Urban Obsessionsurban lifestyle diary

Are there any? Yes, it seems there are benefits to drinking a few well-selected alcoholic beverages. I dare not use the word liquor. That covers too many types of alcoholic drinks. For this supposed exposition into the health benefits of drinking we focus our investigation on beer drinking.

Assuming you are a robust and healthy 30 to 40 year old individual, drinking beer might be more beneficial than not. Citing an article on Essortment on the Health Benefits of Beer, light to moderate beer drinking can decrease chances of suffering strokes, heart problems, and vascular diseases.

A research study at Texas Southwestern Medical Center dated May 1999 reported that “those who consume moderate amounts of beer (one to two a day at the most) have a 30-40% lower rate of coronary heart disease compared to those who don’t drink.”

Why is this so? Well, additional research reveals beer has the same amounts of polyphenols (antioxidants) as found in red wine and has 4 to 5 times as many polyphenols as in white wine. Aside from that beer also contains Vitamin B6 which prevents the build-up of amino acid called homocysteine that has been linked to heart disease.

Of course, don’t just rely on the aforementioned benefits of drinking beer. Keeping a fitness regimen and maintaining a healthy lifestyle is very important.

I am definitely orally fixated. According to Freud, orally fixated adults are either weaned too early or too late. I was weaned early and I didn’t eat whole meals until I was almost six. Until then I was happy eating Cerelac in all its different flavors.

Later when I was growing up through my primary school, I was picky with my food. Instead I tend to select the sweet stuff. Strangely enough I liked chewing straw tips and cracking ice with my teeth. But my oral fixation tendencies reached its habitual potential in high school when I began drinking beer and learning the pleasure of an alcohol-filled mind.

I was into drinking with friends but I didn’t learn smoking until college. It is then that I added another habit of the orally fixated. I started with Marlboro red and then moved to green (menthol) because of the strong burning sensation in my throat whenever I inhale the original Marlboro variety.

However, I stopped smoking after college, but continued to drink. From beer I have since then moved on to hard liquor. It wasn’t hard to do since I was an adult then and was able to obtain license for drinking in bars.

But my oral dependencies did not end there. I recently returned to smoking. This time in favor of flavored cigarettes. And aside from that I discovered to my lovers’ delight that I am a consummate fellatio fan. Hahaha! If that isn’t orally fixated, nothing else is.

Just when I thought cigs and Pepsi are the kicks, I found this wonderful blend of my favorite coffee flavor and smooth tasting tobacco. Its brand name is Hypoo. It has other flavors, of course. But the only one I found at Robinson’s Iloilo is the coffee flavored one.

Hypoo is manufactured by Compania Industrial De Tabacos Monte-Paz S.A. in Uruguay. Its website is here.

There are many types of tobacco. The most commercially used species is Nicotina Tabacum. The most common varieties used for blending “American Blend” or “blonde” cigarettes are “Virginia”, “Burley” and “Oriental”.

The Virginia tobacco was named after the US state it was grown. Because of its intense aroma and golden hue, it accounts for the major bulk of American Blend cigarettes and the reason it was referred to as “blonde”.

Burley tobacco is known for its dark leaves and the toasting process it undergoes before being blended. It is initially air cured in barns at the farm it was harvested from. Later it is roasted in a large oven at the processing plant before being incorporated into the cut rag.

The cut rag refers to tobacco that has been cut into fine strips for use in cigarettes. They are also known as rag.

The Oriental tobacco came from the East where they are identifiable by their smaller leaves and exotic scents and flavors. This tobacco is usually blended in small proportions to lend a unique experience to cigarette smoking.

Curiously I did not find Hypoo among the website’s list of brands from both its domestic and international lines. I wonder why.

I have just upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 today. I used the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin to do this. Of course this caught the attention of the QA people here at 000webhost.com so my account was observed for a few minutes for some “malicious content”. But thankfully they didn’t see anything of that nature.

Anyways the upgrade has been successful. The blog is working fine.

It’s better I upgraded early on. At least if something did happen then I won’t lose that much data.

Lately I’ve been smoking a lot more frequently before I go to sleep. I don’t smoke when I’m working. The high I get distracts me and prevents me from thinking clearly. I use cigarette smoking to help me sleep better. My whole body relaxes, and my mind slows down. It’s a good feeling, you know.

I haven’t touched a cig since college. I used to smoke during drinking sessions with friends. Somehow, the nicotine blocks some of the effects of alcohol. I haven’t done any research yet on why this is so, but whenever I drink and smoke at the same time, I don’t get drunk easily. Plus if I only drink, or only smoke I get the same effects: being high and enveloped in a feeling of languorousness.

What’s more pleasurable is to smoke and drink coffee at the same time. The effects of caffeine with nicotine produces both clarity of thinking and a certain calmness of spirit. It makes me more productive when I write reports or when blogging, or even when I formulate my training programs. However, I was also concerned with the amount of brain cells I’m killing as a result of exposure to nicotine’s effects.

But then I also drank alcohol a lot during college, so there are already corpses of brain cells in there. Killing a few more won’t make a difference, HAHAHA!