Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

“There are plenty of seats,” the usher whispered to me.

“Thanks, I’m good.”

I listened to the soothing whir of the projector as he kept a wary eye on me.

Speed Writing

And then . . . there’s the desk. The desk is where most of the Crimes of Excessive Sedentary Behavior occur.

Something needed to be done. For a week, I switched to working while standing. I raised my laptop by loading up three cardboard boxes onto my desk. Then I’d stand and peck out e-mails. I heard once that Nabokov wrote his novels standing up, so I was hoping my e-mails would have a Pale Fire quality to them.

It didn’t go badly. I shifted and rocked a lot. I kind of looked like an Orthodox Jew praying at the Western Wall, but with a MacBook instead of a Torah. I kept a stack of two encyclopedias at my feet so that I could rest one foot on it at a time, a key to comfortable long-term standing.

But the real breakthrough came when I combined the desk and movement.

I kept flashing back to the Execusiser in Woody Allen’s Bananas. It was a brilliant invention: a desk combined with a workout station. The phone receiver was hooked up to elastic bands, so answering a call resulted in a biceps curl. That kind of thing.

I couldn’t find any real-life Execusisers online. So I found the next best thing: an idea from Dr. James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic. He thinks we should all have our desks in front of treadmills. We should all walk as we work. Levine has gained a small but loyal following of treadmill desk jockeys. They trade tips and stories on the websites, and coin terms like “deskercise” and “iPlod.”

You can buy professionally made treadmill desks for four hundred dollars. Or you can jury-rig your own. I chose the latter.

I did so because I already have a treadmill—the one lying fallow thanks to the complaints of my neighbors below. If I walk on my treadmill, my neighbors can’t protest. It’s so civilized, so quiet. I stroll at barely one mile per hour.

I balanced my laptop on top of a wooden box, and I slung a long pole across my treadmill to rest my elbows. This arrangement, by the way, came after about a half-dozen collapsed versions involving dictionaries, filing cabinets, and masking tape. But it works.

I’m on it right now. This chapter has taken about 1.5 miles to write. I want this book to be the first book written mostly on a treadmill.

There are some skeptics. My aunt Marti chided me. She said it’s multitasking. She told me I’m not in the moment. Very un-Buddhist. Julie asked me, “Isn’t it distracting to type and walk?”

But overall, I’m liking it. In the beginning, it was a little odd. You have to get over the initial hump, that siren call of the chair. But now I found walking while working actually helps hone my focus. When I’m sitting, I’m fidgety. I’m always tempted to stand up and get a snack, use the bathroom, water the plants—anything to avoid working. With my treadmill desk, I’m getting rid of all my nervous energy. Plus, when you’re walking, you can’t fall asleep. No small thing.

I wonder if the Tread-desk has changed my writing style. Are my sentences more energetic? I can’t tell. I do know that I feel more confident and positive when I’m striding along, more likely to answer e-mails with an emphatic “Yes! I would love to go mountain biking in Connecticut, despite the forecast of thunderstorms.” So I have to be careful.

Standing in the Presence of the Elderly

I spent some time standing at my grandfather’s apartment today. It felt almost natural not to sit. The Old Testament commands us to stand in the presence of the elderly, so it was a nice callback to my days of living biblically. I stand behind my grandfather’s cushy brown recliner.

I’m visiting on movie day. My grandfather’s former colleague is over, and wants to see a documentary in which my grandfather appeared. My aunt Jane—a lawyer visiting from Maryland—slides in the DVD and presses play. The documentary is about the artist Christo and his Central Park Gates. These, as you might remember, consisted of a forest of metal poles draped in orange fabric that appeared in the park in 2005. My grandfather was Christo’s lawyer.

I’ve seen the movie before. But it’s a joy to watch it with him. He gets such a kick out of his younger, brasher self.

The movie opens with my grandfather and Christo’s first meeting more than thirty years ago. You hear the comically loud clacking of typewriters, and watch as Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, enter my grandfather’s office. He’s on the phone sounding important (“Good,” “Okay” “Let’s make sure the record is correct”) and nods at the artists as they settle into chairs.

Eventually he hangs up, puts his index finger on his temple, and listens as this stringy-haired eccentric Bulgarian and his French wife tell him their zany plans. They want to install eighteen thousand gates in Central Park.

My 1979 grandfather practically does a spit take. My 2010 grandfather, watching in his recliner, laughs. “I had never met them before,” he says. “I’d barely heard of them. I thought they were nuts.”

At meeting’s end, he agrees to be their lawyer. He tells them the next step is to petition the Parks Department. My grandfather says, “You’ve got to think like [the Parks Department]. They’re thinking what can go wrong. What’ll the Jews say, what’ll the Irish say, what’ll the Poles say?”

My grandfather worked with the Christos for twenty-six years, seeing them through hundreds of meetings, committees, briefs, and fund-raising events. “I know it’ll happen one day,” he always said. And then, finally, there it was, this bizarre but beautiful ocean of tangerine-colored fabric in Central Park.

The documentary ends with the 2005 unveiling of The Gates. You can see my grandfather sitting between the Christos in the backseat of