There’s a Christian music festival that sponsors festivals that I want to give special recognition today. The group is called “Lifest.” The award I’d like to give them is “Worst Named Group Ever.”
Let’s muddle through this one, shall we? I don’t know much about the group. I’m sure they’re nice people. But that name is just wrong. I don’t know how they pronounce it. But when I encountered that name in print, the thought process in my mind went like this: “Lifest. What is that? Well, it has ‘fest’ at the end, so the remainder must be a stand-alone syllable. I guess it’s ‘Li-Fest,’ sounds like ‘Lie-Fest.’ ::pause:: Uhm. No. I don’t think they call themselves ‘Lie-Fest.’ ‘Life-St?’ ‘Life-est?’ ‘Life-Fest?’ ‘Lee-Fest?’”
It was all too confusing, so I decided to run with “Lie-Fest.” Hence my award for “Worst Named Group Ever.” I admit that my choice isn’t exactly nice, but really, they made that the path of least resistance. I guarantee I am not alone in my choice of pronunciation.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
Going the Long Way
We’re in the middle of the summer shutdown in my building at work. That’s when we shut everything down so that we can do lots of work on otherwise active systems. This is when a lot of the more unusual projects get done, which means this is when I'm busiest.
Last week, I was in the stairwell heading up to the third floor. As I got close to the landing, I noticed three guys standing around, looking bored, staring at the door I was planning on going through. One guys was standing directly in front of it, blocking my view through the window.
Since I wasn’t aware of anything unusual going on, I thought about asking why everyone was just standing around.
Before I opened my mouth, I heard a loud grinding noise. The outline of the guy staring at the door lit up like a Christmas tree. A thick sheet of sparks flooded through the crack under the door and around the guy’s boots, shooting seven feet towards the far wall. It looked a little bit like liquid fire was pouring through the crack.
I considered taking a look through the window in the door, but since the face of the guy in my way was now glowing orange, I thought better of the idea.
I decided to let Dumbledore and Voldemort fight it out in there alone. I took the long route.
Turns out, they were removing the existing door frame a little down the hall. I can only assume that they decided the best way to do this was with a flint chainsaw.
Last week, I was in the stairwell heading up to the third floor. As I got close to the landing, I noticed three guys standing around, looking bored, staring at the door I was planning on going through. One guys was standing directly in front of it, blocking my view through the window.
Since I wasn’t aware of anything unusual going on, I thought about asking why everyone was just standing around.
Before I opened my mouth, I heard a loud grinding noise. The outline of the guy staring at the door lit up like a Christmas tree. A thick sheet of sparks flooded through the crack under the door and around the guy’s boots, shooting seven feet towards the far wall. It looked a little bit like liquid fire was pouring through the crack.
I considered taking a look through the window in the door, but since the face of the guy in my way was now glowing orange, I thought better of the idea.
I decided to let Dumbledore and Voldemort fight it out in there alone. I took the long route.
Turns out, they were removing the existing door frame a little down the hall. I can only assume that they decided the best way to do this was with a flint chainsaw.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Lies, Lies, Lies!
Have you ever noticed that some people are decidedly more gifted at lying than others? I’m not going to comment on the frequency with which anyone lies. If I tried that, I’d be kidding myself. How would I know with any certainty?
On the other hand, sometimes spotting lies isn’t exactly difficult. Have you ever heard of Koko the gorilla? In a nutshell, she’s a gorilla who was trained to have an extensive sign language vocabulary. Adding spice to the story, she enjoyed raising kittens – presumably as gravy for the psych students already masturbating furiously over the fact that she exists. There’s a famous story about her lying. According to the story, she was throwing a tantrum one day and ripped a steel sink off the wall of her cage. When she was later confronted about the mangled plumbing, she denied involvement. Her skeptical trainers then asked her who else would have ripped the sink off the wall of her cage. Her sign language reply can be paraphrased as “The kitten did it.”
Koko wasn’t the best liar, but she did a respectable job. She made a valiant effort to frame an innocent bystander, correctly choosing a scapegoat who was both at the scene of the crime and unlikely to argue. That said, I give this lie a 3/10.
This beats out most of our toddlers. They’re delighted to tell their parents that they didn’t break something, even if Mommy was in the room yelling “Don’t break the lamp!” at them and watching the whole thing. I give that type of lie a 1/10.
An example of a 4/10 would be if you went up to a Psych student and asked them something like, “Do you masturbate furiously to the thought of Koko the gorilla?” They’ll deny it, but you still know they do. Still, since it’s impossible to prove, the lie is starting to get some substance to it.
An example of a 7/10 would be if you went up to Koko’s kitten and asked it “Did you tell Koko to rip the sink off the wall? Did you do it to distract your handlers while you coordinated shipments of Peruvian cocaine?” The kitten would just ignore you silently, refusing to answer the question. The fact that it’s content to pretend to be a Cabbage Patch Doll for a cranky gorilla is clear proof that it’s on the lam, but there’s no proof either way. The kitten is smart enough to play dumb. You don’t want to mess with that kitten.
It’s pretty rare that you encounter a 10/10, and I prefer to keep it that way. To that end, I’m withholding the example, but let’s just say it isn’t a coincidence that the kitten has an untrustworthy gorilla doing its dirty work.
On the other hand, sometimes spotting lies isn’t exactly difficult. Have you ever heard of Koko the gorilla? In a nutshell, she’s a gorilla who was trained to have an extensive sign language vocabulary. Adding spice to the story, she enjoyed raising kittens – presumably as gravy for the psych students already masturbating furiously over the fact that she exists. There’s a famous story about her lying. According to the story, she was throwing a tantrum one day and ripped a steel sink off the wall of her cage. When she was later confronted about the mangled plumbing, she denied involvement. Her skeptical trainers then asked her who else would have ripped the sink off the wall of her cage. Her sign language reply can be paraphrased as “The kitten did it.”
Koko wasn’t the best liar, but she did a respectable job. She made a valiant effort to frame an innocent bystander, correctly choosing a scapegoat who was both at the scene of the crime and unlikely to argue. That said, I give this lie a 3/10.
This beats out most of our toddlers. They’re delighted to tell their parents that they didn’t break something, even if Mommy was in the room yelling “Don’t break the lamp!” at them and watching the whole thing. I give that type of lie a 1/10.
An example of a 4/10 would be if you went up to a Psych student and asked them something like, “Do you masturbate furiously to the thought of Koko the gorilla?” They’ll deny it, but you still know they do. Still, since it’s impossible to prove, the lie is starting to get some substance to it.
An example of a 7/10 would be if you went up to Koko’s kitten and asked it “Did you tell Koko to rip the sink off the wall? Did you do it to distract your handlers while you coordinated shipments of Peruvian cocaine?” The kitten would just ignore you silently, refusing to answer the question. The fact that it’s content to pretend to be a Cabbage Patch Doll for a cranky gorilla is clear proof that it’s on the lam, but there’s no proof either way. The kitten is smart enough to play dumb. You don’t want to mess with that kitten.
It’s pretty rare that you encounter a 10/10, and I prefer to keep it that way. To that end, I’m withholding the example, but let’s just say it isn’t a coincidence that the kitten has an untrustworthy gorilla doing its dirty work.
Friday, June 29, 2007
EtOH, Part II
My EtOH blog post remains one of my least popular of all time. So in the grand Hollywood tradition, naturally, it will be the one I pick for my first sequel.
In my defense, it’s not my fault. It’s sheer chance that the topic came up again. One of the major complaints that people have with it is that they don’t believe me that getting drunk doesn’t feel special to me. Now I’ll be the first to admit, I have no idea what being drunk is supposed to feel like for most people. But I recently discovered a way to more clearly illustrate what it feels like in my mind.
Earlier this week, I woke up with symptoms of an inner ear infection. I had one of those once in high school, so I knew what was going on. But my brain made a connection that it had never made before, and I thought of my EtOH post.
To the best of my knowledge, inner ear infections are relatively rare. I’m going to describe them for you for two reasons. First, this is probably going to be funny. Second, I at least try to make these posts make sense, even if I know in advance that my point will just annoy most people.
Now then, the story of me waking up with an inner ear infection:
--Alarm goes off.
--I push button on alarm. The act of raising my head off the pillow comes with a slight spinning sensation.
--I stand up. The room seems to be ever so slightly spinning.
--I walk towards my bedroom door, stumbling slightly.
--Miss the door and walk into the doorframe.
--Stop and ponder. Could have sworn I was on the correct course a second ago.
--Try again, managing to exit the bedroom this time.
--Room still spinning slightly.
--Walk towards bathroom.
--Impact wall with shoulder.
--Put two and two together and realize that at least one vestibular system is malfunctioning.
--Make joke to self about feeling like I’m drunk.
--Suddenly realize I actually do feel drunk.
--Conclude that being drunk feels exactly like an inner ear infection.
I don’t want to spend every Friday night pretending to have an inner ear infection. I should start using that line.
I think at this point we can safely conclude that somewhere in my subconscious is an unstated goal to stop getting invited to parties by the time I’m thirty.
My superego is less upset about that than you might think.
In my defense, it’s not my fault. It’s sheer chance that the topic came up again. One of the major complaints that people have with it is that they don’t believe me that getting drunk doesn’t feel special to me. Now I’ll be the first to admit, I have no idea what being drunk is supposed to feel like for most people. But I recently discovered a way to more clearly illustrate what it feels like in my mind.
Earlier this week, I woke up with symptoms of an inner ear infection. I had one of those once in high school, so I knew what was going on. But my brain made a connection that it had never made before, and I thought of my EtOH post.
To the best of my knowledge, inner ear infections are relatively rare. I’m going to describe them for you for two reasons. First, this is probably going to be funny. Second, I at least try to make these posts make sense, even if I know in advance that my point will just annoy most people.
Now then, the story of me waking up with an inner ear infection:
--Alarm goes off.
--I push button on alarm. The act of raising my head off the pillow comes with a slight spinning sensation.
--I stand up. The room seems to be ever so slightly spinning.
--I walk towards my bedroom door, stumbling slightly.
--Miss the door and walk into the doorframe.
--Stop and ponder. Could have sworn I was on the correct course a second ago.
--Try again, managing to exit the bedroom this time.
--Room still spinning slightly.
--Walk towards bathroom.
--Impact wall with shoulder.
--Put two and two together and realize that at least one vestibular system is malfunctioning.
--Make joke to self about feeling like I’m drunk.
--Suddenly realize I actually do feel drunk.
--Conclude that being drunk feels exactly like an inner ear infection.
I don’t want to spend every Friday night pretending to have an inner ear infection. I should start using that line.
I think at this point we can safely conclude that somewhere in my subconscious is an unstated goal to stop getting invited to parties by the time I’m thirty.
My superego is less upset about that than you might think.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Strap-On Mood Lighting
For some reason, the news outlets (especially CNN) have spent this week obsessing about gay issues and theory. I’m not going to worry about why that might be. (Although maybe I should.) Rather, I’d like to take a few moments to prattle on about the nonsense being discussed.
Did you see this one? http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/06/26/sexuality/index.html
Apparently, a grad student at my local university of choice has been strapping little light bulbs onto people, turning them loose in dark rooms, turning on some video cameras, and asking anonymous strangers to figure out if the people walking around in them are gay or straight.
Funny, I have some friends who do the same thing all weekend (every weekend) without the bling. They never get any grant funding for it though. The secret must be in that strap-on mood lighting.
I’m obviously doing research for the wrong department. Never before have I considered testing for “swish in his step” to help solve some sort of engineering problem. Apparently, if I were working for the Psych labs, I could get away with passing off any or all of the following as groundbreaking research:
--Are gay people really fruity? Monitor their diets and compare to a control group to find out!
--Are gay guys better at packing fudge than straight guys? And do they prefer the same recipes?
--Can you tell the difference between gay and straight people by the quality of their haircutting skills?
--Are gay guys attracted to Disney movies slightly more, or slightly less than flies are to honey?
--Can you spot gay guys by their ugly shoes alone, or do you have to check their manicures to be sure?
--Does this shirt make me look gay? Ok, does it make that other guy actually gay?
I’m hoping that most people who read this thing (if any) find all of those questions funny or retarded (as opposed to serious).
What scares me is that apparently a huge slice of the population would not. At the time of this writing a CNN poll has an even third of the responding public answering a question in such a way as to indicate that homosexuality is a choice. And this is CNN. I have to imagine that if Fox had this thing up it’d be twice that.
This has me a tad confused. Why do so many people apparently think that this reasoning does not work both ways? It would logically follow that people could and would start being randomly gay at will. This theory does not seem to have the same backing as the “be straight at will” theory.
Or does it? I occurs to me that there would be very little reason for most straight guys to go around telling people that they figured they could go gay pretty much any time they wanted to. It would make a poor pickup line with the ladies.
Clearly, the aggressive move would be for an army of gay guys to take to the streets as spies, trying to secretly seduce as many straight guys as possible. Oh wait, they already do. Oh wait, that’s exactly what most gay guys want to scientifically disprove as possible, even if they’re occasionally participating.
So where does that leave us?
--Straight people (esp. guys) would seem to have strong social pressures to maintain an image of strict heterosexuality. This would be true even if the occasional homo might actually be able to turn some of their cranks just fine.
--Gay guys would have strong social-standing reasons to find scientific proofs of inherent homosexuality. This would be true even if some of them really have proven they can sexually handle the occasional women just fine.
--Gay women are invisible, except in pornography. They can say or do anything, but no one will notice.
--Everybody hates bi people, but that’s ok, because almost everyone agrees that they couldn’t possibly exist.
My conclusion?
People need to have more experimental sex before they’re allowed to pretend to be authorities on the subject. Even if they’re really good at dressing people up in strap-on lights in dark rooms.
Did you see this one? http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/06/26/sexuality/index.html
Apparently, a grad student at my local university of choice has been strapping little light bulbs onto people, turning them loose in dark rooms, turning on some video cameras, and asking anonymous strangers to figure out if the people walking around in them are gay or straight.
Funny, I have some friends who do the same thing all weekend (every weekend) without the bling. They never get any grant funding for it though. The secret must be in that strap-on mood lighting.
I’m obviously doing research for the wrong department. Never before have I considered testing for “swish in his step” to help solve some sort of engineering problem. Apparently, if I were working for the Psych labs, I could get away with passing off any or all of the following as groundbreaking research:
--Are gay people really fruity? Monitor their diets and compare to a control group to find out!
--Are gay guys better at packing fudge than straight guys? And do they prefer the same recipes?
--Can you tell the difference between gay and straight people by the quality of their haircutting skills?
--Are gay guys attracted to Disney movies slightly more, or slightly less than flies are to honey?
--Can you spot gay guys by their ugly shoes alone, or do you have to check their manicures to be sure?
--Does this shirt make me look gay? Ok, does it make that other guy actually gay?
I’m hoping that most people who read this thing (if any) find all of those questions funny or retarded (as opposed to serious).
What scares me is that apparently a huge slice of the population would not. At the time of this writing a CNN poll has an even third of the responding public answering a question in such a way as to indicate that homosexuality is a choice. And this is CNN. I have to imagine that if Fox had this thing up it’d be twice that.
This has me a tad confused. Why do so many people apparently think that this reasoning does not work both ways? It would logically follow that people could and would start being randomly gay at will. This theory does not seem to have the same backing as the “be straight at will” theory.
Or does it? I occurs to me that there would be very little reason for most straight guys to go around telling people that they figured they could go gay pretty much any time they wanted to. It would make a poor pickup line with the ladies.
Clearly, the aggressive move would be for an army of gay guys to take to the streets as spies, trying to secretly seduce as many straight guys as possible. Oh wait, they already do. Oh wait, that’s exactly what most gay guys want to scientifically disprove as possible, even if they’re occasionally participating.
So where does that leave us?
--Straight people (esp. guys) would seem to have strong social pressures to maintain an image of strict heterosexuality. This would be true even if the occasional homo might actually be able to turn some of their cranks just fine.
--Gay guys would have strong social-standing reasons to find scientific proofs of inherent homosexuality. This would be true even if some of them really have proven they can sexually handle the occasional women just fine.
--Gay women are invisible, except in pornography. They can say or do anything, but no one will notice.
--Everybody hates bi people, but that’s ok, because almost everyone agrees that they couldn’t possibly exist.
My conclusion?
People need to have more experimental sex before they’re allowed to pretend to be authorities on the subject. Even if they’re really good at dressing people up in strap-on lights in dark rooms.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Concerned Women for America
Did you know there is a group out there called “Concerned Women for America”?
Apparently there is. Generally, I am the king of PC (at least, when applied to groups of unimposing people), but with a name like that, even I start to think that PMS jokes might be ok sometimes.
Anyway, I bet you would never have guessed that this group of naturally upset ladies would have helped make my morning wonderful. But they did.
They have this critical article posted on their website: http://www.cwfa.org/articles/753/CFI/cfreport/
Funniest children’s toy ever! (If you haven’t bothered to read it, it’s a Mattel-issue Harry Potter broomstick toy that makes swooshing noises and vibrates when clutched firmly between the legs.)
I need to start a toy company now. Clearly, thinking up toy ideas is fun and easy to do. Let’s see what I can come up with…
--Toy Replica NASA Spacesuit. Impervious to the vacuum of space – seals airtight!
--Puppies and Yuppies Trampoline. No longer must your pets watch the action from the sidelines! Bounce with them!
--Willy Wonka’s “BottleCAP” gun. Bust a fizzy candy cap in your friend’s ass!
--Spiderman III Spider Garden. Not just for butterflies anymore! Watch your own spiders hatch and grow!
--Lil’ Tykes’ First Espresso Machine. Make any beverage with blasts of real steam!
--Tommy’s First BioChemistry set. Comes with live transgenic E. Coli!
--Mysterious Cold Sore Barbie. She and Ken will never be the same!
--Domestic Abuse Bratz. That’s not eyeshadow anymore!
--Doctor-Makes-House-Calls Playset. Comes with four washable hospital gowns; a stethoscope; and a child-safe, mercury-free thermometer.
--Happy Baked Oven. Comes with a 40 Watt lightbulb, and four packs of hemp brownie mix (just add water)!
Apparently there is. Generally, I am the king of PC (at least, when applied to groups of unimposing people), but with a name like that, even I start to think that PMS jokes might be ok sometimes.
Anyway, I bet you would never have guessed that this group of naturally upset ladies would have helped make my morning wonderful. But they did.
They have this critical article posted on their website: http://www.cwfa.org/articles/753/CFI/cfreport/
Funniest children’s toy ever! (If you haven’t bothered to read it, it’s a Mattel-issue Harry Potter broomstick toy that makes swooshing noises and vibrates when clutched firmly between the legs.)
I need to start a toy company now. Clearly, thinking up toy ideas is fun and easy to do. Let’s see what I can come up with…
--Toy Replica NASA Spacesuit. Impervious to the vacuum of space – seals airtight!
--Puppies and Yuppies Trampoline. No longer must your pets watch the action from the sidelines! Bounce with them!
--Willy Wonka’s “BottleCAP” gun. Bust a fizzy candy cap in your friend’s ass!
--Spiderman III Spider Garden. Not just for butterflies anymore! Watch your own spiders hatch and grow!
--Lil’ Tykes’ First Espresso Machine. Make any beverage with blasts of real steam!
--Tommy’s First BioChemistry set. Comes with live transgenic E. Coli!
--Mysterious Cold Sore Barbie. She and Ken will never be the same!
--Domestic Abuse Bratz. That’s not eyeshadow anymore!
--Doctor-Makes-House-Calls Playset. Comes with four washable hospital gowns; a stethoscope; and a child-safe, mercury-free thermometer.
--Happy Baked Oven. Comes with a 40 Watt lightbulb, and four packs of hemp brownie mix (just add water)!
Sunday, June 17, 2007
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.
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.
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