Sadly Carl is showing more and more signs of his age. When I got him a year and two months ago the Humane Society told me he was 2.1 years old, making him more than three now, which is pretty elderly for a rat. He has coarser, less well-groomed hair. He moves more slowly and bobs his head weakly. He pulls himself along with his forelegs instead of pushing with his hind ones. He does not eat hard foods as easily. He falls off the countertop, something he had only done once or twice before. And now instead of scrambling to get back up he just lays there, looking dazed. He has lost weight, looking more bony. And he paces around restlessly as if deaf instead of just finding a place to curl up and sit still. And in an ominous sign, I got a whiff of his urine and realized it smelled highly concentrated, like that of a hamster. Apparently he is either not drinking enough or his kidneys are not functioning well, or both.

I think he is in a terminal decline. In his last few weeks of life I am giving him all the peanut butter he wants. I am making sure he has easy access and opportunities to have water through his bottle, a dish, and in watery foods I give him. I am not letting him fall off the countertop. I scratch him behind his scruffy neck even though he won’t sit still much. He deserves the best rat hospice possible.

Carl is definitely the most affectionate rat I have had. Kurt was the biggest perv. And my new rat Hans is the most active. I am waiting until he is a little less jumpy for Hans to make his public debut.

Finally, it is submitted. Submitted one day before it is due, that is.

I wonder why, before any important due date, I feel a mounting sense of dread. I wonder why the dread affects my mood and my sleep patterns, and alters my attitude and my thoughts. Maybe it is because at the core I feel I am not equal to the task.

Maybe the dread leads to procrastination, the procrastination leads to shoddy and rushed work, and the result is a poor product or performance that I can safely reassure myself was not my best effort. Maybe it is all just self-comforting formula. Maybe I self-sabotage as a way of protecting myself from confronting the realization that I tried hard at something I believed in and still failed.

But this time it might go okay. This is a trial that depends not on an assignment or a project but on the product of several years of effort. And with some smiling and bluffing and a little manipulation of words I might pass through the trial and never have to confront it or its like again.

This class is over and done with. And it only cost 2000 bucks to learn, "the study of human development is science-driven, complex, multicontextual, and multifactorial" or some such mushiness. Bleh.

13 Dec 2011

A Developmental Perspective on the Unaccounted-for Elders of Japan

In Japan a recent effort to congratulate Tokyo’s oldest man led to a national outcry after he was found to have been dead and mummified in his apartment since 1978 (Fackler). Commentators throughout the country, which had prided itself for its longevity and its respect for elders, expressed outrage and woe over this incident and others indicating that many other centenarians were either long dead or impossible to locate. In this report I will briefly mention how the biosocial, cognitive, and psychosocial perspectives relate to this news item. I will then share a personal experience and offer a final comment on how useful the developmental perspective is in this issue.

Biosocial

The Berger textbook discusses centenarians in the chapter on biosocial development in late adulthood and mentions four characteristics of centenarians: good diet, activity, social respect, and exercise (p. 660). All these factors may have helped many Japanese people to reach old age. It is what happened after reaching old age that led to the national tragedy over Japan’s unaccounted-for elders.

Cognitive

Some of the cases of missing elders occurred after the parent left home under “murky circumstances” after which the family members did not pursue them because they had been so overburdened (Fackler). The parents may leave under a cloud of dementia and never return. Berger explains that dementias such as Alzheimer disease can cause a person to fail to recognize relatives and forget the way home. Eventually the disease progresses to the point where the victim requires full-time care, which may be impossible for offspring to provide (p. 680).

Psychosocial

I was surprised to find the term “psychosocial” used in the New York Times article I cite. Fackler notes that “officials here tend to downplay the psychosocial explanations” (2010). While some editorials have wailed about neglect of the elderly and deterioration of social bonds, it may simply be that public record-keeping is inadequate. The cultural context might contribute to the problem: Fackler cites public health experts who say that Japanese society discourages putting elderly parents away in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, which means that their care falls upon offspring who may be in their 70’s and in need of assistance themselves.

A personal experience

I read over a year ago about Tokyo’s supposed oldest man being found as a mummy, and remembered it until this assignment because it was so shocking. But I realize now that my own grandma (my only surviving grandparent) could be at risk of a similar fate. At 91, she lives alone with minimal assistance. Although my siblings and I visit her regularly, there are times when we go for two weeks or more without seeing her. If she were to pass away in her apartment and go undiscovered for a week or two, we would not be able to see her one last time at an open-casket funeral because of decomposition. The guilt over not being able to say goodbye would be mortifying to me. Yet all it would take is for a couple of developmental factors to intersect: heart failure or some other disease of the elderly, inability or unwillingness to call 911, and my grandma’s highly independent living.

A final thought

I am intrigued by Japan’s unaccounted-for elders because this phenomenon may soon become common in the United States, too. With more people reaching old age without being married, with fewer children to provide care, and a more unhealthy and needy population in general, I think there will be more and more isolated and un-visited elderly people who turn up mummified or worse. The developmental perspective may provide tools for understanding what went wrong in Japan and avoiding it here.

Works cited

Berger, Kathleen Stassen “The Developing Person through the Life Span” Worth Publishers: New York, 2011.

Fackler, Martin “Japan, Checking on Its Oldest, Finds Many Gone” New York Times 14 Aug 2010. Website accessed 8 Dec 2011.

I hate when people talk about their dreams and hate when they then attempt to draw meaning or symbolism from them. So to punish everyone, here are two strange dreams I have had lately:

In one I tried to pull off a heist with two co-workers, but we were betrayed by one of them. She crashed her getaway vehicle, and since she was wedged in the metal of the vehicle I offered her the chance to get out so I could more comfortably choke her to death by crushing her trachea, which she helpfully did while the dream reel rolled.

In the other dream I was walking down a dark, wet corridor behind a zombie-like man. My goal was suddenly to hit him over the head with a hammer in order to sodomize his dead or dying corpse. I raised the hammer and struck him on his hard skull, and felt the impact in the dream. The only thing that could have made it creepier is if I woke up from this dream with the boner from hell, which I did.

Can’t say there was much "meaning" in the whole thing other than that I now sleep at odd hours, play too many video games, and have a preoccupation with the morbid and the grotesque.

My first purchase of 2012 (recorded faithfully in my notebook) was a Mello Yello Zero for $1.75. It was at 2 in the morning, at work. Looking back I found I had spent 4 bucks on Coke products in the previous 3 days. But I don’t even really like the stuff. It gave me a stomach ache. It is so bright green it almost glows. And the Coke Zeros and Diet Cokes I bought leave a gritty feeling in my mouth and, at 20 oz, are way too much to drink in one sitting. My dental hygienist says they give your teeth a "twenty-minute acid bath." Ain’t nobody want that!

So why do I keep buying that synthetic crap? Because it is ubiquitous, it is the default. Those fuckers – Coca-Cola Co. and their ilk – get my money simply by being around the corner, everywhere. They even have a credit card reader on the vending machine, which I have used several times. One of my co-workers wanted to take a picture of me using my card there because of the absurdity of it: it’s like there is NASA technology in place in order to get chumps like me to shell out their pocket change.

So fuck them. If it takes extra effort to avoid giving money to powerful hawkers of dyed sugar water and other such concoctions, so be it. It just takes some tools and planning (packing a lunch and a water bottle), some information (the scary-sounding "twenty-minute acid bath"), some motivation (my longer-than usual recovery from a recent cold and my desire to beat, kill, defile, dismember and eat Old Man Winter), some self-efficacy beliefs (I have always been someone people look to for health habits and have had stellar health in the past), and long-term support (people around me who also want to make healthy choices and are encouraged by me when I do). Fuck Coca-Cola and Chili’s and Applebee’s and Buffalo Wild Wings and PepsiCo and all the rest.

But not Starbucks. I like Starbucks.

I saw recently that Christopher Hitchens died of throat cancer. Very sad. I really liked several of his essays for GQ and was inspired by his Enlightenment thinking and the way he bulldogged for atheism, not making concessions, even for the soft forms of religious belief. What did they call him in the obituaries, anyway, a "public intellectual?" That sounds dumb. He was much more than that.

But another obit was more important to me personally. Lynn Margulis, who formulated the theory of bacterial endosymbiosis, died after a stroke. I remember learning about the theory when I was 12 or 13. Until around that time I had pursued a passionate but undisciplined interest in living things. It was at that age that I learned about the real stuff, the molecules of life and deep time and the mechanisms of evolution. As the theory goes (and it is now very much supported by the evidence), eukaryotic cells had their origin in an event where cells took on other cells that eventually functioned as organelles. The membranes of organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts are similar to bacterial cell membranes, and mitochondria even have their own genome that replicates independently of the larger cell’s chromosomes.

I even found a modern, clinical consequence of this theory, a diagram of which is posted on my fridge because it was so fascinating: researchers were wondering why crush injuries were often so severe and why the response to the injury is often worse than the trauma itself. They did some experiment (I can’t remember the design) where they found out that the mitochondria were triggering a host immune response from the mouse’s cells. It was as if the mouse’s cells were attacking an invader which had actually invaded two or three billion years previously. Essentially their defenses were raised by the prokaryotic components of their own cells. All very interesting.

For me bacterial endosymbiosis was my first Big Idea in the study of life, which I loved. Coincidentally, I remember (and will always remember) Carl Sagan describing his first Big Idea in astronomy as a boy: it was when he found out in a book that the Sun was actually just a nearby star, and the stars were just distant suns. Well, Lynn Margulis was married to Carl Sagan and had a kid with him. Funny coincidence.

As I glance at her Wikipedia page I find that she is apparently linked to some zany ideas that had alienated her from some of her colleagues, which is a common pattern in famous scientists. Also she is apparently not the first scientist to theorize about complex cells arising from symbioses between simpler cells, just the first to detail the theory and provide microscopical evidence of it.