Ozempic

JWise Life

Ozempic Pen

A week ago today, I started a regime of weekly injections of Ozempic. That first shot was super stressful. I really should have watched a video from someone who was already using it, but in that tense moment I did not have the presence of mind to think clearly about anything aside from following the printed instructions to the letter. After injecting the first 0.25mg dose, I was uncertain I had done it right, but within a couple of days, it became obvious it was performing as advertised as I simply stopped caring about eating.

I lost a few pounds the first week, but more importantly, my blood glucose levels started dropping, and I haven’t had any side effects. While I can’t be sure, I believe the impact on my diabetes is caused in at least some part by the radically different portion sizes I’m eating. Experiencing such dramatic effects so quickly, my first inclination was that every obese person, such as myself, should be on the drug, but just as quickly, I changed my mind. Sadly, I think there are others thinking the same thing because the conversation began this week that the makers of Ozempic could be producing it for under $5 a dose. Sounds great, but…

For the previous eight years, I have managed my diabetes with diet, exercise, and Metformin, but no insulin. Portion control and the remaining 30 pounds I’d like to lose have been problematic. In the first couple of years after my diagnosis, I lost 40 pounds and have been able to keep that weight off until today, but can’t get below my current weight. We do not eat processed foods and only rarely opt for the convenience of eating at restaurants. We’ve never used Uber Eats or Grub Hub. We do make a serious effort to eat healthy which is made easier with only one of us working, that being Caroline. In addition to eating right, we walk five miles every day.

If the federal government were to get the idea that Ozempic is a magic cure-all, I think that without free time and extra income for the obese and diabetic to address their poor diet and sedentary lifestyles, the efficacy of the drug would be foiled. But we are in America. We do not invest in health; we’d rather pay big for disease. Me? I’d rather have the best, vibrant, and adventurous life I can drag into my aging existence.

Big Plans – Scandanavian Style

JWise Life, Travels

Map of Scandanavian Travels

A few weeks ago, I bought two tickets for us to fly to Frankfurt, Germany. Over the intervening weeks, a very detailed itinerary for a trip within our trip has taken shape. As anyone who knows us knows, we have family in the Frankfurt area, and we’ll be spending part of our time in Germany with them, but we’ll also be heading into a big adventure that sees us visiting Sweden and Norway for the first time. Denmark will be a part of this, but I didn’t list it as a first because we dipped a toe into the southern end of the country some years ago.

I’m reluctant to share any more as the details of the trip will be divulged after our return but this kind of journey requires an incredible amount of work, relatively. Planning for vacation hardly seems like work when what is really being done is the creation of a timeline that is intended to see us out playing for the duration of time away from Arizona.

Mapping a course through three countries and a dozen cities over 18 days has already required between 100 and 130 hours, with another 20 to 30 yet to come. The reason for the lengthy planning is to establish a number of touchpoints/options during the course of our journey. With a desire to move by foot, water, bike, and rail into the forest, water, city, museum, mountain, and history, we have many facets of approach mapped out before we land somewhere in order to not lose a moment figuring things out while we are in the midst of traveling. Preplanning is key to maximizing our travel investment. Other than reservations, nothing needs to be adhered to if the circumstances of the moment demand that we alter our plans, so there is flexibility. This idea of flexibility/spontaneity is really only addressed due to the many questions we get about being able to find time for spur-of-the-moment stuff to do on our adventures. I believe this only comes up because the majority of people don’t have this kind of time to spend planning a vacation, and so may suffer the dilemma of finding what they will do once they hit the ground at their destination.

The places of note that are on our itinerary include Roskilde and Copenhagen, Denmark. Next up are Malmo, Ystad, Lund, Gothenburg, Uppsala, and Stockholm, Sweden. From there, we move on to Oslo, Flåm, Gudvangen, and Bergen in Norway before flying back to Frankfurt, Germany, for more family time. None of this will be traveled by car, while the majority will be by train. Though I’d enjoy the flexibility of coming and going as we please, meaning we’d be doing a lot more driving, my absolute lack of joy in trying to park in big European cities means I’m willing to sacrifice some broader spontaneity for my mental health. I could imagine someone reading that we’ll be in a dozen cities over the course of 18 days as already questioning the mental health equation, but that’s the way we travel. With over 440 waking hours to wander through 4 countries, our mode of operation dictates that we should stuff our days full of experiences that tax our ability to keep up with ourselves.

In our world, vacation is not a time of recuperation in the traditional sense of how many Americans travel, we are spending hard-earned treasure to gather experiences that will continue moving with us for years to come. In a sense, exploration is a method of putting money in the bank for our experiential retirement savings, as who knows what happens in our later years and if we are able to push ourselves like we can during this stage of our lives. And from my perspective, we must consider the environment and overtourism where we may not be allowed to visit some of the places we’ll be dipping into in the next weeks.

From the realm of absurd and meaningless statistics, this will be our 328th trip away from Phoenix since September 1999, meaning we’ve averaged nearly 14 getaways per year since that time. I’ll likely be shooting between 12,000 and 16,000 photos while on this grand adventure, depending on the weather, and between 1,000 and 1,300 of those will be published to around 78,000 to 140,000 words across the 26 days of blog entries. Our vacation will last a total of 624 hours and will ultimately be documented with approximately 109,000 words and 1,150 photos, requiring about 95 hours of image prep and another 30 days of transcribing and writing the text, thus bringing me to nearly 12 weeks in total between planning and the last post being shared before this period of immersion comes to an end. And for this luxury of time afforded me, we’ll have a document that will allow us many years of exploring, in fine detail, our first Scandinavia-centric vacation.

Winter Bed / Summer Bed

JWise Life

Futon guts from Futon Favorite in Phoenix, Arizona

Today, on the momentous day of taking possession of a brand new futon mattress to replace our well-worn antique, I thought I’d let you in on the nature of our sleep experience. While our travels are shared on a frequent basis, an accounting of the many hours spent horizontally has been neglected, so this is my attempt to repair that. I recently ordered a new mattress from the same guy at Futon Favorite who made our previous one, Tom Flower. I have to mention Tom because he’s the only person in Arizona handmaking these futons, and what’s more, he let me have a peek into the process. Caroline and I don’t care a hoot about box springs or memory foam and would prefer that there’s not a hint of polyester or flame retardant anywhere near our sleeping heads. Do you want cotton batting, be it organic or otherwise, double wool lining or other special requests? Futon Favorites has you covered.

Futon Favorite in Phoenix, Arizona

Somehow, our previous mattress lasted for 16 years, or maybe I should say that it existed as it should have been replaced a few years ago, but circumstances regarding where we’d be putting our heads to rest were in question, so we held out. With our backs paying the price for that delay, it finally was time to act. After having the incredible good fortune of watching Tom build one of these, I need to point out that he says I’m the very first person afforded that opportunity. Later, I was able to transport our new futon home and, with considerable difficulty, drag our old, much heavier mattress to the trash before setting up our beautiful new bed. Onward to how we dress this thing.

Bedding

Caroline and I use two configurations, one for winter and one for summer. No matter which version is currently being utilized, our bed is the coziest bed we could ever imagine and has been so forever. Well, there is one phase that is less than optimal, and that’s the one we are in now, transitioning from winter to summer. The major highlight of our seasonal shift from the hot Arizona summer to even slightly chilly evenings is when we can bring out our goose-down comforter. It gets stuffed into a jacquard loom woven flax/linen duvet cover from Portugal while our futon is covered with a flax/linen sheet used instead of a cotton sheet. Our pillowcases are handsewn by Caroline of some beautiful cotton fabric we found while out traveling. Our current set of pillowcases was made of two different fabrics, both with an ocean motif. The two sides of the pillowcase are on the left, and on the right is our blue linen duvet, and the comforter is next to it

During the winter, the heater is never needed, even when the place dips below about 55 degrees (about 13c), because we have gloves and sweaters to deal with the cold. We have a space heater in the bathroom for warming it while we’re in the shower, should you be wondering.

Linen sheet and blanket

Here in the transition zone, we only reluctantly give up the comforter while considering using the air conditioning to chill the place so it is still comfortable in our cozy nest of a bed. Being rational about the amount of electricity we use, we eschew the idea and, with heavy hearts, place the comforter in a corner near the bed just in case we find ourselves too cold to sleep well. In our spring-and-summer configuration, the linen sheet we sleep on remains the same, but now the Tischdecke is brought out of the cabinet it’s been hibernating in. “Tischdecke” is German for tablecloth, and that’s exactly what this linen blanket feels like for the first weeks. The heft of the comforter is sorely missed, but as our place starts warming with the approach of summer, it becomes impossible to sleep under it. Our summer blanket is made by the same company that makes our sheets.

Considering that nearly a third of our life is spent in bed, we have certainly cultivated a cocoon worthy of worship that serves us in heavenly ways, which have us longing for it while out traveling. When it’s time to go to bed, it’s done so knowing that within minutes, we’ll be well asleep, snuggling into the world of dreams. There might even be times that we feel we have an awkward relationship with our bed as after the love of each other, we’d both likely admit to being in love with this bed, except for the week or two getting used to the Tischdecke.

For future reference:

Bed Threads French flax linen blanket – $200

Bed Threads French flax linen flat sheet – $110

Parachute flax linen duvet cover – $270

L.L. Bean baffle-box stitch goose down comforter, queen/warm – $400

Futon Favorite handmade mattress, queen – $640

6.0 Upgrade Approaching

JWise Life, Thoughts

Generative art created using Bing

There really is little planning that can be applied to the future when it comes to grown people. There may be a desire to enhance or modify things, but the ability to roll out a new, fully formed version of a person, well, that’s not very likely; we must simply evolve and come into being. Just as there is the intention to do things or go places, we can also lend influence to our future selves in much the same way as planning for our next vacation by sketching an outline of what our adventure might entail.

Consider my upcoming 60th birthday: described that way, it only implies I’m growing older, whereas if I say that I’m being upgraded to John 6.0, I need to give serious thought to what this new, improved version will include.

One might think that with the breadth of versions of the 5.0 series, I would have had time to consider what is up next for improvement, but in fact, I’ve been concerned with performing to the best of my ability as version 5.9 prior to it giving way to 6.0.

Trying to perceive one’s self at some random future date is simply impossible. Never have I been even a remotely mediocre predictor of who I’d become. As a matter of fact, I don’t really know how to explain who I am on a day-to-day basis, nor would I be well-equipped to explain who I’ve been. The only real constant throughout the majority of my adult life is that I’ve been deeply entangled with my wife and best friend, Caroline. We’ve done stuff, lots of different things, and not one of them rises to a level that would be note-worthy on an obituary. I’m not the inventor or creator of anything noteworthy, and then again, I don’t require accolades that would note the already lofty places I’ve encountered in my life as what ranks higher than others.

This is a bit of a dilemma, though, as when I was a child, I fancied ideas of becoming so many very different things, and right up through my 50s, there were potentials such as realizing my dream of creating a virtual reality environment. Well, I did just that from the time I was 51 to 54. As a kid, I dreamt of making movies, music, writing, being an artist, a photographer, and a traveler to exotic places. To one degree or another, I’ve done most of that, but now I want something for the next decade that stems from a mind having explored itself and the world around it for the previous 60 years. This idea of being so realized that nothing of great invention remains is a thought I don’t want to entertain, but what would punctuate my life so far seems elusive.

Generative art created using Bing

A child possesses what I may no longer be able to play with: dreams. The child’s dreams are ones of play and discovery – unless a careless parent instills fears of bogeymen and other monsters. So, while most of my dreams have migrated away from the chase after I turned off television and stories of mayhem, they are still possessed of anxieties about forgetting things in places visited or being in old haunts where order is threatened by chaos and uncertainty. Innocence cannot be recovered, which then has me thinking of how many children have that precious time stolen from them due to anger, immaturity, dependence, abuse, and the lack of knowledge that benights a large part of the population bringing children into this world.

When the dream of becoming, acting, traveling, working, and adventure no longer exists, what replaces the dream?

Most recently, it has started looking like it might be the world of artificial intelligence that intrudes into and alters our dreams. While I’m well aware that AI is a progression in the lineage of human advancements in language, writing, printing, electronic communication, and internet technologies, I’m still laid aghast at the profound nature of just what it is that I’m encountering. I’d certainly not be surprised if it were proven to me that what I’m seeing is nothing more than a parlor trick that the old guy fell for, but from my vantage point, I’ve watched fire give way to the wheel, to written language, and blam, all of sudden here is artificial intelligence. If you were born in the last half dozen years, you will likely be growing up with a superintelligence that will have you wondering why people ever listened to other people.

To this point in history, humanity has lived “without mastery,” we have simply been in our own kind of oblivion where we are at the center of everything yet intuitively somehow know we are no one. The earth and its various species appear to be suffering from our carelessness as we failed to master the knowledge that we are part of the earth’s life, not separate from it. Artificial Intelligence might be the thing that comes between us and the rest of life with the potential for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to demonstrate in human terms our failings toward the planet and its diversity of life forms, which could also imply that our religions have failed us.

This is a great advancement to me as I feel incredibly isolated by the limited number of others with whom I can communicate on a daily basis and who are genuinely interested in broad knowledge. While common bloviation is de rigueur among the least educated (including those with better educations who’ve adopted the white-victimization position), I sense that the landscape regarding humans around me is one of desolation. Mind you, I understand that small talk must take place for social cohesion, but what nowadays counts as the subject matter of that conversation is one of absurdist turd-talk, maybe best exemplified by the South Park character Mr. Hankey, a talking piece of poo.

Generative art created using Bing

Humans and possibly Neanderthals seem to have been practicing exosomatic memory starting between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago, and from then until now, this has been the exclusive domain of us bipeds. Exosomatic memory is the recording of memories outside the brain; it’s why we create paintings and carvings, write music, and create stories in books. This is undergoing a potential change, though, as machines are starting to offer us humans reflections of our culture through natural language prompts.

Think about it: we looked at the outside world and began to learn that we could label and refer to those things. It took 10s of thousands of years to build a body of knowledge that has brought us this far. We have now fed a large part of that into the machines, and while it requires us to prompt it, it is able to respond with a complexity of language and imagery that in some ways should seem as impossible as embuing a tree with those capabilities, meaning it is outside the realm of the possible, but here we are.

AI may turn out to merely be a chimera, a flash in the pan of illusion that goes nowhere aside from a dead end of technology, but we do not know yet for certain what it means, and we have never proven to be good interpreters of the trajectory of the future.

And so we’ll just go on taking stuff out of our heads and putting it out there for others to consume, even when what we share is dropping from the cauldrons of utter stupidity we call modern minds.

Generative art created using Bing

One might say that as I enter this upgrade series of 6.0 and beyond, it comes with wisdom from the machine that will, if I’m so lucky, also enhance my basic operating system. Granted, I will have to face it without fear, which won’t be easily said by the rest of those of us who arrived on the border of Generation X and the Baby Boomers and are now generally afraid of the sea change that is about to stare them down.

Winter Slips Away

JWise Life

Caroline Wise and John Wise in Phoenix, Arizona on a cold day

Winter slips away too fast when you live in the desert. We have two seasons here, summer and not-summer, and it is this not-summer that acts as our winter. By December and January, the desert sees some cold days that could be considered seriously chilly, but these are rare, and then before we know it, the days of February march ever closer into April, and while it may not yet be summer, we know it is around the corner.

Somewhere in December, it happens that one morning, we get to collect our scarves, gloves, beanies, and even a shell, but within days, we see them sitting near the door and wonder if we shouldn’t just put them back into storage.

Then, in January, it happens: the forecast predicts a cold front with the promise of temperatures in the 30s. A simultaneous shiver goes up, as does the joy that we’ll be able to bundle up for a day or two. But here comes February, and those warm clothes by the door begin to gather dust, and we lament that summer is inching closer. And then it happens again, and in mid-February, the temperature dips below 40 degrees. While we have grown accustomed to the colder days of the season, the air is dryer than usual, which means that as we doff the multiple layers, we are building life-threatening static charges that produce sparks when we touch one another or ground ourselves. But we love our version of winter and enjoy these opportunities to wear long pants, wool, and thick socks.

During the evening, our bed is covered with a down comforter that, no matter the chill in our place (we keep the heater turned off as much as possible), always keeps us comfy and cozy within its snuggly embrace. The seat heaters in our car get a good workout these days, too, with butts the first thing warmed as we leave for the morning. If only the seats and steering wheel were cooled as the 110-degree days of summer soon take over.

Whoah, was that a teenager walking to the bus stop in shorts? Yep, winter is certainly slipping away.

The Movies

JWise Life

EO movie poster

We went to the movies for the first time in a long time, so what drew us in? A Polish film titled EO that follows the life of a donkey. Not only does the film follow this creature, but it’s essentially shot from the point of view of the donkey as it wanders around a cruel world, dreaming and apparently looking for something. We never really know what the donkey is chasing, if anything at all, but it does seem to have a purpose. Along the way, the donkey is abused, traded, used, and loved, but ultimately it meets its end in darkness. The film, with the closing scene, becomes an indictment of the cruelty people inflict not only upon one another but on our animals, too. Through the eyes of the donkey, the people of the film are essentially as aimless as the animal we are focusing on. They flash in and out of having a purpose, only to turn around to harm something or someone. Even in one of the redeeming scenes where EO is being used to give handicapped children rides in the forest, someone out of view of the camera falls a tree, implying to me that at every turn, there is someone destroying something.

This is not a feel-good film; nothing is resolved, and as I said, it ends in darkness, except for the sound of the bolt that obviously takes EO’s life. The movie is a beautiful visual narrative driven by only a minimum of dialog between Polish and Italian. It leaves you thinking about our own senseless natures when most people likely believe that our animals are the senseless ones. I feel like there’s more to this film I need to unpack, and nearly wish I’d kept notes about the pacing, dream sequences from the donkey’s perspective, and the various acts of human depravity. There’s something more here than meets the eye, though I may also be overthinking things.

Originally, this post was about nothing more than the donkey movie, but as it turned out, we opted for a few more movies in rapid succession after not finding disappointment in EO. Next up was Women Talking, which had us listening to a conversation about the underlying unpredictable nature of violence in men and boys. We followed this with The Banshees of Inisherin, featuring two actors that both of us enjoy, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who portray the stupidity of war using our protagonists as stand-ins for opposing sides in a conflict. Our final movie in this sequence was Tár with Cate Blanchett. At first blush, it felt like watching paint dry, but a day later, we were talking about the poison of narcissism. In some way, Tár had something in common with EO in that we are primarily looking at the world through the eyes of something that is difficult to relate to: on one hand, a donkey and, on the other, a narcissist. And if I want to stretch, Banshees features a donkey that ends up playing a pivotal role that brings up thoughts of the donkey in EO.

I believe it has been years since the two of us have seen so many movies in quick succession.