Happy nineteen eighty-twenty-seven everybody!
Top news story of the year so far: kids are too excited about reading!
Now the time-honored tradition on the occasion of the New Year is to make resolutions to eat better, excercise more, be kinder to acquaintances, spend more time with family, focus on work, stop sweating the small stuff, pay attention to detail and other impractical, contradictory and cliched goals. These resolutions are then generally broken by, well, today. In any case, I have decided to explore the possibilities contained within this new leaf concept. My first assertion, based on little other than that last metaphor, is that resolutions might be best left for the spring. But that's a little too facile, so let's not short-circuit this before we get any lightbulbs.
My first thought, in terms of resolutions, was very much along the traditional diet-and-exercise lines. This type of resolution is a real John Travolta of a tripple-threat: it promises to extend your life, increase your health and energy now and give you something to bitch about with everyone else who is failing at their diet-and-exercise resolution. And if it ends up a flop some time after the fourth or fifth major feature, it promises to come back in a new and fatter iteration sometime down the line.
So let's hit up diet first. I'm already a failed vegitarian of some sort, so that's not really a new leaf so much as a slowly composting one. I thought about becoming a stronger sort of vegitarian, giving up eggs or dairy or both, especially after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, which made commercial egg production sound much worse than I imagined. However, Michael Pollan also convinced me that veganism doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
His argument runs something like this: if everyone was a vegan, no cows, chickens etc would be raised, and because they cannot survive in the wild, they will go extinct. In other words, veganism evades the crime of killing an animal by committing the crime of extinting a species. There is a problem with this argument; a very big one. It falls pray to a universality fallicy. If everyone in the world was a vegan, chickens would probably go extinct because they don't make good pets and noone would be raising them for meat or eggs. However, if even 1% of the population continued to eat eggs and meat, they would continue to raise chickens and things would be fine. In any case, something like 4% of the population is vegitarian and something like 4% of them are vegan, so the problem of vegans causing the extinction of chickens is not imminent.
The stronger case against veganism, to my mind, is contained within Pollan's extinction argument, as well as other places in his book (which I strongly recommend, by the way, as long as you don't mind ruining McDo for yourself). It runs something like this: humans are naturally omnivores, this is evidenced by the facts that we have multi-function teeth, big brains and can't make vitamin B12 for ourselves. The case is presented that cows are generally healthier (both for themselves and for us to eat) when they are allowed to behave like cows rather than meat factories. Likewiswe with pigs. Likewise with grass (which works much better as a polyculture, even for the purpose of making ethanol). So it is fair to assume that humans are healthiest, and probably best for their environment, as omnivores. So long, that is, as they treat their cows like cows and their chickens like chickens and so on. That does not mean factory farming but it does mean farming: these species have evolved to the point where that is their natural environment. Things are healthiest when cows are allowed to be cows and humans are allowed to be humans.
Finally, there is the koala argument. Apparently koalas have a head that is much bigger than their brain, which means that they probably used to be omnivores and required a bigger brain, but now that they only eat eucalyptus, they have tiny little brains. So, while vegitarians are smarter, they are not smarter because they don't eat meat, they don't eat meat because they are smarter (they are also more likely to be female). So there is the possibility that over generations, vegans eating only corn and soy would develop smaller brains than omnivores and become sub-human. Then again, I doubt the intelligence of anyone who consumes only a few foods by choice.
So veganism is out. And I don't really need to loose weight, I'm more concerned with developing habits to prevent future weight gains, so I don't really need any extreme diets (btw, people on diets are more likely to be fat, but this again is a selection bias). So I decided my goal for this year is to cure myself of some of my eating-when-bored-or-tired habits. These include, but are not limited to, eating late at night, taking multiple helpings when I'm not really hungry and pretty much any time I eat cereal. My reading has also indicated to me that most cereals are pretty far from actually being food, so that seems like a good type of thing to cut out. I mean, grape nuts and bran flakes are fine, but anything with more than about six ingredients is probably just processed corn. So I decided to stop eating after 9 pm and stop taking multiple helpings at meals. This has the added benifit of meaning that I will be more genuinely hungry for snacks which, along with naps, are about the greatest invention ever. On a more emotional level, I've decided to encourage myself to enjoy that slightly hungry feeling.
Well, so far I've already broken both the 9 pm thing and the second helpings. Two nights ago I had about six slices of pizza between 9 and 11 for exactly the reasons I'm trying to avoid. Yesterday, I had too helpings of a dinner that really wasn't good enough to merit being over-full. So I'm 2 for 2 and it's been 2 days. Good start to the year.
I'm pretty good about exercise as well, so I'm not entirely sure how badly I need a resolution in this department. I've come to recognize the fact that I feel much better when I get out for a run or do some yoga, and I'm pretty good at getting in three or four days a week. I've gotten a little bit worse about stretching, which happens every winter (stretching cold is no fun and probably not great for your muscles anyway), plus I'm nursing a knee injury that makes some stretches unadvisable. But I would like to get back into my better flexability by the end of the spring. In fact, I'm starting to think that this sort of long-term goal may be a better idea for an exercise resolution. You know, something like I want to be able to run five miles in fourty minutes by the end of the year. So I'm thinking, in view of my tentative plans to do something hardass this summer that I want to be in good shape before I go rather than getting in shape along the way. That's pretty general and yet pretty specific. And doable. Maybe that's not such a good thing...
And of course, there are the other categories of resolutions. Get organized, be optimistic and such. For example, I might make a resolution to always post my blog on time. That seems like a pretty safe one, because I know I'll break it by the second month of the year. In fact, I'm starting to think that keeping a resolution might be more dangerous than breaking one.
See, apparently free will is somewhat of an illusion, something we construct for ourselves after the fact. We are monkeys riding tigers and coming up with justifications for where they go. If we keep our resolutions, doesn't that just mean that the monkey is becoming more convinced that he's actually in control? Sounds a little dangerous to me. I definately get the feeling that I'm being taken for a ride when, at 11 oclock I head for the third peice of cake. Also, we apparently remember regret better than we remember guilt. So maybe my resolution for the year is to enjoy the ride, the six peices of pizza and my monkey chagrin.
