Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 513

Two new clinical studies find something that everyone already knew

The New York Times (and many other media outlets) have reported on two new randomized clinical trials published in The New England Journal of Medicine that found that removing sugary drinks from children’s diets slows weight gain in teenagers and reduces the odds that normal-weight children will become obese.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Though sodas, sports drinks, blended coffees and other high-calorie beverages have long been assumed to play a leading role in the nation’s obesity crisis, these studies are the first to show that consumption of sugary drinks is a direct cause of weight gain, experts said.

Perhaps these are the first studies to demonstrate these findings because up until now, researchers did not see the need to spend time and money studying something that everyone already knew.

Drinking calorie-laden sodas can make you fat? We needed a government-funded study to determine this?

I’m astounded that two separate teams of researchers found this topic compelling enough to invest time and money in order study, and I’m even more astounded that so many media outlets decided to report on this bit of obviousness.

Couldn’t the researchers simply looked at the nutrition label on a bottle of Coca-Cola and come to the same conclusion?

Wasn’t the mere existence of a product like Diet Coke proof enough that a product like Coke contributes to weight gain?  

Isn’t an standard of obviousness applied before the government agrees to fund a study that answers a question that everyone already knows the answer to?

What’s next? A study to prove that eating cheeseburgers and French fries can contribute to weight gain?

Another fan of Charlie’s feet

My wife thinks our son’s tiny feet are cute as hell.

She is not alone. Most women, and especially mothers, are surprisingly obsessed with baby feet. Charlie’s feet are often the first things that women ask to see when they meet my son for the first time. Women, including some I did not know, have even professed a disturbing desire to devour my son’s feet on more than one occasion. 

While I find Charlie’s feet perfectly acceptable, I do not find them uncommonly cute in any way.

They’re feet.

However, our cat seems to be siding with the ladies when it comes to Charlie’s feet.

My unglamorous self

The Hartford Courant ran a piece about me today. I have yet to purchase a newspaper, but my friend was kind enough to send me a photo of the story as it appears in the paper.

My favorite part of the piece is the photo of me writing at the table in all my unglamorous glory: sleeping baby at my feet, Big Gulp by my side, a table scattered with papers and toys and mail awaiting my attention. 

The next time someone tells me that they can only write in a coffee shop with their beverage of choice on a MacBook Air between the hours of 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM, I’m going to suggest that they be a little less precious about the time and location and method of writing and a little more precious about getting actual words on the page.

Adoption in exchange for a kidney would have been a viable option, at least for a while

In the United States, if your dog needs a kidney transplant, you can take one from a stray animal if you agree to adopt the stray.

I like this. It makes sense. I take great pleasure in logical solutions.

It also got me thinking that I might also be willing to donate a kidney if the right person would adopt me. I haven’t had the benefit of parental support for more than twenty years and am willing to take anything I can get.

In fact, it occurred to me while writing that last paragraph that I have been living without the support or safety net of parents for longer than I lived with it.

When I was twenty years old, my stepfather left my mother after failing to pay the mortgage for six months and only then informing her of their financial troubles. She found a note on the kitchen counter stating that he was leaving her and warning that the house would be foreclosed on within the month.

Having cashed in my mother’s monthly disability settlement for a back injury that occurred at work in order to fund my stepfather’s failed multi-level marketing business, my mother suddenly found herself penniless. She and my still teenage sister moved into an apartment in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and struggled to make ends meet until my mother’s muscular dystrophy made it impossible for her to work. At that point she went on Medicaid and moved into a housing complex for the elderly and disabled for the rest of her life.

Ten years later, she died while recovering from a bout of pneumonia at the age of 57.

Since the day that my mother found that note on the kitchen counter and lost our childhood home, I have lived without parental support of any kind.  With a mother trapped in abject poverty, a father who I had not seen for more than a decade and a stepfather who had proven himself to be an evil and despicable man, there was no longer anyone to lean on or anywhere to go if I was in trouble. This helps to explain my brief period of homelessness, my time spent sharing a room with a goat, my difficulties with the law and my long and rocky and utterly exhausting path to college.

When it comes to parental support, I have been on my own in every sense of the word for the past 21 years.

For many people, this scenario is unfathomable. While most of us will at some point suffer the loss of our parents, rarely do people find themselves without any parental support at the age of eighteen. Most of my friends, some almost twenty years older than me, still have at least one, and in most cases both parents still alive and actively involved in their lives.

I have friends who see their parents almost every day, eat dinner with their parents almost every evening, speak to their parents every day on the phone and have difficulty imagining how they would have survived in the world had they found themselves on their own at the age of eighteen, with no money, no home and no safety net of any kind.

They would have survived, of course, and probably thrived as I have. This is what people do. But it is much harder and much more frightening and considerably less joyous when you are doing it alone. My friends are blessed with support system that I never knew and can scarcely imagine.

They were sent to college by their parents, bailed out of financial trouble, provided with a home when it was needed, supported as they started families of their own, and blessed with the wisdom and counsel of a parent with far more experience than themselves.

In fact, data shows that nearly 60 percent of 23- to 25-year-olds report receiving some kind of financial assistance from their parents.

For me, I cannot imagine how it must feel to have parental support as an adult. Until meeting my wife, I have spent most of my adult life believing that I am standing on the edge of a cliff, capable of falling over into ruin at any moment. There was no one holding me back, no one ready to catch me if I fell, and no one willing to pull me back up if I had survived the fall.

While the strength and independence that I have developed as a result of being on my own has been a blessing, I think I would trade it all in for a set of capable, supportive parents.

Even one would’ve been nice.

So while I am joking when I say I would donate a kidney in exchange for being adopted, I am only half-joking. I see the relationships that my friends have with their parents today and I ache for what I have never known. I often find myself consumed by longing, sadness and envy when I see and hear the myriad of ways that my friends’ lives are changed for the better thanks to the guiding and stabilizing hand of a parent.

Still, I know that I am lucky. Though I continue to feel like I am standing on the edge of a cliff, I have my wife, my friends and my family supporting me. While it is certainly not the same as having your parents involved and invested in your life, it is a blessing nonetheless. 

But had someone offered the twenty or even thirty year old version of me the opportunity to be adopted in exchange for a kidney, I might have jumped at the chance.

I’m almost certain that I would have.

First laughs

The boy has started to laugh. It’s the best thing.

Killing machines

Watching this video made me realize that human beings have been constantly and consistently killing each other in organized fashion for hundreds of years, and at an astonishing rate.

I can’t believe that I haven’t found myself in the midst of a battle yet.

Italians did good.

The Italian cover of MEMOIRS OF AN IMAGARY FRIEND, retitled IMAGINARY FRIEND, has been released.

I like it a lot. You?

Unfair assumption #1

In an effort to be more aware of my own prejudices and biases, I have begun examining some of my potentially less-than-fair assumptions about people and life.

I’ll be posting them here from time to time.

Please note that these are not necessarily unfair but potentially so. I’m only admitting to the possibility that I am wrong.  

Here’s the first:

It’s probably unfair, but I can’t help but think that the larger a man’s watch, the smaller his personal sense of self worth.

That man from Nantucket is seriously profane.

For twenty years or more, I have listened to people in movies and on television begin reciting the limerick “There Once Was a Man from Nantucket” and then stop after the first line and laugh, acknowledging that the next lines contained profanity of some kind.

Oddly enough, I had never bothered to look for the rest of the limerick, at first because the Internet did not exist so finding it would have been difficult, but after that for reasons I can’t imagine.

I’ve always adored poetry, even in the limerick form, and I’ve also been interested in the ways in which society deems a word to be profane. I believe that declaring a word profane only serves to give it power, and though I rarely use profanity in my own life (and almost never in the written form unless it’s coming from the mouth of a character), I yearn for the day when the idea that any word is profane ends.

Despite this perfect combination of poetry and profanity, I had never taken the time to find the limerick about the woman from Nantucket and read the final four lines.

After hearing the limerick referenced yet again on a podcast yesterday, I finally decided to find and read the entire limerick. The original version of the limerick goes like this:

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

I actually like it. It’s fairly clever as limericks go.

Then there is the dirty version of this limerick, which is honestly too dirty for me to post here. I thought it might contain a four letter word or two, but the entire limerick is profane and suggestive in a way that I could not have imagined.

You can read it for yourself on Wikipedia, but if you are easily offended, you might be better off remaining as blissfully unaware as I was until about five minutes ago.

I may be opposed to profanity, but there was good reason why I had never heard or read the limerick until today.

Every time you watch this video, you’ll see something new.

I can’t get enough of this video. The people, the movement, the assortment of objects the background.

It’s utterly fascinating.