heard the same mechanism for yelling is used for high notes. Sometimes that works for me, sometimes not. I think it’s meant for you to feel it out on your own. When you get it right you’ll see what they meant.
10. Vibrato should be allowed to come naturally, and not be forced. Also understand that the wavering is between soft and loud versions of the sound and not between sharp and flat versions of the actual note.

That’s it for now! Honestly, I tried tackling these one by one and they each made their own incremental difference. It can be hard to concentrate and make sure you’re adding them all together properly into one performance, but it’s worth it if you can practice enough to get it to become second nature.

  The Good | Staying Informed About All Sides of a What Seems Too Good to Be True

As I’ve mentioned in a few articles, my interest in healthy eating and cooking got quite a boost thanks to the quick read SuperFoodsRx by Dr. Steven Pratt. About a month ago I found another truly unbelievable information source, completely free online, that provides nutritional data on pros and cons, nutrient density, nutrient makeup, nutrition facts, and more.

One of the nicer contributions is a pair of indices: the Glycemic Index of that particular food, and how it ranks in terms of its inflammation factor. My disease in particular is purported to be prone to oxidative stress, so I wanted to know if even the healthy items I was digesting had a way to be “out to get me.” Therefore I compiled this list of only the Superfoods and so-called “sidekicks” (similar nutritional makeup as the main food, can act as a substitute, just not best of class) that I deemed safe for dinner consumption.

Then I used the site I described above, http://www.nutritiondata.com/ (the link goes to the same page through which I found the site) to pair each food item with its respective inflammation factor to allow you to make the same informed decisions without having to do the cross-referencing yourself. Enjoy!

Superfood/Sidekick | Inflammation Factor

Broccoli 79 to 98 (spears)

Brussels Sprouts 103

Cauliflower 32

Avacado 49

Asparagus 112

Artichokes -4 (raw) / 3 (cooked)

Beans

Lentils -15

Green peas 28

Sugar snap peas 16

Garbanzos -128

Blueberries -16 (frozen) to -28 (raw)

Purple grapes

Cranberries -4 (raw) to -130 (dried)

Strawberries 28

Blackberries 6 (raw) to -24 (frozen)

Raspberries 1 (raw) to -127 (frozen)

Cinnamon -4

Garlic 2573 (powder) to 4873 (raw)

Onion 794 (powder) to -49

Scallions 304 (raw)

Chives 0

Kiwi

Pineapple 65 (raw)

Honey -1262

Yogurt -115

Oats -410 to -60 (instant)

Wild rice -103 (cooked)

Brown rice -161

Couscous -98

Barley -127

Wheat -40 to -49

Oranges 3 to 10

Tangerines (Mandarin Oranges) -22

Limes 2 to 15

Pumpkin 334 (canned unsalted)

Carrots 209 to 245

Tomatoes 18 (cooked produce) to

-3 (whole) to -19 (stewed) to -24 to -32 (all other canned including paste and sauce)

Turkey -61

Skinless chicken breast -22 to -29

Walnuts -174

Almonds 276

Extra-virgin olive oil 1137

(Ground beef is not a SuperFood but maxes out at -7 for 90/10)