Getting High

In last week’s post I made a bit of a fuss about mowing the lawn, which is not a terribly inspiring display of athleticism and derring-do. While I’m satisfied to do such ordinary things myself these days (especially since it seemed for a time that I couldn’t), I enjoy tales, whether real or fictional, of other people doing the extraordinary. Extraordinary for them, that is. They needn’t be Olympic athletes, though those are fun to watch too. If they simply and credibly push beyond their own usual limits, that by itself is impressive enough. Mystery/suspense writer Harlan Coben, for one, successfully creates relatable characters for whom one roots, and so he is a favorite author of mine. Typically his protagonist is a largely unremarkable suburbanite who pushes himself (or sometimes herself) to extremes, though not beyond plausibility, in order to rescue a kidnapped family member or resolve some other crisis of similar personal importance. Coben has a recurring character named “Win” (Windsor), however, who is much too good at everything all the time to be believable. I don’t mind when he is a secondary character who rapidly smooths some plot wrinkles, but the only occasions when I don’t much care for Coben is when Win is central to the tale. Win is not a relatable human, and so it is hard to care much about what happens to him. I prefer humanly flawed characters in movies, too.
 
One movie I happened upon last week had just the right mix of relatable humans and extraordinary efforts. Fall was in theaters in 2022 and is now available on DVD and for streaming. It is a mix of suspense drama and female buddy picture. This is not one of those recent films where a female protagonist discovers she just happens to be awesome with a sword or discovers she has superpowers and faces no obstacles but boorish men who don’t take her seriously despite those obvious superpowers so she is still a victim. Those are not empowerment stories. They are fantasies. Now don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with fantasy. Coben’s “Win” character mentioned above is of a similar ilk, and apparently some readers want to be him. It is just that if, as a viewer, you don’t happen to be the target audience for the particular fantasy on the screen or page, it is hard to care about the character or the story. More rounded human beings with human flaws (regardless of “identity”) work better for general audiences.

 
Fall delivers on this. Becky and Hunter are well-rounded imperfect human beings who nonetheless push themselves to do something exceptional. I was invested in the characters early in the movie – so, yeah, I cared that they might fall. The movie begins with Dan, Becky, and her friend Hunter rock climbing a scary cliff face. Dan dies in an accident leaving Becky to grieve. For the next year she simply does not get past it. She is an ass to dad, she drinks too much, and is borderline suicidal. Hunter meantime has become an Instagram minor celebrity with the tag Danger Girl. She puts herself in harrowing situations (usually involving height) and posts selfies. She has over 60,000 followers. Becky’s dad reaches out to Hunter to help his daughter. Hunter challenges Becky to face her fears and get past them by climbing an abandoned and rusty 2000 foot (610 meter) TV tower with her. Excitement and terror ensue.
 
Fall once again shows that good directing and a good script with appealing characters outweigh large budgets and outlandish special effects.
 
Thumbs up for a simple suspense drama done right.
 

Trailer

Inhaling

A year ago a lingering aftereffect of COVID (yes I was vaccinated and boosted) was a serious sapping of my energy. The illness itself in February 2022 had been relatively mild and over in a week. Afterward I felt fine when just standing or sitting but became extremely tired and utterly out of breath from walking no more than 100 paces. I expected this energy drainage to dissipate quickly but it didn’t. Despite my efforts to exercise, it lasted through the summer. Things slowly improved after that but didn’t get back to “normal” (which is to say immediately pre-COVID level) until after my second bout with COVID in January of this year. Unlike my first experience with the virus, this one hit me hard for a few weeks. Yet, weirdly, afterward my stamina and oxygenation snapped back to January 2022 levels. I have no explanation for why this happened, but was happy to feel normal again regardless.
 
Of course, normal at 70 is not what normal was at 50, much less 30 or 20. Assuming no change in physical activity, the Harvard Medical Center notes that after 40 strength can decline 1.5% per year. Yes one can combat – even reverse – this with additional exercise and training, but these weren’t necessary before 40. The Harvard site adds, “Fast-twitch muscle fibers shrink and die more rapidly than others, leading to a loss of muscle speed. In addition, the capacity for muscles to undergo repair also diminishes with age.” Charming. I had just assumed earth’s gravity was increasing.
 
Perhaps more important than strength per se, however, is stamina – or so it seems to me after last year. While, once again, I’m happy to have recovered the endurance I had in January of last year, I still sorely miss what I had in, say, 1978. This is largely related to VO2 max. This is the maximum rate (V) of oxygen (02) your body can utilize during exercise. A high VO2 max is what keeps one from tuckering out when shoveling, running, hiking, rowing, or whatever. As with strength, VO2 max declines with age holding all else equal. Our lungs simply get less efficient.
 
According to Healthline, “good” V02 max numbers are for men

Age  20–29  30–39  40–49   50–59   60–69 70–79
         45.4       44        42.4     39.2     35.5      32.3
and for women
         39.5       37.8    36.3      33         30          28.1
 
Nonetheless, again as with strength, one can counteract the decline to a significant degree with exercise. High-intensity training (HIIT) is the preferred method: exercise hard for a short amount of time, rest for a short period, and then repeat multiple times. A recuperative day following each HIIT day is also recommended. This is more effective at raising VO2 max than slow-and-steady break-free exercise, though of course both help.
 
By dumb luck (and by being too cheap to hire a landscaper) rather than by plan I follow a HIIT schedule in spring and summer. I have a lawn suited in parts to a mountain goat. The sloped areas must be cut by hand because a tractor would tip over. This slip-and-slide task was not easy for me in 1978 when this was my parents’ property. In 2023 it is arduous in a way to which level mowing doesn’t compare. Every two passes I need (not want, need) to stop and catch my breath. It takes a dozen passes. In back of the house above the retaining wall there is another similar slope. They should be enough to get me literally to breathe easier.

My front lawn

Beatenberg – Stamina

Another Change of the Guard

Dr. Jean Twenge is at it again. She has studied generational differences for the past 30 years and has written several books on the subject, notably Generation Me (about Millennials) and iGen (about Generation Z). There is always a new generation on the rise, however, so there is always room for a new book. After all, even Generation Z is now able to shake their heads and sigh “These kids today!” as they look at Generation Alpha (called “Polars” by Twenge but by hardly anyone else) who were born after 2012. In Generations she chooses not to focus on a single generation but to compare and contrast all six currently existing in significant numbers in the US. Though her book is very US-centric in part because of the large data sets available, she notes that there are close similarities in other Western (especially Anglophone) countries. There is always some question about the boundaries of generations, but one has to draw the lines somewhere, and Twenge’s choices are pretty conventional:
 
Silents (Born 1925–1945)
Boomers (Born 1946–1964)
Generation X (Born 1965–1979)
Millennials (Born 1980–1994)
Generation Z, aka Zoomers (Born 1995–2012)
Polars, aka Alphas (Born 2013–2029)
 
The parents of each group usually belong to one or two generations earlier. Boomers, for example had either GI Generation (gone now but for a handful of centenarians) or Silents as parents.

 
Analyses of this kind always bring objections about generalization and stereotypes. Twenge acknowledges that we are talking about overlapping bell curves when discussing generational characteristics. Every generation has its prudes and libertines, slackers and workaholics, communitarians and individualists, and so on. There are always outliers. Yet the averages – the centerlines of the bell curves – really do differ from one generation to the next and are worth noting. For example, a 20-y.o. Zoomer woman getting married in 2023 is widely regarded as too young; her friends and family likely will try to talk her out of it. Yet 20 was average for a Silent in 1960 when nearly half of all brides were teenagers. This difference profoundly affects life courses and personal outlook for most members of each group – even ones who are not average.
 
Silents are underrated. Nearly all the major political and cultural changes of the late 20^th century for which Boomers often take credit were instigated by Silents: Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan, Gloria Steinem, Abbie Hoffman, and the Beatles just to mention a few players were all Silents. The Boomers embraced the changes and made them mainstream, which counts for something. Generation X, the latchkey kids generation, was the last to grow up with relatively light supervision. Millennials were the first not to remember a time before the internet. The oldest of the Zoomers were only 12 when the iPhone was introduced. Alphas don’t remember a time before smart phones.
 
Twenge argues that changes in technology (TV, computers, and phones primarily) are a major cause of generational differences – more so than general world events.
 
Twenge makes use of the enormous amount of data collected by government and non-government sources to track and chart marriage rates, birthrates, crime, mental health, income, home ownership, employment, drug use, alcohol use, political affiliation, sexual orientation and “fluidity,” education, and more across time. If there seems to be a constant trend, it is that each generation gets off to a slower start at what is now called “adulting” than the one before. Adolescence keeps getting extended. In part this is because more people go to more school for longer, but there is more to it than that. Millennials and even more so Zoomers have delayed everything from driver’s licenses to sex to alcohol use. Parents are probably OK with that, but it seems odd to someone whose youth is best depicted by Dazed and Confused.
 
Those looking for political red meat will have to tease it from Twenge’s charts themselves. She is inclined to report trends rather than judge them one way or the other. All-in-all Generations is a well-documented overview of the current generational divides.
 

The B52s – Song for a Future Generation

 

Wearing the Crown

Today I get to spend spend an hour in the dental chair for a replacement crown. I need either a new one or a replacement every year it seems – sometimes two. I have all 32 teeth, or at least the roots and cores of them but 20 are capped. So, a dozen uncapped teeth remain at risk while any of the existing crowns could potentially need to be reworked, though a couple (both gold) are over 40 years old and fine. No one has fun in a dentist’s chair, but the greatest pain is paying the bill on the way out. “You can split the bill into two or more payments,” the young woman at the desk always helpfully offers. I decline and write out a check (yes I still have a checkbook rather than going all digital) for the full four figures while telling the story of the boy who cut off his dog’s tail a little bit at a time so it wouldn’t hurt as much. (I stole that story from my old high school math teacher Mr. Andre; he probably would have preferred I remembered how to do integrals.)
 
Prehistoric peoples by and large had excellent teeth from what we can tell by the skeletons we dig up. So do modern Inuit with an almost pure carnivorous diet; so do the few remaining modern pure hunter-gatherers (i.e. no farming or trade for farmed goods). However meritorious or foolish the paleo diet may be in other respects (I have no opinion on this), it seems to score on this count. Farming and consequent high grain diets changed everything. Grain mixed in saliva turns to sugar and attacks enamel, so ancient Sumerians and Egyptians had terrible teeth. Unsurprisingly, they invented dentistry as a specialized profession. Mostly dentists pulled teeth and fashioned bridges and dentures – often from human or animal teeth. Yet, fillings were an occasional thing. Remains of Etruscans dating to 700 BCE have been found with gold crowns on teeth.

 
Crowns, however, remained rare until 1903 when Dr. Charles Land created and popularized a porcelain jacket to replace the enamel on a tooth. The method spread rapidly though gold became preferred by some for being durable, noncorrosive, and easy on the gums – porcelain sometimes cracked. Nowadays improved ceramics – sometimes fused to a metallic base and sometimes 3D printed of one material – dominate though other types have not disappeared.
 
It has not escaped my memory that my mom and my dad each had a full set of crowns, each completing the set within a year of death. In case this is an unspoken family tradition, I’ll double down on brushing and flossing. I still have 12 with the original enamel, so I might not complete a full set for years.

 
OK, maybe some people have fun at the dentist. Jack Nicholson in the original Little Shop of Horrors (1960)