Month: August 2012

You mean we could have moved to the Brewery District?

If you think alcoholic bears are impulsive, you should have seen my parents house-hunting. They took the first house they looked at. No research. No deliberation. No agonizing.

But I’m wondering if they made a mistake. Check this out.

To think we could have established the new LBHQ in the Brewery District. I mean, even making a point of knowing these things, I had no idea we even had a brewery district. Apparently it is “exciting and vibrant,” or will be once it’s completed, with (presumably important) proximity to public transit, hospitals and police. OMG! How could we have missed this opportunity?

Where the hell is the so-called Brewery District? My first guess was the south foot of the Burrard Street Bridge, where Molson Canadian belches out yeasty-smelling effluent. I would have loved to live there, people. But it turns out that’s not the Brewery District; it’s just an area dominated by a giant macro brewery.

The new marketer-spun Brewery District is in New Westminster. How could I not have known this was a particularly beer-oriented locale? (I think my parents really should have known, don’t you?)  I mean, sure, the development’s not ready, and when it is, it’ll consist of little child-unfriendly high-rises, and we’d have to yank the kids out of school and across the city, but…beer. We’d be living the dream, my fellow inebriates.

Mixing like Zaphod Beeblebrox (sorta)

Today’s local paper carries an opinion piece about blue raspberry–flavored foods. “When did blue raspberry become a thing?” asks Angie Quaale of the Langley Times, noting that food is not generally supposed to be blue.

Indeed, a blue hue often reliably indicates that food is off. Even blue food that’s ostensibly palatable, such as blue cheese and that weird potato-like thing that Arthur Dent sampled in the hull of a Vogon ship, gives plenty of consumers the dry heaves. Yet here we have a marketplace where blue raspberry everything shimmers and sparkles at us. You name it: Jell-O, kids’ lunch snacks and juices, and popsicles, the very product Angie tags as responsible for the incursion of blue raspberry into the marketplace.

More troublingly, Angie says blue raspberry is artificial.

I didn’t know this, my fellow inebriates. I just thought scientists had gone ahead and engineered blue raspberries. Why not? The other day the family ate yellow tomatoes and red peppers, and earlier at the bowling alley Miss V gobbled down a handful of blue M&Ms.

If they can make blue M&Ms, why couldn’t they engineer a blue raspberry? The two feats seem about equivalent, don’t they?

I pondered this briefly before deciding to make a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. It’s supposed to be kind of bluish-green and taste like Jack Daniels with peach schnapps and blue curacao plus some orange juice. But you know the sorry state of our liquor cabinet, so I substituted gin for, well, all the ingredients—even the one item we had (best to save the OJ for the kiddies). Curiously enough, my Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster wasn’t bluish-green but clear. Given Douglas Adams’s description of the drink as “like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick,” I’d say my version was close enough.

Does alcohol relieve stress? Why we need more studies…

My Fellow Inebriates,

I’m still pondering whether our moving-related alcohol consumption is helping our stress.

What the hell is stress anyway?

There’s bad stress (distress), and there’s good stress (eustress).

Distress can make you feel like you’re in a life-threatening situation, even when you’re not

Distress is what we’re talking about when we experience flight-or-fight symptoms despite not being chased by a leopard. Sweaty palms, increased heart rate and blood pressure, and anxiety all arise from a threefold assault on the body’s systems—the central nervous system, the adrenal system, and the cardiovascular system—which, if prolonged, threatens homeostasis, or equilibrium.

Eustress, or positive stress, describes the feeling of completing a grueling run, planning a wedding, or completing a demanding task—mental,  physical, or both. While the same physical symptoms may present, the critical differentiator here is often that you’re in control of the situation, and the outcome corresponds with satisfaction and well-being.

And I forgot to mention the kids…

So if I spend most of my time trying to lose control, that’s stressful, right? In a bad way? And when I don’t manage to lose control, I find myself hanging out with characters like Scarybear and Fluffy, who scare me with apocalyptic and paranormal threats respectively (although Scary also throws in some old-fashioned physical violence). LBHQ is a stressful place!

(I haven’t even mentioned the silverfish in the bathroom, which Fluffy is apparently summoning from the Other Side. He didn’t think of doing it at the townhouse, I guess, but he must have remembered that particular Dark Power when we moved here.)

Okay, then, can alcohol help?

The stress response is much too complex for my two brain cells to understand, but apparently chronic stress initiates a cascade of equilibrium-adverse events in the body:

Corticotropin Releasing Factor (CRF)

  • The hypothalamus secretes CRF (corticotropin releasing factor), which gives the pituitary gland a kick.
  • The pituitary secretes ACTH (adrenocorticotropin hormone), which gives the adrenal glands a kick.
  • The adrenals secrete steroids that affect temperature, appetite, arousal, alertness, and emotional state, priming the body to direct oxygen and nutrients where they’re most urgently needed.

All this is okay, but you wouldn’t want it to go on all day, which is what we’re talking about when we refer to chronic stress.

Researchers have found that stressed-out people will seek alcohol if:

  • Other resources are unavailable.
  • Alcohol is accessible.
  • They think it will help.

Wow! That seems like a bit of a no-brainer. What’s more interesting is that monkeys raised by their peers consume twice as much alcohol as monkeys raised by their mothers. And rats exposed to unavoidable electric shock (omg!) demonstrate a greater appetite for alcohol than rats who can control whether they receive a shock.

The take-home message is that lab animals are getting a lot of alcohol. So if the well is indeed drying up here at LBHQ now that the stress of moving is almost over, perhaps I could moonlight at a lab.

I contacted the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research (ILAR).

Some studies show that low doses of alcohol actually improve the stress response and even enhance performance. Other studies show that alcohol initiates the stress response. Moreover, the response depends heavily on whether the subject is an occasional drinker or an established alcoholic. Stress may play a role in relapse among abstinent alcoholics, but genetics may also play a dominant role.

We definitely need more alcohol studies, using lots of different subjects, especially bears.