My Body

[Note: My working title for this post was “Lake + Caffeine,” but I changed it because I decided the enormous list in the middle was the best part. If you opened this expecting scandal or something, sorry to disappoint. I considered using a phrase that will appear within the list instead, but decided it would ruin my best joke.]

My complete unwillingness to join company in drug-altered states is usually described as “lame” or some variation thereof. This is not troublesome because I have no concept of peer pressure. To me “peer pressure” sounds like what happens to me when I’m forced to ride in crowded elevators*.

Anyway, if we pretend for the moment that health considerations have nothing to do with my non-participation, it makes for an entertaining topic of discussion. Even if various substances had no effect on my well-being, let me try to highlight why I’d still stay well away from them, for practical reasons.

My body has a long track record of responding to things in unusual ways. Let’s list some for fun:
1) Most people drink alcohol and get drunk. In contrast, my alcohol post has annoyed many people who assume I’m full of sh**. (Facebook readers, I’ll try to remember to port that entry as a prequel to this Note. Please leave comments if I forget and I’ll fix that.)
2) Similarly, freezing temperatures make most people get cold. Here too, up to an almost arctic threshold, I simply seem to give off more radiant heat and don’t notice. Anyone who knew me at Northwestern for any length of time will remember that I was the only person around who seemed to think that an Evanston February meant “jacket weather.”
3) Most people think direct sunlight is “nice.” If I’m exposed to it for more than about 30 seconds without massive squinting or sunglasses, the odds that I’ll develop a day-ending headache a few hours later ramp up with each minute of exposure. On the plus side, my vision would make most pilots jealous.
4) Most people get headaches for other reasons. That hasn’t happened to me yet, excepting a few times when I abruptly stopped getting caffeine after having adapted to regular high doses.
5) Most people think that loud club music is great fun. When I’m exposed to it, I lose all ability to hear anything and am comparable (socially) to an autistic koala bear. I wear earplugs on the rare occasions I go to clubs and this – inexplicably – dramatically improves my ability to hear people. On a related note, in other places, most people can hear other people speaking to them whether they face towards them or away. That’s true for me in small rooms, but if I’m outside or in someplace like a supermarket, I might as well be deaf. On the plus side, in quiet areas, I can hear a butterfly trying to sneak up on me from 50 meters.
6) Experimental data applied to a mass and energy balance of my body (you think I’m joking, but I’m not.) revealed my average daily metabolic rate over the course of three months to be about 4800 calories per day. (Here also, you think I’m joking but I’m not.) The same experiment revealed that I am equally happy consuming about 1300 or 4800 calories per day. I can do either one (seemingly indefinitely) and be perfectly happy. Anything significantly different from either value has to be forced, and is not pleasant. I have never heard anyone else claim anything like that before.
7) Most people say that getting hit with something, getting cut, getting scraped, etc. all hurt. I agree that scrapes and impacts hurt, but I can get shockingly deep cuts and I don’t feel a thing – unless something like salt or soap gets into it. (This can be annoying. On many occasions, I have noticed blood stains on something I’m working on, only to eventually discover that I’m personally standing there bleeding on the item while I’m trying to figure out where the stains are coming from.)

All this brings us back to the topic of me and drug use (sort of). I don’t use any because I don’t trust that my body will register them in the first place. (Reminder: the post asked you to assume a premise of health and legal reasons not existing.) If it does, I certainly don’t trust that the effect will be nice.

But I have an exception. I take a very pragmatic approach to caffeine abuse. I tend to like the taste of most caffeinated beverages – to the point that I would drink liters of them at a time, given the chance. When I was younger (before I had developed behavioral controls for this sort of thing), this led to some erratic behavioral swings. It didn’t help that I was unaware that caffeine was the culprit (or that there was a culprit).

These days, I let myself get into “pulses” of caffeine use. I ramp up use of the stuff until I hit a practical maximum, then I stop using it. Repeat as necessary. It’s a good system, and since I’ve developed an awareness of how it effects me, I can adapt my behaviors to best work with it.

This system has enabled me to accomplish some of the otherwise-inexplicable projects that I decided to take on over the years. My last completed painting is very large, and very detailed. It took five years to finish. Roughly 95% of the thing was done during eight-hour sessions where I was on too much of a caffeine buzz to notice the day had ended. Similarly, about five people on Earth are aware that I have a complicated, convoluted, 250ish page website that defies categorization or description. 95% of the thing was done over the course of four intense days (that came as two pairs (the first setup, the second execution), separated by about five years). These blog posts all seem to come to me at the peak of caffeine energy pulses. They tend not to come at all when I’m taking a dry spell. Several other just as outlandish examples are occurring to me, but no one would know what I was talking about if I tried to explain them.

My point is this. Iced tea hits me like a crystal meth/crack cocaine cocktail. So why would I want to try something stronger?







*Sorry, I think it’s pretty likely that this joke will only register with the fluid dynamics crowd, and I suspect that even there it might bomb. But I like it, so it’s staying.