Bah, New Year

Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock

1. For all of us who watch our weight, shouldn’t we followers of Agatston and Atkins continue to avoid refined flour and reduce processed food, though that might drive us nuts (which are excusably high fat only if you’re near zero carb). To do any diet right, you can’t eat out. Outside of chain drive-ins where everything is regulated (and often posted online), chefs fluff the foods to make them taste better. Virtually all restaurant foods have excess salt and oil; it’s how they taste better.

So why are all who are not so diligent are living long lives? Americans do just fine with Wonder Bread and not bakery or homemade whole grain loaves (ever read the ingredients on Wonder wheat varieties?). If you can get the patient to the hospital in time, often they’ll live into their 80s. John Belushi and Chris Farley didn’t make half that, but they did more than overeat, didn’t they?

I trust the doctors and scientists overall, and if I missed meat I’d have no trouble eating it occasionally. For me, though, it’s fun to be a vegetarian. If I live longer, great, but day in and day out I don’t have that bloated lethargic feeling that I recall from drippings and bleached flour rolls.

The doctor tells a man with a family history of heart disease to walk 1 mile a day. Lapping Wilson Park is 0.9 miles. Over the rest of my life will that missing tenth of a mile cost me eight years, three months, 17 days? What happened with science is that it cannot study varying lengths, just the common ones. Science says having an 81 mg tablet of aspirin daily is heart-healthy. Why not 75 mg or 100? A regular aspirin is 325. The research looks at what’s available: adult or “children’s,” and the little one does the blood-thinning just fine.

Be it resolved: eat well, but not strictly any more.

2. In other words because I feel better when I eat better, let that be my guide. Plus I feel better when I exert; I feel terrific when I move my body in fun ways. Exercise, however, is boring. Exercise is a task; it’s a study of the American psyche on how not that many push in the gym and track while a vast majority of people just sloth around. And live into their 80s, providing their health policies are paid for.

Bicycling or strolling somewhere is a joy. Playing tennis or similar almost unorganized sports is exhilarating, even when you’re a klutz.

Be it resolved: Go out and play.

3) The main thing that has to go in the New Year is this kindness shtick. Recently I ranked kindness as not only a personal value but the biggest one. What was I thinking?

I’m so trapped. I’m nice anyway. But now it’s like a vow for a value, or vow to a value. My temptation is saying or writing something hurtful, though it’s good copy. Yet kindness, or rather unkindness, means almost anything short of criminal acts, such as various cruelties, deliberate thoughtlessnesses and petty swindles. Anything greater than that? Felonies have their own laws.

There’s being kind short-term and being kind long-term, and they’re not quite the same. Kind in the long term may mean being blunt now. Kind in the near future may just let the other person learn a truth later on without you there to take the blame. Last, there’s being kind to oneself, and that likely means, first, being honest with oneself.

I may want to be kind, but I must take a stand on folderol. I probably can’t persuade people desperate for explanations that astrology is as fake as professional wrestling, but do I have to amiably feign interest in an involved discussion? That may seem kind to others, but it’s a bigger kindness to self to avoid biting my tongue almost clear off.

Ages ago in Little Rock another editor and I were considering how to advise a colleague frustrated at the work load. “How about,” I said, giving him the A-B organizing principle where grade B level work often is good enough. “For us,” my overachieving friend said, “that works fine, because our B is the A level of others. Lots of people, though, need to aim for A’s just to produce anything decent at all.”

The story has been in my head for perhaps 20 years because it metamorphosizes — emphasis on “metaphor” — to how hard it is to understand that a common concept rarely is exactly to others how you picture it to yourself.

Pointing out flaws in the cosmos, if not in the neighborhood, comprises most of my thoughts in Brick. Yo, garcon, a kindness exemption here, please.

Being honest means taking stands. It’s all well and good to puff out one’s chest for dignity, for democracy, for civil rights or human rights or eagle rights. But it’s the everyday matters — like bona fide medical scientific facts versus supplements and pyramids — where it takes real bravery, because it can hurt people whom you actually want to spend time with.

Let’s just say kindness has its place, and it’s my New Year’s Resolution to keep it there.

-30-