Yoga Project update

I have been remiss. I launched the Yoga Project, started my quest for enhanced mental and physical flexibility, and then went silent. You’re probably wondering how it all turned out. Have I become a human pretzel? Have I attained enlightenment? Continue reading

I gave at the office

Did you know about #GivingTuesday? Me neither. But it’s a Thing, the brainchild of someone who was nauseated by the consumerist mayhem of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an attempt to reclaim the spirit of Thanksgiving from the clutches of corporate greed. It even has its own website.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave away 99% of his FaceBook shares yesterday. I myself got an e-mail from my alma mater. There wasn’t an explicit ask in the mail, nothing really on offer, just a big DONATE button at the bottom of the page. And as we head into the “holiday season,” the asks will keep rolling in right and left. Continue reading

Butterflies of love

The other day a friend asked me if I was still volunteering at the hospice. I told her I was.

That must be so hard, she said. Actually, I get that comment a lot. It must be so hard.

I didn’t quite know what to say. My immediate reaction was to say that it wasn’t hard. But I couldn’t explain why. Continue reading

Connection

After these first few months volunteering in the hospital, and now in the hospice, I am starting to come away with impressions. Things that stay with me, things I find myself thinking about offsite, things I am trying to learn how to digest.

The most important one is connection.

When you’re vulnerable like this, in the hospital or dying, things get pared down to the absolute essentials. Bodily functions, simple things. I got a good night’s sleep. A dish of ice cream.

The people whose suffering haunts me the most are those who don’t have anyone there for them. They are alone, navigating a system full of strangers, at a time in their lives when they are at their most vulnerable. Their suffering is amplified because of this. Continue reading

The Saga of Smokey the Cat

smokey1It has been a very long, dry spell here on Gydle. My apologies. But like I’ve said before, I’m not going to waste your time and mine by putting up meaningless drivel.

I decided to break the fast with a cat story.

I know it’s taboo to write about your cat on your blog, but it’s also taboo to have a blog and not post anything for four months, so while I’m breaking the rules I figured I might as well go all the way.

But you said you weren’t going to put up meaningless drivel! you say. Good point. But just because it’s a cat story doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. Whether or not it’s drivel, well, you’ll have to make that call. Continue reading

Eat sh*t and … thrive!

IMG_1040Everybody’s talking about the microbiome these days. If you’re not taking probiotics, you’re probably eating sauerkraut and swilling kombucha. I know I am.

What’s the Microbiome? I’m glad you asked. See, the human body is made up of about 10 trillion human cells. And that same body is also home to 100 trillion bacteria. Your mouth, nose, armpits, bellybutton, skin and especially your gut are teeming with thousands of different species of bacteria. Collectively, they’re called the microbiome. If you took them all out, they’d weigh about 2 kilos.

And then you’d die, because they play a crucial role in keeping you alive. Continue reading

Huh? Say What?

There are so many things that don’t translate between languages. I could list reams of French one-word concepts that cannot be captured quite right in English. Every time I see one of them in a text I’m supposed to be translating I cringe. Vulgarisation. Valorisation. Territoire.

And then there are the turns of phrase. I understood that péter un plomb or péter un cable meant to be really pissed off, but for the longest time I had a really hard time visualizing someone farting out a bit of lead shot or wiring. In French yoga, downward facing dog is chien tête en bas. But I heard chat a tomba. The cat fell. Indeed.

So my interest was piqued when I received EPFL’s weekly Science question for translation last Sunday. There is, apparently, a word – or rather, one syllable – that has the same meaning in every language in the world. Continue reading

Holy hairballs, Batman! It’s not junk after all!

Greetings from hibernation nation. I did say I’d come out if something really big happened. Guess what? One of my current scientific obsessions was Big News today! No, don’t go away – it’s not the microbiome. It’s my other obsession: junk DNA. I’ve written about it before, here and here and here.

In a stunning “no doh?” development, a vast international array of researchers has discovered that the 99% of the human genome that was considered “useless junk” isn’t junk after all. Continue reading

10 reasons to get a good night’s sleep

Today is world sleep day.

In celebration, I urge you all to drop everything and take a nap.

As I mentioned back in April last year, research has shown that getting 8 hours of sleep a night is important for optimal cognitive function. We all know how crappy we feel when we’re sleep-deprived. Brain fuzz takes over. We start to yawn uncontrollably in an effort to oxygenate our exhausted neurons. Our eyes start hurting and feeling dry, prompting us to rub them for relief.  Every horizontal surface starts to look attractive. But there is a lot more to it than just feeling lousy.

Continue reading