I've always had problems with addiction. If I've done it, I've probably been addicted to it — a variety of drugs, food, alcohol, sex, porn, collecting of various kinds, body piercing, and so on. When I've been wealthy they've spiraled out of control and when I've been poor I've restructured my life to keep feeding those addictions — by becoming a drug dealer, by getting a job at a piercing studio, whatever…
Breaking most of those addictions for me comes from making rules (or by integrating the addiction into my success plan by building a “reward system” to fuel them). I really realized this when I cured some of my food addictions when I started eating vegan. Now, I didn't actually become vegan because of this, it was just a happy accident — to be honest, I'm not convinced that any compassionate person could continue in a meat-heavy lifestyle after reading a book like The Food Revolution. But that's not what this entry is about so I'll stop myself from preaching on that — in the case of my caffeine addiction (which also upsets my stomach) I try and make rules linking it to particularly productive work days (Monday and Tuesday are really long days for me for example).
I wasn't going to have a coffee (by coffee I mean six espressos in a giant cup) this morning but I saw something in my parking garage that made me go back down with a camera… and after that I couldn't stop myself from continuing on for that elixir I crave so much.
The dude with the parking spot in front of one of mine must have made some enemies in the last little while, seeing as something got most of his tires slashed. I have my suspects. It's kind of an eerie thing to walk past in the morning… but I guess I'm showing my pathetic anthropomorphism of the automobile right now since it didn't phase me one bit when Rachel walked out of our back door and tripped over a dead guy with his guts all over the sidewalk (yes, the stain is still there months later).
While I'm talking about vehicles, I was thinking about people on bikes. I don't have US or Canadian numbers in front of me, but I wanted to show you these numbers on what air pollution in various cities equates to in terms of daily cigarettes smoked. These numbers represent how many “cigarettes” you'd have to smoke a day to equal the damage done to you simply by breathing the air in these locales.
London UK - Marylebone Road - 30 cigarettes per day
Glasgow - 44 cig/d (indoors is 15 cig/d)
Bath UK - 46 cig/d
Oxford UK - Average/year 61 cig/d, peak of 185 cig/d
The cleanest testing city in the UK is Aberdeen. If you live there it's the equivalent of smoking only 5,000 cigarettes a year. Now, the reason I mention bikes is that the curbside numbers for air pollution are approximately three times as high as those indoors (and a modern air conditioned car also does air filtration, so the stinky bastards inside the cars don't even get to enjoy their own pollution). Picking a city out of my ass, let's imagine for a moment that NYC is about as polluted as the cleanest city in the UK. If that is the case (and I suspect it's actually dirtier), then riding your bike daily in NYC would be the equivalent of smoking 15,000 cigarettes a year, or a two-pack-a-day habit.
To put it in different terms, on a health level, people who ride their bike in the city are doing themselves far more long-term damage than good.
Oh, and if you're wondering why I haven't commented much on the RNC, it's because you'd have to be a goddamn idiot to buy anything from Bush at this point, and I have zero trust in any of the NYC media on the subject — at its simplest, when one paper claims under 200,000 people were at the protests and another claims over half a million were there, you eventually realize they're all just professional liars. The word “professional” means they're being paid.
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