Note of the Living Deb

I've been wanting postcards to help me speak out rather than stand idly by. But it's been trouble. Should this be a learning-new-tricks post? Are postcards not a thing anymore? I think they are still sold for tourists, but I guess I don't know anymore, and I was hoping for a cheaper bulk option. I do know there are currently postcard-writing campaigns to get out the vote, but is that just a fluke?

So the obvious place to go was Austin Creative Reuse. All they have are "vintage" postcards. Sometimes. A bit pricier than I'd hoped for.

I tried various other places to no avail.

Finally I went to my local post office. The post office sells plain white postcards with the postage already printed on them for just the price of the postage. But you have to drive there and wait in line. It was time to exercise my car, so this was my excuse.

They did not have any. They said the central post office "might" have some. This is like how my local credit union does not have any cash (except from the ATM, which doesn't understand that sometimes I want a bunch of $5 bills for tips or a bunch of $1 bills for bus fare).

So I looked online. I don't want to buy from Amazon for reasons. Etsy was weird. But supposedly drug stores and Target have postcards. So I looked again today.

Walgreens - I looked with the greeting cards and with the office supplies/envelopes. Nope.

Dollar Tree - Same.

Target - Same. So then I asked someone at the service desk, and he said they have only one kind and told me the aisle, which I'd already been to. (This was the aisle with boxed sets of note cards, FYI.) I checked very thoroughly, and no.

Staples - Surely. Went to the aisle with envelopes where an employee offered to help, and he took me to the other corner of the store with the computer stuff and showed me packages of postcards, four to a page with perforations, for your printer. I took one. Victory!

I never would have thought to look there.

These postcards are completely blank. I could decorate them! But I decided instead to use one side just like an envelope and then use the whole other side to write my concerns. That's probably going to work, right?

I like to check out Facebook regularly to get updates on my friends, but I also get news and I also get an education. Here are just three examples of what I learned today:

Music theory as normally taught in schools is racist.

My comments: "Wow. One might expect that there would be classes on Western classical music theory and then also classes on comparative music theory. So finding out that there's just the former, and it's called "music theory" was bad enough. But then we have to find out it was popularized basically for Nazi purposes and so it's yet another horrifying dark shadow we live under. (How open-minded that Schenker included both a Pole and an Italian in his top twelve!)

My favorite part is where he shows that some people think that something without melody can't be music, and some people think that something that's not danceable can't be music.

I also liked when he asked what was the difference between two groups of musicians he had shown pictures of: some were American and some were German."

Then I learned that a Tibetan altitude gene also exists in a recently discovered extinct human species.

My friend's comment: "It's pretty cool if you can say the reason you can breathe in higher altitudes is because some of your ancestors were a completely different species of human."

I also learned that A handful of recent discoveries have shattered anthropologists' picture of where humans came from, and when.

My comment: "There have been a lot of discoveries since my World History class in the late 1970s. Humans were around at least 300,000 years ago (not the 200,000 I learned), now the first-known fossils are from Morocco (not Ethiopia), at least some humans migrated from Africa at least 200,000 years ago (not just the big migration 60,000 years ago), and rather than outcompeting Neanderthals (and newly discovered Denisovans), they may have just intermarried."

And that's why I'm on the computer way too long.

What I had already learned:

1) The macronutrients are protein (~4 calories per gram), carbohydrates (also ~4 calories per gram), and fat (~9 calories per gram). (This is still considered true.)

2) Alcohol is a carbohydrate. (This is not true.)

First of all, alcohol has ~7 calories per gram. I learned that from a flier I fount on campus when I went there to get my flu shot. Then I did more research.

Men's Journal has an interesting article on "How to Count Alcohol Against Your Daily Macros". They say that "By itself, alcohol is not a carb, fat, or protein. ... To metabolize booze, the body converts ethanol to acetaldehyde to acetate, and then shuttles it through the citric acid cycle—which means alcohol acts like both a carbohydrate and fat." [I don't know what the second sentence means except that acetaldehyde and acetate do not sound like sugars to me, which is what I expect carbs to turn into.]

When you're designing your diet, they say you could count it as a carb or a fat.

Reasons to count it as a fat:
* lots of calories per gram
* overconsuming it, like overconsuming fat, leads to weight gain
* if you're on a low-carb diet, you shouldn't use alcohol instead of other carbs

Reasons to count it as a carb:
* it is not essential life, just like carbs [this is also news to me]
* it interrupts your body's fat-burning process, also like carbs
* most alcoholic beverages have calories from carbohydrates as well as from alcohol
* if you're on a low-fat, high-carb diet, you shouldn't use alcohol instead of fats

KatieRingley.co's Macro Basics for Booze" shows that nutrition labels don't even list the calories that come from alcohol, only those from protein, fat, and carbs. Not that alcoholic drinks even have nutrition labels.

According to the Mayo Clinic's "Nutrition and healthy eating", "Typically "net carbs" is used to mean the amount of carbohydrates in a product excluding fiber, or excluding both fiber and sugar alcohols."

Follow-up question: Wait, isn't fiber a carb and don't we need that? Per Fiber Facts' "Do Fibers Count as Calories and Carbohydrates?", the FDA says that calories from soluble fiber are only partly absorbed by the body and should count as 2 calories per gram; insoluble fiber is not absorbed and can count as 0 calories per gram. But when calculating insulin needs for diabetics, don't count any of the calories because their absorption rates don't affect insulin.

Additional follow-up information: Sugar alcohols are not well absorbed, so you end up with fewer calories per gram than sugar, though none of them are listed under carbs. They are, however, included in the total calorie count.

The longer we live, the more things we have to re-learn or unlearn. I feel more put out having to re-learn something I already learned once than learning something new, but a better strategy would be to feel glad to be living long enough to be having to/getting to expand my consciousness.

Old Knowledge

Sometimes knowledge goes bad by becoming untrue.
* I'm average height now. It no longer makes sense to refer to myself as short.
* Prices change. Back in my day, ...

Sometimes knowledge goes bad by losing some or all of its relevance.
* I know how to dial a rotary phone, carefully set the needle onto a record so it doesn't scratch, and rewind a tape when I'm done, but who cares?
* We still have other movie theatres, but I'm generally going to Alamo Drafthouse now when I can. (Except the South Lamar location; I hate that parking garage.)
* I often think of old friends who would be interested in something, but many of those people are no longer available to me.

Sometimes the old knowledge has always been bad; we just didn't realize it.
* racism, sexism, etc.
* word pronunciations I guessed wrong from reading the words

Sometimes our old knowledge is still true; it's just that there's more available now.
* We still have HEB, Wheatsville Coop, and Whole Foods, but we also have Trader Joes (and an additional bigger Wheatsville down south).
* Newtonian physics still works for some things, but now there's more.

New Knowledge

Sometimes the thing we're learning is not actually new; we just make a discovery.
* Thrift stores have things I like. Sometimes even dollar stores do.
* Ten-year-old cars in reliable models are much better than 2-year-old cars in models with average reliability (they are cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain, and more reliable).
* When I suck at learning something, I can still learn it; it just takes me a while. (I like the term "slow learner." I'm a slower learner at foreign languages and things that require gross motor coordination like volleyball, ultimate frisbee, and ballroom dance.)
* The magic of compound interest (and the anti-magic of inflation).
* You get a diagnosis for a condition you've had for a long time. (See the book The Best Practices Journal for a fascinating example of that.)

Sometimes our old knowledge is just wrong and we finally figure that out. Sometimes we were just mistaken or ignorant; sometimes we were blatently lied to. So we want to try to unlearn the garbage and learn the truth.
* Fats don't actually cause weight gain (even though they have more calories per unit of weight than carbs and proteins); simple sugars are what we should minimize
* untrue prejudices

Sometimes the world changes, and we need to change, too.
* The book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves taught me that even the grammar and usage rules we learned in school can change.
* Austin no longer has Liberty Lunch or Les Amis, but it does have Alamo Drafthouse and Trader Joes.
* Smart phones now exist and are ubiquitous.
* Campbell's tomato soup is no longer delicious. (I think they add a lot more sugar now than when I was a kid.)
* Austin has roundabouts now, including at one of the two main exits of my neighborhood

Sometimes you, yourself change.
* We get potty-trained. (Go, Charlotte, you can do it!)
* We're big enough to not need a car seat, high chair, etc.
* Menstruation starts or ends.
* We get sick or injured or traumatized.
* We develop or lose an allergy.
* We gain or lose a bunch of weight.
* Our hair changes.
* We become vegetarian (or make some other voluntary dietary change).
* We change our way of doing something else (more recycling, less plastic, more frugality, less debt, etc.)
* We get a degree or other certification.

Sometimes there's a big change in your close environment. Almost the entire list of things that can cause stress (both good and bad things) apply.
* We get married, divorced, or widowed.
* We have kids or our kids leave home.
* We enter a new roommate situation.
* We get a new job and/or lose an old one.
* We move to a new house/city/country.

I'm adding a new tag, called new_tricks, for when I discuss examples of this.