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.

I fell asleep on the bus yesterday and only woke up to the sound of the bus driver saying "last stop" over the loudspeaker. I rushed off the now-empty bus and realized I was a half mile beyond my destination. I’ve never been able to sleep on a city bus before but I sure did this time because I had a thick cotton hat on that allowed my to rest my head against the window without getting drain bramage and I have not been getting a lot of sleep this past week and this semester because of work and school.

This reminded me of when I read the phrase "sleep machismo" in reference to people’s attitude toward sleep as a low-priority activity, the first to lose out when there are other demands in one’s week. The author was some health professional who said that people are missing sleep at the expense of their health and not even knowing it.

But I know there are many adverse effects on my health and social life and do it anyway. I have been losing time to hang out with friends and family, losing opportunities to be outside in the sun and seasons, and absorbing some possible mental health problems that may be making me more depressed or negative. But it seems like a bargain I can reasonably take: I am getting done some necessary coursework for the next stage in my life, I am paying down tens of thousands in student loan debt, in other words, I am doing things that cannot wait. Maybe I can compensate with extra exercise and a healthy diet and with better time management. In other words there is no "machismo" involved, rather it is a sober accounting of the costs and benefits and a compromise between wellness and accomplishment, and between the future and the present.

Besides, as I have been learning, people who are resilient tend to view their current problems as a temporary hardship that will eventually be overcome with time and effort. Now I can worry about the process of "becoming," later I can enter the "being" phase.

One or two inches have fallen already. But that’s okay. I am ready for it and looking forward to skiing Theodore Wirth park and Elm Creek Park Reserve. I also want to check out the trails at Willow River State Park outside Hudson WI. They have some great hiking trails but I have never been there in the winter before. I am in better shape than I was last year and have more reason to get out since I have been so cooped up inside – at home reading all kinds of damn books and at work under fluorescent lights.

And today I biked to work under the falling snow with my thermal underwear and my headlamp and stopped for a sandwich on a bench on the Greenway and watched the cars go by on Highway 100. I should really get a mountain bike.

Also went to the Annex Teen Clinic benefit last night. I left pretty soon though. I don’t need to hear the oldies performed again. Not when I could be sleeping.

This class would suck if it weren’t so easy. A three-hour class every Tuesday morning. But even the professor cannot stand to go that long, so we usually get out after two hours. Actually the text is kind of interesting, in a fuzzy kind of way.

A Developmental Perspective on the "Parasite Singles" of Japan

In Japan the term "parasite single" became instantly popular in 1999 when it was first used to describe unmarried young people, primarily women, who live with their parents and remain dependent on them even after college (Orenstein 2001). Although the concept of stalled young adults is increasingly talked about in the U.S and Europe, Japan’s young adult situation has some interesting peculiarities. Bringing a biosocial, cognitive and psychosocial perspective on Japan’s parasite singles may help illuminate this issue in a way the media reports do not. After mentioning how these three domains are relevant to the parasite single issue, I will relate my own personal experience and then offer a final thought on how useful the developmental approach is in this discussion.

Biosocial
According to Berger, sexual desire, attractiveness and fertility is at its peak in emerging adulthood (2011, p. 488). But many of the parasite singles in interviews report that they have no intention of cutting short their fun. Although often employed in low-paying jobs, their entire income is disposable, and the young women interviewed report relishing their ability to spend lots of money on spa treatments and parties that they could no longer enjoy if they were mothers. One young woman said, "If I have my first child by the time I’m 35, that’s early enough" (Tolbert 2000).

Cognitive

Berger emphasizes dilemmas that emerging adults face. She says that emerging adults are no longer bound by the strictures of their parents’ life patterns, so they must make important choices on their own (2011, p. 504). This is especially evident in Japan’s parasite singles as they live in a household of traditional parental roles while avoiding such roles for themselves. In her article, Orenstein focuses on the ways in which they are protesting against the rigid gender roles of their parents’ generation, in which the woman must quit her job soon after marrying in order to care for her children and her emotionally distant, work-obsessed husband (2001).

Psychosocial

Berger emphasizes that friendships are especially crucial in emerging adulthood, and this is evident in the testimony of the female parasite singles interviewed by Orenstein (2001). Again and again, the young women talk of their desire to have the freedom to eat out with their female friends, go shopping together, and get new manicures and hairstyles at their leisure. They emphatically state that they want to live for themselves, identifying more with their friends than with their mothers, whom they may even pity in some ways (Orenstein 2001).

A personal experience

I also have gone through a "parasitic" phase. After graduating from college I was so depressed and so sick of school that I told my parents (whose approval I craved) that I was going to "take some time off." I could hardly bear their placid acceptance of this statement. Yet I took their offer to continue to pay my car insurance and cell phone bill while I worked a job that did not require a college degree, hung out as much as possible, and drank too much alcohol. Although I was living on my own, I still felt my life had stalled, so I cut back on the drinking, took on a more demanding work schedule and new responsibilities, and took the pre-requisite courses for my chosen graduate school program. If I could go back, I would have skipped those years of freedom altogether because they did not contribute to my life goals or happiness anyway. I believe I am happier when engaged, and I want to help others avoid being as careless with their time as I was.

A final thought

According to the biosocial perspective, parasite singles may be taking advantage of the best years of their life in order to enjoy close relationships with friends and to have adventures they would be forced to suppress if they had spouses and children. But on the other, their chances of having a safe pregnancy and starting a family later on may be reduced. Cognitively parasite singles are, understandably, not enthusiastic about adopting their parents’ lifestyles. But their own focus on their immediate gratification may be a form of irresponsible risk-taking in itself (also a danger of this phase of life, according to Berger). And psychosocially, parasite singles are devoting themselves to friends and selfhood instead of to the prescribed path of career and family, but an element of balance or "juggling" of the three realms may be lacking. All three of these life-span approaches are useful in discussing the parasite single phenomenon and in reflecting on my own post-college stagnation. I look forward to the point when the unfortunate term "parasite single" fades from use and we gain some real insights into the causes and consequences of stalled young adults for Japan and elsewhere.

Works cited

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

Orenstein, Peggy "Parasites in Prêt-à-Porter" New York Times Magazine 1 Jul 2001. Accessed online

Tolbert, Kathryn "Japan’s New Material Girls" Washington Post 10 Feb 2000 page A01. Accessed online

On the same note as the previous post, I think I could learn to be less dismissive, to remember that there are good times and bad times to be skeptical.

Recently a co-worker of mine told me about how he drank a single cup of coffee and it resulted in a nosebleed for hours. This same co-worker had made a number of highly questionable claims about health in previous conversations and he was prone to repeating scientific falsities that he had heard in the popular media or secondhand. So, I thought, this sounds implausible, but I will just listen and nod like I usually do.

Sure enough, later I looked into it, and it turns out that caffeine can cause people to have uncontrollable nosebleeds! I immediately felt guilty for dismissing my co-workers testimony. I was glad that I had not directly contradicted his claim, and I had been supportive and displayed interest in his story. But I still felt my skeptical attitude had been a little condescending. "Trust but verify" prevailed. Skepticism is a great tool for finding the truth but it should not prevent you from giving a person a fair hearing.