September 26, 2008

Home Sweet Home or Homesick?

Dear Bloggers,

It sounds strange but it can even happen to me.
Yes, even somebody like me, can get homesick somehow.
A couple of weeks ago , we were driving around a bit by car and all of a sudden, It struck me like lightning.
My mind was drifting of and was playing with me, when we had stopped at the lakeside and I stared across the water.



I saw the boats sail by and then I just realized that I was homesick.
I finally missed after all these years, the place were I was raised.
In a small village next to the lake.
I never experienced these feelings before, It took my breath away.
And the funny thing is that I could not talk about it for days.
I had to find out, why I had these feelings.
After a couple of days I talked about it to my wife.
It is not that I miss the village that much that I have to go back there.
But it is the water, the smell of the fresh breeze and the mentallity of the people living there.
It is a big difference to what I am used to now.
I simply have to admit that I miss the fresh air, the summer breeze which is nearly always there and simple things like going by bike with my kids to the beach.
Also that you wake up early morning and take the bike and cycle across the lake, when everybody else is still asleep. The other early people you greet when you pass them but not disturbing anything.



Enjoying every minute being in the middle of nature and together with your loved ones.
Concluding after my wife has been calculating, we have to stay at least eight years in the place were we are living now.
Before we can move back again to the area where I learned all the basic things of life and nature around me.
Unless we win the jackpot in the lotterie, or get money in an other way.
So I keep gambling on the future.
I believe that God can do miracles.
and I hope that a miracle will come my way.

Don't worry dear bloggers, I will not let my head hang down and run around fully depressed.
I still have my own believes.
Well I stick to this phrase like always: “Live life as long it is there, pray for less fights, spend your last money on a drink and fuck if your life is depending on it.”

The Old Sailor,

September 18, 2008

How to kill the pain

Dear Bloggers,

Painkiller…
I need you so badly.

After the extraction of my moulder, on september 5 this happened - read also love gives wings, I was pretty happy when I left the dentists office.- the pain got actaully worse, after a couple of days I went back to dentist and he found out that the imflammation I had, had done it’s work already in my jaw.
It was a pretty hungry bunch of bacterias who ate a hole in my lower jaw. (as big as a golfball.)
I ended up at the the dental surgeons office in the hospital and he fixed the problem.
Only side effect is that the pain will disappear in the coming week.
Hmmm, let’s hope so.
More than two weeks of toothpain is more than enough, you get so tired of it.
I have checked on the internet what the explanation is of this so called perionditis.
Read and weap I would say.
"I wish nobody to have the same experience in pain."



Periodontitis (peri = around, odont = tooth, -itis = inflammation) refers to a number of inflammatory diseases affecting the tissues that surround and support the teeth.
Periodontitis involves progressive loss of the alveolar bone around the teeth and may eventually lead to the loosening and subsequent loss of teeth if left untreated. Periodontitis is caused by a convergence of bacteria that adhere to and grow on the tooth's surfaces, along with an overly aggressive immune system response against these bacteria.



Treatment of Periodontitis
In the earlier stages of the disease, most of the treatment involves root planing and curettage (cleaning) under the gum margins.
It involves the removal of plaque and inflamed soft tissue in the pockets around the tooth with an instrument called a curette.
Its purpose is to remove the bacterial colonies and the mechanical and chemical irritants that cause inflammation in hopes that the disease can be eradicated.
The goal is that the gum will reattach itself to the tooth or will shrink enough to eliminate the pocket.
In most early cases, root planing, curettage, and proper daily plaque removal are all that are required for a satisfactory result.

In more advanced cases, the treatment may become more complex.
If after removal of the deposits, fairly deep pockets remain, they can be eliminated by a minor surgical procedure called gingivectomy.
This is done under local anesthesia, and a medicinal dressing is placed to cover the wound area for a week or so while it heals.



In my case it was more advanced as my bone was heavily attacked but most of them were killed already by the antibiotics, so the curretage was not that hard anymore and the hole was filled up with somekind of atrificial bone, which goes in as a cement and hardens out when it is placed.
At least I am happy it could be done with local anesthesia and I could leave the hospital after an hour, there was no problem to fill the gap through the hole that the moulder left after it was extracted.
The pain I will keep in line with some heavy weight painkillers.



Although I walk around like “Stoned For ever” I feel a lot better, and soon I will return to work again.

I will be smiles all over again.


The Old Sailor,

September 11, 2008

if grief.......


Dear bloggers,

I just go back to the days of my youth where a couple things came on my way that were less pleasant. At that time I lost my belief in the church or let me say the religius part of it. If there is a god why do these very sad things have to happen..

Let me start at the beginning.
It was half way my time of puberty and I did not have anything to complain about female attention.
This is not because I am a Casanova, but due to the simple fact that my dad had a riding school with horses.
This is working as a magnet on young girls until the boys are entering their lives.



I learned pretty quickly that I was not the ideal picture for all women, and that you had to put in quite a bit of effort to get their attention.
Although it went slowly, every now and then I booked a little success and kissed one of these “dreamgirls”(puppy love).
Anyway being in love is the same feeling all the time.
Butterflies all over the place.
But to much more, it came on a later period in live.
The unbelievable feeling in your stomach and the build up tension made it super special.
And that is pretty tricky if you are not really knowing how to deal with all these feelings.
It is very strange if you are at the beginning of your life, and all of a sudden you get the message that one of these young girls dies of a brain tumor.
Years later you are thinking back about the fact that she was suffering of very painfull headaches.
But nobody came to the conclusion that you could die of this, Not even a single doctor could see that there was something wrong inside her head, and she was just a young flower getting in bloom growing to something beautiful.



And then all of a sudden you are standing there blurred and with mixed up feelings, it felt like part of my body was removed, shocked and as struck by lightning.
I stopped and had no words when I was next to her coffin and saw a family totally shattered by grief.
Young and inexperienced, you are standing there not knowing what to say, not knowing what to do.
Although I was convinced that there are things in life where you did not count on. This was very barbaric of life and I have never understood this.
Days in a row, I have been crying my eyes out and filled with incoprehensible feelings is was trying to find out why.
My mum could only try to comfort me as I was brokenhearted and I had to find myself back.
After a while I had to go on with living, eventhough I had the feeling the world had stopped turning, everything around me had done her normal things.
Still I have trouble to give this a place in my live, although I let it rest more and more.
But like today it pops in my mind again and I have no clue what has triggered it.
I am caught in silent grief again, and my heart is softly crying.
My brain is running on full power and I have to do something to get my thoughts back to something normal.
Also the anger against the religion is coming up again.
Although i have the idea that also this anger will not help anyone and is it God’s fault?
Or is it natures fault?
Who will explain it, as until now nobody really can give a proven theory about our excistence on this planet.
At least the story about the beginning is still a mystery and in life you are not sure of anything.
One thing is a fact for everybody: “The light on the horizon is there for all of us, and one day we will end this life with dying.”

The Old Sailor,

September 7, 2008

Love gives you wings

Love gives you wings?

While I was sitting in the waiting room of the dentist I read a part of the following article, I was there with a terrible toothache and as a happy ending one of my moulders was extracted.


Love gives wings

The article I finished reading on the internet and it was published in Dutch in 2004 (that F**king old news) what you find by the dentist.



This is how the article starts:
‘It was beautiful weather about 13 degrees, wind in the back’, These things Nijboer remembers after he has beaten the record on the Dutch marathon. ‘Furthermore I just graduated and met my girlfriend who is now my wife. These kind of circumstances you can’t just create. But they are giving you wings.’ If you should believe all the writers of poëtic popsongs, is Nijboer not the only one, who is struck by love and all other things seem to go better in life. Bryan Adams (When the feeling’s right, I can run all night) until Whitney Houston, from The Olsen Brothers until Chris Norman, the wings of love should by many of us sweep us up to severe hights. Is love giving us wings ? And how are these wings working?



About the deepest functions of love and falling in love can higher educated people have total different opinions. For many of them it is clear: In the end – Think about Darwins opinion – the love is only there to keep the species a life. ‘Being in love is hanging strongly together with sexual desire’, says Cas Wouters, professor sociology from the University Utrecht. Being head over heals is in this approach of love the engine that turns the sexual behavior on, with as a result reproduction of the species. Others see for love a roll of freedom in it. The romantic love, has according to them, in the biggest part of history love was playing a secondary roll in life. Especially when it came to reproduction ‘The strong combination between love and reproduction of the species is only about a century old’, says seksuoligist and psychotherapist Carolien Roodvoets, author of "Nu alleen de liefde nog", (Now only the love still) a selfhelpbook for single females above thirty years of age.

Melting together with a partner
‘In the prehistoric times women were just in between fertilized, as dogs and horses do it just happens’, says Roodvoets. Marriages, she analysed, were not there because of love, but more for the sake of economic interests or power proportions. ‘The love has maybe always been there but it was never the switch to be hit for sex.’ But , it was there in the interest of reproduction, the need for love can be as strong as the need for food or sleep, believes also Roodvoets. ‘Every human being suffers of existentiël lonelyness’, she thinks. ‘the love can ease the pain a bit.’

It sounds like the Eros-mythe of Aristophanes, were Plato wrote about. The prehistoric human has united according to this story both genders. But when they threatened the gods because they thought they were surpreme, Zeus cut the human beings into two. Since then we are all looking for our better half. ‘The desire to melt together with their partner, is the heart of love’, thinks Roodvoets. The question is: does it get us to greater hights?



Who goes looking for the hard proof about stimulating side effects of the human falling in love, will not find much, barely nothing: poëts, philosphers en romantics, and in a lesser way also the alfa- en gammascientists have all told their tales, but in the exact, biomedical science the subject is not really worked out. Although this is not that surprizing: Being in love is a distinctive function that can be very difficult to test on guinnee pigs. And with living humans it is tricky to experiment, if they are being in love or not. Also because pharmaceutic companies are not looking yet for a “fall in love pill”, therefore we are missing money and motivation for a large scaled investigation in this field.

Theoretics about love
Still there is a lack of theoretics about the biochemical ground of the loving feeling, and the effects that they are having on our functioning around it. The most popular theory is speaking about having any doubt and calls it ‘the molecule of love’, also known as phenylethylamine, a small amfetamine kind of molecuul that de brain can make herself.

According to the followers of this theory is phenylethylamine forming(in English shorted to PEA) the first and central link in a finetuned network of signals who are steering the body when it is heavily in love. A shot PEA in the brain would be the starting signal for making the hormones like dopamine, adrenaline en noradrenaline, all with their own stimulating and braking effects.

Dopamine, for example, is a brain hormone that is closely involved by pleasurable and even euforic feelings, due to the fact that stimulating side of it has effect on the ‘rewarding centre’ of the brain.- this centre plays a big role by addicted persons. That dopamine can influence sexual behavior comes out when Parkinson disease patients are getting short of dopamine and this is filled in with dopamine from outside: the sexual drive and desire can strongly rise after the insertion of dopamine.

Adrenaline in the centre?
In the centre of the boosting workout of being ‘head over heals’ it could be formed by the hormone adrenaline. This hormone prepares – not only by being in love, but also by fear- the muscles in the body for action, if needed the body can preform optimal. The vains are getting narrow, de heartfrequence and the bloodpressure are rising, the congestion is running on low and the sences and the brain are being on extra alert – all ready to get in action fast and sharp when ever needed.

The discovery of small amounts of PEA in cacao and chocolate gave these populair theory the last few years the extra fuel. On several internetsites you can read that PEA declares why some persons after a disappointment in love fully get in the grip of chocolate bars – all to get enough of this stuff into the brain, although it is clear that PEA already in the bowels is dismantled and due to that – unfortunately – never will reach the brain.

In reality, says endocrinologist Focko Rommerts from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, en theorys like this have to be taken not to serious. About the central rol of PEA by love is as a matter of the fact less known than that they all say or write, he explains. ‘After the first articles published about this subject has everybody made his own opinion about the substance. The reality is that we not know that much about the hormonal changes during the time that we are falling in love.’

Matter of hormones
Our body make continiusly dozens of hormones, declares Rommerts, which anyway all react on eachother. It is not that easy to pinpoint the hormone which is responsible for what it is exactly doing. An extra complicated factor is that many hormones on different places in the body give total different effects. ‘In the vains fishing for elements in the hope to discover how love is working, is as hopeless as looking through the garbage of a restaurant to find out what yesterdays guests had for diner’, this is how Rommerts recapitulates the problem for endocrinologists. Probably it will be proven, he presumpts, that many of the hormones playing one roll at the same time, ‘because if it was only one, we had closed this case a long time ago.’

A few years ago the young Swiss neurobiologist Andreas Bartels, then still a doctoral student in London, but in the meantime working at the Max Planck-institute for Biological Cybernetics in the German city of Tübingen, was turning it another way around. He decided to find out about the biological secret behind the love by taking a different route, a kind of following the tracks. Together with his professor, Semir Zeki ,Bartels traced volunteers that, after their own telling, were really insanely “head over heals about someone”.Out of seventy people that reacted were seventeen selected by the doctoral student as test persons, average age was 23 years old. The ones that were chosen had during the interview been ‘dripping in’ loving feelings.

The chosen turtle doves were placed in a machine that with the help of magnetic waves every few seconds was making pictures of their brain. Half of the experiment was that they looked at a friends picture, nothing special. But the other half was melting away by looking at the laughing faced picture of the love of their life.

Activated braincentres
After measuring the two scientists deducted the two series from eachother and reconstructed it as one average set of brains. The result was a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), a picture that shows in one flash of the eye, which parts of the brain are using relative a lot of oxygen and which ones use just a little oxygen on the moment that the picture was shown of the one they where head over heals with.

The brains section that lighted up, tells Bartels, are centres that are also being involved by other positive emotions, and are being part of the already named rewarding centre. Other braincentres, involved by negative feelings and social disapproving, seemed to be on non active when they looked at the picture of their love – who said that love does not make you blind?



The activated centres, Bartels remarkably finds out that they, have nerve cells where we know from that they are very sensitive for two hormones: oxitocine en vasopressine. Both of them are in the last few years, especially in experiments with mice, being brought in connection more often with the drive to strong social matingbonds that will be formed, like the bond between the mother and the newborn child of the bond between two adult animals.

Love as encouragement
Here brings the brain explorer the falling in love investigation through a couple of spectacular brainpictures us back to the hormones – although they are not looking like anything anymore that gave the physical encouragement to Nijboer that brought him to his record time.

That love gives wings, can still not be measured and be based on biological hard evidence: For the excistance of stimulating physiological effects of being in love there is no hard evidence. But that doesn’t mean that the loving feeling on the psycholgical field can not be a form of aroussel – and that especially when this is being answerred.

‘Love is affirmative’, says Roodvoets. ‘It reinforces your self esteem through the fact that your partner gives you the feeling that you belong to him or her. That you are being the number one. The joy about this works as a pink cloud. You can tone down the things better, you can enjoy yourself on things as a romantic diner or good night of making love. The feeling that someone is there for you, and special the promise of getting mor of all these beatiful things, makes that everything goes a bit easier then normal.’A rotten day at work? What the …. Does it make any difference. More important is where you want to go for diner tonight.’

Who gets butterflies in his stomach, should drink a lot to drown the bastards, before they do any real harm.



The Old Sailor,

September 6, 2008

Love Hurts

If I am going to play cupid, you will at least end up with a broken heart.

September 5, 2008

The prince on the handsome white horse

This blog was posted in Dutch on 28 april 2008

Dear bloggers,

This story is specially for all the female readers
.
Finally you found him, the prince on the white horse where you have ben dreaming about all your life……………



And than after a month he shows already a few cracks in his image and also the horse is not that good (together you cripple already through life)
So to go short princes and white horses are reasonly unreliabile.
It is a bit the same as a vicious guy and a sportscar.
The worst is what I think is that your dream of the future is soapbubble, and there will be nothing of your dreamt future come true.

I think that the same has overcome my wife, she thought that she had found the prince of her dreams.
Although she did not mis anything and also love she does not have to be short of.
Well her prince was in the good old days more loving and much more spontanius (these are her words)
How could this happen?
In the old days I was not turned down or disappointed
And we did not to take care about anything.
We did not have children and financially we had nothing to complain, furthermore we were in the blooming time of our lives and nearly every day sexual adventures (What is there to wish more for a man.)



And now we have come to the Charles en Diana chapter, there were fairytale stops to excist. It starts to become for me bigger growing dilemma, she says that she still loves me but does not show that at all.
The most used excuses are:
Either the kids are awake, or she complains that she is so tired and wants to go to sleep, but strange enough she watches at least half an hour television.
All my attempts are being turned down.

If I break through the cirkel and it comes to the deed, I am to rough or to much in a rush
I am getting more and more trouble to keep myself in line.
Sometimes i wonder if all women with an own opinion, are so distant to their spouce.
There are actually a lot of women that are not allowed to be contradict against their man, in my eyes this is very old fashioned, but they still excist.

I will never be a Casanova and I do not wish to be one.
But I start to understand more and more these men around me.
I never understood these men that had a girlfriend next to their relationship, or the midlifelosers that found there pleasures outdoors.
It becomes clearer to me, if you are being turned down all the time, you start to look for pleasure somewhere else.
Home is only a statement for the outside world.

I don’t want to hurt anyone or cause suspicion, please don’t get me wrong
But it is one of the reasons why now a days a lot of marriages get stranded after a few years
And in 90% of the cases the man was caught being unfaithfull. (Men are not that handy in hiding these thing and to live with a sectret.)
He is portraited as the bad guy.
Nobody asks for the real reason behind this behavior.
Especially women “get a kick on it” to get these guys fully convicted and put him down to the ground.

But isn’t the mistake at their own gender
It is pretty tricky to stay a prince if they constantly try to upset you.
The white horse has in the meantime been exchanged for a familycar and the money you worked so hard for ended up in a payment for a mortgage.
The fairytale marriage still excists.




The once so handsome prince bacame a kind of Cinderella figure, who has every now and then a pretty hard life as the “two little darfs” are giving him a hard time
And if you are coming home from work the “wicked witch” is sitting on the couch.
I would love to see this changed and make it, to get to the last page of the fairytalesbook.

The story nearly always ends with “and they lived happily ever after.” This I would rather end wit my own words as: “Live life as long it is there, pray for less fights, spend your last money on a drink and fuck if your life is depending on it.”

The Old Sailor,

September 2, 2008

Not just good, but very good for you

Dear bloggers,

About a week ago, I ended up in a deep conversation with a good friend of mine, we talked about the fact why we are actually being on this planet and for what reason? We also found out that behaving agressive or getting angry is actually a silly kind of emotion. And believe me it does not help you at all.
Although it can take the pressure away when you have a burst out.
Just give up pretending that you are so special.
We will all end the same,so you better make something out of it.
Relax and take it easy.

In life there are only a few things important, a lot of people forget to enjoy themselves.

If your wife or girlfriend feels stressed, depressed, has a headache or wants to get in shape, she should simply read the following guidelines.

Not just good, but very good for you
have loads of sex and it helps to keep us healthy




I do not share all my hobbies with my friends, but at least we can approach this scientificly but behind closed doors.
I was surfing on the internet to find me some new things to explore scientific, this time it was not beer but sex another hobby of me.

Okay, so maybe there’s some wishful thinking going on — the science isn’t exactly iron-clad — but evidence is accumulating that the more sex you have, the better off you are.

Yes, boys and girls you should do these things to keep in good shape you do not only need a fitness room, but for the benefits of sex are generally thought to people in loving, monogamous relationships.
For the once flying solo, be carefull a sexually transmitted disease might kill you in the healthiest days of your life.



Risky sex with lots of partners will probably do more harm than good.
But while researchers try to nail down the impact on overall health, data is mounting when it comes to some specifics.
Here are several potential benefits:

1. Easing depression and stress



The release from orgasm does much to calm people. It helps with sleep, and that is whether we talk about solo sex or sex with a partner.
But wait, there’s more. A recent study of college students at the State University of New York in Albany suggests that semen acts as an antidepressant. Females in the study who were having sex without condoms (see safe sex caution, above) had fewer signs of depression than women who used condoms or abstained from sex.
“These data are consistent with the possibility that semen may antagonize depressive symptoms,” the authors wrote, “and evidence which shows that the vagina absorbs a number of components of semen that can be detected in the bloodstream within a few hours of administration.”
Hmm, I am not kidding you, ladies. Semen is good stuff. It gives a shot of zinc, calcium, potassium, fructose, proteins -- a veritable cornucopia of vitality!
It is as good as breakfast, with fresh squeezed orange juice (sorry I got carried away a bit)

2. Relieving pain



Orgasm is a powerful pain-killer. Oxytocin, a natural chemical in the body that surges before and during climax, gets some of the credit, along with a couple of other compounds like endorphins.
According to a study by Beverly Whipple, professor emeritus at Rutgers University and a famed sexologist and author, when women masturbated to orgasm “the pain tolerance threshold and pain detection threshold increased significantly by 74.6 percent and 106.7 percent respectively.”

3. Boosting cardio health



I can’t resist another plug for semen. It’s possible that male his little swimmers can lower your blood pressure.
Another recent study found that women who gave their men oral sex, and swallowed, had a lower risk of preeclampsia, the dangerously high blood pressure that sometimes accompanies pregnancy.
No, I’m not making this up. “The present study shows that oral sex and swallowing sperm is correlated with a diminished occurrence of preeclampsia,” said the Dutch authors.

See? We told you it was good for you.
There have been other studies showing that sex lowers blood pressure, and might even protect against strokes because of its stress-relieving ability.
But when we think of sex and the cardio system.
Is there nicer way to get "a broken heart"
Well, not only does that hardly ever happen, but sex might actually protect the heart. So let's get started with a life, that contains a weekly schedule of frequent sexual intercourse.

4. Countering prostate cancer
Over the past few years, several journals have published studies showing that the more ejaculations the better.
Now the Journal of the American Medical Association, no less, has reported that “high ejaculation frequency was related to decreased risk of total prostate cancer.” It doesn’t matter how a man climaxes -- intercourse or masturbation.
So next time he says, “Really, honey, it’s therapy,” he could be telling the truth.
And I have a different opinion about men now with well devolleped upper arms (okay, not every bodybuilder is wanker)

5. Healing wounds
Some evidence suggests sex can be rejuvenating to the point of helping wounds to heal faster. Several experiments have shown that oxytocin can help even stubborn sores, like those suffered by diabetics, to heal by regenerating certain cells.

6. Fighting aging



Maybe it’s the reverse of the aging process, maybe the happiness, maybe all of the above.
One thing’s for sure: “Use it or lose it” is literally true.
For ever young isn't that the dream of many of us?
Complications like urinary tract infections. What’s one way to prevent it? More intercourse.
Sex is a form of exercise, after all, and like all exercise, it burns calories and can help battle the onslaught of the years. In fact, nursing home experts say they wish oldsters would have more sex.
Can sex really make you live longer? Maybe.
Of course, it could be that these gents were just healthier and felt like having sex more often.

But since there’s no evidence that lots of sex is bad for you, what have you got to lose?

I just follow these lines in life:
Live life as long it is there
pray for less fights
spend your last money on a drink
and fuck if your life is depending on it

The Old Sailor,

Talking and Writing

Dear Bloggers,   Why is it that some folks (such as myself and my daughter) talk so much? This visit, I am learning how I process throug...