Stalemate

The ‘relationship’ I have got with my house resembles how I play chess. I contacted the agency for rental houses and within only a month time they offered me a lovely but pretty expensive house. It was love at first sight. Not that ‘stricken by lightning’ kind of love but more a comfortable, cosy feeling of coming home. Without a second thought I said I'd take it. I play chess only now and then. I am a beginner. Learned it about three years ago from a friend. I never expected to learn it anyway until then. I have played only against three live opponents so far. The one who taught me is unbeatable to me because I can’t foresee more than two moves at a time. Renting the house was comparable with a well known opening move in chess, namely white pawn to d4. I prefer to play with white. This move is somewhat slower than the popular e4, because white will not be able to castle for three more moves. Like I was not able to move houses in the coming years.

With hindsight it is easy to tell that both fulltime studying and building up my own practice was not an ideal situation to rent a house with monthly payments above my budget although I had some savings at that time. Black answered against my odds with pawn to d5. My second move, pawn to c4, or spending a huge amount of my savings to invest in advertisements was my logical response to challenge black’s d5. My dreaming beyond reality took off as soon as the first few customers responded to the expensive advertisements. Among them were several clients who wanted to extend their computer competencies another passion I have, teaching computer skills. To make that part of my practice, which I pictured for myself as a big institute in the future, more official, I joined the foundation for European Computer Driving Licence ™ as an authorized testcentre for computer exams. I was imagining renting the house attached to the right side of mine as well. In my imagination I already divided that house into an office where I would work, a room for counseling sessions with phobic clients and a computerroom as a multiple test facility. The living room would be an extension for my own living room and I would partly tear down the wall connecting those two rooms. I could already picture myself in the twice as big backyard. My neighbors were completely unaware of my secret daydreaming I hope but I encouraged their search for a cheaper house quite a lot. Anyway, until that house would be available I still managed to do all my business in only one room of my own house where I felt like a queen in a humble castle. I have had a few setbacks then. Black’s move from pawn to c6. First of all were the annual payments for authorization pretty high. Second my dog died after being hospitalized in an university pet’s hospital. The bills from the vets afterwards were almost as much as I invested in marketing.  I could see the bottom of my piggybank looming. Black was declining my offence and was reserving an open diagonal for his queen’s bishop.

However, the feeling for my house only grew stronger in the following years.  Only my plans for expanding my private practice moved a little to the background because studying was more  time consuming than I thought it would be. Without much financial foundation I dreamt about buying my rental house one day, without having a strategy to fulfil that dream though. Rumour had it that the investment company,  owner of the houses in my block, was debating to sell them. I was determined to take that chance when that day would come. With great confidence I moved my knight to f3 . Then one day my neighbours told me they were moving houses. A little too early to my plan. Black indeed moved his queen bishop and attacked my knight at e1. I was not really enthusiastic when a new neighbour moved in their house a few months later. But after learning that he was planning to stay temporarily I felt relieved. I moved my queen’s knight to c3.  

Eventually the financial crisis was bugging me also. Which made me calculate what the consequences would be when I was paying mortgage instead of rent.  I had figured out that it would even be cheaper to buy this house, instead of renting it. That’s because the Dutch tax system allows one to deduct the interest of the mortgage payment from income tax. I didn’t want to face the fact that getting a loan from a bank to buy a house is a lot harder when you are an entrepreneur. It would require a minimum of three years of a stable income at least. I was not there yet as I was still studying fulltime. That’s why it was way too soon that my prayer’s of the opportunity to become owner of the house were answered, when there was an unexpected transfer to another investment company. This new owner of these houses was offering them for sale to the renters. Without much hope I had gone to see the mortgage broker. After calculating the maximum mortgage I would possibly qualify for, and the largest repayments I could manage, he made it clear to me that it was impossible to get a loan. Black pawn to e6. He told me that really it would be better if I bought the house with someone else. Although I am lacking long-term strategy I was sure that that was not part of my plan ever, it had to be mine and mine only. I am still thinking about what move to make next. But like chess I have some time left to think things over. If only I could see beyond two moves ahead.

Old and wise

My political knowledge is shaky to say the least. So I can hardly say anything about the political situation here in the Netherlands now but there are probably new elections coming up again because the negotiations went wrong yesterday. One party of the mixed government stepped out of the negotiations because he couldn’t deal with the proposed cuts to reduce the national debts. The party causing this political standoff is led by a man who is known for his rudeness in debating and opposing against immigrant policy mainly. I couldn’t care less of his departure because he makes me feel ashamed to be Dutch but unfortunately he has quite a lot of people agreeing with him.

The effects of the financial crisis hit us all eventually and without necessary cuts it seems impossible to me to break free of that downward spiral. The problem is that when you’re hit hard by those cuts and witnessing at the same time other people flourish, it’s human nature generally to blame someone or something other than oneself.  Thousands of people are in financial troubles because of mortgages. Until a few years ago the sky was the limit to finance a house for couples with double income. A huge part of the financial troubles rose after divorces and break-ups because the leaving partner had to be bought out of the mutual property. There are only a few here to admit that their original mortgage was beyond their capacity, or at least that their commitment to their relationship was not so strong. Of course this is only one lousy example but my point is that the general attitude about the crisis reminds me of one of the major symptoms of a depressive disorder: loss of confidence or self-esteem. To feel helpless to manage one’s life or resolve problems.  Sobriety seems to be a dirty word. Every group seems to have its own worries. Students expect to be helpless when the governmental student allowance will be cut short. Teachers and caregivers in health department are already squeezed to their limits because of the relatively low payments compared to the workload. And the number of laid off people is rising. So, very little volunteering for carrying the cuts.

A good thing is that some creative businesses are blooming these days. I learnt in a television program last week about so called repair-cafes. You can bring every kind of broken household equipment there to be repaired. Good for your wallet and good for the environment as well. There must be many other initiatives like that but I can’t think of more at the moment. I wish I could ask my granddad how they dealt with the crises they were facing back in the last century. They managed so we can do that too.

Why is it that in Western society we treat elderly people like they don’t know that much? Put them away in nursing homes and decide for them what’s best, that’s how it is here. There still are cultures around the world where the oldest people in the community are being asked for advice. Maybe it is because computers have been taken over Western life. Not all contemporary older people are familiar with computers and smartphones. My mom is seventy five and even though she is far ahead of her peers in staying tuned with modern life, not surprisingly she needs more explaining about how to use her new gadget, a Samsung Galaxy, than my kids. While explaining to her how she can send messages other than textmessages she is already used to, I realized that there is more than a technical aspect in it. These days you sent a message and depending on how busy the receiver is you’ll get an answer, right away or within a few days time. Because the ones you’re contacting are in touch with all their social networks at the same time and handle the requests in between everything else of their daily lives and sometimes simply overlook your message because they have an overload of requests. It is not a matter of not thinking of you, older mom or dad or grandparents, but attainability still has its limits for young people too. Although seemingly cool to have all day round access to the internet, sometimes we, younger people, forget to live in the real world. That’s the generation gap. Most elderly though modern people turn off their computers after checking their e-mail and go on with their normal life.

I am glad that my mom still lives in her own house, still works and likes that, has an open mind for modernism and is still mobile. It is upon us to realize that the personal touch can never be replaced by modern technology and that we have a choice to visit them and dropping a thousand other obligations. Because they make us see that there is more to life than being virtually connected. 

Confessions of a chocaholic

After typing down my confession last week I had decided to take the bull by the horns. It was time for a small experiment of a little theory I had. I personally believe that starving yourself is not a good way to lose weight. The opposite is what will help much better, feeding yourself properly. Eat as much as you like as long as it is vegetables or bread. After all, when your stomach is already filled up with “normal” food, there won’t be much room left for snacks. I went to the library to find myself some books with healthy, tasteful recipes for dinner because my inspiration on that part of daily food is miserable. I’ve found as much as four books of our Dutch diet guru Sonja Bakker. I skipped her diet plan as a package and only made some dinner recipes from the books. Breakfast and lunch I could decide for myself, I thought. In the books of Sonja I’d read that losing weight depends on having variation in what you eat. People who eat the same food daily, although within the limit of the calories they use, won’t lose weight. That’s because the regularity makes the body lazy. Digestion and burning down calories should improve with variation in the menu.

It was not so hard sticking to that great plan of mine. Instead of having the same breakfast, cereals (with chocolate flavour!) I chose some of the many other goods from the store. I took my home made sandwiches for lunch with me to the university and didn’t feel hungry during the daytime. My peers and me spent a couple of long busy days in the lab, testing people for our project. I granted myself one cookie after coming home because I did a great job without snacking. And after dinner I enjoyed my tea with another one. The third day was a pretty stressful day and I took a small piece of my favourite chocolate bar when I came home. I’d tried to melt the chocolate slowly in my mouth and really taste it before swallowing. That felt good! Way too soon the chocolate was dissolved but I convinced myself to close the cupboard firmly and concentrate on cooking another tasteful meal as I planned. I am feeling proud of my culinary prowess lately. Sonja came up with really nice recipes.

Unfortunately I was craving for chocolate again within an hour after dinner this day. I was stressed and tired. I didn’t try very hard to distract myself because how much harm would another small piece do after a whole day being very strict? There was only a small piece left in the package and I could not read the tiny printed nutritional information on the label without putting on my reading glasses. Wait a minute. This needed some extraordinary calculations because it told me only how much calories 100 grams of the bar contained, which is the amazing number of 555 kilocalories. You’ll need to know that this kind of bars weight 300 grams and do some more maths to find out how much a block or even a row contains. I definitely didn’t eat more than a few rows at a time ever, too much would make me feel sick. So, these kind of bars consist of rows of 4 square blocks each, but how many rows? I decided to count the very next bar of chocolate I would buy this week. Done that. As you might expect, it was a little shocking to discover that my daily dose has a minimum of 185 kcal to approximately 400 kcal max. And, since I was confronting myself I also looked up how much a cookie was. My other bad snacking habit. Apparently I like to fool myself with thinking that a whole wheat cookie is not so bad.  I used to chew happily one, two or ten of those cookies away while thinking it is healthy because of the whole wheat. Yeah, only 71 calories a cookie, not so much. But then, ten of them equals the calories of a rich diner. Add up a couple of hidden calories here and there and it is obvious how I grew my spare tire. I must have had days that I snacked an entire day supply of calories

.

On the bright side I’d learnt a lot. Another thing still is how to get rid of the extra weight. My experiment of eating as you like, as long as it is healthy, appeared to be not successful and it will take some more effort. What is the attraction of chocolate? It is not that I’m addicted to chocolate in general. I don’t even like chocolate all day long. Only these Milka bars filled with cream and biscuit on moments when I feel tired and stressed. I could, and should really, replace these bars with extra dark chocolate because that contains far less fat and calories and still has the nice properties of chocolate. We all know what those properties are, don’t we? For those who don’t, there’s more here: http://www.ice-cream-recipes.com/chocolate_science_health.htm One could easily consider chocolate as being healthy food, it stems from a veggie after all, the cocoa tree. There’s a limit on fooling oneself however, and the most appealing chocolate and cookies contain too much sugar and other useless calories.   

Three wrongs make a right. I will come up with better results next week, I hope. 

Matryoshka

For years now I have had my mind focused almost completely on acquiring knowledge. From the day I started in 2005 with the course of counseling, followed by several brief courses, before I enrolled in the mathematical course which was required to enter the study of psychology. In my mind’s eye I still appeared not too fat even though I never have been a skinny person. Sometimes in the last few years I was a little concerned about the size of my physical appearance, especially after seeing myself in a picture or a video. However, I kept on snacking chocolate and cookies in times of exam stress. Many times, I did a Scarlett O’hara about that and thought I would deal with it later. Last year me and a male friend were discussing the types we preferred of the opposite sexes. Mind, he is neither in perfect shape at all but he was quite explicit when he stated that he liked women not as big as me. Wow, digesting that I thought “Look who is talking”, but admittedly I was feeling very positive about having lost 14 pounds without any effort after returning home from my visit to him. It must have been the heat and the change of environment because I didn’t turn down any food or sweets and I enjoyed every meal he offered me. Unfortunately school started again pretty soon after coming home and before the first semester was over I gained back those pounds again. Still I didn’t worry much about that. When my favorite black jeans didn’t fit as comfortable anymore I had a few properly other pants left. But now it is almost time for tank tops and short skirts revealing much more bare skin than in Winter, I can’t hide the spare tire around my waist no longer. I have to face it: There is work to be done! 

Although very tempting for the short term prospect, I will not settle for crash dieting. I’ve decided not only to lose 30 pounds and tighten my skin but I also wish to become more energetic. So, there it is, I stated it out loud here in my blog for you all to be witness of my goal. While I am typing this down there is just the slightest bit of doubt bubbling up in my mind; Do I really want to go for it? All I can say to that is: “Yes, yes, yes!”. Now this first obstacle has been taken, to admit openly that I want to be slimmer it is time to come up with a proper plan of how to really accomplish that. It will be a little difficult to find a healthy diet because I am a picky eater. I absolutely won’t eat anything that has been living in the water or has had wings on its body. And, I have become really addicted to my daily dose of chocolate. But hey, nobody said this would be easy. I think I also need something to visualize the amount of what I want to get rid of and see the progress I will be making. I am looking at the stack of textbooks I’ve digested for school so far, and thinking how heavy they are. I pick up my Eastpack rucksack and start filling it with books. There it goes:

-          - Cognitive Neuroscience (hardcopy), 4.2 pounds

-          - Personality Psychology/Abnormal Psychology, Custom edition for Leiden University, 2.6 pounds

-          - Abnormal Child and Adolescent Psychology, 2 pounds

-          - The Neuroscience of Clinical Psychiatry, 1.5 pounds

-          - Attention, Theory and Practice, 1.5 pounds

-          - Critical Thinking, 2 pounds

-          - Psychometrics, 1.5 pounds

-          - Behavioral Research Methods, 1.5 pounds

-          - Cognitieve Sociale Psychology, 1.5 pounds

I have to take another bag because no matter how hard I push, there won’t fit anything anymore in this one. And I am only halfway.

-         -  4 small books from Psychopathology, Assessment and Interventions, together 3.4 pounds

-          - Seksuologie, 2.7 pounds

-          - Discovering Statistics using SPSS (and sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll), 3.4 pounds

-          - The Science of Emotion, 1 pound

O my, I’ve run out of books because I’ve already sold much from the first and second year and adding it all up makes the sum of 27.3 pounds, almost there though. I will add the syllabi from the five statistics courses and the one from the bachelor project to round it up to 30 pounds. It feels very heavy when I try to lift both bags. No wonder I am out of breathe so easily. Now that it has become very vivid what I am challenging I will have to think thoroughly of both a food and an exercise plan. I will do that coming week. For now I am glad that I didn’t buy any chocolate eggs for Easter but I will enjoy the Easter brunch today very much, as if it is the last supper. Happy Easter everybody! 

Incredibly close

A little while ago I was moved deeply by a young boy named Oskar. He had lost his dad at 9/11 and all he had left from him was a key. In a heartwarming way he started his quest to find the lock that fitted the key throughout New York City. To help you imagine a nine year old boy doing that, facing his fears and approaching his problem in his own special way I quote him for you: "I started with a simple problem... a key with no lock... and I designed a system I thought fit the problem. I broke everything down in the smallest parts... and tried to think of each person as a number... in a gigantic equation. "

Although I know very little about biology, and even less about hormones and neurotransmitters , I do know that chemical substances in our bodies and the receptors designed for each of them, resemble the key-lock metaphor quite good. That is why I am intrigued by what is going on in pharmacology, especially psychopharmacology. Except for the enormous amount of possibilities to find the exact key to fit a receptor, trying to activate it or block it, dependent of what is wrong in the natural way of brain functioning,  there is also the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier prevents the brain being infected by many of the viruses and bacteria we encounter in our daily life.

The body uses a few hundred neurotransmitters – small molecules, and neuropeptides – small chains of amino acids to help us function by the chemical message they carry. But without the appropriate receptor, communication of that message discontinues. To make it a little more complex: there are fast and slow receptors and the message may be to stimulate a further response or to block it. The way hormones work, compared to neurotransmitters, is that they tend to work more over time and have different effects on different organs, to name a few.

This last week two events made me elaborate the subject of the chemicals in the brain a little more. The first was an article I have read in New Scientist about narcolepsy. The other was a talk with a friend, while smoking a cigarette together…  Let me first explain some more of the narcolepsy case. Narcolepsy is the opposite of insomnia. People from both groups probably envy each other because their counterpart has something they lack so much. I wouldn’t know what is worse: falling acute asleep when doing something intense like laughing out loud, or feeling constantly exhausted because of sleep deprivation. However, there is hope for both camps thanks to research with Dobermann pinschers. Researchers found a hormone, unknown so far, and called it orexin. One of the effects of orexins is the “stay awake” message they signal. A failing orexin receptor is cause of narcolepsy. In the case of Dobermanns narcolepsy it is suspected to be due to a gene mutation but interestingly in humans it might be due to infections because the onset is later in life and there seem to be a seasonal pattern in patients suffering from it. The human receptors for orexin are not damaged but troubled by the immune system due to a respiratory infection, information supported by chance by the pandemic swine flu. With a lot of effort a better treatment of both narcolepsy and insomnia is to be expected.

Here in the Netherlands it is almost number one priority to “help” people to quit smoking. Recently a new weapon in this battle was extremely supported by health insurance companies and therefore by GP’s: to reimburse a prescription drug with the name Champix. This act of war against nicotine addiction was presented for free until the end of December 2011, after that date one has to pay for this medicine. This drug Champix is the European trade name for varenicline, a substance to reduce withdrawal symptoms of nicotine addiction. After initial success stories the failures are coming to surface now, however not officially but more in talking among smokers about who succeeded or failed to quit smoking.  That’s why I thought about it some more after talking with my friend in the comfort of a break for a smoke, outside of the restaurant we were having dinner. Two out of ten people who are smokers still, that’s about the same number in the bigger population. Although many people quit smoking these days a likewise number of youngsters start doing it. If only they knew how hard it can be to give it up later… The failures of quitting with the help of champix are not so strange because varenicline is a partial agonist, meaning a stimulator, of a certain type of the nicotine-acethylcholine receptor in the brain. The drug stimulates the receptor partially which results in a lesser dopamine release. And because dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in the reward system it reduces the satisfactory effect of nicotine. Varenicline is also partially an antagonist of nicotine, meaning that nicotine is not fully able to attach to the receptor anymore. In my humble opinion the fact that it works partially is the key factor. It is almost like flipping a key open with a hairpin. The official description of the side effects are pretty deterrent: high risk for depression and suicide, disturbed sleeping pattern and having abnormal dreams and nightmares, headaches and nausea. Some researchers say that it will only help one out of five people to successfully quit smoking. To me that seems a little too low to justify messing in the brain. On the other hand, smoking is also messing in the brain. And like Oskar said: “If you don’t try, you’ll never know”.