Why Is Something Always Broken?

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published January 20, 2025] c. 2025

Is it my imagination or do I spend waaay more of my waking hours trying to fix stuff than I did three decades ago?

Nope, it s not my imagination. There's just so many more things to break than there used to be. And by "break", I mean all the glitchy things that one's stable of smart electronics and appliances and cars seem to be programmed to annoy us with on a daily basis.

Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself, "so what's going to thwart me today?"   I seem to be dealing with multiple things in need of annoying attention at any given time. It s like a continuous game of modern-life whack-a-mole.

I don't remember that it used to be that way.

Obviously, my appliances used to be waaaaay simpler. I think longingly of the stoves I had in my early marriage that had exactly two dials: one that read Off-Bake-Broil. (The preheat button consisted of waiting 15 minutes which it turns out is incredibly easy to do.) The other dial had temperature settings. Pretty much the only thing that could go wrong with it was the bake igniter in the bottom which appliance guys routinely kept on their trucks. They came, it got fixed, and they went away.

Now when one teeny-weeny component out of the five zillion teeny weeny components on the electronic panel of my gee-whiz stove decides to go south, the whole panel fails, resulting in a month-long wait (with no working stove) while the $500 replacement panel comes in. I just don't think this is progress.

Every single day, it seems, I seem to be researching how to fix some issue or other that will crop up with malicious frequency on my iPhone. It just sucks up so much mental bandwidth which frankly is getting in ever shorter supply.

For example, all of a sudden the phone screen got really dark. Why? Not so dark that you couldn't read it at all but really annoyingly dark so you could only read the screen in bright light. So I had to Google it and see what the solution was to restore it to normal brightness. I deeply resent the time 

As for upgrading to the next version of IOS, I would rather sign up for a root canal. Nothing that worked before will work the same. It's a guaranteed time suck.

When I ask my husband for electronic help (he has an Android phone), he will inquire patiently, "So what did you do just before this problem happened?"   Like I actually did anything. I NEVER TOUCHED IT! I snarl back. IT JUST DID IT ALL ON ITS OWN! Smart phones are malevolent creatures that go wonky when you so much as breathe on them. I remember when the working of a phone required in its entirety: picking up the receiver.

I am hoping that my 2005 Corolla lasts as long as I do because the thought of figuring out how a new car works is too depressing to even contemplate. I know I'd be trapped inside the thing and be unable to figure out how to get out of it, or even in it, never mind drive it. There s only so many times the fire department will be willing to come and extricate me from it.

We noticed that our new-ish refrigerator now has filters that are supposed to be replaced every six months. It's been a year. We're not sure what happens if you don't do it, because we have no idea HOW to do it. Appliances (and electronics) no longer come with nice easy to read manuals. We're even puzzled why refrigerators even need filters since every refrigerator we've ever had before didn't have one. But we've agreed that if the inside of the refrigerator suddenly starts smelling like a dead rodent, we will probably have to figure this out. But we'll be annoyed as shit about it.

Some of our outside Edison bulbs have gone out. I have spent hours looking at more than a hundred Edison bulbs on line and none of them are the same. Lightbulbs are definitely going to be an upcoming column.

Every time I get the remote messed up, I ponder the days when the most you had to do with a TV set was wiggle the rabbit ear antennas on the top. I was even able to embrace the subsequent rooftop antenna which I knew how to turn to either San Diego or L.A. to increase my viewing options. The worst that could happen was a windstorm blew it down.

Instead, it seems that at least once a week, I am rebooting my cable box when something glitchy mysteriously makes the TV malfunction. It's kind of amazing how often that fixes it but why do all these glitches even happen in the first place? Inquiring minds want to know. Actually, they don't want to know. They just want the stupid cable box to work in the first place.

I mean, how many streaming shows can anyone watch in one lifetime anyway?

I guess this is truly the pitfall of all the smart devices and fancy cars and wowie-zowie appliances. But if one thing is abundantly clear: the more parts, the more things to break. Digital definitely has a downside.

Every day, I personally thank all the stuff that is actually working including and especially my ever-more-decrepit body. It's probably pretty amazing that as much stuff in both me and my home are working on any given day as there are. I try not to even contemplate all the possibilities for equipment failure, both me and the electronics.

It would be waaaay too scary.

 

Being Shaped Like a T-Rex (BRI Replaces BMI)

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published January 6, 2025] ©2025

Good health news always seems in short supply as you get older.  So I was willing to take it as a win when my primary care doctor commented a while back, “Well, at least you’ve aged out of early-onset dementia!”

If it’s New Years, every magazine cover will be featuring articles about diets.  So it seems a particularly appropriate time to redefine one’s fat. I was intrigued to read an article recently that the dreaded BMI (Body Mass Index) that has declared me a porker for some years now is being replaced by a new index called the Body Roundness Index (BRI). 

Criticisms about the BMI maintain that it was developed on data only from men, most of them white, and doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex, and gender diversity.  Even Olympic athletes can be classified as borderline obese using its metrics.  The BMI can apparently not differentiate body fat from muscle mass. 

But this new BRI focuses on body roundness with the roundest bodies having the highest risk of dying from cancer, heart disease and other afflictions. 

I was greatly encouraged at the thought of dumping the dreaded BMI which always seems to be staring me in the face whenever I go onto my doctor’s web portal.  That BMI number is like being greeted with “Welcome, Chubs!  And how is our adiposely-amplified self today?”

But after reading more, this roundness thing gave me pause. 

This is because I have a really oddly constructed body. Back when my mother was pregnant with me, women could drink and smoke as much as they wanted.  And probably did.  I can only assume she was hitting the cocktails pretty hard at certain points of my development.

For example, I recently saw a beautiful choker necklace in a catalog and knew I had to have it.  But when it arrived, I discovered that the model had one thing I didn’t have: a neck.  This part of me isn’t really a weight issue so much as anatomy.  Unlike the swan-throated model, my head seems to sit directly on my shoulders making choker wearing problematical at best. 

As it turns out, I’m also missing a waist.  Of course, I make up for it by having multiples of other parts, like chins.  And thighs. 

I also have really short arms for my height. Anything that otherwise fits me is going to have a sleeve length that makes me look like an orangutan.  I could always solve the sleeve thing by ordering a petite size, but I wouldn’t be able to take a deep breath in a garment that is cutting off circulation to my internal organs.

Women’s clothes are measured on fit models who are assumed to have standard parts.  They are not designed for those of us with three thighs and no waist and little T-Rexy arms. Which I think we’ll all agree is good news.  But it makes acquiring apparel a significant problem.

If there is one downside of being overweight, other than the potential of an early death, it would be clothes shopping. I would chat it up with the personal shopper at Nordstrom who would inform me that they usually only order one size 16 in any particular style and those are so in demand that she immediately pulls them for her regular customers.  Now, I’m not in retail, but if I had a size that was instantly selling out, I’d order, well, more. But I’d be missing the point. Once you get past a certain size, department stores don’t want you waddling around in there among the osteoporotic svelte. 

Chunker departments, where they even exist, are invariably hidden in a corner of the third floor which you can spot from fifty yards: racks of nasty brown, navy, and black polyester slacks, and skirts with hideous floral prints in colors not found in nature. We chunkies just hate wearing this stuff – a point that I routinely note in the feedback box at Nordstrom Oinker. (It’s actually Nordstrom Encore, but if you say it fast it comes out sounding like Oinker, which, in fact, I am convinced is the subliminal meaning in that choice of word. What, after all, does “encore” have to do with fat people?)

I wasn’t always fat.  Prior to my divorce many many years ago, I always wore a size 4, which in today’s deflationary size market is probably a 2, or even a 0. (Personally, I think size 0 is what you should be after you’ve been dead a while.) Afterwards, I packed on 40 pounds eating the Post-Divorce Mrs. Fields Cookie and Chardonnay Depression Diet. Alas, I’ve been heifering, er, hovering around a size 16 ever since.

With no little trepidation, I decided to calculate my BRI.  I feared my lack of a waist could skew my score given that the BRI is designed to be a “calculation of combining height and waist circumference measurements to evaluate the ‘roundness’ of the human body.” Did I need to be abused by yet another metric when I’m already pretty clear what the answer is using more low-tech methods? (It’s called a ‘mirror’.) 

The BMI categorizes me as “Overweight.” (The category above that is a brutal “Obese” followed by an even more soul-crushing “Extremely Obese.”) As it turns out, the BRI is kinder.  It concluded I have “above average body roundness, with a waist circumference larger than most people.”  So a nicer way of saying, “Sorry, sweet pea.  But you’re fat.”  It politely suggests that I “consider consulting a doctor or nutritionist to develop an appropriate health improvement plan.” 

Or maybe I can just do as I always do on January 1 and put “Lose weight!” at the top of my resolutions list and then lose the list.  Works for me!

Meanwhile, sometimes I think this T-Rex’s body looks waaaay too familiar…