The Water-Method Man

This post should have been called water's virtuous circle, but then I remembered the first book I tried to read in German, more than five years ago, which I must admit I was not able to finish.

I somehow managed to read two chapters of John Irving's "Die wilde Geschichte vom Wassertrinker" ^(*), but when you are spending more time looking up words on a dictionary than reading the book, at some point you'll just let go. Probably now, having already higher walls (Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, Erwin Schrödinger, ...) behind me, I will give it another try, because I like John Irving and also because the book is not mine! Even though my friend K might have long forgotten that I borrowed it, it is still a nice excuse to meet him... :)

What I actually wanted to talk about is the unexpected chain of valuable consequences that the simple fact of drinking water regularly can start. Vicious circles are unfortunately well known, but we should not forget that virtuous circles do exist as well. They are kind of a reinforced loop of events that, once set off, produce all kinds of beneficial effects.

Let us start with the recommendation to drink at least 2 litres of water a day. If I want to follow this piece of advice on a normal working day at the office, let's say I want to drink 2 liters without counting standard meals, if I spend 8 hours at the office then I have to drink 0.25l per hour, if I did the math correctly. It means I have to try and drink a glass water every half hour.



Let's see the chain of positive effects that starts as we drink that glass of water:

(i) we are drinking (more than) 2 litres of water a day, with all the health good effects that it brings forth

(ii) we have to leave the chair and stand up every time we have to go to the kitchen to refill the glass. Our muscles are activated and our eyes are granted a rest from staring at the computer screen (if your work consists mainly of sitting in front of a computer monitor, it is good to try to focus on a distant point every now and then)

(iii) one of the most noticeable effects of drinking half a liter water an hour is that the frequency of your WC-needs is going to raise remarkably. With that we boost the function of our kidneys and bladder.

(iv) frequent visits to the WC mean -as in (ii)- the same beneficial effects for our muscles and eyes as when going to the kitchen

(v) after the WC business we, of course, wash hands, with which we get a very important prevention factor against cold and flu. Which, in present times, is not uninteresting.

(vi) to finish, in a kind of job as mine, where you often need to "go up a little" to look at the problems from above, where you need regularly a happy idea at the right time in order to make everything simple (or, at least, manageable), introducing some physical activity (going to refill a glass, being in the WC) is really useful to unconsciously reorganise your thoughts and then get back to your computer knowing what's the next step.

Fred Trumper, the hero on Die wilde Geschichte vom Wassertrinker, had to drink lots of water because of an abnormally narrow uro-genital tract.

In my case, it is just about sparking this wonderful virtuous circle that only needs a glass of water to start.

^(*) lit. "the wild story of the water drinker"

Am I late?

You know I have a thing about dandelions. I find these plants fascinating in many senses, although this does not really seem to be a popular opinion among lawn-owners.

One of the fascinating facts about dandelions is the way they reproduce. Many dandelion species do it by apomixis, which means they do not reproduce sexually, which means there are no two individual "parents" that produce offspring, but a single individual that produces exact genetic copies of itself.

This kind of reproduction, based on an exact duplication of genetic material, is not very different from the cellular division that happens in our bodies all the time, say when our hair or nails grow or when new red blood cells are created in our bone marrow. In a sense, dandelions or other species that reproduce asexually, challenge our conception of what an organism is.

In his book The Extended Phenotype Richard Dawkins makes a mind-blowing point about dandelions and organisms (emphasis is mine):

"Janzen (1977) faces up to the same difficulty, suggesting that a clone of dandelions should be regarded as one 'evolutionary individual' [...], equivalent to a single tree although spread out along the ground rather than raised up in the air on a trunk, and although divided up into separate physical 'plants' [...]. According to this view, there may be as few as four individual dandelions competing with each other for the territory of the whole of North America. [...]"
Dawkins, R.: The Extended Phenotype, Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, p.254

It is mid-August now and the peak of dandelion flowering season is long gone. Long gone? If you pay attention, you still might see some late-comers, those poor lazy ones that are always too late.



And if you come down close enough, you almost can hear them asking themselves: What is going on here??? Where is everybody???

Books on the tramp

If there is a day when I miss being in Catalonia it is April the 23rd, Diada de Sant Jordi and World Book Day. It is an old Catalan tradition to give a rose and a book to the loved one. Last Wednesday I longed all day for the smell of the roses and the never ending bookseller stands all over La Rambla.

It is World Book Day because Miguel de Cervantes died on April 23rd 1616, and so did William Shakespeare (funnily enough, though, and thanks to the late British adoption of the Gregorian calendar, they died ten days apart!). Garcilaso de la Vega died on an April 23rd, and Shakespeare himself was born on a 23rd April, too, so everything pointed to this day.

And thinking of books, I remembered I wanted to tell you about BookCrossing. Are you ready to enter the biggest library in the world? Do you enjoy reading? Would you like to do it for free? Are you up to have some fun without leaving your city? Take a look at their website!

I love such crazy ideas, those initiatives that are based exclusively in people's good will and brotherhood. And though they work. And they make me regain faith in the future of mankind every day. Last week we catched two new books. Someone released them just on our supermarket's windowsill. That easy.



Plus, Mar gave me a rose and a new book for the Diada, and I gave a rose and a book to her. We've been doing so every year since we are here. My parents told me that they have another book for me, too.

So, I guess I have some homework to do now.