Who's in control now?

The other day I was sitting, watching TV, full of food and feeling like there was no way I could possibly get up to make my lunch let alone go outside and walk around the block with the dog. It got me thinking, I'm not quite sure how but I started to wonder whether the mind or the body is in more control.

Most people are aware of the effects the brain can have over the physical body. Stress can cause people to loose hair, stop eating, or even have a heart attack. The placebo effect, a now common practice scientifically, is when someone shows marked signs of improvement from an illness when given medication they believe will work, though the medication they are given might be nothing more than sugar pills. Because the patient believes that the treatment will be beneficial they end up showing signs of progress.

On the other hand when one is paralyzed no matter how much they believe they may be be able to walk again or fantasize and dream about running in the fields they generally cannot will themselves to no longer be paralyzed. When we are asleep and dreaming no matter how hard we scream in our dream, most of the time our body will not awake out of the dream until our REM cycle has completed and our body has gotten the rest it needs. When our bones are broken only inactivity and rest can heal the physical.

If our body is destroyed there is nothing the mind can do but sit there. Conversely if s our imaginative abilities, rational sensors and/or emotional systems are destroyed we are deemed less than human, a vegetable, which in most cases results in ending a life that is believed to no longer be true life.

In reading various blogs and websites there were large arguments made for the mind being the true controller of all things human. We decide that we want to stand up and in those few milliseconds our brain sends signals down our arms telling them to push on the chair to stand up on our legs that have also been told by our brain to get ready for the imminent activity. But if those legs don't work doesn't that make everything the mind tries to achieve futile: in other words useless?

I'm not really sure there is an answer but I found it curious nonetheless. In reading one website a gentleman makes a diplomatic case (if we were to believe the two entities as opposing sides of an argument) that the two are inextricably linked and neither can function without the other. It seems to me that there have been cases where a person is breathing but in a coma with no higher brain function. Are they still human? And people continue to survive without the use of their limbs, thinking, creating and rationalizing with the rest of us. Are they truly human? I see his point, that the mind and the body work so closely with one another that you can't discredit one or give more credit to the other. Our bodies react to our emotions causing us to feel sick to our stomach or full of excited energy. Our brains get tired when our bodies are causing us to drone out in front of the television not really watching or listening.

I guess it's true that one cannot be without the other but it still made me wonder how much control my brain had over my body when I was in that food coma on the couch.


The Gentleman's article I referred to above is: http://ezinearticles.com/?Conceive,-Believe-and-Achieve---Mind-Over-Body,-or-Body-Over-Mind?&id=123040

A Responsible Kid at Last

The lunchboxes have arrived! And so much faster than the Stum (as my roommate will now be called) and I had expected. From now on we will be bringing our lunches in style. Admiring my lunchbox today I felt it was the best 15$ (including shipping and handling) I’ve spent in a very long time. In an effort to be frugal in these struggling times I have begun to cut frivolous costs, including, as some of you may have read, by bringing my lunch to school- I mean work.

I have a few money saving tips that in my opinion are helpful tools for keeping cash in the bank though they may be obvious or maybe I'm a fiscal genious. I'm gonna go with the former but in the spirit of blogging and putting ideas and such out there I'm going share what I've learned in my very few years as a responsible “adult”.

1. It is important to know your own economic limitations. My father always said that I should take a certain percentage of my paycheck and put it away in some kind of savings account. These days a good savings account is also one that accrues interest. Places like www.img.com have a 3% interest rate on their savings account, which can be opened by anyone at anytime online. What I mean by know your limitations is it's good to know how much you are receiving each month and how much you are spending. A lot of people (myself included) end up spending more than they are earning. What's hard, however is to know where the extraneous costs are.

2. I believe that it is worthwhile to have fewer credit cards thereby reducing your potential credit debt or spending more than you have (limitations!). Another good idea when it comes to credit cards is to always pay them in full and on time. In full so as to avoid interest rates on the left over amounts on your card and on time so that you don't damage your credit score. I find it's helpful to put a mental limit on how much money I spend on my credit cards each month and stop using the card once I've gotten to that limit (which sometimes happens early on in the month).

3. Now I pay off some of my bills on my credit cards automatically. It's important to track what those bills are and the activity of those bills. Recently I discovered that my cell phone bill was quite large, unnecessarily so. I was paying for more minutes that I ever used and features like early nights and weekends that were not needed when I had rollover minutes that were accumulating and not being touched. I immediately changed my phone bill to fewer minutes and a lower amount of dollars. Then I went back to my credit card bill and saw a charge for my gym. I haven't been to my gym in over 6 weeks and in being honest with myself I'm not sure when I'll be going back. I immediately contacted my gym and cancelled that sucker.

4. Finally, more words of fiscal wisdom from my father, don't set monetary boundaries that are unrealistic or become too stringent. Don't put away too much money for savings leaving you with not enough money to have a few small frivolities, like dinner and drinks with friends during the weekend or catching that new movie in theaters. You should always have some running around money, make it so that you don't limit yourself so much that you're having to say no to a lot of fun activities like dinner thereby making yourself more miserable if you were in debt.

Of course, there is a fine line between being prudent with your money and being frivolous. I don't think there is an exact science to it and everyone's patterns and behaviors are different and can differ from day to day and month to month. There are a few helpful blogs and websites that can give you further and more detailed tips for saving money on a daily and case by case basis like this one: http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2008/02/06/little-steps-100-great-tips-for-saving-money-for-those-just-getting-started/. It documents 100 different ways to save money from buying stuff for yourself to watching TV and buying gifts. This website is accredited and has a more organized list of ways to save: http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/your-money/2008/05/05/smart-money-saving-tips-you-need-now.html.

Of course my list is about the very basic stuff and again, probably common sense but it's good to share the wealth of sense that is floating around out there and in our heads.

Growing up Kids

I find that as a newly made responsible adult that I am constantly finding ways to revert back to my childhood, as many people in their early twenties and beyond constantly are. We buy gadgets to sublimate for toys. We join club sports leagues in place of after school games. And for many of us, like myself, who are on a limited income, we bring our lunch to work, instead of to the classroom.

Making my lunch becomes a nightly ritual that I have found somewhat enjoyable as I decide what I will eat the following day; how it will be a slight variation on the day or two days before. In an effort to to keep the excitement going while concurrently jumping back a decade in time, I have found myself scouring the web for lunch boxes. And not just any lunch boxes, metal lunch boxes of the "old school" variety with characters from a past life, where PBS was the highlight of my morning (and possibly my--at the time--stay at home father's as well).

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a perfect lunch box, though my roommate (who has recently joined the hourdes of lunch bringers) and I have certainly tried. Iming back and forth our favorites we wandered through the web looking for the right fit. So many of what we found were soft and "insulated", with sports team logos or just plain navy blue. It seems that both she and I agreed, we wanted metal, square and something from an era where Dora the explorer and Pixar were not even around yet.

What is fascinating is that she and I are not the only ones who are in the market for some old time fun. Websites like lunchboxes.com stay around probably for people who collect lunch boxes, a practice I find strange since they aren't the most attractive items. It made me wonder what the kids now-a-days carry their lunches in or if they are bred on the Kraft lunchables that were so popular and "cool" in my day. Do kids still trade items from their lunches or is everything now so delicious and processed that kids can get chubby and happy on their own foods?

One thing is for sure, whatever the kids are doing now, so many of us, I'm sure, can agree that we wish we were doing it too, instead of this daily grind we've been relegated to.

What we chose:

A Literati stuck in a digital Age

I'm new to the world of blogging. I've been a child of newspapers, books and magazines since before I can remember. I keep talking about how I aspire to be a journalist and when people ask me what kind of journalism I'd like to be in I immediately say Print. But print is a dying medium. The newspapers are going broke. People don't like the feel of the ink on their fingers or the trouble it takes to fold the New York Times over four times just to read one article, only to have to do it again to read another article on the next page five minutes later.

Frankly I've always found the idea of blogging self indulgent, like going to a psychiatrist. Though I do like talking to a shrink. It feels relieving unburdening all my problems onto someone else who probably won't tell me something I don't already know or who won't ask me a question I haven't heard before but having their Ph.Ds and MD diplomas in front of me makes me feel like my money is being justly spent by having someone "experienced" tell me what my problem is. And here I go again, ranting about what I feel. I just wonder who really cares about these opinions.

I said something very similiar to my roommate when I told her I was starting a blog and felt a little embarrased by it. She responded very quickly and rationally saying "It's no different from facebook or myspace where people are constantly posting how they feel one moment or what they did the next. What do you think all those status updates are for?" So here I am blogging with the best, or maybe just the rest, to flex my writing and cramp my fingers. My father said I should write down how I'm feeling for ten minuets a day, even if it's just to say that my stomach hurts and the dog took a big-- well you know-- outside. So in the spirit of self indulgance and narcism I've decide to write my thoughts down on the world wide web for, well, the whole world to read or not.