A happy spine!
Well, I decided that, while I understand mattresses that make you sore when you wake up, actively trying to stab me is not acceptable behaviour in a mattress. So I bought a new one.
NOT from Sleep Country. ;-D
It's a Japanese futon-style mattress, but thicker, for the American sensibility I presume (I asked for a thinner one, but he said nobody buys those, so he doesn't have any). I guess people on this continent have trouble with the idea of getting a thin mattress, since it would be different from the ones in the commercials that everybody else uses. Grrr. Oh well, next one. Still, this one has made my back feel sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much better, and it was pretty damn inexpensive. I still hurt all the time, but not like last month, when I wanted to amputate my nervous system. I think investing in a mattress was a much wiser move.
http://www.nationalmssociety.org/Brochures-What%20is%20MS.asp
I don't know what people used to sleep on - my brain has vague impressions of mattresses made of straw, feathers, and cozy blankets, but I don't know about the non-European bits of the world. I tried the internet, but it wants to tell me all about sleep disorders. I get the impression that mattresses with springs are a fairly recent invention. As with many recent inventions, we now believe that this is the only way to do it, anything else is weird, deviant, or third world*, and we can't live without it. Bah, I say, and doubly bah. I bet the number of people in the world who sleep on the ground far outnumbers the people who have enough money to buy a bed, let alone a house to put it in.
Or, to put it visually, for the past five thousand years, the timeline would look like this:
|..................................................................................................| -> time in history with no mattresses with springs
|..| -> mattresses with springs
(I actually calculated this so it would be an accurate visualisation, assuming people started using mattresses with springs at the beginning of the last century.)
And if you wanted to represent the number of actual mattresses, it would look more like this:
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| -> no springs
|-| -> springs
(That one's just a guess. I don't know how many people there have been on the planet.)
Between crappy beds and computers, back pain has become one of the most popular complaints in the past few decades. Add in stress, chemical, and diet-related illness, and it seems to me that our quality of life has declined, despite the miraculous inventions of dishwashers, cars and televisions. How strange. I think back pain from lifting things is a respectable pain; back pain from stupid sleeping arrangements is just pathetic. I've fantasised for years about sleeping on the floor on something soft, but it's just recently that I've had any partners who didn't freak out about this idea. I wonder how much back pain I could have avoided if I'd insisted on doing this a long time ago?
Another mattress pet peeve: I'm obsessive-compulsive in a warm and friendly sort of way - though I am quick to set aside my preferences, as this is a very unhygenic world, and I don't want to miss out on anything. I can handle the normal bugs who have always lived with us. Microscopic flora and fauna are a part of life. If they are in balance, the bugs that help us will tend to outnumber the ones who can make us sick. You just have to keep things relatively tidy, and wash your hands when appropriate. I don't mind the idea of bugs so much, but anything mattress-like that we keep for twenty or thirty years just grosses me out. In the old days, and still in Japan and who knows where else, they put the mattresses out in the sun to kill all the bugs. But I guess you can't patent and sell the sun. Yet... So we make these fancy mattresses, and call other mattresses weird, and we're obsessed with cleaning products, but we sleep on things for ten to thirty years without putting them in the sun, because that would be weird and foreign, and nobody does that anymore. Can somebody explain this to me? The cleaning products we've designed in the past century to get rid of the bugs have caused new and mysterious illnesses in the past few generations of people. The antibacterial soap which has taken over the grocery stores will create devastating new virulent diseases which will kill a lot of us if the bombs don't first. And we're happy to sleep on things that are painful and full of bugs. *brain boggles*
Oh well. I just put my pillows in the laundry now and then, and that makes me happy.
* Who named this, anyway? Historically speaking, shouldn't the African continent be called the first world? I thought that the general consensus these days was that humans came from Africa first, and spread to the rest of the world? I assume that the "first" in this phrase, as we use it today, really means "most important to us, the all-time greatest rulers of the planet, even if we do say so ourselves."
NOT from Sleep Country. ;-D
It's a Japanese futon-style mattress, but thicker, for the American sensibility I presume (I asked for a thinner one, but he said nobody buys those, so he doesn't have any). I guess people on this continent have trouble with the idea of getting a thin mattress, since it would be different from the ones in the commercials that everybody else uses. Grrr. Oh well, next one. Still, this one has made my back feel sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much better, and it was pretty damn inexpensive. I still hurt all the time, but not like last month, when I wanted to amputate my nervous system. I think investing in a mattress was a much wiser move.
http://www.nationalmssociety.org/Brochures-What%20is%20MS.asp
I don't know what people used to sleep on - my brain has vague impressions of mattresses made of straw, feathers, and cozy blankets, but I don't know about the non-European bits of the world. I tried the internet, but it wants to tell me all about sleep disorders. I get the impression that mattresses with springs are a fairly recent invention. As with many recent inventions, we now believe that this is the only way to do it, anything else is weird, deviant, or third world*, and we can't live without it. Bah, I say, and doubly bah. I bet the number of people in the world who sleep on the ground far outnumbers the people who have enough money to buy a bed, let alone a house to put it in.
Or, to put it visually, for the past five thousand years, the timeline would look like this:
|..................................................................................................| -> time in history with no mattresses with springs
|..| -> mattresses with springs
(I actually calculated this so it would be an accurate visualisation, assuming people started using mattresses with springs at the beginning of the last century.)
And if you wanted to represent the number of actual mattresses, it would look more like this:
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| -> no springs
|-| -> springs
(That one's just a guess. I don't know how many people there have been on the planet.)
Between crappy beds and computers, back pain has become one of the most popular complaints in the past few decades. Add in stress, chemical, and diet-related illness, and it seems to me that our quality of life has declined, despite the miraculous inventions of dishwashers, cars and televisions. How strange. I think back pain from lifting things is a respectable pain; back pain from stupid sleeping arrangements is just pathetic. I've fantasised for years about sleeping on the floor on something soft, but it's just recently that I've had any partners who didn't freak out about this idea. I wonder how much back pain I could have avoided if I'd insisted on doing this a long time ago?
Another mattress pet peeve: I'm obsessive-compulsive in a warm and friendly sort of way - though I am quick to set aside my preferences, as this is a very unhygenic world, and I don't want to miss out on anything. I can handle the normal bugs who have always lived with us. Microscopic flora and fauna are a part of life. If they are in balance, the bugs that help us will tend to outnumber the ones who can make us sick. You just have to keep things relatively tidy, and wash your hands when appropriate. I don't mind the idea of bugs so much, but anything mattress-like that we keep for twenty or thirty years just grosses me out. In the old days, and still in Japan and who knows where else, they put the mattresses out in the sun to kill all the bugs. But I guess you can't patent and sell the sun. Yet... So we make these fancy mattresses, and call other mattresses weird, and we're obsessed with cleaning products, but we sleep on things for ten to thirty years without putting them in the sun, because that would be weird and foreign, and nobody does that anymore. Can somebody explain this to me? The cleaning products we've designed in the past century to get rid of the bugs have caused new and mysterious illnesses in the past few generations of people. The antibacterial soap which has taken over the grocery stores will create devastating new virulent diseases which will kill a lot of us if the bombs don't first. And we're happy to sleep on things that are painful and full of bugs. *brain boggles*
Oh well. I just put my pillows in the laundry now and then, and that makes me happy.
* Who named this, anyway? Historically speaking, shouldn't the African continent be called the first world? I thought that the general consensus these days was that humans came from Africa first, and spread to the rest of the world? I assume that the "first" in this phrase, as we use it today, really means "most important to us, the all-time greatest rulers of the planet, even if we do say so ourselves."