I'm Still Standing

Hello book blog readers. Bored much? Like you and everyone else, I’m concerned about the world, but I do personally feel pretty safe at the moment. My employer took the responsible (and State mandated) decision to order social distancing and the possibility to carry on our work from home. Like a lot of people in academia, I’m flattening the curve and slouching at the same time, and that’s what this blog post is about really.

Here I am, back to the camera, at my standing desk placed on an old table, music on, in my loose comfy clothes, working on this blog post. It’s coming together strangely, connecting my situation and ideas from all over.

Don’t you know I'm still standing better than I ever did

Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid

My livelihood (at the moment) consists of books and computer screens, and not interacting with the public. I recognize that this puts me in a privileged position. I also live in a small, mid-western town and can walk a couple of blocks on an empty sidewalk to the grocery store, which itself is not busy even in normal times.

I’m hoping that I’m not an especially high risk for a lethal brush with COVID-19. And yet the statistics, and the demographics about the North American and European experience with this novel corona virus make it clear that I can’t be sure about that. It’s early days, but the patterns for severity of individual reactions are all over the place, and doctors can’t really say why some are much more severely impacted than others.

Everyone’s heard that expression: “sitting is the new smoking” right?  For myself, I can’t help but worry that an “underlying health condition” might be hiding out in my sedentary, close work habits. I sure spend a lot of my time sitting, hunched forward. Perhaps most of us do. In a recent issue of Psychology Today, Judy Foreman posted an article entitled: “Don't Take This Pandemic Sitting Down: Sitting can be bad for you, and here's why.” In this article Foreman points out “the average American sits for 13 hours a day.” 

That can’t be good, even without a new virus that attacks the respiratory system.

Ever seen this graphic or a variation like it? Makes you wonder if evolution is giving up on this whole walking upright experiment. Ms. Book meet Mr. Chair. Judging by the sciatica bothering me, I know that archaeologists are going to be puzzled by the peculiar mechanical wear on my hips someday.

I'm still standing after all this time

Picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind

I speculate that interacting with texts through keyboarded machines has accelerated the move to working on flat, level surfaces. Not so much thought seems to have gone into the posture of the unfortunate operators though. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a 1950 article in The Lancet used the newly coined term “ergonomic” for the first time. That sounds about right to me; I had probably never heard the term myself until the late 1980s.

I’ve been trained in sitting and terrible posture since elementary school. I can remember sliding so far down in my desk by the end of the day that I used the chair back to support my head. My body knows very well that sitting increases stress in my neck, back, shoulders, arms, and legs. I have a personal years long battle with crushed ribs and sore shoulders. No doubt a lifetime of sitting, reading, and using a computer has done more than give me myopia; the muscles, ligaments and discs surrounding the spine are now probably stretched and damaged beyond mending, so that I find it hard to be comfortable in most situations and pillows are now essential work equipment.

Years ago I bought an inversion table to reverse the stress on my spine and help me slough off the weight of book culture. But the discomfort of desk work and reading has only grown worse over time, to the point where I daydream about zero-gravity desks . . . and look with envy at the weightless astronauts on the international space station.

May I recommend a built-in massage feature?

I know I’m not alone. People have been searching for body friendly ways to engage with texts for a long time. When I visited the book-lovers safe space that is the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia recently I saw two older chairs cleverly adapted for reading.

I'm quite envious really.

The oddly shaped leather chair is designed for the sitter to face the “back;” arms supported on cushioned rests, so facing away from the camera. I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to try it out!  

One floor up in The Rosenbach, the reconstructed office of the American poet Marianne Moore . . .

. . . where you can spy a closet door hanging bar that she used to relieve the stress on her poor spine, trampled by a stampede of literature.

I'm confidant that it didn’t used to be this way in the western book world. A few years ago I took up calligraphy and immediately found it more comfortable, and controlled to work on a slanted surface as I had when I studied drafting in high school. This put me in mind of the images of upright medieval scribes at their work.

Likewise I notice that all of the work heights in our library’s Letterpress Studio are designed to accommodate people standing while they work, and I can go all day on my feet in this space.

But what does any of this have to do with the current pandemic? The Foreman article connected the dots for me:

“sitting increases visceral fat. Visceral fat is not an inert blob of tissue, as once thought, but an active organ that pumps out chemicals called cytokines (adipokines) that lead to chronic, systemic inflammation. Chronic inflammation, in turn, leads to insulin resistance (a precursor of diabetes), atherosclerosis, and neurological degeneration, among other things . . . It gets worse. A sedentary lifestyle is also linked to high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, gallstones, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, some cancers, cognitive dysfunction, dementia, osteoarthritis, low back pain, frailty, decreased functional independence, constipation, muscle weakness, depression…”

Yikes!!  It sounds to me like simply sitting too much could be a co-conspirator in raising the mortality of this epidemic among the more sedentary population. Really makes me question the wisdom of my life choices. And yet another motivation - if I needed one - to put down the computer and get moving! Big battles start at the personal level.

I'm still standing yeah yeah yeah

I'm still standing yeah yeah yeah