As of late...

I feel like I am totally messing up and totally succeeding at the same time.  I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, the wrong thing, too little, or too much.  I guess that's where one's own sense of intuition into what's right and wrong comes in to play.  I feel like I'm happy with my figure, but I don't feel healthy.  At the end of the day I feel absolutely exhausted.  I feel like my heart is beating too fast and I am trying to move too many agendas too far each day.  But I'm afraid if I slow down, I'll fall off this train, and it's been such a fun ride so far.

I entitled this picture (excuses) because I've used the weather as an excuse to skip exercising for two mornings in a row.  I mean in Nebraska, this would be considered a nice day.  We'd try to sneak something in.  But in California, these hazy mornings mean sleeping in.  I see a few people strolling the sidewalks of Glendale, but not many are out.  Last weekend, the visibility was 10 miles, so I hiked up into the Verdugo Mtns and took a picture of downtown LA.  Yesterday, the visibility was 3 miles and today it's 1.5 so I just told myself to skip it.

My weight on the scale went up, but also has my activity level over the past three weeks.  I will get a performance evaluation on Tuesday which I am looking forward to.  I justified skipping workouts since I've been so hard on myself lately, I might actually need a rest day.  Today we are getting massages.  We've had a contract for monthly (or more) massages at a chain called Massage Envy.  It gives me an excuse to shave my legs at least.

So when I start skipping workouts and making excuses, I tell myself to think of exercise as a daily pill.  Instead of taking an antidepressant pill, weight control pill, birth control pill, immune system boosting pill, vitamin D pill, I just go for a walk.  There's nothing wrong with spending an hour a day in nature.  Moving.

So I guess you could say the view from my handlebars is getting better.  Got to sneak in a ride with RBC on a Tuesday night.  It was great.  I worked at UCR during the morning, then took my bike to Don's for a tune-up.  Then, I headed down to Adams via Victoria and La Cadena Dr.  I love the scenic glamour of Riverside et environs.  I have no idea where we went on the ride, but it was my first night ride in a long time.  I remember passing across Overlook at one point and thinking, I'm glad we're crossing this beast and not heading up it.  I missed my biking friends and it was a sweet rendez-vous.

I've been doing some crazy gardening.  I germinated a bunch of seeds under lamps and transferred them to the front lawn.  If they survive, we'll eat them all summer!!!  Our new goal is to OCCUPY GLENDALE until July.  Glendale is awesome, it's nearby a bunch of fun places.  In July, we will visit the windy city of Chicago.  So by then, the garden will either be established or wilted from not surviving.  It's crazy windy here.  There was a wind advisory (above 35 mph gusts) for this morning.  Take that Chicago.

advanced maternal age

Tuesday, February 7th I attended a lecture at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum at
Claremont McKenna College.  The speaker was R. Scott Hawley, who is an American Cancer Society Research Professor at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, MO.  His talk was entitled "When Good Eggs Go Bad--Because Sometimes Even Chromosomes Aren’t Perfect."

retinoic acid

He talked about the process of meiosis, which takes place in humans when the female egg cell meets a male sperm cell. 23 chromosomes from each cell have to meet and pair up in order to start the process of cell division, yielding a single hybrid offspring containing 46 chromosomes. Mistakes can be made in the process of preparing genetic material (DNA) to participate in this complex dance of macromolecules, which can result in too many or too few copies of a chromosome to be present in the offspring. When 3 copies (instead of 2) of chromosome 21 are present, characteristics of Down syndrome are observed.

Because females make all their eggs while they are themselves yet unborn, the eggs can become exposed to a range of environmental factors over the course of a woman's life, putting them at risk for DNA damage and defects to their eggs.  Males by contrast can make billions of sperm at a time, on a daily basis (and they don't start doing it until puberty) by a process regulated by retinoic acid.  Prof. Hawley showed this frightening graph (which I recapitulated using data from this source) relating risk of chromosomal abnormality and maternal age, and I started watching the clock tick-tock.  My biological clock.

There are countless studies showing that modern women are delaying child-rearing in favor of their careers.  And there are women like Sarah Palin whose son Trig has Down syndrome.  Rick Santorum has a daughter with too many copies of chromosome 18.  The conversation over lunch this past week turned to the church's pressure for couples to reproduce (and political opposition to funding contraceptives for women of child-bearing age).  It's all too real and scary for my brain right now.

(c) Pavel Popov 

Environmental and lifestyle factors affecting a woman's probability of experiencing fertility problems include: age, smoking, excess alcohol abuse, stress, poor diet, athletic training, being overweight, and sexually transmitted infections.  As I consider the possibility of getting pregnant, I am also wary because of the amount of risk factors present in my own life (being a chemist and living in a pretty high-stress, pollution-rich area).  I try to strike a balance between over and under weight, under and over exercise, good and poor diet, I guess moderation is the key.  Given the nature of information these days, one could probably justify anything.

What I don't like is that it somehow sounds like Eve is being blamed for everything again.