Fitbit(e) Me

Some consumer product fads are harmless.  Pet rocks.  Rubik’s cubes.  Bottled water.  Wait, check that, I’m being told that bottled water is still a multi-billion dollar industry…..go figure.

Regardless, I’ve been waiting in the weeds to complain about a new product fad that began as harmless, but has morphed into an annoying pastime for some.  It involves the Fitbit.

For the un-indoctrinated, a Fitbit is a wearable product (basically like a wristwatch) that uses sensors and wireless technology to calculate how much a person moves in a prescribed time.  While there are plenty of competitors (such as the Apple Watch), Fitbit has developed tremendous brand-awareness and loyalty, and has a big lead in this space.

There’s nothing wrong with the Fitbit, nor with the consumer ‘need’ that the Fitbit tries to address for people.  That is, give them motivation to live a more active lifestyle.  If monitoring the number of steps taken daily, along with distance and time does that for people, that’s great.  Fitter human beings benefit not only that person, but society in general.

The problem is not the Fitbit.  The problem is Fitbit users who consistently believe they must tell everyone else how much they’ve moved.  I’m beginning to think the Fitbit user manual carries a warning message claiming the Fitbit will self-destruct if the wearer doesn’t immediately announce their daily (or more frequent) fitness results to those within shouting distance.

Hey Fitbit users:  The rest of us are happy that a consumer product has made you more fitness-aware.  We just don’t want to hear about it every damn time you’re around us.  You might want to assume that some of us are doing a lot more than you are to stay fit, we simply aren’t publicizing it.  Also, I would caution Fitbit users to remember the importance of diet in overall health – but please, you don’t have to tell the rest of us your daily fresh vegetable or yogurt intake, either.

By definition, fads come and go, and that’s especially true with fitness and diet crazes.  Only time will tell whether the Fitbit is a fad.  In the meantime, let’s at least agree not to talk about it.

The Real Mad Men

Not so long ago, I wrote about how much I enjoyed reading non-fiction books by Dave Barry.  He published a new humor book recently, titled Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster).  I got the book for Father's Day, and just finished it.

While it was another laugh out loud collection of essays, I was particularly interested in a section where Barry got semi-serious.  In a chapter titled The Real Mad Men, he wrote about how the parents of the Baby Boom generation lived their lives and raised their children differently from us modern parents.

He makes fun of how much today's parents coddle their children and worry about things, compared to how their parents rolled with the punches.  He makes the predictable comparisons in areas like sports ["If a kid played a sport, they might go to the games, but they didn't complain to the coach.....or make fools of themselves by getting into fights with other parents or screaming at the referee.  It just wasn't that big a deal to them.  It was kids paying games."] and education ["They found out how their child was doing when the child brought home a report card.....if the grades were bad, they didn't march into the school and complain that the school had failed their child.....they told their child to shape up, and they maybe even gave their child a smack on the back of the head."].

But at the end of the chapter, he makes this summary that should be required reading for most of today's parents:  "I'm not saying my parents' generation didn't give a crap.  I'm saying they gave a crap mainly about big things, like providing food and shelter.  Whereas we modern parents.....never stop parenting, making sure [kids] get whatever they want, removing obstacles from their path, solving their problems and worrying about what else will go wrong, so we can fix it for them.  Yes, we've gotten really, really good at parenting, we Boomers.  This is fortunate, because for some inexplicable reason a lot of our kids seem to have trouble getting a foothold in adult life, which is why so many of them are sill living with us at age thirty-seven."

"They're lucky they have us around."

RAGBRAI - 2015 Edition

This year I was only able to fit in one day of riding on the Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI).  Instead of the last year or two, I rode 100 miles in a single day rather than over two days, from Fort Dodge to Eldora.

My 2015 observations:

* We need more bandwidth!  Cell phones worked OK on LTE out in the country, but in the small towns where everybody stopped, there was no data going in or out.  You'd think RAGBRAI and its vendors would find a way to end the data gridlock.

* There was a significant delay on the ride due to two bridges being under construction within a couple of miles of each other.  This is unacceptable to any veteran of the ride.  We know RAGBRAI is supposed to work with the Iowa Department of Transportation to make sure the route doesn't run into this kind of thing.

* It can get a little lonely on the extra 25 mile loop that allowed for this year's optional 100 mile day.  I've done that three times now, and it helps to have someone else with you.  Unlike the regular route, there are few riders and almost no organized places to stop along the road.

* Still hard to find church-stand fruit pie on the ride.  But I did, a fine slice of apple pie.  There were several other varieties, but again saw no pineapple pie this year.

* The usual big corporate food vendors were there (Farm Boys, Mr. Pork Chop, Tom Tenders, Beekman's Ice Cream), but the biggest crowd I saw by far was at the new Iowa Craft Beer Tent.  Rumor is that it drew the largest crowds all week.

* Drones!  Saw drones overhead capturing video of the ride in a few different towns.  It would make for a good chamber of commerce presentation.

* Best jersey seen this year goes to Team Good Beer.  Nothing special about the name, but they had lederhosen-style jerseys, which were awesome.

You Have A Tumor

In July of 2000, after a few months searching for answers about chronic fatigue and stiffness in my legs, I got a call from my family physician.  It was obvious this was no ordinary call; it was Sunday morning around 9 A.M.

After a quick exchange of pleasantries, I will always remembers her next words:  "You have a tumor."  I will never remember much about the rest of the call, beyond being told to go to the hospital later to visit with a neurosurgeon she recommended to me.

In short, I had surgery a few days later to remove a spinal tumor.  Although the pathology was not confirmed for a couple of weeks, it was later determined to be a benign ependymoma.

Today, July 14, 2015, marks the 15th anniversary of that surgery, the only in-patient surgery I've ever had so far, and hopefully the only one I'll ever have.  Several weeks later, it was followed by a six-week course of preventative radiation therapy, which I know I'll never have again.

I don't want to write much about it, I don't even want to talk much about it, but it's a good time for me to look back and consider the lasting impressions I have now:

• There is no not being scared when you are told you have a tumor.  It doesn't help for others to tell you it's going to be fine.  However, one thing that does somewhat mitigate the fear is drugs, in my case Xanax, which has a way of making you not care about things even though you know they are very serious.  This remains the only time I've ever taken something like Xanax, but I can understand how and why people get addicted to it.

• The internet is an incredibly distracting, mentally exhausting resource for looking up health issues.  It's 50/50 to me whether it was (is) a good thing or a bad thing.  But what might help is to find someone else who's been through what you're going to go through.  I wish I would have known someone else in my situation, someone who might have given credible advice.  Unfortunately, it was kind of a rare deal, so much that the internet didn't even help.

• When someone is going through a recovery and/or long-term oncology-type treatment, send them a card sometime.  Misery loves company, even when the company isn't as miserable as you.  It's just good to know that others haven't forgotten about what not only you, but also your family, are going through.

• Don't act in such a hurried or fearful way that you make non-emergency medical decisions without getting a second opinion.  I didn't, and although I feel like I had a good surgeon and a good outcome, in retrospect, I'd have gotten a second opinion on both the surgery and especially on the preventative radiation therapy.

• There wasn't anything good about this tumor/surgery/treatment, but if I had to pick something, it's that I no longer care about aging.  In fact, I've considered every birthday in the past 15 years to be a gift.  Health is a gift.  Age is a gift.  Too bad I had to spend a few weeks thinking about dying young before I figured that out.

What's In A Name

Years ago, one of my kids was talking to a friend, who was trying to remember my name.  She couldn’t come up with it, and eventually she said that it was "some old guy’s name.”  And so it was that I first recall ‘Bill’ being called an old guy’s name.

For reasons unknown, I always remembered that story.  My given name is William, and I certainly have other options for an everyday nickname, including Will, or the more contemporary Liam.  (But not Billy, I already went through that phase as a child.)

So in the past year or so, after reading that the name Liam was the #1 name for newborn boys in Iowa for the past two years, I’ve been jokingly(?) asking folks to call me Liam, because Bill is an old guy’s name and I’m still a young guy.

This Liam thing is starting to catch on.  So I'm telling people.

If I simply don’t respond to Bill, by chance or by choice, I can always correct the person by saying I don’t recognize Bill anymore, only Liam.  Of course, this isn’t entirely true – because I’ll also go with Will.  I often use Will instead of Liam when asked for a name at a casual/fast food restaurant.

Name versatility.  It allows you to go from a young guy to an old guy and back to a young guy.

Vehicle vs. Pedestrian, Redux

Today, I'm writing about a simple change in behavior that will save hundreds, if not thousands, of human lives each year.  It requires no change in the law, and no government or private money to implement.

Here it is:  Show some humility when crossing a street at a non-electronically controlled intersection, look both ways, and yield to the traffic instead of thinking it should yield to you.

I actually touched on this idea in a blog post about six years ago.  Unfortunately, it hasn't caught on.  I'm constantly amazed at how many people enter nonchalantly into uncontrolled (or not stop-lighted) crosswalks, seemingly without regard to the thousand pound steel cannonballs converging on them.  It just happened to me the other day, when a fat man and his dog crossed in front of me without so much as a glance.

Maybe it's just me (it isn't), but when I'm driving, I'm not paying that much attention to a poorly marked pedestrian crossing.  It's just another set of faded white lines.  I'm a lot more worried about the other vehicular traffic around me.  Hell, I'm at least as worried about avoiding potholes, which is in essence me saying I care as much about pavement conditions as I do about crosswalk conditions.

Sure, I know that a pedestrian supposedly has the right of way in a crosswalk.  But in the end, that is a specious argument.  What does that matter?  If my vehicle accidentally hits a clueless pedestrian, I might get a ticket, perhaps worse, but they might be permanently disabled or dead.  Who made out worse?

Given the no-win nature of this outcome, why do pedestrians continue to think it's OK to cross a street without taking the minimal precaution of looking both ways?  I know people aren't raised that way, so what makes them change?

Perhaps this is too broad of a conclusion, but I think today's 'look at me, I'm important' reality show / social media-based culture plays at least a minor role.  You know, the culture in which I'm supposed to care more about what you're doing than I am about what I'm doing.

Please.  In the meeting between vehicle and pedestrian, vehicle always wins.  Do yourself a favor, show some humility, and look both ways before crossing any street.

Coffee And Doughnuts (And Terrorists)

I don't understand coffee and doughnuts.

Oh, I know what they are, I just don't understand the people who are willing to buy and consume them.  Let me explain.

I recently met a colleague at a local Starbucks (his choice, not mine, I don't drink coffee).  I got there around 10am, and during the next hour, I observed a steady stream of customers walk through the door.  There were men and women of all ages, some dressed for work, some clearly not working.  If I had to categorize them under one group, I suppose I'd say they were upper-middle class Caucasians.

These customers all had one other thing in common:  They were perfectly willing to pay several dollars for a cup of heavily sweetened, coffee bean-flavored hot water.  No doubt, this same thing was going on in thousands of other coffee shops in America, and perhaps every other country in the developed world.

This is why the terrorists hate us.  We live in a society where people are willing and able to spend hundreds / thousands of dollars every year on foo-foo coffee.  In the meantime, there is human suffering occurring in the U.S., and especially in the rest of the world.  Make no mistake, the terrorists don't intend to lessen the suffering, they simply want everyone else to suffer like them.  (Oh, and there's that religious thing, too.)

I don't blame Starbucks for any of this.  They are branding geniuses, able to get consumers to not only feel good about paying a lot for something unhealthy, but to also get those folks to waste the equivalent of many hours per year to stand in line for it!  As a capitalist, I say props to them.

I observed this same sort of hypnotic consumer behavior a few days ago at another brand name juggernaut, Krispy Kreme.  They were giving away free doughnuts on National Doughnut Day (yup, that's a thing), and the line reportedly when around the block for hours.  All of this for an unhealthy, warm, super-sugary blob of dough.  At least people weren't paying for it that day, which accounts for why I presume the crowd to have been made up of all economic classes and ethnicity.

So let's recap.  Starbucks and Krisy Kreme = admirable brand name juggernauts.  Their customers = free-spending hypnotized calorie consumers.  Coffee and doughnuts = super-expensive comfort food.  Terrorists = still and always a-holes.