I sat down to a meal with my family, and the inevitable topic of personal health came up.  With a vocal minority of health professionals, one has to take care around my family when bringing up any subject that could be remotely tied in with the medical field.  Charred foods evoke carcinogens in food, outsourcing IT jobs turns to the booming medical tourism in India, the cotton in my t-shirt ends up in a conversation about weight loss, and weight loss dovetails (without fail) into weight loss surgery.

Mom’s lot in life is working in an inner-city county hospital.  In recent years, she’s noticed a shrinking amount of heart-surgeries in favor for “preventative” gastric bypass or stomach banding procedures, and increased cases of strokes an brain aneurysms.

“Get your headaches checked out. If there’s a clot and they can’t *coil that, you don’t have long to live.” — Mom.

She says this as I stuff another piece of chinese roast pork belly in my mouth, increasing the cholesterol that latches onto the walls of my blood vessels, thereby creating a perfect net to catch a blood clot.  Mom then passed her hand over my head, just barely grazing my hair as if to show me where the deadly blood clot will burst in my brain. This disturbing move is just like the time when she gently traced my ear to show where cancer would form if you talked on a cell phone for hours on end.

“I’ve seen young kids… with cancer right along here.” –Mom

Just as I get over mom’s spooky prophecy:

1. I developed a headache yesterday which continues today. [I'm writing this with the concern that I don't keep aspirin in my desk as an emergency blood thinner that will sustain me in case I need to be rushed to the hospital]
2. Someone forwarded me a chain e-mail of how to identify if someone is having a stroke.
3. My iTunes playlist played a podcast interview with Jill Bolte Taylor about how she, as a brain scientist, experienced her stroke.

My take away: the universe is agreeing with my mom, and I’m going to have a stroke… or it’s all in my head.

* coil = coil embolization

I have a prejudice against Las Vegas. There’s the “something for nothing” attitude and all of that excess which goes against all the hard-earned money ethos that was hammered into me by my parents.  So, when Snuff and I were talking about a our friend’s honeymoon plans, I got defensive… in my own passive aggressive way.

Me: “Las Vegas? How cliche.”
Snuff: “What do you want? She’s 100% Polish (American) and he’s 100% Italian (American) where else would they go?”
Me: “Austria?”

I inherited a certain frugality which I didn’t think was all too sensible until I started shopping for myself; I don’t carry around a change purse like mom does. I’m not worried about being cheated; I was horrified to find a certain generation of Dutch people counting up the contents of their wallet before and after paying for anything.  My desire to avoid bringing out the stinginess of my dining companions outweighs the scrutiny of splitting up a dinner bill.

My money hang up is about pennies, they are a fun challenge to spend and paying cash helps me stick to a budget.  For those shops that I deem cash-only I make sure I have four pennies to ensure that I don’t receive pennies back as change.  Please, if you do not understand why I carry around four pennies or do not understand consumer math, you can stop reading this blog post now.

Scenario 1

Bill:  $14.19  – I tender $20.04.  Expected change $5.85

Here’s the unintentional grift.  When handing the pennies over to the cashier, one penny manages to drop and fall into the checkout conveyor belt.  Feeling bad, the cashier fishes out a dime from his own pocket and enters that I paid $20.13. I received $5.94.  A profit of$0.09

Scenario 2

Bill $13.67 – I tender $20.02.  Expected change $6.35

This one is a just a bit more dishonest.  I originally handed over $20.02.  I then realized that I had $0.67 and thought of handing it to the cashier but since she was already going through the till, I said “never mind” unknowingly setting off the grift.

The receipt officially says $13.67 billed, $20 tendered.  $6.33 is handed back to me and I asked why I got pennies back.  The cashier assumed that “never mind” applied to the two cents I handed her.

Apologetically, she hands back the two cents AS WELL AS $0.35,  completely forgetting that she already handed me $0.33.  A total of $6.70, a profit of $0.45

It’s becomes apparent around this time of year, at least at this latitude, that things are grim.  I start my day commuting in the dark, look out my office window to see grey skies, then trudge home in the dark.  My disorder does not stem from the lack of sunlight though… at least not directly.

The lack of sun plus the hard freeze leaves us depending on cold frame, hot-house, or imported produce.  Some of us don’t think twice about buying summer foods in winter like tomatoes, corn, and melon.  Others, who have a passion for eating seasonally grown food and patronizing local farmers are called locavores [ link ].  Failing that, those people who like the notion of eating local foods and are unable to find local growers, are encouraged to eat organic.

I realize that foods are most delicious at the height of their season, but ensuring proper provisions for the winter months requires canning.  The notion of fetching a jar of home grown something-or-other from the basement is delightful, but the last thing I want to do is give myself botulism.  As for practicing local or organic, take last night’s dinner:

Red-leaf lettuce and watercress salad (Mexico)
Mussels (Canada) with tomato (Florida hot-house)
Lemon (Chile) Spaghetti and Parma cheese (Italy)
Strawberries (Florida hot-house)

None of it local, none of it organic, and if we were counting the carbon food-miles, it’s a nightmare.

I don’t want to feel guilty, but therein lies the disorder.  We now have this responsibility laid upon us to eat well for ourselves, the well-being of the local economy, and the health of the planet.  Happily in the first world we can over analyze to think of a strategy for all of our neuroses and excesses.  The third world and industrializing nations have people out there are looking for clean water and food to buy let alone worrying about where it came from.

Food for thought? To me it’s food to agonize over… and don’t get me started on the politics of coffee.