Sunday, August 3, 2008

I Listen To What I Accuse You Of

The arthritis is in my feet now. It takes a goodly amount of time to come down the stairs when I get up in the morning. I can only hold on to the rail with my left hand and arm early on like that. Just now I went out on the deck used as the entry to my house. It's connected to a deck on the second floor by a set of 16 steps. I have to hold on for the first trip up and down, then after a couple of rounds of going up and down the stairs I get to where I can go up the stairs without holding on to the hand rails, and eventually I can descend the staircase without holding on. That's kind of what I aim for, because doing that makes me feel like I can act normal in front of others without attracting a critical look from them. Climbing up and down the outside stairs exercises the tendons and ligaments in my legs in addition to the muscles. I get some aerobic exchange through repetition.

I'm fascinated by the articles I'm reading on Vitamin D these days. I especially like considering what humans have had to do in order to live up or down toward the polar regions where they don't normally get enough sunlight for their skin to manufacture the amount of Vitamin D they need to stay healthy. There is a consideration that has to be made about skin pigmentation too. People with dark skin have a more difficult time converting UV rays into Vitamin D. If they live above forty degrees latitude, where even light-skinned people have difficulty getting enough sunshine to their skin in order to manufacture Vitamin D, then they can get sick and die without having a clue why that happened.

One of the surprising things I read yesterday was how much Vitamin D the skin can manufacture in a given time. I've read that it takes fifteen minutes of exposure for the skin to get started producing the vitamin. Yesterday I read that twenty minutes in the summer sun can produce 20,000 IUs of Vitamin D. I don't know how the altitude or pigmentation factors in to that. It's apparently not that hard to get enough even with dark skin in the summer. It just takes a little longer where there is more pigmentation to penetrate.

This measurement of how much Vitamin D the skin manufactures in direct UV sunlight has caused the people who study this sort of thing to rethink their previous position of using 400 IUs as the RDA. Still, adding 400 IUs as a supplement to milk products practically eliminated an old problem with the bones called "rickets." Apparently, rickets used to be a fairly common health problem among the poor, and the cause of it had nothing to do with being poor, but not getting enough sunlight.

This makes me think about the stories I used to hear about how southern belles would cover every inch of their skin when they went outside to look even whiter than they were. Granted, they were apparently a fairly sickly lot. They must have had that "prison pallor" people who get put in jail get from being inside all the time.The symptoms of Vitamin D deficiency looks like the who's who list of old age diseases. Sentencing a criminal to prison for a long time must have been the equivalent of torturing him to death by premature aging.

If I wanna use this universal experiential database I've been writing about lately, I can't question what I write... with the other experiential database I attained institutionally. The only way I can be there in real time is by not "knowing" it with my institutionally acquired experiential database. By not "no-ing" it. By not denying it. Only by apperceiving it in real time and pushing the keyboard buttons down without "thinking" about it can I "see" what I say.

This is what a good preacher does, and probably a prophet. They "say what they see", but they're not actually "seeing" it. I.E., they don't have to know where they're at to be there. People can verbalize what they experience in real time if they don't question the veracity of their spoken word. If they stop to question whether what they describe is true or false, they lose the flow, and they're not saying what they see in real time any more, but reciting history.

"...You never count yo' money, before you leave the table, there'll be time enow for counting... when the dealings done." ~Lyrics from The Gambler

Just about anything one can say, that leaves the right impression is always about how to keep the flow going without people getting in they own way. What a ticket to ride! An enabler of the flow. I try to get people to give me advice so I'll know what to say to them. I tell them to do what they said I should, and I'm always right.

I might listen to you if you tell me something you think will help in THAT regard. Otherwise, I get my advice from an alien source. Me. My attitude might seem rude, at first, but I'm much more likely to listen to the advice I offer you, than to the advice you offer me. When all is said and done, it may turn out that I am who I think you are. Can you be okay with that?

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