…beats per minute. That’s the very tight targeted heart rate zone that I work out in. I’m sweating at this heart rate, but it’s easy for me to carry on a conversation and, if I’ve eaten correctly and well, then I feel like I could go all day. This is my base zone, and Nordic athletes have been training this way for years. Building a big base, it’s called, and one of the reasons that Nordic athletes are so successful is that they have a huge level of base fitness and they supplement it with a couple of high-intensity interval workouts each week. The latter helps build VO2 and cardio capacity, as well as stamina.

But this isn’t really a piece about my training methods. It’s about my determination not to decline into inactivity and death. Oh, I know the theory of entropy and all that. It’s just that I don’t want to wind down too soon.

I had this stunning revelation in May that everything — everything! — physically wrong with my parents was preventable. High cholesterol, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Even my father’s cancer might have been preventable. He had esophageal cancer which occurs predominantly in male smokers who were heavy drinkers. My father smoked Pall Malls and drank scotch for 20 years. Scotch is a known carcinogen.

It’s easy, when you’re scared and angry and hurting, to want to blame something, someone.  Why couldn’t they take better care of themselves?  Why didn’t my father get an esophageal scope every two years?  Why didn’t they change their diets, lose weight, and eliminate the Type 2 diabetes?

But what I’ve learned from my own struggles with fitness and health is that it isn’t so simple.  Each time I take a bite of food I make a choice.  And during the four weeks leading up to my father’s death, I ate McDonald’s four times, once each week.  I ate a Big Mac meal with medium fries and a medium soda, and I ate it because I was frantically busy trying to manage all the details of my dad’s medical care, my parent’s finances, care for my mother, my own paid work, finishing my thesis.  You name it and I can give you a reason (or rationalization) why I ate this food. 

But the truth is that mostly I ate it because it was easy, it tasted good, and it offered me some degree of comfort.

On a typical day, when I’m being careful and mindful, I eat four 375 calorie meals.  This adds up to 1500 calories or 30 weight watchers points.  Each meal is broken down into 19g of protein (about 100 calories), 9g of fat (81 calories), and the reminder of calories to a mix of whole grain simple carbs and complex carbs from fruits and vegetables. 

Each Big Mac meal totals 1060 calories, 414 of which come from fat.  The meal has 46 grams of fat — almost two days’ worth for me — 134g of carbs, and 27g of protein.  That’s a shit pile of badness that adds up.  For me it added up to 8 extra pounds of weight.

Oh, it wasn’t just the food.  It was also that I felt unable to drag myself to the gym, or out for a bike ride, or to even walk the dog one block to the park.  I was doing well if I worked out three times a week for 30 minutes.  I felt stopped in my tracks by life.

Which would be okay except for that entropy fear.  And the disease fear.  And the determination not to need joint replacement surgery at 65, a bypass at 70, or be dead at 73.  It’s enough to make me run frantically around like a gerbil in a Habitrail

 What I instead must remind myself is that it is one meal at a time, one workout at a time.  That’s they way to fight entropy and disease.  It’s a long slow adjustment to our nutritional navigation and,  just like dying, this is one we pretty much have to do alone.

I write about technology for a living. And it used to be that I was so good at it, that I actually wanted to buy the products I was writing about. I wanted a laptop with WiFi. I wanted a wireless jukebox to stream my MP3s from the office to the living room. I wanted an Xbox, a Kindle, a watch with an altimeter and GPS built in.

However, I never wanted a smart phone. I said I didn’t want to be that connected. I said nothing I did was life and death and my clients could just wait. Then in June, 2008, I bought a Blackberry. And much to my surprise, it actually mitigated my anxiety because I could see the emails coming (and going), I could reassure myself that nothing crucial was happening while I was out of the office. So even though I could read my emails and respond with lightning speed, my Blackberry still was little more than a phone with email access.

That was before I installed the Google, Facebook, and Dictionary.com apps. Now my phone is like a magic box, full of knowledge that I MUST KNOW RIGHT AWAY! The temperature in St Johns? Google it. The definition of “philogyny?” Go to the dictionary.com app. What my ex-wife is doing (I swear I’m not stalking you, Sap)? Go to the Facebook app and check out the status updates. What Terri Gross talked about last night? Go to the folder where your podcasts are stored after your phone automatically downloads them each morning.

For a woman who loves knowledge, the magic Blackberry box seems like the greatest toy in the world. But I noticed something was happening to me. Because I could immediately get the definition of a word, I stopped making lists of words that I wanted to look up. And because I didn’t write those words down, I didn’t remember them as well. “Philogyny” was sitting in my email inbox yesterday morning (because you can have words delivered to you, as well) but I couldn’t remember it this morning when I sat down to write this blog post.

My attention span has shortened, too. When I see the blinking red light on the top of the Blackberry that indicates a new email, text, or Facebook update, I am compelled to check it, even if I am busy with other things — say, writing. The magic Blackberry box is keeping me, I think, from the stillness necessary for deeper thought. It’s my own version of Pandora’s jar (because I haven’t had all my memory erased by technology and forgotten that it was a jar and not really a box), but rather than releasing evil into the world and trapping hope inside, I’ve unleashed the evil of busy-ness and trapped the stillness necessary for sanity and art inside my Blackberry 9000.

My ideas around busy-ness aren’t new. I’ve been struggling with busy-ness for 15 years. We live in a culture that values this. There is an unassailable right to say, “I’m working. I’m busy.” It dates back to that city on a hill so favored by our forebears. What is new is that technology makes it even easier to be busy and not even realize it. It’s fun to check the weather on your phone. It’s cool to use the GPS feature and plot your bike route. It’s interesting to be able to find a restaurant in a new city just by punching a few buttons and letting the “location-aware” features tell you what’s near by (Never mind that ten, twenty, thirty years ago I’d have told you that was Big Brother in action).

But all of these things pull our attention away from the present moment. Which is why I am going to kiss more and Facebook less.

I will leave you with one example of my tech dependent ridiculousness. My mother and I were driving from her house down into town to meet with an attorney. She asked the specific address of said attorney. “I don’t know,” I said. “The computer was already shut down when we were getting ready to leave, but once we’re back in range and I have a signal, I’ll Google him on the Cracky.”

My mother’s jaw dropped. Then she dropped her already bass-low voice another half octave and said, “Have you ever heard of a phone book, Kathleen?”

Oh, how quaint. I believe I’ll go acquaint myself with this tangible object.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately with my new in-laws. Well, okay, technically they’re not really my in-laws because I’m not yet married, but I still think of them this way. Especially because I can’t get legally married. But that’s not what I want to write about here.

Steve, who is married to my partner’s sister, is a technogeek like I am. Of course, he has a Kindle. (For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past four years, Kindle is an e-book reader branded and sold by Amazon.com.) Last time I looked, he had a mix of books on it – from business and history titles purchased on Amazon to free books downloaded from Google as part of the Gutenberg project. Steve believes that e-books are going to someday replace paper books.

Alice, my partner’s 85 year-old mother, worries that Steve might be right.

Although I think Steve is super smart, I’m not sure he’s right about this one. Even though I did see a 70-something man in an Ashland coffee shop reading the Wall Street Journal on his iPad. (I mean, come on! The WSJ in full color anywhere you can grab a signal? How fabulous is that? Makes me almost want an iPad) I realize the WSJ is a newspaper and newspapers have all sorts of problems of their own quite different from the world of book publishing, but I still don’t think that Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos is going to bring down the book or the New York Times.

People want a sensory experience when they read. They want to feel paper under their fingers, hear the sound of a page turning, smell newsprint or a musty old book. While HTC and Apple may be able to use haptic technology to give us a reasonable facsimile of using your finger to flip a page, they’ll never be able to truly replicate the feel of a yellowed, brittle paperback page. Or the smell of said page.

The following story gives me hope: Books’ power to connect is as potent as ever. It’s about kids finding redemption in the stories of Sherwood Anderson. Sure, they could have read Anderson on their Kindle (and it would have only cost them $.99 for the download), but something tells me these folks had the old Signet Classic edition or maybe the Norton critical edition. And if a book — a single book — can inspire a classroom of strangers to tell their secrets, who knows what a whole library can do.

I’ve spent the last six weeks in a state of extreme stress.  I’ve awakened almost every day — and multiple times during the night — with cortisol flooding my system.  The notebook by the side of the bed for panicked list-making, the glass of wine, the Lunesta, the Chinese herbs, the acupuncture, the meditation, the meditation MP3, the gym (twice daily sometimes), none of it helped consistently. 

So I just went with it.  Because what my body really wanted was to do nothing.  Which wasn’t really an option there for a while. 

At least that’s the story I told myself. 

And maybe it was partly true and partly because I am a hyper-vigilant oldest child.  Maybe it is because in this modern world we believe we should always be doing something (proofing a document, checking email, updating our Facebook status, cleaning the lavatory, paying bills, organizing the toolshed).  Maybe it’s because I’ve been so busy for so long (mother’s illness; graduate school; divorce; moving once, twice, three times, four; father’s illness and death) that I’ve forgotten that it’s okay to simply sit still — or if not sit still, to simply do exactly what I want to do.  But since Thursday afternoon that’s all I’ve been doing, simply doing what my body wants — which has been to:

…nap on a Saturday afternoon — even if it is sunny out.

…go to the farmer’s market and buy fresh produce.

…cook my beloved a multi-course meal while bluegrass streams in via Pandora.

…ride bikes so long my head is quiet.

…paddle quietly up the Columbia slough.

…see Toy Story 3 in 3D and laugh at how silly looking a theater full of people wearing dorky glasses is.

…pray at the church of the New York Times and read about San Francisco’s weird ice cream man and the quadruple amputee who should inspire us all.

…drink coffee on the balcony and watch the weather change.

…read good, honest writing.  Like my friend, Erin’s blog.

…realize I love nonfiction so incredibly much that I will even buy a memoir for sale at the butcher shop (“Red Tide” about salmon fishing in Alaska and is incredibly well-written).

A few years ago, one of my sisters said to me, “I just wish it could be like it used to be, kids playing in the backyard, swimming, and not worrying about anything.  I just want to go back to 16 San Felipe Way.”  And I’ll admit, at first I thought, wow, how very magical thinking of you.  But now, I understand the sentiment behind the statement because all I want is a summer off.  I want to do this the old fashioned way — which means without Lunesta or Wellbutrin or Prilosec.

I don’t need a mother to cook me dinner or do my laundry.  But I do need time to lie on my back and look at the clouds (which in Oregon means almost every day) and not worry about deadlines or the strange noise the truck is making or whether I remembered to pay my and my parents’ electric bills. 

Of course, I still need to work, finish up the last of my grad school duties, and manage my father estate.  So my question is, what’s your favorite way to recharge without simply dropping out?

Yesterday, I drove along the Hood Canal from Sequim, Washington to Portland, Oregon. It was the sixth time I’ve done this trip since April 26th, the day my father was taken by ambulance from his home to the hospital because of an accidental overdose (or in medical parlance, “over sedation”).

Much as this trip is long and the reasons for travel emotionally taxing, I also love driving along Puget Sound and always feel my spirit restored as I look across and up the Hood Canal. The water is never the same — some days flat as glass and grey blue, other days hard rippled with wind and tide and looking steely grey, still other days glinting with wave and sun and sparkling impossibly blue — and it butts up against hillsides treed with oak, madrone, and fir, and the Olympic mountains, the fastest growing mountain range in the world (2 inches a year, which in geologic circles is GINORMOUS!).

The houses along the Canal range from 50’s style cottages to more yuppified cedar shake numbers with red or green metal roofs.  In other words, classic beach houses.  These houses are interspersed with state parks and two different bits of Coast Salish indian reservations.  Like all reservations this time of year — at least on the West coast — these guys do a bang-up business selling fireworks.  The fireworks these guys sell — Roman candles, bottle rockets, killer bees, and firecrackers – are illegal in Oregon.  That’s what makes them so much fun.  I imagined getting some Roman candles to light off, you know, after a gin and tonic, or two. (Light fuse and get away, the warnings on the side of fireworks say.  I always thought this would make a great tattoo.  You know, after a gin and tonic, or two…)

As you cruise north through the town of Potlach, there’s the Danger Zone Fireworks, Cheap Cheap Fireworks (no comma), Patti’s Fireworks and Seafood, Indian Munitions, and finally, Illeagle Fireworks (sic).   I stopped to make sure that I had read the sign correctly, hoping it was a typo and not a painful cultural comment.  There it was, one word: Illeagle. 

Now, normally, typos make me laugh but this one hurt my heart with its irony.  Ill Eagle.  Where do you even start with that one?  The quality of indian education?  Insight into the soul sickness afflicting native communities? A comment on the disrepair of our nation? 

I decided to start with the most obvious: the language and the amazing things you can do with 26 letters.  Then I thought that even though Illeagle was one word, maybe the sign maker intended this — a kind of Sherman Alexie joke on white people who would first expect the typo and second, then go to a place of f  benevolent condescension that assumes the sign a prime metaphor for the lack of hope facing indians.   

I tried to recall other stunning typos, but mostly I just drove along feeling sad for the sign maker and all the broken promises that have led to the sickness of our national symbol and our nation.  Red, white, black, yellow we are all suffering.  From the Gulf Coast to Homer, Alaska.  From West Virginia to Oregon.  Our policy of manifest destiny, begun 234 years ago,  hurts.  Every.  Living.  Thing.

Happy 4th of July.  I won’t be on the balcony shooting off Roman candles.  Instead I will be quietly mulling what it is that I personally can do to help heal the ill eagle.

…but thinking makes it so.

– Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

How many times have I seen Hamlet staged?  Before yesterday, I’d seen it twice in Ashland, once on video with Sir Laurence Olivier, once with Mel Gibson (surprisingly good even with Gibson).  And then yesterday, a fabulous third time in Ashland with Dan Donahue playing Hamlet.

This is an interesting staging of Shakespeare’s 400 year-old play and it shows how much the Bard’s plays can bear and how they maintain their relevance. The set looks like a grey and foreboding castle and then you notice the razor wire on the ramparts and the ever blinking and panning security cameras mounted on the castle walls.   It’s enough to make anyone paranoid and crazy.

But, I understood Hamlet’s descent into madness differently. Rather than craziness brought on by betrayal –  before I’d thought Hamlet’s madness a reaction to the shock of his mother’s betrayal — I now  understood how the death of a parent and the attendant grief and regret that could really send a person over the edge.

My father died less than a month ago.  I have regrets.

He wanted to die at home and I promised him this. But he died in an ICU bed, attached to oxygen, a central line, heart monitors, and O2 monitors.  And I was powerless in the face of the medical establishment, finances, and my mother to change this.  The night after he died, I thought I would go mad with grief.  It pounded over me in a way I’ve never experienced and I felt at times as if I couldn’t breathe and was going to be forever lost in the sea of regret and despair.  I wailed in a way that could only be described as keening for a man I wasn’t even always sure I liked.

Slowly the grief has abated.  I think of it like water sloshing in a bathtub.  It keeps moving for a long time, but only those first initial waves wash out of the tub and onto the floor.  In my case — and Hamlet’s, too — the key to calming the water is to stand porter at the doorway to my thoughts.  Rather than revisit the scenes that cause my wailing, I get on my bike and ride, a sure fire way to quiet my head.  Or watch hours of television on Hulu.  Other times I just sit looking out the window thinking nothing at all.

For the price admission, art continues to save lives.

I didn’t see this movie.  I didn’t watch “Volcano” or “Dante’s Peak,” either.  And sadly, my local video store doesn’t stock the 2005 Pakistani classic, “Volcano Island.”  These movies are NOT about how volcanoes spew ash and then wreck the summer of 8 million people living in the Pacific Northwest.  These movies are about how volcanoes are hot and spew lava and gas over an unsuspecting populace.

 Because it’s not exactly gripping drama when a glacier-covered volcano named  Eyjafjallajokull blows a cloud of ash in April and it so effects the jet stream that, exactly two months later, a 40-something lesbian in Portland, Oregon has to turn on her heat because it is only 56-degrees Fahrenheit. 

It is not drama, but it is tragic.  Still, I am certain Martin Scorsese doesn’t care that I find myself bundled up in Gortex and polar fleece and walking along a beach in the rain.  That picture to the left?  That was taken in early June.   And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt Stanley Kubrick isn’t going to film me out paddling during a deluge that put the river at flood stage.  (Even though it is awfully dramatic.  If you look closely at the opposite shoreline, you can see the rain pounding off the river.  But, Kubrick is dead, so, well, you know.) 

My dear friend Barbara would like to point out that a little cold is a small price to pay for being alive.  Yesterday she told me that on the island of Martinique, there is a volcano foolishly named — in classic French hubris – Mount Pelee that, in 1902, killed 30,000 people in 60 seconds when it blew out laterally.  Louis-Auguste Cyparis was one of only two survivors and he only lasted because he was in a dungeon-like prison cell.  When he felt the hot air oozing in between the door jamb, he took off his prison pants, urinated on them, and stuffed them along the crack of the door. (This is how today, we know what to do if there is a hotel fire.  Oh, except, use a towel and wet it in the sink.)

My point is: hot lava, cold ash, or hotel fire, the only life you can save is your own.