After nearly a whole month of suffering from my neighbor's smoke, at long last, as of yesterday afternoon, the property manager got her to go smoke behind the laundry room and I can breathe again.
It turns out there is a law against "endangering the health or well being" of another person, which is grounds for eviction. I thought there simply must be a law along those lines, it's insane to think that a person could smoke freely even when the smoke stings another person's eyes, makes her chest hurt, prevents her from opening a window or turning on the A/C, and generally makes her miserable in her own home. Thank You Lord that there is such a law.
The neighbor's attitude had been that "this isn't California and I'm not doing anything wrong!" but I think the principle of the thing finally got through to her --the threat of eviction if nothing else. But best of all I don't think there are any hard feelings on either side and I'm very glad of that since I've been hysterical over it more than once and could easily have said or done something I'd regret. Insufficient prayer of course.
I did get an anti-pollution mask that worked great for a few days at blocking out the smoke, although of course having to wear a mask in my own home wasn't fun, but after a few days the smell of the mask materials started to nauseate me and I had to give up wearing it yesterday.
So the manager's intervention came just in time.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
A Rant Against Smokers' Rights
I used to be a smoker, even a very heavy smoker for a few years, but I quit 22 years ago this month and am SO happy I did. What a horrible addiction.
But now I'm unusually sensitive to smoke and avoid it if I can. I don't go places where I know there will be smoke in the air. I don't know if my sensitivity is due to having been a smoker myself, but I've thought it may be. People who have never smoked don't seem to have quite as much trouble with it as I do now.
But whatever the reason, it is very hard on me to be around smoke now. It makes my chest hurt, it stings my eyes, and after some time of exposure it gets up into my sinuses where it causes me to smell smoke for a couple of weeks whether there is any actual smoke in the environment or not. Then it's the smarting eyes and the tight chest that tell me if there is or not.
When I was a smoker I was oblivious to the effects on nonsmokers, as I think most smokers are. It seemed to be mostly a matter of aesthetics, people not liking the smell, rather than anything harmful. You adapt, you go to the smoking section in the restaurant, you smoke on countless front or back porches because the smell of smoke is not wanted in the house, and so on. We heard "scientific" reports of the supposedly harmful effects of second-hand smoke, but such reports have an abstract quality to them. I don't recall anyone complaining that the smoke actually hurt them.
Now I know that it hurts and I know it the hard way, by being trapped in my own apartment with the smoke from neighbors' cigarettes and no right to protest against it. They have the rights. At least in my state they do.
For the first four or five years I lived in this apartment I had the same neighbor to the south of me and he didn't smoke. Then he moved out and there have been half a dozen or so different tenants in that apartment since then, all of them smokers. The management requires them to go outside to smoke because they don't want the apartment walls plastered with the tars and permeated with the smell of smoke. What that means is that the smoke comes into MY apartment next door.
It comes through the window if I have one open, of course, and it comes through the A/C if I have it on. What else do you do on hot summer days but run the A/C and open windows to cool the place down? I can't do that if there is smoke in the air. But it also comes in when everything is shut up. I think that might be because I do have to run a fan since I can't do anything else to keep the place cool, and the fan may suck the smoke in through the cracks around the door and windows. Just a theory.
Mercifully most of the tenants haven't been heavy smokers and were gone most of the time anyway, but while they were smoking it was an unpleasant experience for me. When I once asked the manager if there was anything she could do about it, the answer was no.
Now I have a new neighbor and she's home most of the time and she has friends there with her much of the time and they ALL smoke. And at least one of them is a very heavy smoker. Someone smokes sometimes well into the night so I can't even have a window open during the coolest hours any more.
This is pretty much unbearable. It is the smokers who have the rights, not the victims of the smokers, a very odd injustice. Sure, it's a personal habit but this particular personal habit happens to impact others, very seriously too as I now understand from experience. I'm sitting here with smarting eyes as I write. Tenants are normally protected from other tenants' habits that encroach on them but not from smoking. I did a little research on the rights involved in this sort of situation and it doesn't look good for the nonsmoker. They've got laws against smoking in public places but not in apartments. Apartment managers sometimes try to accommodate people but that doesn't always happen.
I found one case, back in the 90s but as far as I can tell the same attitudes still pretty much prevail -- a man had lived for some time in an upstairs apartment when a very heavy smoker moved into the apartment below him. He would wake up to a cloud of smoke in his bedroom. He got an irritation in his eye from it that required medical treatment. The management said there was nothing they could do about it. When he politely approached the smoker, she agreed to smoke in a different place but that didn't last long. She was aware that she had a "right" to smoke where she did. Finally the management sued HIM for "harassing" the smoker, which merely meant the request that she smoke elsewhere. The court decided against him. He was evicted. Amazing.
I've ordered a carbon-filtered mask from Amazon which should arrive early next week, to wear in my own apartment, because my neighbor has the right to inflict her smoke on me.
But now I'm unusually sensitive to smoke and avoid it if I can. I don't go places where I know there will be smoke in the air. I don't know if my sensitivity is due to having been a smoker myself, but I've thought it may be. People who have never smoked don't seem to have quite as much trouble with it as I do now.
But whatever the reason, it is very hard on me to be around smoke now. It makes my chest hurt, it stings my eyes, and after some time of exposure it gets up into my sinuses where it causes me to smell smoke for a couple of weeks whether there is any actual smoke in the environment or not. Then it's the smarting eyes and the tight chest that tell me if there is or not.
When I was a smoker I was oblivious to the effects on nonsmokers, as I think most smokers are. It seemed to be mostly a matter of aesthetics, people not liking the smell, rather than anything harmful. You adapt, you go to the smoking section in the restaurant, you smoke on countless front or back porches because the smell of smoke is not wanted in the house, and so on. We heard "scientific" reports of the supposedly harmful effects of second-hand smoke, but such reports have an abstract quality to them. I don't recall anyone complaining that the smoke actually hurt them.
Now I know that it hurts and I know it the hard way, by being trapped in my own apartment with the smoke from neighbors' cigarettes and no right to protest against it. They have the rights. At least in my state they do.
For the first four or five years I lived in this apartment I had the same neighbor to the south of me and he didn't smoke. Then he moved out and there have been half a dozen or so different tenants in that apartment since then, all of them smokers. The management requires them to go outside to smoke because they don't want the apartment walls plastered with the tars and permeated with the smell of smoke. What that means is that the smoke comes into MY apartment next door.
It comes through the window if I have one open, of course, and it comes through the A/C if I have it on. What else do you do on hot summer days but run the A/C and open windows to cool the place down? I can't do that if there is smoke in the air. But it also comes in when everything is shut up. I think that might be because I do have to run a fan since I can't do anything else to keep the place cool, and the fan may suck the smoke in through the cracks around the door and windows. Just a theory.
Mercifully most of the tenants haven't been heavy smokers and were gone most of the time anyway, but while they were smoking it was an unpleasant experience for me. When I once asked the manager if there was anything she could do about it, the answer was no.
Now I have a new neighbor and she's home most of the time and she has friends there with her much of the time and they ALL smoke. And at least one of them is a very heavy smoker. Someone smokes sometimes well into the night so I can't even have a window open during the coolest hours any more.
This is pretty much unbearable. It is the smokers who have the rights, not the victims of the smokers, a very odd injustice. Sure, it's a personal habit but this particular personal habit happens to impact others, very seriously too as I now understand from experience. I'm sitting here with smarting eyes as I write. Tenants are normally protected from other tenants' habits that encroach on them but not from smoking. I did a little research on the rights involved in this sort of situation and it doesn't look good for the nonsmoker. They've got laws against smoking in public places but not in apartments. Apartment managers sometimes try to accommodate people but that doesn't always happen.
I found one case, back in the 90s but as far as I can tell the same attitudes still pretty much prevail -- a man had lived for some time in an upstairs apartment when a very heavy smoker moved into the apartment below him. He would wake up to a cloud of smoke in his bedroom. He got an irritation in his eye from it that required medical treatment. The management said there was nothing they could do about it. When he politely approached the smoker, she agreed to smoke in a different place but that didn't last long. She was aware that she had a "right" to smoke where she did. Finally the management sued HIM for "harassing" the smoker, which merely meant the request that she smoke elsewhere. The court decided against him. He was evicted. Amazing.
I've ordered a carbon-filtered mask from Amazon which should arrive early next week, to wear in my own apartment, because my neighbor has the right to inflict her smoke on me.
The science of carbohydrate metabolism, not that I know much about it
An old thread on a book about the low-carb diet by someone named Taubes got revived at EvC and I've been following it more or less. Molbiogirl keeps arguing that insulin isn't the problem but nobody else has said it is, so I lose track of the argument and tend not to read her stuff very carefully.
PD and Percy explain that for them it's all about what helps you lose weight and that the underlying chemistry involved is of secondary interest if at all. That's my concern too. But also, if diabetes is in the picture, as it is for me, you pretty much HAVE to restrict carbs because they raise blood sugar -- and that has been borne out over and over in my own experience with using the blood sugar monitor to check. Carbs raise the blood sugar, not protein and not fat, at least not to any comparable degree.
Part of the argument from Atkins -- and probably Taubes -- is that insulin is normally produced in response to raised blood sugar, its job is to keep blood sugar on an even keel, and that weight gain occurs when it begins to malfunction. As I got it from Atkins, when more carbs are taken in over a long period of time than get burned off through normal activity and exercise, insulin first begins to be overproduced in reaction, which can bring the blood sugar down even to the level of hypoglycemia, then begins to be insufficiently produced, as if it's wearing out, eventually to the point of diabetes, but on the way there something happens to the metabolism such that you start gaining weight.
The usual idea is something called "insulin resistance" at the cellular level which prevents insulin from doing its job of controlling the blood sugar, which then gets stored as fat. I hope I have this right but it's part of the Atkins system I didn't spend much time on and may have it wrong. Apparently this is the part of the science that molbiogirl disagrees with, but it does seem irrelevant to the purpose of the thread -- which is about the role of too much carbohydrate in causing obesity and that is pretty well documented, not to mention supported in countless testimonies, including my own and some other contributors to that thread.
Diabetes is a condition of hard-to-control high blood sugar due to malfunctioning or nonexistent insulin production. If you still have some insulin function you can possibly manage the diabetes with diet and that's preferable to drugs, but uncontrollable blood sugar due to lack of insulin production leads to death by starvation unless insulin is administered, because insulin is necessary to deliver the sugar to the cells. When sugar is consistently at high levels in your blood that means it's not getting into your cells, and high blood sugar itself leads to all kinds of organ damage and damage to blood vessels.
Right now I apparently still have some insulin function but its activity isn't always predictable. As long as I keep carbs low, getting carbs mostly from nonstarchy vegetables and keeping starchy carbs and refined carbs to an extreme minimum, I don't get scary blood sugar spikes. But my blood sugar still isn't down in the normal range consistently and maybe never will be. I'm continuing to lose weight, however, and still hope to get blood sugar even better controlled.
PD and Percy explain that for them it's all about what helps you lose weight and that the underlying chemistry involved is of secondary interest if at all. That's my concern too. But also, if diabetes is in the picture, as it is for me, you pretty much HAVE to restrict carbs because they raise blood sugar -- and that has been borne out over and over in my own experience with using the blood sugar monitor to check. Carbs raise the blood sugar, not protein and not fat, at least not to any comparable degree.
Part of the argument from Atkins -- and probably Taubes -- is that insulin is normally produced in response to raised blood sugar, its job is to keep blood sugar on an even keel, and that weight gain occurs when it begins to malfunction. As I got it from Atkins, when more carbs are taken in over a long period of time than get burned off through normal activity and exercise, insulin first begins to be overproduced in reaction, which can bring the blood sugar down even to the level of hypoglycemia, then begins to be insufficiently produced, as if it's wearing out, eventually to the point of diabetes, but on the way there something happens to the metabolism such that you start gaining weight.
The usual idea is something called "insulin resistance" at the cellular level which prevents insulin from doing its job of controlling the blood sugar, which then gets stored as fat. I hope I have this right but it's part of the Atkins system I didn't spend much time on and may have it wrong. Apparently this is the part of the science that molbiogirl disagrees with, but it does seem irrelevant to the purpose of the thread -- which is about the role of too much carbohydrate in causing obesity and that is pretty well documented, not to mention supported in countless testimonies, including my own and some other contributors to that thread.
Diabetes is a condition of hard-to-control high blood sugar due to malfunctioning or nonexistent insulin production. If you still have some insulin function you can possibly manage the diabetes with diet and that's preferable to drugs, but uncontrollable blood sugar due to lack of insulin production leads to death by starvation unless insulin is administered, because insulin is necessary to deliver the sugar to the cells. When sugar is consistently at high levels in your blood that means it's not getting into your cells, and high blood sugar itself leads to all kinds of organ damage and damage to blood vessels.
Right now I apparently still have some insulin function but its activity isn't always predictable. As long as I keep carbs low, getting carbs mostly from nonstarchy vegetables and keeping starchy carbs and refined carbs to an extreme minimum, I don't get scary blood sugar spikes. But my blood sugar still isn't down in the normal range consistently and maybe never will be. I'm continuing to lose weight, however, and still hope to get blood sugar even better controlled.
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