Junk Food as Heroin?

I knew there was a reason I couldn't stop eating those cookies

The ONLY way is to love yourself. It's taken a while, but I think I'm finally figuring it out.

Are People Altruistic? Economic Quandaries Abound

Here's an excerpt posted in the NY Times from the author of Freakonomics’ new book, Superfreakonomics.

I want this book!!

Love

Do you ever feel filled with love for the people around you? Filled with goodness and you want to harness it somehow? It’s like raw energy that flows out of you and you don’t want to let it escape, like heat, but you don’t know how to keep it around. You want to take that palpable affection towards these people, this empathy you can almost touch, and cling to it, hang on to it. Maybe you could put it into something.  Like a poem or an essay or some other set of words that somehow lets you hang onto that energy for awhile longer, lets you keep some of it close…

It’s bound to drift off in the end but sometimes you just need to do something with it…

Recipes for Happiness

When I was little, I would sometimes wonder why poor people don’t all just jump out the window. It sounds terrible, but I mean, really. Say you live in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. You’re a woman, so you don’t get much to eat, you work long hours in a garment factory, and hygiene and sanitation is terrible. I used to think: how on earth could you find happiness??

Maybe I’ve just moved beyond my fifteen-year-old angst, but in recent years I have come to understand and more fully appreciate how people manage to be happy in many kinds of lives.

I’m not saying that poor Bangladeshi women live easy, wonderful lives, or anything near that, but what I do want to emphasize is that humans have ways of dealing with hardship than those of us who lead cushy lives often struggle to understand.

Perhaps I should only speak for myself, but I have spent a lot of years of my life wishing that things were different and feeling sure that it was impossible to be happy in my present situation. In fourth grade, I was convinced my life would be drastically better if I could get new brown Sketchers’ shoes for my school uniform. In seventh grade, I was sure life would do a one-eighty if I made A-team soccer. In ninth grade, I was sure if my face were prettier I would be happy. In eleventh grade, I positively itched to get away to college.

Last spring, my psych professor Barry Schwartz gave a new perspective on the whole happiness thing and on why I had spent so much of my (at least adolescent) life dissatisfied. Opponent-Process Theory basically explains that emotions work in pairs and vary around a neutral point, and when we feel one emotion it is because that emotion has temporarily suppressed the other. So if you feel something really good, you’ll later experience a really bad feeling; and if you experience something sort of good, you’ll later have a sort of bad feeling. But the more you have a feeling, good or bad, the less strong it is, and the stronger the following reaction is. This explains everything from why sky-diving is more fun the more you do it (the more you do it, the less the “bad” overwhelms the “good”), to why people become increasingly dependent on drugs (in this case, with time the “good” overwhelms the “bad” less and less).

For me, this theory shed some light on how to (and how I had) escaped the death-grip of chronic dissatisfaction. First of all, it explained how people who have so little can be so happy. They experience a low, and that low might be something absolutely terrible, but with time it feels less and less bad, and thus with time the good feelings that follow becomes stronger and stronger. Secondly, this theory explains some of the ways that I think I’ve (completely unintentionally) managed to change my own enjoyment of life. I think that I seek out bigger challenges now, so that after bouts of hardship, I will reap their greater rewards. Like running six miles. Or up and moving to a foreign country where I don’t speak the language. Both of those are hard things that make you feel amazing after you’ve done them.

I’m not saying that everybody should go out setting up hardships for themselves. Some people thrive on that (me, to a certain extent) and others just don’t. What I do think, though, is that by keeping this in mind – that every good will follow a bad – you’ll maybe be able to help yourself get through a rough time or two.

Roots

When I think about why I came to Bangladesh, there’s a whole host of reasons that I can easily explain. Get some experience by doing an internship, learn a language, spend some time with family, learn more about the world, get some time away from the Swarthmore Bubble. And that’s all well and true, but there’s another X factor that I can’t quite figure out what to make of: get in touch with my roots.

It sounds like bullshit, right? “Get in touch with my roots.” I imagine myself as some barefoot, long-haired hippie digging my toes into the mossy ground near a big tree with family names hanging from its branches instead of leaves. “Get in touch with my roots.” What does that mean, anyways?

The best explanation I can think of is that I’d like to discover things from my genetic past and make them more fully a part of myself. I’d like to be comfortable in the same places and languages that my ancestors lived in and spoke.

Here’s the thing, though. Sometimes I really wonder whether my desire to connect with this past is actually legitimate. I mean, I have Bengali blood. But when I’m having a bad day, I tend to wonder: does that mean that I am actually a Bengali?

My liberal education, plus my experience living in Argentina, have made me understand that most of who we are is formed by the culture we live in. That’s why I consider myself Argentine, even though I don’t have a drop of Argentine blood in me: because Argentina became home. I'm not going to lie, though: I think I was able to feel Argentine because I look Argentine. I guess what I’m trying to do here is to get to those “roots” by making Bangladesh more of a home, as well. The only problem is, I will never look Bengali.

So maybe I have no right to be here. Maybe I don’t belong, and maybe I never even will, as much as I try and as much as I want it. All I can say is that there is something that pulls me back here, and as green as my eyes and pasty as my hands are, I know that it will keep pulling me and I will keep coming back.

Gym Stalkers and Other Cultural Musings

So I have a stalker.

Round, short, and jolly, she might not fit the usual stereotype for stalker, but hoh-boy, let me tell you. One day at the gym I was innocently pedaling away on the stationary bike, reading a book, when I saw someone waving furiously at me from the elliptical, trying to get my attention.

When the girl saw I had looked at her, she called to me, “Asho! Asho!” meaning ‘come here,’ and waved her hand even harder. A bit confused, I said, “Pore, ami pore jabo,” which means “I’ll go later.” I continued to bike away, and thought to myself, who does that? Who asks somebody to come over who you haven’t even met yet??

Needless to say, I didn’t go over to her, and after a few minutes she waddled over to me, and so began our one-sided friendship. When I’m at the gym, she shows me pictures of her boyfriend, unbidden stuffs her headphones into my ears so I can listen to whatever song is playing, invites me to her house, follows me from one set of equipment to the next, and, slightly creepily, comments on my “beautiful face” and “beautiful body.” She’s called a bunch of times in the evening, and the next day demands why I didn’t answer her calls.

I really don’t go much to the gym anymore.

It’s not that I don’t want to make friends. Let me clarify: first of all, I’m convinced that she wants to be my friend only because I have light skin and green eyes, which quite frankly is not exactly the basis I want any new friendship to be based on. Secondly, there are some places where I’d like to just get time to relax with my own thoughts, music, or a book.

I have always known, but am now in Bangladesh coming to more fully understand, that that notion of “my own,” is a very US idea. Here, as I’m sure is the case in many Asian cultures, your time is not your own, your things are not your own, and even your body is not fully your own. Even the way you say that you “have” something lends to this in Bengali: for example you would say “Amar boi acche” to say “I have a book,” which literally translates to something like, “A book exists to me.” Here, it’s normal for people to come unannounced and stay, to drink “your” juice without asking, and relative strangers to hold your hand for awkwardly long amounts of time.

I hypothesized a long time ago that this was the case because everybody lives so jam-packed here: half the population of the US is crammed into a country the size of Massachusetts. But then I realized a couple of things: first of all, that Bangladesh’s population explosion happened in the past couple of decades, whereas its cultural traditions are ancient, and secondly, that Argentina is an immense, sparsely-populated country that is, in some ways, similar to Bangladesh. Ok, in Argentina you probably won’t have some random girl making you talk to her friends on the phone at the gym; but on the other hand, you will have all your friends eating from your packet of cookies (though they might ask first), you will get a lot of hugs, kisses, and unsolicited pokes, and you will find that many people are consistently late and at least appear to have precious little respect for your time.

And so while I’ve been raised more or less in a society where “mine” and “yours” are clearly defined, I find that the older I get, the more I wonder how natural that delineation is. How necessary having “my own” things are to my happiness, and how necessary it is to micromanage my time so that I don’t waste huge amounts of it on somebody or something that doesn’t matter to me. I am coming to think that maybe if we spend so much energy protecting ourselves and keeping others away, we miss out on important things, like truly feeling compassion for others, or learning to live in harmony with the natural world. Maybe it lets us get out of our own heads, and live not just as and for ourselves, but be part of and live for a greater purpose.

So I'm changing, I think.

Doesn't mean I want my stalker, though.

Thanks!

Ok, not to overdose on this "spirituality" theme I seem to have stumbled on, but there's a poem in a book I am reading and it completely speaks to what I've been thinking about recently. There's something so perversely beautiful about Bangladesh, which this poem reminds me of. Our street is lined with green trees dotted with pink, yellow, and red flowers, but below them on the road there are dumpsters that overflow with smelly trash, and brown dirt everywhere, and moldy white washed walls. I can't help but love it all, and find it all beautiful... somehow. And I find myself giving thanks for it, despite how crazy and perhaps even wrong that might seem. Maybe "thanks" isn't in order, but somehow I always seem to find myself saying it.

So I don't usually have much patience for poems, but I just can't help but love this one:



Listen
with the night fallingwe are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the back of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

                                                 --W. S. Merwin

Sugar-free Spirituality?

If you’re not Muslim, being in Bangladesh during Ramadan, or Ramazan, can feel like an exercise in guilt. No eating in the street, and even in the restaurants or cafes that remain open, you can expect to feel a little bit scrutinized. For a hypoglycemic like me, the unacceptability of eating or drinking in public means a certain level of lightheadedness and dizziness is often around the corner. I tend to rush home desperately to have my lunch, wondering in amazement how people last another five long hours until Iftar, the breaking of the fast.

Ramazan has had other impacts on me besides just wreaking havoc on my blood sugar. It’s gotten me to think a lot about the things we do out of belief, and the ways in which the physical realities of food and our bodies play a role in our spiritual life. Because I find the typical Muslim fast – no food and water during daylight, followed by a large, heavy meal after nightfall – to be highly unhealthy, I decided to engage in my own fast of sorts: a fast from refined sugar, which tends to make me crash about half an hour after eating, and generally just feel like crap.

I will admit that this “fast” was not undertaken with religious purposes. However, as the days rack up, I’m realizing that in my own way, this is something of a spiritual undertaking to me. Because really, what could be more spiritual than honoring and caring for what God gave me? The more I think about it, putting sugary shit into my body feels like a sin. Same goes for hydrogenated oils, fried gunk, and other things that were never meant to enter a human digestive system.

I also believe that I’m experiencing spiritual rewards by abstaining from refined sugar. At the beginning of this fast, I experienced huge cravings, but I refused to cave. And now that they’ve subsided a bit, I feel the clarity of mind that I never know when I’m experiencing sugar cravings. But mostly, I feel glad to know that I’m extending the life that I was blessed and lucky enough to have.

What's This?

I've decided to write a blog. I don't know how often I'll post, and I don't know how interesting the posts will be. But it's something I've wanted to do for a while now, so let me take a few paragraphs and do my best to explain why...

Ask me to shake your hand those days, and I might have hesitated a split second or two. It’s not that I’m a germ-a-phobe. Quite the opposite, actually, as my sister would tell you – I’m one of those drink-the-milk-straight-from-the-carton types. It’s actually that those days, toward the end of last semester, my hands were so chapped that I would have been hesitant to offer them up to you for judgment. I know after our palms had barely met that I would remain, ingrained forevermore in your mind, as “the girl with the really dry hands.”

Call me paranoid, but that is not an exaggeration. My hands were beyond papery. It actually almost reached the point of sandpaper; they looked like they’d lived sixty years longer than the rest of me. In order to attempt to salvage the last remnants of youth, I tried slathering my hopelessly chapped hands with some sort of banana hand cream I found in the medicine cabinet. It didn’t seem to work very well, but maybe my hands were just vastly beyond hope.

Throwing pots sure can take a toll on your hands, I learned. I learned a couple other things as well last semester in The Potter’s Wheel. How to make a teapot from a hunk of earth, being another one. I think, however, that what I gained last semester amounts to a bit more than some severely chapped hands and a shelf of doubtfully constructed ceramics.

In the studio, the hours pass effortlessly. An hour spent stuffed into a seat in Sci 101 may pass at snail’s pace, but in the ceramics studio, I glance up after hours and realize it’s already time to clean up and head to lunch. My thinking seems to slow down in the studio, which is maybe why time seems to pass so slowly. One thought, instead of leapfrogging into another tangential thought, hangs in my mind; it dawdles, sips a cup of tea, lingers for a while. Perhaps that’s why time moves so seamlessly in the studio -- instead of my usual hyper-speed leapfrogging from topic to topic to yet another topic, I watch the thoughts drift in and out of my mind.

I really enjoyed thinking in this way. Instead of feeling like I was desperately clinging to the caboose of my train-of-thought, I felt like I was detached from my thoughts rather than part of them, and I could stroll around, examine, assess, critique and criticize them. It was eye-opening. Instead of being a slave to my thoughts, whims, and ideas, I felt outside of them and thus able to properly assess them.

Another thing I love about ceramics is that it is so often a physical release. I spent my time in the studio scraping clay out of a big plastic-lined trashcan with my fingertips, wedging balls of it on the canvas-covered tables, smacking it into balls, slamming it onto the wheel, whacking it into the wheel’s center. No wonder my shoulders would ache after a long day in the studio, and nerves in my back would pinch against each other in painful reminder of the morning’s work.

For such a violent sport, though, you make such delicate things. That's another thing I love about pottery: you need a combination of harshness and gentleness. You need to be able to throw your whole body’s weight against that clay, but you also need to know when to lay off the pressure. You need to know force and delicacy; it’s all about the balance. And there’s something so perfect that happens when you throw a perfectly centered pot. When it’s centered in just the right way, you feel the clay move up with your hands almost effortlessly. Perfection... the universe is in order. You’ve achieved domination over this hunk of clay, you’ve gotten it to do exactly what you wanted it to do. It’s an incredibly satisfying feeling. That process of taking a mass of senseless stuff and shaping it into something beautiful and meaningful - not through brute force, but by controlled effort - is also to me what writing is about. I love doing this with pottery, and I love doing it with writing.

With this blog, I'd like to take some of my thoughts and slow them down to a ceramics class pace: allow them to wiggle and settle, and give my thoughts the time of day necessary to making any cogent conclusions about the world. I'd also like to practice some of the violent delicacy needed to making any good piece of art: I'd like to mash some ideas up, slam them around, shove at them from all directions, and then whittle at them gently until only the sleekest, smoothest ones remain. I'd like to separate my thoughts from myself in the same way that I was able to in the studio. So I'd like to make this blog an attempt at a moreartistic and contemplative way of thinking, and I'd also like to make it an attempt at working something beautiful out of the everyday.

So here's to clay-coated fingers, as I knead away at this big lump of clay!