Ode to pollen, ragweed, mold spores, and getting old…

Creeping up on my 44^th year of life and the inevitable breakdown of the physical form becomes… well, inevitable. 

I feel it in the tightness of the hips and lower back getting out of bed in the morning. It’s in the creaking and cracking of knee joints whilst squatting to lift up an object. It’s in my failing eye sight that has been, up until a year ago, perfect vision 20/20. It’s in the unavoidable root canal that I’ve been avoiding for the past eight months. The most recent ailment that has befallen me is seasonal allergies, in addition to a general assault on my previously ironclad immune system.

For someone who has always been healthy, strong, hardly ever sick and never been to the hospital ever (except for that one time I had to have my stomach pumped), it’s sobering to realize that the body is on the slippery slope of decline. Exponentially so. To commemorate this officious step away from youthful immortality towards unalterable death, an attempted (silly) foray into composing haiku… (part of the PBS experiment.)

                                                      Weepy, wat'ry eyes

                                           Mucous membrane, snot snot snot

                                                   Phlegm, my best friend is

         O, yonder hip-bone
Lest you jest at my pai-ain

       T’aint funny one bit

                                         Curs-ed are the years 
                                     Cantankerous maladies

                                         I declare, Begone!

                          Ipso facto death

            ‘fore he thee pluck, crooks finger

                            It, I ignoreth

I’m obsessed with the notion that we are (literally) dying just a little bit every day. I may be having a mid-life crisis. More on that later if/when I figure it out.

Project Brain Stimulation

Who sez you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

Brad Pitt is a big proponent on keeping the brain healthy and fit so that we’re both mentally agile as we drift into our twilight years. No vacant drooling into our soups for this couple.

Do you know that if you don’t periodically teach your brain new tricks, it’s in danger of becoming flabby from disuse? Our brains are thinking organs that learn and grow by interacting with the world through perception and action. Mental stimulation improves brain function and actually protects it from cognitive decline. Or so I've read.

Do you also know that alcohol in moderation can actually be good for the brain, however too much alcohol can kill brain cells and your ability to think and reason effectively? But that’s another post for another day.

Accordingly, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to engage the brain in creative and fun new activities (Project Brain Stimulation, or PBS) to keep it in P90X tiptop shape. I'm not implying one needs to tax one's brain by reading Michio Kaku's "Parallel Worlds" and mastering the notion of string theory, black holes and parallel universes, which is fascinating, by the way. Can you imagine eleven different versions of yourself living eleven different lives? I can't.

I'm talking about learning something new on a small scale. It can be as simple as learning how to dance the rhumba, or craft haikus, or fashion swan origami, or a new language (okay, learning a new language may be a little harder). Or knitting. Which is what I chose for my first PBS endeavor.

Not sure how or why I was compelled to learn how to knit. Before last month, I've never had an inkling of needing nor wanting to knit. (Knitting was for grandmas.) It may have been when I stumbled across ravelry.com while researching blogs for this blog. Ravelry is this giant on-line knitting community. Knitters share their projects, patterns, chat/discuss/gossip about knitting on message boards. It's like a cult with yarn instead of the wacko philosophizing and/or partner swapping.

Poking about, I came across these drool-worthy sweaters made by a knitter in Germany. I may have thought something like, "Dang, that's a fine looking sweater", downloaded the pattern, got confused with all the strange instructions (it was akin to trying to make heads and tails of Egyptian hieroglyphs), drooled over more sweaters, got more inspired, googled knitting classes in Rhode Island, found one taking place at Blithewold Mansion in Bristol, and there I went.

For whatever reason, the instructor didn't feel the need to teach us how to cast on (committing the first row of stitches on which to grow subsequent stitches), the very FIRST thing, in my humble non-knitter opinion, one would need to know to even BEGIN knitting. In spite of that one weird exclusion, it was a productive 2 hours - I learnt how to make the knit and purl stitch.

For those who've never knitted before, the actual physical act of knitting is like learning how to walk for the first time. The synapse firings were rebelling HARD, as my fat clumsy fingers fumbled with these too-long knitting needles, threatening to poke an eyeball out with every stitch, yarn tangling around my ankles. I MAY have stabbed the woman next to me with the non-pointy end but she was too polite to bitch me out. (Sorry, knitting fellow whose name I do not recall.)

Once my over-ambitious plan of knitting a cool sweater as my first project crashed and burned, I set my sights on a more humble project: the all-purpose winter scarf. I went home, youtubed how to cast on, three months later… et voilà!

Don't laugh!

I may now cross # 7 off my bucket list.