Wow, time has flown by! Diabetes Blog Week is almost over. Today’s prompt: “What is one thing you would tell someone that doesn’t have diabetes about living with diabetes?”

I feel like I should have something profound to say here, as if after almost thirteen years of diabetes—has it really been that long?—I should be some kind of sage. But when it comes down to it, living everyday with a chronic illness renders it rather banal.

Doing all of the diabetes things (checking the blood, using insulin, changing infusion sets, looking at CGM graphs, being mindful of all the factors that affect blood glucose, and doing so many other activities) becomes just another part of living. It’s an unwanted part, to be sure, but those of us living with the disease integrate it into the fabric and rhythms of our life because we have to. Sartre and Camus would remind us that we’re always making choices, but practically our options are severely constrained when it comes to either accepting this disease and making it part of who we are or deciding to ignore it and face the consequences.

What this means is that we live life in multiple ways. We have the “normal”/”healthy”/non-diabetic portion with jobs, commutes, families, hobbies, and obligations, not to mention anxiety, joy, boredom, failure, and success. And then we have the part where we pick up the slack for our malfunctioning endocrine systems. This brings its own tasks, obligations, diversions, emotions, friendships, and opportunities to be better than yesterday. Diabetes is just another “thing” that we do. And like other things in life, sometimes it’s surprisingly easy, while other times it’s cruelly difficult. Sometimes we use these challenges in life and diabetes as a springboard to transcendence, and other times we just can’t wait for them to be done so that we can say, “Well, that sucked. Let’s never fucking do it again if we can help it.”

Diabetes just is.

It’s an aspect of my life that I manage (or mismanage) like any other part. Could I have better BG numbers and be less afraid of insulin? Yes. Could I also sleep more, floss regularly, and worry less? Yes to all. Do I mostly do alright with the diabetic and nondiabetic parts of my life? Absolutely. Diabetes isn’t a separate thing from me, but it is also not an essential, defining part of who I am. Just as I would never say, “I’m a toothbrusher,” it seems ridiculous to assume that my diabetes shapes the essence of my life any more than my toothbrush. I would rather say that I’m a husband, a software engineer, a triathlete, and an international playboy, and I just happen to do all of these things with diabetes.

That’s what I would say to people with or without diabetes: This illness is just another part of life, so don’t expect it to be our top priority or our defining characteristic. There’s more to us than that. It is, nevertheless, an important part of our lives, and it’s going to have an impact on what we choose to do and how we do it. Occasionally, it’s going to mess everything up. Try to be as Zen and thoughtful in your acceptance of this part of us as we are trying to be ourselves and as you would be of any other aspect of our lives.

The few people that I’ve talked about it one-on-one have all said that it will likely be useful to someone out there, so I’ve decided to go ahead and write it. Besides, May is Mental Health Month, and reducing the stigma of mental health issues by bringing this kind of thing to light is what the month is all about.

Enough stalling. On with the dispatch!

When I graduated from high school, I weighed 135 lbs (61 kg). Since I’m 5’11″ (180 cm) tall, that put my BMI at the extremely low end of normal and healthy. I was always thin when I was growing up—some used to say “skinny,” which I always hated hearing because there was usually judgment involved when it was said. I was, to quote Lisa’s matter-of-fact assessment, a “stick boy,” but to me that seemed normal. The way I looked at 18 was how I’d always known myself. Being thin and athletic was part of my concept of who I was.

Why did I weigh so little? Simply put, I didn’t eat very much. I just wasn’t that interested in food. Don’t get me wrong, I ate three good meals a day, and throughout my whole life I’ve enjoyed good food and indulged—yes, even overindulged—when it was plentiful. For the most part, though, it wasn’t. I don’t want to make it sound like I was starved, because I wasn’t. I ate at mealtimes; I ate what was available, which was pretty healthy; I didn’t ever feel overly full; I rarely got a lot of satisfaction from eating; and I didn’t mind being a little hungry.

When I got some freedom in high school, I kept eating the way I always had. Eating healthy was a choice, and (perhaps) I put more pressure on myself than was necessary to eat well for several reasons. (1) I had good eating habits and enjoyed some of the healthier foods, although (even then) eating veggies wasn’t a routine choice. (2) People in my family tend to get larger as they get older, and I didn’t want that to happen to me. In our defense, my grandmother’s desserts are delicious and plentiful! (3) As an athlete, I knew food is fuel. Even at that age I understood that the better the food, the better my running performance was. (4) It was America in the late 80s and early 90s. Even though obesity wasn’t an American epidemic yet, the media was starting to get saturated with stories about “good foods” and “bad foods.” I seemed to take those stories with more gravitas and certainty than they likely deserved.

I thought I was normal. I still do think my teenage self was alright, if atypical. I certainly never thought I had an eating disorder. There might have been clues that I thought about food the wrong way, but I didn’t see them as such. After a cross-country race I was cooling down with a friend who we all thought had an eating disorder. When I declined a hunk of French bread from her loaf, she said, “If I have to eat, you have to eat, too.” Then there was the time in my first year of college when the resident assistant on my floor tried to give me a flier for an eating disorder support group. And when we were newly married and going on road trips, Lisa would from time to time remind me that normal people eat lunch even when it’s inconvenient. I was able to shrug off the first event—my teammate was being friendly, and I certainly wanted her to eat—and Lisa and I were doing the normal thing of figuring out a shared schedule. But the support group suggestion upset me quite a bit. How much I ate was no one’s business but my own, I thought, and I certainly didn’t see myself as having a problem.

Was I calorie deficient? No. Did I have an eating disorder? It’s difficult to say looking back after all these years, but I’m inclined to say “no.” I certainly had several of the elements of disordered thinking about food and body image that are typical in anorexia and orthorexia, but I never actually avoided eating when I was hungry. Eating disorders are serious medical conditions, and I don’t feel any need to include myself in that group lightly. Plus, I was always considered very healthy; no doctor that I can remember ever suggested I was underweight or malnourished. Nevertheless, it’s a fine line and I was close to it. (Looking back, I’d say “uncomfortably close.”)

What I do know, after more than 20 years of being thin and then gaining and losing weight a couple of times, is that at 37 I have body image issues which occasionally lead to anxiety and unhappiness.

In a nutshell: I simply cannot see myself objectively.

I know that when most of us look at ourselves in the mirror, we see things that we like and don’t like, and those things usually look worse to us than they do to other people who also get to see them. That’s normal human behavior. I suspect even Clive Owen looks at himself in the mirror and occasionally sighs in frustration.

What I’m talking about is not really knowing whether I’m the right size and not knowing if the things I don’t like about myself are actually problems or just a symptom of my messed up body image. My mind’s concept of myself is still the person who weighed 135 lbs, had bony arms, and a very outie belly button.

As a triathlete who trains all the time and weighs between 145-150 pounds—depending on the season or phase of the moon, it seems—I’m able to convince myself that what I see isn’t actually the way things are, but it’s all based on faith and logic and not on what I think I see. This I can manage pretty well. “That Buddha belly there,” I think to myself, “isn’t really there. And besides you need it for your infusion sets and CGM sensors. So don’t get any ideas.” And, “That kind of jowly area you have there . . . it isn’t really there either. Really. Really. I know. Trust me. Really.”

What I still have a hard time dealing with are the comments from other people that I’m too thin.

I feel like I’m in a very good place with both my weight and my feelings on food. (Although sometimes I think diabetes would be easier if I didn’t have to eat, that’s completely beside the point and only ever happens when I really, really want to eat but am battling long periods of high blood glucose.) I like to eat. I look forward to eating—and cooking, too! I eat meals of all sizes. I snack. I eat so-called junk food along with my healthy lunch from home. I adore ice cream. Food and I are tight, and my weight stays where it is only because I workout.

But when other people suggest that I’m working out too much or have lost too much weight—even though I haven’t lost any in almost 18 months—my mental equilibrium gets thrown off. I know that I should take it as the joke or sarcastic compliment that it almost certainly was. But not knowing what I really look like and having been defensive in the past, these things leave me worried that maybe people are trying to tell me something that I really should be able to see for myself— just like my RA suggested almost 20 years ago. There’s a fine line for me between shrugging off these comments while being happy with who I have become and accepting that I really just don’t know whether there’s a kernel of truth in them.

I don’t really know how to end this post except to say that it’s not as bad as it might sound from the last few paragraphs. I think about food all the time because I have diabetes, and I think about how I look most mornings after taking a shower and whenever I change my diabetes paraphernalia, but I don’t feel dragged down by food or my body image very often. Mostly I just want anyone reading this to know that (a) if you’ve felt the same way, you’re not alone, (b) body image problems and eating disorders can happen to men, (c) sometimes people are trying to help you the best way they know how and sometimes there just wise-cracking, and (d) it’s okay to like yourself no matter how you think you look. Well, that’s probably enough rambling for now.

p.s. — Yes, this post was scary to write, but it was scarier to publish it.

p.p.s. — If you feel like leaving a comment—which I encourage—please be open-minded and courteous.

It’s going to feel so good to be out from under the shadow of that obligation. But even afterward, I’m going to keep fundraising over the next six months until the ride because (a) all of the money goes to a great cause that I believe in 100% and (b) if I raise enough money, all of my transportation costs will be covered (including getting my bike there and back). I didn’t set a higher goal initially because I wasn’t sure how much I could actually achieve, but not having the hassle of figuring out the trip’s practical details is turning into a great motivator.

As you might have gathered, I work with wonderful people who are passionate about what motivates them and very generously give their time and money to get behind causes they believe in. The core purpose of the company is to accelerate the pace of science and engineering, and part of that involves building software tools that are used in the type of research that JDRF does.

And what does JDRF do? A bit of advocacy and patient support and a whole lot of research funding. (It’s there in their name: Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.) The work they support spans the gamut: computer simulation, in vitro studies, hardware and software development, and human clinical trials. They also support groups using mice in their research.

It turns out this got me into an ethical dilemma last night, as I was thinking back on the fundraiser. One of my coworkers backed away when I said I was soliciting for JDRF, saying, “They’re one of the groups that does animal testing.” This assertion surprised me because, when I think “animal testing” I think of cosmetic-wearing bunnies and not beta cell-enhanced mice. (I had forgotten about these “diabetes cured” mice we always hear about when talking with her.) Plus, the JDRF doesn’t actually perform the research itself.

But it occurred to me that these might be distinctions without difference for my coworker. Even though I had no intent to deceive and I don’t share her beliefs on the matter, I had accidentally enticed her to act contrary to her values and felt I must give back her contribution.

There was never really any hesitation on my part about needing to return her gift, even though I feel chagrined about it, partly because I made the mistake in the first place but more so because I don’t see anything wrong with what JDRF and its funded researchers are doing. In a perfect world, there would be no need for this kind of testing because everyone with diabetes would be cured. But in the world we live in, I have few problems with the sacrifice we selfishly choose to make for countless mice as long as we learn something useful from them that moves us in the direction of somewhere much, much better. Even though they were furrier and friendlier, I feel the same way about the dogs that Banting and Best used in the development of insulin therapy 90 years ago. I’m not advocating for the extreme position of “anything goes as long as it happens for the greater good.” On a scale that ranges from “No Animal Research” to “Anything Goes,” I draw the line near a place that minimizes suffering, forbids cruelty, excludes primates, and demands results commensurate with the number of animals involved in the trial. (The more animals used, the bigger the pay-off must be.)

I know and deeply respect that everybody has their own ethical compass, and we should be true to where it points. I just hope that we can get to the more perfect world soon, where we don’t have to make these choices any more. And that’s why I’m fundraising for JDRF.

Lisa is in Philly for a rare business trip, and I needed to buy a few groceries for the week. I didn’t need many things; just a few staples were all I required to get me through lunch and dinner. On this week’s bachelor menu for dinner: a couple nights of pasta and sauce, Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese (don’t judge me!), turkey tacos, and chicken caesar salad. It looked a trip to the supermarket was in order.

We usually shop together at our local Stop & Shop. It’s nearby, quick, inexpensive, and familiar. But I hate the look of their produce section. Don’t get me wrong, there are some good, locally grown veggies, but buying romaine lettuce there depresses. The rest of the store, however, has a whole lot of everything else, all up to snuff.

I’ve been holding on to a $20 Whole Foods gift card that I won at the office gym, when I “maintained, not gained” weight between Thanksgiving and New Year. It’s not a place we regularly shop, in fact we’ve only been there two or three times before. The nearest store is a couple exits down the highway, it doesn’t have most of what we buy at the grocery store, and we had the perception that it’s expensive. But I had $20 of free money to buy groceries, and I was hoping to eat lettuce that made me happy instead of sad when I look at it.

Ever since I got back from Provence, I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate fresher ingredients into our cooking. I like farmer’s markets, and weekly market days, and places like the Mercat de la Boqueria and the Mercat de Santa Caterina that we saw in Barcelona last month. (Even the market that Céline, Doug, Scully, and I visited after picking up our race kit last Saturday was worth the trip.) I’ve been telling myself that if we had anywhere like the places shown below, I’d shop there whenever I could.

Today was the day of decision. Would I make the time to seek out the good stuff? $20 said, “yes.”

Here’s my take on Whole Foods. (I’ll leave aside the whole Stuff White People Like aspects.) If the US were a nation that really cared about food, the produce and cheese sections of our supermarkets would look like those in Whole Foods stores, while the rest of the store would be more like Stop & Shop. It would have high quality, (somewhat) higher cost, more sustainably grown produce in the same store with lots of varieties of cheese, meat, and seafood, along with all of those staples.

Will I keep shopping at Whole Foods? I don’t know, that partly depends on Lisa; it does involve an extra 30-40 minutes of grocery shopping per week and a bit of extra planning to shop at two different stores in different towns.

Will we buy much if we do shop there? I doubt it. For $14.41 today I bought one head of organic romaine lettuce ($2.49), two cups of Greek yoghurt ($1.49 each), and 7 oz. of pre-packaged deli pastrami ($8.99). The same yoghurt cost $1.25 at Stop & Shop, and at $20/pound I expect to hear Gordon Ramsay in my mind calling it “the most amazing pastrami” when I eat it. Basically, I bought a whole lot more of everything at our regular supermarket for less than $30.

But look at this lettuce!

You can see it below in salad form, along with the three cheeses I bought in Canada. (You might also notice the last dose of antibiotics that my doctor prescribed for the bacterial infection in my chest that’s causing my bronchitis.)

That’s worth at least two more trips to Whole Foods to finish spending the $5.59 balance on my gift card, right?

When we arrived at E.U. exit control there were no other passengers there—thanks to the fast march—but I decided to use the “connections with less than 1/2 hour” lanes out of principle. The border guards looked at my passport, (maybe) looked at me, used his big stamp, and waved us through. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go through security again, and we just had one small stop before our gate where they double-checked people with American passports to make sure that we had them and were on the up-and-up.

Simple. And appropriate. If we had looked suspicious or acted oddly or not been running through the airport to catch our flight, I’m sure we might have gotten a little extra scrutiny. And that makes sense.

Furthermore, when we were going through security at Barcelona’s airport it was an easy and relaxed experience. Here’s what it was like. First, after waiting in almost no line, someone who looks an ordinary civil servant looks at your passport and boarding pass to make sure you’re going the right place and have the documentation to get there. Next, you take all of the metal out of your pockets, take off your jacket, watch and belt, and go through the magnetometer, to meet your items on the other side of the X-ray machine. The security guard sees your pump, points at it, gives you the thumbs up, and goes about his business. Your pants may hang low; they may wobble to and fro; but you can throw your bags over your shoulder and saunter over to a nice collection of tables to reassemble yourself. The trays aren’t deep, decaying, table-busing tubs; instead, they’re shallow, smooth, and easy to take things out of. Your Euros slide nicely back into your hand and into your pocket without you needing to scrape your fingers along the bottom of the tray to retrieve them.

Notice that at no time did you have to (a) take off your shoes, (b) get an aggressive pat-down, (c) let go of your wallet, (d) explain your medical device, or (e) feel rushed or under suspicion.

Let’s compare and contrast this with going through security at Boston’s Logan International Airport—with which I am quite familiar—the last three or four times.

You arrive at the airport, check in, and go to a long security queue where a uniformed representative of the U.S. government looks at your documents under a black light and then back at you skeptically, considers the situation, and then writes something inscrutable on your boarding pass which might translate into “Bonne Voyage!” or “Send this man directly to Gitmo.” You go through another queue where you jostle with other people who are taking everything out of their pockets—wallet, coins, keys, glucose tablets, Kleenex, scraps of paper, chapstick, the random Stop & Shop card, etc.—and putting it into a bin along with their belt, shoes, jacket, and watch. You walk (in your socks with a hole near the big toe) to another uniformed officer, point at your pump and say, “I’m not supposed to take this through the back-scatter X-ray imager.” To which he replies, “It’s okay. You weren’t supposed to take them through the magnetometers.” Uh-huh. Okay. You’re the boss, chief.

You stand, holding your pump facing a device that showers you with X-rays. They say it’s safe, but radiologists who have looked at the images suggest it actually does penetrate the skin and sinus cavities and have called it “the biggest low-dose radiation clinical trial without informed consent ever performed” (or something like that). Another TSA agent somewhere else can see that you don’t have any weapons, but then you will still get an extra-thorough pat-down.

After a few seconds, you step out of the machine so a guy (for me) can ask, “What side is your property on?” Do you mean my pump? “No. Your property.” Oh. My junk. The one thing I didn’t take out of my pants. Uh huh. And then comes the very thorough going over. Up one leg. Down the other. All the way around the inside of my waistband of my pants. Down both arms (since they were less visible because I was instructed to hold my pump in my hand.

Going to Buffalo last week, after the TSA agent who swabbed my pump and hands walked away to test for explosive residue, the woman behind me said quietly, “Makes you want to go through again, huh?” We New Englanders have dry cynicism down cold.

Eventually, once it’s clear to The Man that you’re not a terrorist, you get to go collect all of your stuff that’s been sitting unattended on the X-ray belt: wallet, fancy watch, coins, glucose tablets, Stop & Shop card, hand luggage, etc. Plus, oh yeah, your shoes and belt. Good luck finding a nice, out-of-the-way place to put everything back on. You’re going to be in the way and feel rushed.

And don’t get me started about coming back into the U.S. from another country. Getting into Canada is easy: “Are you transporting anything to sell or give away in Canada? Do you have any guns?” The UK and E.U. don’t care about anything as long as you’re not trying to stay for an extended period of time. Australians (and Californians) just want to make sure you aren’t bringing any microbes in that might destroy the local flora and fauna.

But coming back into the U.S. lately has involved a whole bunch of suspicious questions and needless queuing, especially to declare that I have nothing to declare. Just put an “OK” stamp on the duty card and let us walk out of the airport already. Jebus.

Is this really the right way to make us safe? Has this actually stopped anything? (I doubt it. And you know if it had, the TSA would be crowing about all of the Mega-Badness they prevented.) So why treat passengers like criminals? (BTW, I get less intense scrutiny when I visit my brother in the pokey.) Why subject us to extra-thorough screening because we have medical devices? (It’s not like they haven’t seen insulin pumps or CGM transmitters before.) Why, more than ten years after 9/11, do we still have a ridiculous system for getting through airport security and customs?

I have my suspicions, but I’ll just keep them to myself so that I don’t get branded as anti-American and put on a “no fly” list.

Hint, it’s part of the “fortress mentality.” (Which is also the reason why architecture from the 1960s and 1970s sucked so bad.)

What did we talk about? There was the usual stuff you would expect: diabetes and running and bicycling; races we’ve run; people we know in common; Canada and the United States; what we do for a living; and Lisa. We also talked about India, movies, photography, food and our issues about it, English, French, Montréal, relationships, and the Ontario building code. Not to mention a whole bunch of personal stuff that we’ll just keep to ourselves, m’kay?

We spent a long time on Friday night talking about healthcare costs and insurance in the United States and Canada, who pays for what, how much things cost, how easy it is to get access to services, and so on. (I think this is the diabetic version of “How do you say        in your country?” BTW, the answer in Canada is “toque.” Isn’t that precious?)

Basically, it comes down to this: In both the U.S. and Canada, it’s fairly easy to get low-out-of-pocket-cost access to doctors and basic procedures if you have insurance, but prescription medications and diabetes supplies are wicked expensive in both countries. Some drugs cost consumers/patients less in Canada, but pump and CGM supplies have much lower copays (for some of us) in the U.S.

There’s a form of rationing in Canada by limiting how much various plans will pay for, as well as by de facto waiting lists for non-emergent procedures. While in the U.S. we let our employers and insurance companies ration our care by determining how much they’re willing to pay for. In the U.S. and Canada if you have more money, you have better access to helpful things (such as CGMS and all of the test strips you need.) And in both of our countries there are slow-moving regulatory systems that keep us from having access to the most exciting self-management devices and technologies.

I’ve been thinking about all of this in the context of the on-going debate over the U.S. healthcare law, which turned two last Friday, the day that I left for Canada. Happy birthday, Affordable Care Act! Monday, as I flew back, the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments about whether it would survive to its third B-day. [1]

Leaving aside the politics of healthcare in the U.S., one thing is clear: Taking care of our diabetes costs too damn much for what we get. No one in any country should have to make choices about whether and how to manage the basic parts of their disease based on costs. The only way we’re going to fix the healthcare crisis in the U.S. and make it possible for people with chronic illnesses in any country to afford what they need is to lower the overall cost of healthcare so that money is free to go where it’s really needed.

Let’s spend less time thinking about how we pay for things and spend more time trying to make them more affordable.

1 — I’m sympathetic to the argument that it’s Constitutionally strange to compel a citizen to buy something from a private entity. Of course, I also completely buy the argument (a) that a citizen’s failure to have insurance has a significant detrimental impact on my ability to afford my insurance, doctors, and prescriptions and (b) that everyone needs to use the healthcare system, often at times that they don’t expect. Both of these make “buying” healthcare much different than buying a car or anything else “for the common good.” Finally, as much as any other part of the core American value system, I am a firm believer that being a nation that values the rule of law is part of what has helped the U.S. become the more-or-less equal, free, and prosperous society that it is now. If the “individual mandate” portion of the law is ultimately deemed unconstitutional, I wouldn’t be grievously disappointed if the Court overturned it (even though I like it).

Obviously, the answer is more radical—and likely much more legal—than the current system of forcing people to buy private health insurance. Get rid of the ineffective system of private insurance as the primary gatekeeper to healthcare, put everybody into a single-payer system, and pay for it via federal taxes.

The business practice of brainstorming has been around with us so long that it seems like unadorned common sense: If you want a rash of new ideas, you get a group of people in a room, have them shout things out, and make sure not to criticize, because that sort of self-censoring is sure to kill the flow of new thoughts. . . .

[Alex Osborn, the 1940s ad man and inventor of brainstorming] thought, quite reasonably, that creativity was both brittle and fickle: In the presence of criticism, it simply couldn’t wring itself free from our own minds. We could only call our muses if judgments didn’t drag us down. Osborn claimed that this very brainstorming process was the secret to BBDO’s durable creativity, allowing his ad guys to produce as many as 87 ideas in 90 minutes—a veritable avalanche. “The brainstorm had turned his employees into imagination machines,” writes Jonah Lehrer in a long, excellent article in The New Yorker. But as Lehrer argues, the only problem with all this is that brainstorming is total bullshit. . . .

• You’re More Creative Working Alone: “Putting people into big groups doesn’t actually increase the flow of ideas. Group dynamics themselves—rather than overt criticism—work to stifle each person’s potential.”
• Criticism Improves the Brainstorming Process: “Usually, inventions often begin when an inventor spots a problem. Good ideas usually don’t hang by themselves, unattached. They come about as solutions. Thus, allowing criticism into a room full of people trying to brainstorm allows them to refine and redefine a problem.”
• Creativity Is About Happenstance, Not Planning: “Too much familiarity bred groupthink. Too little meant that they didn’t have enough chemistry to challenge each other. The most productive groups were those with a baseline of familiarity but just enough fresh blood to make things interesting. . . . Studies have shown that the most successful groups of scientists also work in extremely close physical proximity. Just being around another creative person is vital to the process . . .”

See, it was like this. Saturday night Lisa was out singing her big, wonderful heart out in the second of three holiday concerts. I stayed home, since some friends and I were going to take it in on Sunday before going to a post-concert dinner and Muppet movie viewing together with Lisa. So there I was sitting on the sofa (with the cat sleeping on my lap) catching up on a week’s worth of snail mail, writing odds-and-ends and worry and bullshit in my journal, plotting out my 12-mile running route for Sunday morning, and watching TiVo’ed “BBC World News” and “Charlie Rose” episodes.

I go back-and-forth between liking and loathing Charlie’s show.

Shoulder Jeff #1: “He’s the voice of the American, white, male, moneyed, center-right Washington/NYC-based establishment. While his guests have a variety of opinions, they helped talk you into supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq . . . or, at least, not opposing it.”

Shoulder Jeff #2: “True, true. But his guests also talk about all of those things that interest you. And since you don’t read as much as non-diabetes/triathlon stuff as you used to, he’s bringing those opinion-makers opinions to you. Besides, you only seem to write in your journal when you’ve been reading the New York Times, watching Charlie, or traveling. Clearly you need him and his guests for inspiration. Plus, you still have Terri Gross’s daily NPR show/podcast/tumblr Fresh Air for balance. Anyway, it’s good background noise while Lisa is away.”

Shoulder Jeff #1: “Okay, well at least be careful. Especially of his guests with ties.”

All true, little shoulder Jeffs.

The last episode I watched had three 40-to-60-something guys (all wearing neckties . . . except maybe John Meacham) sitting around his table talking about the GOP presidential clown parade candidates. It was not a great interview, but it made me want to read their little book: Playbook 2012: The Right Fights Back. It’s one of those “insiders traveling with the candidates tell you about the presidential sausage being made” works that I always like reading in Newsweek after the election.

Except this wasn’t a real book at all. It was one of those “electronic” books. Did I really want to buy a bunch of bits to read on my iPod?

Shoulder Jeff #1: “Why don’t you start, Jeff’s reactionary psyche voice?”

Shoulder Jeff #2: “Oh goody! Okay, I have a list. You won’t actually own anything. What if the forces enabling DRM decide one day that you aren’t licensed to read it anymore? And you won’t be able to lend it out after you’ve read it. And when you’re done where will it go? There’s no bookshelf-able “thing.” If your hard drive crashes, it will be gone. (Well, okay, not gone gone . . . gone-until-you-redownload it gone.) And *gasp* it will be hard to read page after page on a smaller-than-a-notecard sized thing. Plus you’re going to encourage the publishers not to sell real books anymore.”

Shoulder Jeff #1: “WTF, man? It’s not like the words are going to be different. And do you really want to keep this 73-page gem around for your never-to-exist grandchildren to pick up randomly off the bookshelf. ‘Oh look, that Michelle Bachman person sounded cray cray forty years ago.’ Riiiight. Or maybe you’re ‘going to need it for part of a major research project’ in the future? Yeah, okay. Listen. You’ve been buying virtual iTunes music for the last seven years, *and* you still buy CDs when you come across amazing whole albums. Plus it’s just $2.99.”

So I bought the e-book.

(That last paragraph was actually supposed to be the majority of this dispatch, but I got carried away. Sorry.)

A recurring thought in my mind is what would have happened if I had been born 20-25 years earlier than 1974. Would I have been a protester, a marcher, a sitter-inner, a free-lover, a Weather Undergrounder? Or would I have been a “Get a job, you dirty hippy!” kind of guy? I can see both streaks in me, each conveniently made moot by time and a blanket of post-Watergate political apathy.

In high school I was comparatively liberal and a bit of a spacey free spirit. In college I was comparatively conservative, lacking in small-liberal-arts-college savoir faire and cultural sophistication, and rather disdainful of the sloganeering of the politically active folks on campus. Don’t just tell me, convince me. And, no, shouting loudly (or taping over your mouth in symbolic protest) is not at all convincing. If I had been in college in the late 60s and early 70s, which way would I have gone?

In 2003 I went to the one big anti-war protest in Boston that I heard about before it happened. (Was it just me or did the media do a terrible job covering pre-war dissent?) But I treated it as a sort of anthropological exercise, since I felt very ambivalent about the invasion. Looking back now, of course, I feel like a big dope for ever believing the administration. I took a lot of photographs of what I saw, but I think I missed the point that most of the people there were basically like me, just with more conviction.

So it was interesting when I was in France to hear a few of my fellow travelers relive a similar debate from an earlier generation. The woman whose husband was an Air Force wing commander during Vietnam argued that if we had helped the French with materiel and support at Dien Bien Phu, we would never have needed to go to war in Vietnam. On the other side was the former member of Students for a Democratic Society, who took time off school to protest and was ready to go to Canada to avoid the draft. He obviously saw things a bit differently. In the middle was the thermonuclear physicist who didn’t express much of a political opinion at all but just argued the facts.

That’s me. I’m the thermonuclear physicist, just 20-25 years younger.

So now that we have Occupy protests/camp-ins going on everywhere and local officials and the police moving against them in scenes straight from 1972, I’m torn again. I support the message of the Occupy folks. (I’m the 99%, too.) And I support many of the progressive causes that have glommed onto the original anti-plutocracy movement. But they’re often being presented in a way that makes them seems to me (at best) uncoordinated and (at worse) silly, vapid, elitist, or out-of-touch.

Maybe that’s it. I probably would have been a marcher but not an occupier/draft-card-burner. I can see myself having gone to protest along with the sensible people that I know and respect, rolled my eyes at the hippies, and then gotten on with the rest of my life.

Whew. I’m not a reactionary or freeloader (but just barely).

As my fascination grew, going to see local cemeteries became something that Lisa and I could do together on a whim. As I walked around with my pen and paper looking for names, Lisa would look at dates and ages and try to piece together family relationships. It’s been a while since I posted any of the more interesting names or headstones here. That’s about to change.

This headstone has it all: death with his scythe, cherubs, devils, crossed bones, an hourglass, scroll-work, the sun, and a snake eating its own tail to signify the unending cycle of life and death. See below for many more headstones.

Through this new crop of photographs, you can see similarities within regions and times, the effects of mass production, differing regional concepts of piety and sense of style . . . not to mention the role of wealth, the presence of master craftsmen, the concept of personhood, and so many other things.

Many markers are memorial stones—not actual headstones—and are often very simple. Many of the dead only got initials on their marker, if they had a stone at all. Some markers were added decades (even centuries) later, usually in a moment of civic pride.

The earliest remaining headstones with names and dates tend to be very ornate and were for extremely important clergy. There are vastly more 18th century headstones remaining, and they tend to be more simple. Unfortunately, machine-carved and die-cast stones signaled an enormous change in the interestingness of grave markers. By the late 19th century, everyone had a headstone, but most of them had no pictures at all. Almost 150 years after mass-production changed them, it’s interesting to see machine-etched pictures starting to return to stones in the late 20th century.

By touring cemeteries, you can see the transition from early Puritan to Georgian and Federal styles and themes. The macabre and religious iconography gave way to the secular and harmonious. In later stones, you can see hints of Transcendentalist sentiments (such as practicality and comity, symbolized in shaking hands) as well as the Second Great Awakening’s self-satisfied piety in skyward-pointing fingers exhorting you to look for the buried in Heaven. You can even occasionally see Art Nouveau and Art Deco stylings in New England.

Throughout the entirety of American grave markers, Bible verses or short secular poems appear. These usual implore the living not to mourn the dead but to seek to follow them into heaven. Indeed for a long time after the English first appeared in America in the early 17th century, images on headstones were one of the few acceptable forms of public art. Despite Biblical exhortations against the graven image, you can see the shape of a body in some of the early headstones. There are the shoulders; there is the round head. Eventually the skull gave way to the cherub and then to the fleshy human face.

Numerous themes appear in New England grave artwork, often combined together onto one stone:

• Skulls with crossed bones
• Skulls with wings
• Cherubs (or faces with wings)
• Faces and the “memento mori”
• Urns with trees
• Drapery, columns, arches, “false tombs” (This is a form of 18th/19th c. landscape art.)
• Scrollwork, vines, leaves
• Flowers
• Hourglasses
• Heraldry (Though this is usually very limited, very aristocratic, and very Tory.)
• Crosses, Jesus, Mary (These are almost uniformly Catholic.)
• Hands pointing toward heaven or shaking hands (These appeared during the Second Great Awakening.)
• Finials

A tour through a single large cemetery is often a fascinating way to see the generational changes in American orthography, typography, diction, expression, language, and style.

• “ye” versus “the”
• The ligature “s” (as f)
• The change of year didn’t always happen on January 1st. For example, you’ll see 1691/2.
• In the mid-19th century there was the same crazy typographical mishmash that you might see in a typical newspaper.

You can also see the change in tooling and craftsmanship that made these markers.

• Hand cut on slate by a local craftsman, often with visible guidelines — Until about 1820.
• Hand cut on marble by someone on a more regional basis, probably by mail order — Starting in earnest around 1840, just in time for the Civil War and its massive carnage.
• Cast from moulds. If you tap them, you can tell they’re hollow, and you can see the seams where they’re joined — ca. 1840s-1850s.
• Mass produced by machine with automated cutting tools — from 1860 onward.

I hope you will look at these photographs and start to see some of what I’ve noticed over the years. And I hope that, as you encounter things I haven’t noticed, you’ll tell me what you see.

Click on any photograph to enlarge it. Click on the enlarged photograph to move to the next one in the series.