High Blood Pressure

Few things in life naturally lower our blood pressure – but plenty can raise it. Between worrying about our health, our families, our pets, our friends, our careers, our finances… there’s little time left over to just ‘chill.’

There are numerous drugs on the market that will help keep BP at an even keel. Doctors tell us to give up almost all of the things that give us the most pleasure. “Everything in moderation,” they tell us. Yeah, and we’re also told to ‘just say no’ and ‘you can’t eat just one…’

But these are, literally, words to live by.

We should eat right, exercise, do yoga and/or meditate and all our troubles will magically disappear. Really? Just like that? Yet we continue to abuse our bodies – putting chemicals and additives and artificial coloring and preservatives into our system on a daily basis. We have little if no self control and, when we feel poorly, we blame everyone else but ourselves.

I, for one, do not have high blood pressure. I’m as stressed as the next person but I don’t keep things bottled up inside. I yell, I complain and… you know what? I feel better.

So, do what your doctor tells you and take meds if they’re recommended but the rest is up to you. Find something that calms you – I knit and I color. It relaxes me at the end of a long and stressful day. So does drinking a cup of hot tea and eating a whole lotta chocolate!

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Bad Hair Days

My Dad’s latest obsession… his hair. At 85, he’s still got a full head of hair. The problem is, he spends so much time resting in his ‘comfy lounger’ that his hair is almost always a victim of static electricity. To battle the condition, Dad has taken to wearing a baseball cap. All the time.

He seems to feel like he must wear this hat, all day long (and inside) because you just never know when someone might drop by unexpectedly to visit (that actually NEVER happens). I tried putting a hand towel over the top of the chair but that only resulted in his wearing the towel around the house because it got stuck on the back of his shirt.

Static is static after all…

It’s funny but I never remember him caring about his hair sticking up in all the years I’ve known him – I guess it’s just another age-related obsession when you really have nothing else to think about all day long. Maybe I should get him some Brylcreem – You know, because “a little dab’ll do ya!”

Three Magic Words

Once upon a time… you fell in love, you got married, you had some kids and you lived happily ever after. At least that’s how all the fairytales went. Now, however, families come in all colors and genders; they sometimes have the kids before the marriage; and the story often does not have a happy ending. Oh well – that’s life.

That might sound kind of harsh but it’s realistic. For some. We don’t always get what we want out of life. Sometimes, when we expect to hear those three little words: “I Love You,” they come out sounding more like “fool me once…”

We’ve come to expect a certain amount of sentimentality and even magic in our relationships. We watch too many movies and read too many trendy novels to the point where we actually start believing that they represent reality. The secret to their success, sadly, is that they’re so far from what life is really like that they have become our fantasy escape. We envy what those characters have and they’re not even real. 

I know money can’t buy happiness (although sometimes it may ‘buy love’) but it certainly can give off that illusion!

State Of Mind

We spend countless hours on our looks and on our bodies – lotions, spas, gyms, power drinks – so why don’t we spend any time trying to improve our minds? Yes, we play games on our computers and do crossword puzzles and the like. But, since graduating from school (be it HS or college), we haven’t properly exercised our brains.

Try these experiments:

• Say the alphabet backwards
• Play the old car-trip game (by yourself) where you think of alphabetized foods you’d like to take on a picnic 
• Try to remember the names of all of your teachers by grade

How did you do? I was visiting my son some weeks ago and, all of a sudden, I remembered a name we had both drawn blanks on in a recent phone conversation. We laughed. But it just goes to show you… It’s easy to forget but it’s redemptive to remember!

See My Keys?

How many of us, on a daily basis, have lost (oh, okay, misplaced) our keys? It’s by no means the end of the world as we know it. It’s just a case of senior moment-itis. Or is it…?

And it’s not just our keys anymore either. We lose our phones and our wallets, too. But it doesn’t end there. We carry around so much weight (women particularly) because of all the stuff we insist on taking with us in our handbags – just to leave the house:

• Multiple forms of ID
• Breath mints
• Lipstick
• Feminine products 
• Pen and paper (if you’re my Mom and you don’t have a smart phone)
• Coupons (if you’re my Mom and you can’t resist a sale)
• Tissues (if you’re my Mom and you can find multiple uses for them)

Don’t even get me started on the room-to-room surveillance mission. I tell myself each and every time that I needn’t write stuff down because I’m just going to the next room… Then, as I look around (helplessly trying to find a clue as to what I came into that room for), I start taking a mental picture of my surroundings:

• Will something familiar tip me off?
• Will an object just magically appear in front of my eyes?
• Maybe if I retrace my steps it’ll all suddenly become crystal clear? 

I could go on and on and on but I need to go out and run some errands… See my keys?!