Adam's Miracle

If there's anything that I've become particularly sensitized to, it's postmodernist bullshit, to the point where I conversationally refer to the shit as "po-mo" only if I intend on dragging most of the sounds out in a sneer that would make Billy Idol blush. I am, as I might explain in an entry apart from this one, very much against the suggestion that just anything could be art. Marcel Duchamp is a personal hero of mine, it's true, but there were artistic statements that he was making about both post-modernism and art criticism through presentations that were, themselves, fairly po-mo-seeming themselves. He was on the attack, and he didn't deny meaning per se, so much as he knew he had achieved a point where he could achieve pointed pranks upon the establishment without having to do much dirty work himself, so much as nudge the whole matter along.

However, I digress, because I'm about to make an attack on something that isn't predictable by this setup. Y'see, I also have quite a bit of a fire shooting out of my sides and eyeballs about the responsibility of art and the artist too, as a result. Yet again, I can hear the staccato clicks of mouse buttons "UnFollow"-ing me soon, but I'll press on anyway. It is the responsibility of an artist who utilizes English words in a visual presentation to take some personal role in appreciating the assertions and inferences suggested by a particular combination of words. Juxtaposition with a picture, no matter what the picture ends up being, thusly is supposed to charge the picture with the bludgeoning that is all of that hidden and surface content slamming into the viewer+reader.

However, we now exist in an era where software or even websites give the tools to make this combination (frequently easily without even having to create the picture, so that pictures can be hijacked for some sort of flat-out pointless remix) happen in minutes, if not seconds in plenty of hand pairs. Now, something that used to require a lot of time and effort (and thusly self-policed itself as an art form so that such idle combinations were less likely, due to the time spent) now can be done by any bored pre-teen that manages to not find anything to watch on the now hundreds of television channels that are available, let alone all the way through any frail elderly human being that finds that they somehow have no time for something as stimulating as chess (chess fucking rules). I have nothing against these human beings normally, but I do have something against the runaway effect of idle thoughts and false hopes. In fact, I basically have something against anything that can so blatantly sabotage a human psyche, but at least most other things actually take some fucking effort to make.

Oh, I suppose an example would be good...

A perfectly good image of a forest, complete with some artistic background blur, just got some fucking white bars pasted over it and some ambiguous-ass words thrown in. there's a small amount of arrangement/alignment, ¿but would this take more than 3 real minutes with most software programs that enable this kind of thing? I mean, for me it wouldn't, apart from having the picture, and I frankly suck at Photoshop. It's kind of embarrassing, actually, but true.

¿For what, though, do we get this? Oh, I'm sure it motivates someone who's down and out, but I'm asking some honest questions about the underlying situation: ¿What the fuck does it say about us as human beings, that so many people lap this shit up, and is inspiration going to remain this fucking cheap? My previous blog in the series had a lot to do with the attention span of willpower (as I've gone back to retitle it), and shit like this is not going to help the matter at all. What is necessary in this age is an attention span to read, to mull over thoughts. Novels, sentence fragments. Essays, not quotes out of context.

LET HER KNOW (!?)...

That is a fucking Hallmark commercial. There were more than 60 notes on a sappy, directionless Hallmark commercial without the fucking crown emblem in the picture that circulates through a blogging site, or the Internet, or as a goddamn Forward in your work E-mail box (because everyone knows some fucking guy/gal who insists on forwarding you random crap to your work E-mail box that makes you reading a blog seem productive by comparison). I'm only remarking on the latest in a long string of versions o f this kind of garbage, and it's only just now started to even look that good, even though no one wants to explain why wasting this time on this actually helps them do whatever the hell it is that it relates to. Honestly, a lot of it downright looks like an idiotic way to reaffirm stupid ideas, and passing it around just gives a pathetic sense of validation that you're okay, because a bunch of other people want to believe they're okay for thinking the same total rubbish as you.

¿Example? I thought you'd never ask! (I know... you didn't ask.)

Not now that I see that you think this needed a perfectly nice picture of a landscape fucked up by some shitty Photoshopped cliche, actually. I actually just got convinced that we're different, because I'd rather go outside and play in a fucking field, while being paranoid and looking for text to come in and ruin the whole scene. I picked a kind of positive one, as a scary note. Just imagine if I were to bring up one about being lovesick, or what a perfect guy is (in which every single item was bollocks), or any number of other things that I could list which would be reacted to as if the short statements were preaching some great truth. Now imagine these things being passed around by kids who are spending an equal time at computers for less productive means than I was (who, mind you, guaranteed can't type as accurately or quickly as I can, judging by what I end up reading...), all of them approving these sweeping emotional statements, and...

...I'm going to cover this crap later, but a quick aside:

You're not that old, kids. You haven't lived a full life yet, so maybe you don't have to worry about being alone your whole life. You're still developing, actually: That's kind of exciting, because even if you ARE screwed up, you can actually fix it... and be infinitely more well-adjusted by my age than I turned out to be. Get off the Internet, and learn about what those sentences you're looking at in pictures actually MEAN.

Man...

...I am a jerk. ¿See? I can say something in a short point.

This isn't even a challenge: The year didn't harm you, as tough as it is to accept. I had a rough year, but I made mistakes that resulted in that. I also made fewer of the old mistakes. The next year will be better, because I have learned and will apply those things. Overall, things get better, because I take charge of my circumstances. ¿Does that make for great word art (with or without the picture)? Apparently not, but it also doesn't reinforce a lot of stupid reactionary thoughts that I might have, so my hopes will actually get somewhere.

The fact of the matter is, it's entirely baffling (pleasantly) that the response has been so favorable to these "Grievances" entries. Frankly, they're long; They have complex sentence structures (with varying levels of proficiency), they have correctly spelled words (like "proficiency"), last longer than 10 words on average, don't have some picture of mountains to ruin by writing over them, and generally don't offer you false hopes, so much as giving cold hard ideas about why something might not be such a good idea upon a real second look. I mean, apparently you're all understanding that it's because I actually respect you, and am not talking down to you, so much as saying things that I know won't be favorable on a reactionary level, but should be said to put the brakes on runaway behaviors. Yes, I am disappointed in those of you buying into this pap or anything resembling it, because we're frankly doing a lot of this shit in person too, let alone in text messages, instant messages, and the like. Oh, it's easy to get a fixation on the matter, especially when some sites outright skirt the line, albeit ultimately artfully, but I'm certain that some real scrutiny can show the difference (without even the close [¡but not quite!] example that I linked to).

This line of thinking is going to trouble some people, because it means that I'm not particularly in favor of most quick-fix short-snippet solution sayings, and it's honestly what guides my system of beliefs (and yes, I have one, although one too complex to put on a piece of postcard artwork). I don't give myself short statements to sit and waste a shitload of time interpreting, unless I have some cheat-sheet information on advice to give if my own mulling over isn't working. You'd be surprised at what I could believe while having such a spare set of guiding notions, but it does inform my preference for real advice, rather than trying to always guess what the other person wants from me. There is a way for allowing for creativity, but so far, this Internet manifestation of an old problem doesn't do much to solve it.  I guess that I apologize for being zealous about wanting a world in which you're not easily swayed by some jerks with spare time on their hands and some photo editing software, let alone an ability to quote something out-of-context or say something they heard before.  I'm not intending on offending you outright, unless it gets you thinking about the collective impact of all of these market-sized "ideas." I wrote about it for this long because frankly... I actually give a shit about this.

Possibly, the only things worse than the rationalizing, self-enabling addicts are the quitters. I don't mean people who, after a struggle, manage to quit something that was destroying them. I am referring to people who half-try at every single thing that could possibly help them out. Give them a 12-step program, and they'll stop at Step 4. They've tried every fad diet without thinking about what the diets mean, and they lose their nerve before they even lose two pounds, ballooning right back and possibly beyond the previous weight, into depression. Go ahead and insert exercise for a similar headshake, from me. The idea is fairly simple: Most of you are clearly not accepting the idea that a Deterministic system is in place that makes every action happen, not wholesale (which is actually kind of necessary for Determinism to work), so you're kind of stuck with the ugly little problems that free will brings up. You almost always are starting because you decided to, or made decisions that led to you feeling forced to make the decision towards the task or activity, and yet here you are, acting like your only option is to quit, before really going through any options that might just be really uncomfortable (but that's hardly that horrible when up against not ever finishing anything).

The same could be said of people in discussions, when they're trying to prove their points. They lay down some groundwork, or simply give the conclusion, but they never quite finish, ¿do they? They ramble, they dart about from supposed "point" to "point," letting any little thing distract them, until they've run out of time or patience to impart their supposed "knowledge," and simply don't even finish in order to give the sense that they might have an attention span in this modern age, they just up and

I want to note, before we continue, that my good friend (I want to call him a good friend, anyway, in that he is good at being a friend, at least, and because I'll break down crying later if you don't wait to tell me otherwise) Howard managed to remind me that SIEMENS (still a ridiculous name for a company) makes fashionable hearing aids, although they don't seem to be for the more severely hearing-impaired individuals, judging mostly by placement. Anyway, my reply to the very appropriately snark-laden ("Oh yeah? Look at this:" was what followed the upcoming response) question about what I thought of that was this,

"In the case of glasses, you can at least make varying visual choices with them, even though the costs usually keep people from stockpiling multiple pairs. Most hearing aids seem to still be stuck in fairly drab designs and plain colors. I think that the guy who NEEDS hearing aids, who then makes the bold choice to wear neon green lightning-bolt hearing aids, would kind of need to occur as a possibility before the guy who just wants to look like he's lost his hearing by having a fashion accessory could be satisfied.

I confess that I would be dumbfounded if non-functional stylish hearing aids came out first, as a result."

So, considering that Howard responded with the video proving the existence, I guess that just leaves the bizarre possibility of someone being such a hipster that they want to have a fashionable look based upon the disability of someone who can't actually hear normally. In which case, my previous arguments shift to accomodate, in my personal belief. But, now that we've effectively discussed some of the social politics of genetic hearing disabilities or different abilities (as I myself frequently believe them to be, in some cases), let's consider hearing loss in an average lifetime (Mr. Holland's Opus isn't the end-all be-all talking point for families with genetically disabled hearing members, but it certainly should be watched when considering the matter, no matter how sappy some people might consider it to be).

We're killing our hearing, of course, but what's disturbing is how little is really discussed in terms of how this is occurring.

We think that loud is rock 'n roll, but a lot of the people I know seem to have no bloody idea as to why this is the fucking case. If they did, a lot of things would likely be different in the listening habits involved.

As it is, a lot of you are letting the companies dictate your emotions through loudness. Compressing and smashing the volume against the peaks at nearly every second they can progressively more as the years go on, you of course end up convincing yourselves that mp3s somehow sound like the original CD wav files, ¿so who needs to fucking buy those stupid old things? Yeah, the way that happens is by cheapening the quality of the original files to begin with. For more on the Loudness War, I personally recommend the quickest primer at Bob Weston's Chicago Mastering Service, although even I can be enough of a Man to admit that fucking Rolling Stone actually did the best popular journalism piece on the matter in the entire fucking decade. To get any better, you'd have to dig around for some of the more obscure sources that generally agree with this, and/or know a thing or two on the subject (like me and others), so read up, and deal with it.

So there you are, consumer: You're removing critical audio data left and right, tossing out the data of dynamics and space in order to cram more audio onto your fucking iPod, so that it doesn't sound worse in your shitty earbuds. At this point, we have ourselves a bit of a problem, because I think that we know that this is quite a bit of a double standard, perpetrated all in the name of convenience. First off, take a look at what your hearing range actually technically is, at least at the ideal, when you're not fucking it up so terribly. Second, consider that you're going to have to face that it takes a hell of a lot more data to actually give you what the human ear can hear and the human mind can sort out. Now, you're going to then tell me that the data-compressed from that charming little song is the same song? That is akin to suggesting that your darling gal finds my mellifluous voice exactly as uncontrollably charming on the phone, with so many frequencies filtered out, as she would in person (while you're obsessively giving yourself a soundtrack to every moment with your fucking iPod, you self-centered prick). I think we both know better than that (and don't worry about it... I don't find her that attractive anymore, now that she's dating a fucking iPod user.).

On top of it, you're all wearing earbuds, and an alarming number of you are trying to tell me that the convenience of them means that they're acceptable for hearing. No, asshole(s), that's why you have that beautifully-sculpted cartilage outside that we call the ear (even though it really includes the inside canal and various parts as well) in the first place. There's a lot of detail and channeling that those surfaces do, and earbuds are skipping all of that in order to do their pathetically uninteresting and crackly (because they're not that durable, are they?) job. They're also not isolating you from other sounds, so of course you end up turning up the volume even more to shut out other sounds, while you get less data operating in a more narrow frequency range yet at FEWER volume dynamics!

ALL IN THE NAME OF CONVENIENCE.

Oh fine, don't trust me: Trust Pete Towshend, who played guitar for the loudest band ever, who is experiencing his problems primarily through using headphones. That's right: That full-stack, when giving his ears space and room to breathe? Not painful, not like plugging headphones directly into that Marshall head.

Our brains are adapted to compress loud sounds psychologically: Since so much of our hearing does involve our brains, this makes sense as a way to guard the processing functions of the organ from being blown to pieces. But of course, this triggers an alert in the brain that the sound is LOUD, ¡and that attention should be paid! We're back to the "fight or flight" bit, folks, because whatever's making that sound could be BIG or DANGEROUS or BOTH. As it is, we can see by the fact that a large majority of us have that compression and attention occur (at least initially) that the ancestral individuals that had this trait tended to survive, as opposed to others which got lucky, were recessive, or mutated later. That, however, is what we're capitalizing on, and one of many reasons why rock 'n roll has that reputation for danger. Keep doing the sound that loud, and it won't have the same affect: That sensory adaptation that was a good thing now could be our undoing, whether it's the same sense of taste mindlessly repeated over and over again, or the same sound that is played constantly at the same volume. ¿Is it any wonder that a generation that has more battery power to play music being driven into the same narrow volume ranges through headphones so shitty that they have to be turned up louder to get the same decibel effect is more frequently listless than many before?

While I may have an exaggerated view, I do not find this to be a coincidence, that we are becoming so much harder to excite (and anyone that doesn't believe me should attempt to run into each other at rock shows... people look fairly perturbed if anything occurs that is outside of their experience of blankly staring at the performer, something that clearly is outside of viewing a performance outside of a YouTube sub-window) as a populace. As a result, we are entering a bizarre world where I might be one of the few rock 'n roll acts left. My live music has staggering decibel drops, where the dynamics give way so that yelling actually sounds like yelling, and I hit frequencies completely untouched by the average iPod AAC or mp3 file, startling and exciting the audience so that there is clearly some danger, here, even without my bursts of motion. I don't want it to be this way, but it fits directly with what I have noted of the listening behaviors that are occurring. It's only a piece of an overall landscape that I am putting together in other posts on our divisive culture, but this alone fills me with worry and dread, especially when so many people are rationalizing against me. ¿Why, then, do we have so many people that have trouble telling a difference in the audio tonality of a voice, if it isn't because they aren't used to listening for such nuances?

The complexities of the human ear cannot be replaced so easily by hearing aids altogether, in regards to what we are noting, so it does little good to do anything short of protecting it frequently. If you must listen to music (and I must), listen to it on larger headphones, and limit the usage of that, when you can: listen to it in the air (or at least, until bone conductivity-speakers take more of a hold and become cheaper), to capitalize on your whole hearing. I fear a situation in which relatively narrow bands of hearing will be almost completely gone, while wide swaths of hearing will leave us with little subtlety in our world. You see, I am a romantic, of sorts. I find your whispers draw my attention, your sense of projection means something, and when you don't use it, I draw near so as to get you to not whisper as much (and strain your nice voice further). There are rhythms in your language, and I want to hear each time you draw your breath, let alone those hesitations that you give me.

My heroes have tinnitus, and I hopefully only suffer from it in a neurological sense of it, but it is enough to allow me to retain some productive fear. I myself always seem to have the most intact hearing in every band that I am in, and it's a distinction that I find to be of a dubious level of honor. I myself have not finished my piece for 51 guitars, and don't want to quit playing the guitar because of my hearing problems becoming too much, because I know how I could get there.

I also want you to be able to hear me when I offer advice or tell you stories of my ridiculous adventures.

Getting rid of all of that is not worth the convenience. I'll pick out my music before I go out of the house each day, because it never was that much of a problem before, really.

So yes, the data matters, the details matter, the nuances count, and the volume doesn't have to be so high. Let's be quiet, for a while, for about 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

This one actually is going to tap into some cultural considerations and decision-making mechanisms that won't be fully discussed, here. If they were, this would be the length of a fucking book, as opposed to several small introductions to the rage that everyone's been trying to force as clearly part of my character. Looks like you got your wish, people: I hope that I'm conveniently 2-dimensional enough for you, now.

Anyway, it becomes apparent after the holiday season (otherwise known as the season of eating that separates most people from the Diabetics from those with Diabetes Type I and Diabetes Type II) that people's tastes are not exactly that unified. In spite of the Food Network, Bravo, and the like, we aren't all eating brilliantly decadent meals that manage to include every food group and keep a smile plastered to our faces 24/7 (although Alton Brown rules). That's hardly a surprising lack of development, considering that we are completely mismanaging our own metabolisms just by the way we consume food, so that we are constantly reacting, rather than thinking calmly, about how to eat in general. Now, there's also a clear barrier to most of the previously mentioned recommendations from ever making it through to actually becoming staples of our diets. Next thing we know, we're wrinkled, old, can barely taste anything, and are shoving 20 pills down our gullet with our pathetic excuse for a breakfast (if we're lucky, we've not in retirement homes and have splurged on what the saucy young brunette on the television told us to get for breakfast, like Special K or whatever-the-hell will be the splendid breakfast recommendation, by then), because half of our organs are functioning at less than half of their previous efficiencies.

But, about that barrier: How something tastes, to you. Y'know, those of you who have severely hampered your sense of taste by repeatedly beating up your ability to smell, which is highly entwined with your sense of taste (and you don't need to have a cold to know that much [although having had one certainly helps slam the point home, so reach back to that]) by smoking. In spite of this, there's frequently a disinterest in sucking that up and eating some of the vegetables quite likely to assist in guarding against some of the damage coming from smoking and basically just about everything else, considering how many cancer types there are in existence.

I live in a universe where an absurdly high number of people that I know who are self-proclaimed vegetarians to some extent won't eat one or another vegetable that I, as a supposedly Universe-Hating Omnivore (oh, the nerve of him for even typing, now!) happily chomp and/or drink (¿organic juices? ¡Yes, ma'am!) up. My example that is the most blatant would be the carrot. Yes, you're probably covered for most of your daily intake with a multivitamin, but how often are you honestly taking the blasted things? Even I will admit to being kind of forgetful and infrequent with said pills even now, as I slowly transition to (trying to get rid of some of my old bullet-sized stock of non-) chewable vitamins. In any case, getting the nutrients through ingestion is much more recommended in the first place. So, maybe now's not the time to have a dislike of something fairly major and identifiable for the label that you've affixed to yourself, ¿hrm? Being 12 about the eating preferences made more sense when you were, say, twelve, and your Mum was around to make sure that you survived long enough to maybe grow tall, bitter, and passed up for people who primarily eat beef, whose colons have several feet of unprocessed matter to prove it, washed down with copious amounts of horrible-tasting light beer that they clearly didn't have any problem getting a taste for, despite obviously not having a taste for it before.

But no... we've got to bow to your subjective sense of what you can accept eating, without you developing any new tastes until you die, to hear how we're told this matter. We even bandy about such concepts as having good taste, as if this is supposed to mean that someone has made all of the right choices, rather than the condition of having experienced a wide breadth of variants for the sensation, and thusly are capable of making an excellent judgment upon the basis of this worldly knowledge. I'm incredibly sorry that you never "had a taste for it," whatever it might be in presentation to you, ¿but what are you intending on doing, now that you have so clearly defined all of your parameters, whether literal taste (eating) or figurative (culture, communication [physical and verbal], arts, beliefs, etc.)?

¿Are we to believe that the entire extent of the human experience is merely the nailing down of the proper subjective views for you to take? I am accused with labored repetition of being arrogant and judgmental, and yet many of my detractors are guilty of the same on a much more covert level, a much more socially acceptable way of rejecting various aspects of the world. I am not even going to suggest that we can't have our own subjective judgments of the world, not at all (I may be a jerk, but I am not a tyrant, per se). I am just suggesting that I find myself a little skeptical of people wanting to be close to others, to have friends who might not be identical to them, when such things are closed off due to a lack of even attempting to reconcile differences. That's just the thing: I know that many of us are different in our tastes, and I DO find that glorious, as I suggest frequently in my writings less overtly, alternating with great spouts of fervor as I attempt to bludgeon home the idea on a more blatant level (I have problems, and I slowly am solving the ones that are a hindrance). However, the only thing that ever matters to me is the why, not just for me to know, but for both of us to know: That kind of understanding allows for an appreciation to blossom, amidst it all. Or, I suppose, I could just be told that ______ is vile and shall always be that way.

Anyway, thank you Mum, for understanding that I needed some time to come around to liking a lot of vegetables and various things that are good for me, along with giving me an open mind to apply my analytical razors to, in regards to art, let alone the world. I am, however, profusely apologetic for all of the stubbornness (also heavily drawn from both her and my Father, responsible for many of the razors of logic being referenced) that now torments her, in regards to my broad taste(s) (note the clarification of how the word is being utilized) and how I won't let her just settle like the wide swath of people that I am pointing my psychological finger at(I am guilty of the problem too, at times). However, I do consider it absolutely the least that I can do, in regards to repaying all of her patience with me over the years.

It will be several more years before I catch up, but I'm apparently not as good at the role, so I might have to go at it a bit longer. One might say I've gotten a taste for such mild struggles.

There really is, isn't there?

I mean, never mind that the person is an awful human being, or honestly quite hideous due to not taking care of himself/herself at all (see Airing of Grievances, Vol. 1): One look from those eyes, especially with a smile, and we're supposed to just bow to that person's will.

We all are completely aware of the value of our own eyes, considering how fascinating we find the eyes of others. I mean, even I am aware that they might be the one feature of my face that I haven't gone through a period of outright loathing for, although I came close in relation to the fatigued states that they veer towards on these long nights, writing (or as it will come to pass by the time you see this, editing down my rage in the hopes that somehow, I'm going to get it out in a way which means that broadcasting it out won't prove necessary. Clearly, you reading this means that this honestly stupid goal did not fully succeed.) or, as it used to be in the old days, reading or drawing... which might at times turn to a mirror and my own eyes. I can't rationalize that my dark, dark brown eyes are uninteresting to women anymore (thank you to every gal that has ever helped me along on the matter), except that maybe they just won't get much attention while they sit behind glasses...

...which actually brings me to one of my points, under this. By point, I mean yelling angrily.

Normally, I let this matter slide, ¿but at this point in the year? I'm going to let my fucking rage fly like I just conquered your goddamn island and planted a flag in your mayor's eye socket.

Do not talk to me and tell me that your fashion glasses aren't a big deal. If they weren't, you wouldn't be fucking wearing them. Let's not even pretend, on this. Yes, I am goddamn jealous that you can see a nice perfect 20/20. It makes perfect sense that your ancestors survived and continued to pass on their genes, because their eyesight lasted long enough to avoid severe injury and pick out nice-looking mates who could clearly also see them, resulting in children who tended to survive for the same reasons (with the vision-impaired ones generally blindly falling off of cliffs and such), and so on, until eventually they got to you. Of course, I know that the arguments frequently turn to effectively making the frames out to be like picture frames, in order to make the lovely genetic picture (the eyes) look all-the-better, and I do understand that argument. I also know the questions that are asked of those of us gazing upon the fashion-glasses wearers, about whether they make the wearer "look smart." That is, in fact, supposedly one of the compliments that is bestowed upon the person wearing glasses.

It must be nice to have that choice. I can’t get contacts past my blink reflex (and I have TRIED hard), so unless I get surgery, I basically have the choice between glasses and missing a whole lot of detail (I can see, but I can’t risk a number of details that could be important being missed, plus there’s being in school in general. As a result, I have to have glasses to be a productive citizen. No, I don’t get prescription glasses covered under insurance, so that cost is straight-up eaten by me/my family).

Frames are cheap, ultimately, which is nice, because then you can focus on all the glorious little nuances of the frame when shopping without having to think about not wanting to wear them everyday. For those of us needing vision correction, there’s a huge tack-on in the form of the lenses that the frame is holding, so for those of us who aren’t independently wealthy, we generally have to stick with the same pair (maybe two, tops, on average for people who have other things going on in life, one just being a backup) for a while, if not indefinitely in some cases far more impoverished than mine that I know and am attempting to also complain on behalf of.

We can GET fashionable frames, I’m not arguing about that. No, I’m just noting the possibility of glasses being complimented on by an individual is kind of low. Even if everyone complimented a new pair of glasses frames, it usually doesn’t happen more than once for any particular individual doing the complimenting. However, then there’s those of us who have to have them, they’re this burden that we have to have, let alone protect the lenses of to a paranoid extent, lest some dickhead slam into them and give us massive eyestrain for the next long ______ until we can scrounge up the change to get a replacement lens that doesn’t have a scratch RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NATURAL VIEWING FIELD, FUCK.

¿Is that a scratch, or just some grease? Oh please oh please oh please...

We don’t generally get to be attractive without the glasses off, unless we spend yet more money on contact lenses, as mentioned earlier (if we can make them work at some point before we die) or manage to overcome fear and budgets to get lasers to cut in and hopefully not fuck us up even further in that increasingly rare, but still occurring complication. I’m pretty sure that none of you think that squinting is attractive, so don’t try to argue that last point. That’s why plenty of my glasses-off pictures have my eyes too fucking wide or two narrow, by the way (oh, and let's not forget the wonderful glare factor of glasses, which is normally what I'm compensating for, because I rarely want that in the picture, and anti-glare costs even more).

So if you got this far, I’m not telling you that you don’t have the right to fashion frames, because you do, legally and in general. However, some of us don’t consider it a “whatevs”/"whatever, no big deal" situation, because I haven’t even talked about the self-esteem crippling jeers from schoolyard peers that turn the glasses-bearer into a potentially majorly bitter adult who writes endless text on the Internet to attempt to vent enough rage to get some relief.

I’m not telling you to not do something, because I have a compromise: Acknowledge everything I’ve said. I’m not making up things above, and I’m not going with anything that’s very uncommon.

Give someone wearing prescription glasses a compliment about their frames, even if you’ve seen them wear that frame a bunch of times before. Give them a hug and tell them they’re looking good/nice/handsome/sexy, whichever one is most comfortable with you, but TELL them. I think in the midst of that, we could overlook how you're borrowing the identity of someone who's genetically different or who has strained their eye muscles considerably from reading in dim light or looked at computer screens far longer than most of us reading this now have.

I suppose people who wear glasses don’t have the right to feel cheap and assert the natural value of everything that glasses actually do signify that is being exploited with fashion-frames. That’s what our existence feels like without anything I’m recommending, in the midst of fashion frames: Cheap.

The top of my nose has indentations more noticeable on days when I’ve been awake longer due to having more work, which has made me wear glasses longer on a lot of recent days, and now I’m freaking out because those spots might get a little worse that way than they already are. It’s fucking raining again today, so I’m having to clean the damn things even more constantly than usual. I look even more tired from the low-level strain that keeps occurring when I miss a spot.

I feel completely fucking unattractive right now, to the point where I just used the word “feel,” for the love of everything.

I don't know if you've picked up on this, readers, but I have trouble when attempting to date women. A lot of it comes on the communication fronts, and how both the other party and I manage to keep injuring that. However, the best times I have always had coincide with times when the woman in question, despite all of the trouble that could be keeping her silent, manages to both say that I look good when I don’t have glasses on and when I have glasses on, even in cases where I’ve had the same frame for nearly two years of knowing someone.

I shouldn’t be expecting marriage proposals at this point, because I’m terrifying in my transparency and ugly because I’m wearing glasses that I used to think were nice, but clearly aren't nice enough overall.

"Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses."
-- Dorothy Parker

Hey, Dorothy Parker...

On behalf of the 21st century and anyone who has to endure you being completely over-referenced (because frankly, anything that could be good that gets referenced too much can grow tiresome. Get over it, hipsters, because you know that you'd get bored if you were in my shoes, too.), FUCK YOU for ever saying that. I'm sorry that times were rough then, and I'm sorry that your life sucked (although to claim that none of it was ever your fault would be complete madness), but I can't agree with anyone referencing you in that fashion. As it usually becomes, I can't yell at the girls in question for being first-class twits, so I have to settle for yelling at a fairly innocent woman's grave instead. I'm sure if I pour something with alcohol on it, that her drunk spirit might find it in her to forgive me, though.

But that's just it: Many of the girls referencing Parker aren't visually impaired. Also, they're fucking kidding themselves, because boys and Men aren't automatically less attracted to girls wearing glasses, and 1/3rd of my own dating record displays this fact (it actually would be more, if I had more courage with asking women out in general, historically). On top of it, if that statement does prove true, I can guarantee you that the main reason that I'm deterred has had to do more with the fact that I have to be somehow scrutinizing whether your fucking glasses are prescription, while somehow not looking creepy for staring at you, and on most days, that balance tends to prove a little too tough, for me. No, I am not opposed to dating a girl who wears fake glasses, and they can look nice, but I would have severe problems dating a Woman (preferred over girls... girls bore me in dating, and I don't mind going to Hell for that remark) who didn't think that the social politics of glasses were being referenced with glasses like I've illustrated above. I also have little problem with women wearing colored contact lenses... I think that it's just fair that, in light of the fact that I don't let such things make my decisions for me, I shouldn't feel unreasonable in trying to see what I'm dealing with as the natural state before I accept as many alterations as I would end up with. I think we all know by the principles of dating that this is, ultimately, a futile wish, but it's my wish, every goddamn time.

A couple of sidenotes, while I'm on the "eye" topic:

• Yes, glaucoma is a situation where I fully endorse medical marijuana being used, but then again, I never said that it was wrong, just why the rationalizations (in regard to some smokes magically not being smoke) fucking kill me, sometimes.


• Don't use eyedrops to get the red out (regular Visine, for example) on a remotely regular basis, unless you absolutely have to for the sake of appearances on some job moment coming right up. They get the red out by dumping vasoconstrictors onto those surface blood vessels atop your sclera, and the tightening up of those forces the blood out. Yeah, it solves things for a little while, but your eyeball was craving moisture and rest, so it didn't really get satisfied on either, there.  Go with the artificial tears formulas, if you can manage to address the actual problem with the time that you have.

I kind of finally feel better about the topic, now, considering that I heavily borrowed from an earlier post in editing this one together to work a touch better, now. I'm sure that everyone who wears fashion glasses thinks that I fucking hate them now, but I just was hating not having the right to ever be annoyed. Your eyes look quite nice, with or without the glasses, I promise.

One of the first things I ask someone when they're whining about being tired doesn't even have anything to do with whether they exercise, or what they eat, or how frequently they do either, let alone sleep:

It's about when they last had water, and how much.

I always get this weird look when I ask the question to someone who hasn't heard me ask them that, and it's almost always too long, or too little, when the answer finally does come out.

The usual suspects that you saw coming a mile away, I'm sure (you're quite smart, I'll grant you that much):

• The human body is 60% composed of water, outright (and then there's plenty of oxygen and hydrogen bound up in many of the remaining compounds... it's one of those organic creature deals, y'know).


• The human brain is 70% composed of water (there is something to be said for you not thinking straight because of a deprivation of water...).


• 83% of our blood is water.


• 2.4 liters, on average, of this water must be replaced every single day, through consumed water and the water content bound up in our foods that we're consuming (at good, sensible rates, ¿RIGHT?)

"I had 8 glasses of water today, though!"
"Um... ¿when?"
"I had a couple this morning, and then I had 6 just now!"

Goddamnit, does Karthik have to choke a guy?

Much like with any of the nutrients mentioned in the previous entry in the series, you need water at multiple times in the day, ¡and you can't just take a recommended amount, get it all in at one point, and expect to be okay, damnit! Your body doesn't understand what game you're trying to play, ¡and it has better things to do than second-guess your smart-aleck ass anyway! So, more water is going to seep into the descending loop of Henle in each nephron of each of your two kidneys (or perhaps one that has grown to approximate the size of what once was two kidneys, because that's how you can get away with having one), because now you have a ridiculous excess of water, and then you go excuse yourself to the bathroom and remove the problem, which actually was going to help you. ¡FUCK!

So you're cycling out water, for sure. THEN, you have to consider all of that stuff that you drink. Oh yes, I drink some of it, too, but I never said that I wasn't very disappointed in myself, ¿did I? (I really didn't, not at all)

• Coffee


• Tea (Sweet or bagged or loose-leaf, etc.)


• Soda (Pop, Cola, I don't fucking care what you refer to it as, or how you're more right with your name. Shut up.)


• Alcohol (Beer, hard liquor, wine, etc.)

Each and every single one of these is a diuretic in some way, so you're going to lose water pretty equivalent to the liquid amounts of these that you're drinking. As a result, you get the brief sensation that you're quenching thirst, but you're really going to have to be compensating by intaking twice as much water for each volume unit of any of these, ideally, in order to balance the matter out. Yes, the first two do have a wonderful ability to flush the systems out (although that's mitigated by any number of ridiculous things that we justify putting into them), but you want a certain amount of water in your system when that's all said and done. Your nifty Diet _____ soda isn't going to somehow reduce that effect, and the artificial sweeteners that are normally in those aren't going to make your life that great either, so don't try to dodge the truth about soda being an ill-advised thing to consume, when all is said and done. Just minimize it to some extent.

Also, considering that you're clearly getting some exercise now, you are probably losing water through sweat. This is again a good thing, as you're also using it to carry out a lot of poisonous products that you've been wanting to get out, let alone might be forming during the exercise, and it's no surprise that your skin's going to be looking better as a result of that activity (although you're now going to have to put up with my attention as a result, and we know by now that this is an insufferable pain, so maybe you should sculpt yourself into a more Jabba-like state, since your brain will also function at such a horrendous level that I won't want to talk to you on two [normally synergistic] fronts of interest!). However, that's more water that you need to replace, then.

Thirst is not going to save you, no matter how much the goddamn commercials glaze over this fact publicly.

Gatorade's electrolytes are nifty, don't get me wrong. However, you should note the sodium content of the stuff. It's there to force your thirst reflex to make you drink more, and that's it. Sooner or later, you're going to want to drink some basic water. Your thirst reflex, much like your hunger reflex, has a bad case of timing. They claim that they're good timing mechanisms, based on feelings (and don't even get me started on THOSE), but they're basically the last-ditch efforts of your body to force you to take care of yourself in some way resembling "proper." You have to tailor your intake to anticipate those needs, rather than the other way around, so you should be hydrating also before the exercise, not just during (which proves to usually be insanely hard, by comparison) or after, let alone in acceptance of the implications of your beverage(s) of choice.

How anyone can be remotely aware of some of these (like altogether many people actually are) and still so blindly ignore them is beyond me, but it happens all the fucking time in my life with the people that I interact with. Not only do I get to deal with their fatigue and outright sleepiness, but I also get the added bonus of their charming mood snaps that occur when their brain is clearly deprived of something quite critical to its composition, let alone its functions directly.

Of course, you're taking in nutrients, and probably excreting the amounts that you don't necessarily need, as well. That means that you're going to need more water in general for the sake of carrying out these extra solutes (no, your urine shouldn't resemble the coloration of various Mario Bros. villains or Muppets: That's NOT healthy, actually.). Failure to recognize this over and over again, while those beverages or sweating remove water consistently, may leave you itching to have a kidney stone or three in your lifetime. If you're lucky, you can have one painfully pass though your ureter and leave Zorro-style. If not, The Empire will have to assist you with their lasers to break up the mass and then the passing will probably be more repeated and more painful still. If you have plenty of water in your intake, those solutes are a lot less likely (in most individuals: Some of you have to be 9 times more careful in your lives because of bad kidney functions that don't even have to necessarily do with anything like alcohol abuse, and I don't envy you at all) to collect to the point of welding together and forming a combat force against your health and sanity.

As it is, that extra interstitial fluid (the extra fluid in between spaces of cells that resembles cytoplasm in some cases) and blood plasma gets filtered through the amazing network that is your lymphatic system. Also, your breathing passages and skin's hydration allow cells to have the right moisture to be at full size, forming barriers of protection and fully-functioning mucus layers and immune blockades in their own right. Basically, keeping hydrated is an essential component to not getting sick, something to keep clearly in mind this holiday season, because those cold conditions lead to very dry conditions (water doesn't readily hang out in the air if the temperatures cause it to liquify or even freeze quickly), and it becomes no subsequent surprise that you're more likely to catch airborne viruses and bacterial illnesses during this season.

It should be noted also that you're being kind of an idiot if you're always drinking freezing cold water: Your biological processes like operating at higher temperatures, so you're not ultimately doing yourself any favors by knocking things down so low, let alone tightening up your vocal cords (singers know what I'm talking about) and straining that voice of yours in yet another way. Drink it a bit warmer (without necessarily making it scalding when you're not brewing tea or coffee) than room temperature, at least: There's a reason why that has a more lasting soothing quality, and you don't need to be getting sick to know how much nicer that lastingly feels compared to your throat closing up on you every time you have a "cold one."

All of this talk of water makes me thirsty, but it really could just be the rain outside. I'm going to go ahead and not take my chances, though.

(Once again, these are not ranked: The numbers are present in order to help me keep track while editing the content, and to keep things straight during and after posting. There'd be some pretty absurd ties and/or upsets if I actually ranked even what I had so far, ¡let alone what's to come!)

So, there's a clear absence that's been screaming out this whole time, and that tends to take a form resembling the snark-filled question of "Right, right, this is all nice, but don't I have to eat healthy shit too, and not eat fatty foods? I don't think that I can do that shit, man!"

Fair, though, fair.

By the way, as we're getting into this, I ended up making the title a reference to Frank Costanza, the Seinfeld character that allowed a perfect gateway for the television version of Festivus to get so readily circulated in the first place.

That said, along with the inferred mockery of my own empathy-driven rage, let's continue back on the topic that I actually just set up earlier...

Nutrition is considered important not only for having vitality and that vibrant energy that I hawk like I'm a snake-oil salesman (link provided for the young and old who might not be familiar with the badass reference), but basic day-to-day functioning and having any shot at living into those predicted lifespans without being a total hopeless wreck, by then. The food pyramid is an excellent start for novices that is frequently struck down as being impractical for daily living, but it helps take care of quite a few needs while eliminating a lot of the thinking that neurotic psychopaths like myself do through much of the day. As it is, with few exceptions on an average basis (presumption being that most organs are functioning adequately, most nutrients tend to be absorbed most readily by ingesting them in food sources. In any case, most pill supplements want you to be eating or have just eaten for maximum efficient absorption anyway, as an acknowledgment to this fact.

So, let's presume that you have the use of The Internet in order to look up, on average, the toxicity levels of individual nutrients, along with whether something is water-soluble (i.e. excess will be excreted in urine when the kidneys are in good shape) or fat-soluble (gets stored in the fat if in excess, so that toxic levels are usually a potentially legitimate concern if you keep overdoing it too radically), so that I don't do a run-down of every single nutrient.

Let me concentrate instead on one, because it builds on other entries of mine:

You are not getting enough Vitamin D. I don't want to hear how there's vitamin D in your milk, your orange juice, and your multivitamin that you take to keep things simple (which is fine for early-level health fiends, but I believe in a certain proactive character that lies within people going so far as to read this!): You could probably get more vitamin D. On a side-tangent, I fly into a fucking rage when someone talks about how they simply need to go get a few minutes of sun each day to be okay.

• A lot more ultraviolet light is getting through, and even if you don't believe in global warming specifically, the holes in the fucking ozone layer are pretty blatant, and are letting a lot more UV radiation through, damaging your fucking DNA a bit more readily than that bit of a vitamin D increase, damnit.


• Unless you're working outside all of the time, I bet that doesn't compensate for how much time you're spending studying/working indoors, most certainly.

So, that taken care of as an excuse, let's consider how much is in a multi-vitamin (I'm going to use Centrum as my example, as it's very readily available nationwide in the U.S.):

400 I.U.

I.U. stands for International Units, a standard that's a bit more precise and universal a measurement than all of this milligrams (mg) or other weight-units rubbish, and it's based on the biological activity of the item being measured, so it has a very practical application when applied to a nutrient that has biological relevance.

That said, you need vitamin D at more than one time in the day, as your body clearly is doing shit beyond the one hour in which you're having that Pop-Tart breakfast (or whatever failure to eat right that I might share with you on more than a few days). The amount present in a supplement, that fortifies milk or orange juice... that takes care of nationwide worries of an outright deficiency in many people, and that's all that the government would ever concern itself with. Depending on how much you do, you might actually need more vitamin D, and if you're trying to safeguard your bones against future worries of osteoporosis, it might be a good idea to step it up, a bit. On top of it, the nutrient also has roles to play in neuromuscular activity and immune function (that's right, kids, it's not all about vitamin C and zinc, ¡because the body needs more than a couple of things when an invader is knocking over all the shelves in the shop!), so ot say that this isn't getting a lot of action would be quite the grand mistake.

I do admit that it's a good thing that vitamin D is fortifying foods that also contain calcium, since all of that calcium (that you're clearly getting because you know you need more bone mass to keep up with my other suggestions) is kind of worthless and not utilized without vitamin D, but individuals might want to consider resorting to a higher intake. On top of it, many of these supplements are not necessarily being 100% absorbed, as they tend to be vitamin D2 (QUACK QUACK... QUACK... quack... I like the reference), rather than the much-more readily absorbed vitamin D3, which is mostly only available in deliberate pill-form supplements, at present. The best thing about vitamin D? It has your back: If there's an excess, it doesn't immediately start becoming toxic, and you can super-duper overload before it becomes a problem. The excess gets used when there's not enough being taken in, which is a relief for me when I know that I'm not always 100% the best with my nutrition for a trillion days in a row. Just consider all of the implications for you if you're not getting enough (oh, and let's also consider that women, who have more concerns about retaining bone mass in the midst of various hormonal shifts and losing blood for a few days each month, which includes calcium and vitamin D, among other things, should probably get more in order to build even healthier bones in advance), on all of those levels, and it's kind of a given that you should get more vitamin D.

The sad fact is that, myself included sometimes (though I've gotten much better), you're also probably not eating at a reasonable pace or quantity. Consider the starvation-defense mechanisms that are in place to have allowed the ancestors (who, as we so far can believe, did not have refrigerators with Häagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry's ice cream inside) to survive in between all-too-infrequent meals, but didn't go away when said refrigerators came about. A trait that was frequently rewarded is now our enemy, because it's easy to be fat. Now now, you must... chill! I will say this again later, but I'm not a fan of emaciated skeleton humans... it's not attractive. Anyway, now that I have you panicking at least a little less for a while, back to what I'm talking about... the three square meals a day fits a schedule that doesn't even match to what we're doing now, let alone back then. ¿Do you really think that you're using all of the calorie energy that you're getting from that Xmas dinner? With maybe a few exceptions, I imagine that the answer is usually that you are not. Let's also not forget that you're probably stressed from your Modern Age lifestyle in some way, so that you're also in Fight/Flight Mode, and are probably trying to store calories as readily as possible, while also putting them in the highest-energy form possible so that you can make it out of there now, and prepare for if the scuffle you're supposedly going to get into leaves you injured for a long while (and theoretically unable to get food in an Early Historic Period). Your metabolism is likely to go into a certain level of shutdown, as far as burning the calories immediately: ¡You might need them later!
 

Dude, body... we're going to eat again at dinner.

No, we haven't eaten again, and we just got a lot of calories... WE MUST STORE THEM!

Fuck, ¿why do we even talk anymore?

Distress! Anger! We are in danger!

¡Shut up!

...

...so there's that. Then, on top of it, you have to basically imagine your mitochondion as power plants. Actually, hang on... Mitochondria (as the plural actually is) are an organelle that exist in nearly every living cell of yours (as in, you shouldn't really count those amongst most of the visible cell layers that you present to the world, because those are old and dead layers, let alone other dead tissues that form support systems internally). In fact, I will somewhat simplify things by suggesting more basically that they are the bacteria which we have the friendliest relationship with (although they are certainly not the only ones, they are the main ones that we have internal to the cell). You might find this bizarre, of course, for me to say that, especially since we are taught that they are an organelle, like I was just saying. However, they do have their own DNA, and they are not constructed from the DNA code in the nucleus of a cell, like basically every other part of the cell worth mentioning in a technically short entry. There is a setup coming, but I think you can spot that a mile away by this point in my "Grievances" series...

Like any classic power plant (I am not referring necessarily to solar plants or wind farms, so fucking work with me, here), there is a by-product of that metabolic activity that these mitochondria undergo in order to make aerobic respiration work and give all of the wonderful energy that you're probably taking for granted when you're fist-pumping to the new Super Mario Bros. game for the Wii (which I wish I owned, let alone the fact that I'm separated from my Wii, now that I finally fucking have time to play it). Those mitochondria are the reason that aerobic respiration happens in complex eukaryotic cell-laden creatures like us, rather than the extremely lower-energy fermentation processes that we tend to resort to when we just can't keep up with the demands of our muscle activity, or simply want some other organism to do our bidding for making yogurt, beer, or harder liquors. So you can clearly see that these are the little guys/gals that we want to be working well at any given time. However, when they're being given a shit load more caloric energy to process, that 'pollution' (in the form of free radicals) builds up faster than what is considered "usual" and can damage the DNA of these mitochondrion every bit as much as UV radiation can cause free radicals to form and damage the DNA of our dermal layers. To make matters worse, these mitochrondria have a whole lot less DNA in the first place, so that the same amount of mutation has a much bigger potential impact. Sure, they have the same mechanisms as the contents of the nucleus for repairing and correcting damage, but let's imagine a shitload of binge eating or binge drinking on a regular basis, and how quickly the probabilities could add up, for that. ¡It's a wonder any of us manage to survive the modern diet, at this point!

It doesn't take that much, thusly, for a mitochondrion individual to become either completely dead or reproducing incorrect descendants, etc.. If you get this happening regularly and rapidly enough, you have a widespread inability to process sugars of simple and complex sorts that takes places in the cell, or perhaps tissue, or organ, depending on how widespread the problem is. Keep in mind again that this isn't a code that's being given in the overall DNA code of the main cells. In fact, these mitochondria were given to you via their ancestors through your mother, because the egg gamete of the pair is a larger than full-sized cell that contains all of your embryo's original organelles. The implications to set up future metabolic problems in offspring become alarmingly noticeable when the situation is viewed in this light.

But, of course, we have no problem with over-feeding ourselves at every single meal. Most of you aren't laborers per se (and frankly, neither am I), so you're not really readily burning these calories off. The overall net result works out, but we never really find it too worrisome that this happens in spite of the same starvation mechanisms that I was mentioning before, and how quickly they take hold. Now let's fastforward, for most of you: You see these energy crashes, the situations where people "hit the wall" at 24 or 30 or 40, etc., when that charmingly slim figure just can't take all of the abuse anymore. ¿Does it ever occur that the excesses of the past can set up the failures of the future, considering everything I noted, and the multiple individual papers that are leaning behind many of the statements that I am rambling about, let alone how it doesn't strike me as a surprise that your metabolism might closely resemble that of your mother's when she gave birth to you (I'd like to take a brief moment to say that I love my Mum)? Go on, eat your shitty fast food all the time, because your generation happens to be working out alright, ignore those amongst us who come from families that consumed a lot of fast food already, and scratch your heads when the kids aren't alright.

Or eat in moderation. I don't want you to starve, I really don't: A lot of shit shuts down, from brains to sexual capabilities to just about every organ imaginable at thresholds much higher than what you're guessing, most likely.

This is, by the way, where those vegetables (and plenty of fruits, truthfully) come back into play as being important: Their antioxidants are more readily absorbed than in supplements, and antioxidants are exactly what counter the possibilities of free radicals oxidizing parts of the mitochondria and the DNA to wreak their havoc in the first place, much like in the instances regarding that damage from the smoke and charred food in Grievance #2.

I'm suggesting that, unless you have some critical beliefs against eating more than three times in a day, that you become a snacker, a "grazer" as I think they call it. Break the day up into smaller meal chunks, and you might also find that getting in the nutrients that I was mentioning above might become a bit easier when you're dividing by a higher number than three. As it is, your metabolism will also run higher in genral, even before we factor in exercise (which you're clearly doing, ¿RIGHT?), because it isn't so readily going into that starvation mode that it has to get kicked back out of in the midst of a new meal being provided. Your liver won't get destroyed so quickly by an excess of fat inside that isn't being worked on actively by the liver, and I think I've noted that to be a pretty nice thing in general. You'll notice that I didn't even necessarily say that you couldn't have the occasional high-calorie food, but I've also noted that you have to burn that off at some point too, so I think that you can put all of that together to be responsible.

Make the changes now, so that later can be a bit nicer, for you.

You're irritating enough right now when you're bitching idly about being tired, so I hardly think you're going to find me up for being around that often when you're complaining about it all the time, because you never stop being tired (and labored).

Give me the excuse, and I have officially fucking heard it, in regards to aerobic exercise, the lack thereof, and particularly why running is such a fucking horrible thing to do...

...or so it's said. Like anything, it can be, if you do it like a total asshole. I heard the blast beat synchronicity of multiple people clicking their mice in getting ready to "UnFollow" me, and I'm frankly surprised that I've gotten this far without losing half of my Followers (I think that they believe I'm going to stop, and they might just be now gathering that yesterday wasn't the end... I have a number in mind, and I bet that some of you clever ones can guess what it will be. Don't tell the others... let's keep it a surprise.), but I'd recommend you hang on.

For this image to work, you're going to either have to vividly pull out the last memories of being at a gym, go to a gym in your regular routine (Um, which you have, ¿right?), or suck it up and finally go. Don't go doing your grim routine (I don't know that many people that it starts happily for, and I'll freely admit that I have varying days) just yet, though. Just go to the room with the aerobic machines and just stand there. Do it in a corner, like you don't know what you're doing (the last thing you want is for people to freak out because you're the creep staring at them, and this isn't that visual an experiment, actually), perhaps. Just listen, once you've stopped making much sound. Most gymnasiums don't have a lot of television sound now, because they've got some ridiculous headphone setup or low-power FM-radio frequency broadcast for each and every television, so this should be easy. Even so, unless it's a small gym and someone's being a total jackass, this will still apply... just listen.

¿What are you hearing?

• The wiring of treadmills


• The swoosh/slight scrape of elliptical machines (c'mon, not many of them are properly serviced, so they start to make friction sounds after that much use... let's not pretend otherwise)


• The tension-filled whir of wheels letting out cable for rowing machines


• Cross-country ski machines? Yeah, ¡right, maybe in the 1990s! (Although they weren't horrible as an idea...)


• Stationary bike pedaling (similar lack of servicing at hand, so I doubt it will be quiet)


• 1-2+ elephants

Wait... ¿what?

Oh, my mistake, that's just someone running on a treadmill.

But here's the thing... I just listed a shit-ton of sound sources that should be drowning that out. That pounding isn't supposed to be there, so readily. This is one of those weird myths that fucking kills me, that no one necessarily says, but a lot of people clearly collectively believe: Running involves a whole lot of pounding footsteps until you've gone a certain distance. As it is, most treadmills made within the last 8-9 years also have a certain amount of elastic rebound that should be assisting those very same footsteps in ways that pavement simply won't readily do unless you have fancy shoes (which I will get to below). The television won't convey this correctly (oh, by the way, you can stop hiding in the corner, now... seriously, that boy that was checking you out is starting to have second thoughts, at this point.), so you might have to check out a marathon, sometime, particularly if you live in a big city or visit people in a big city.

Kenyan runners do it right. If you can't accept that about a country that has running in its culture nationwide, you might as well stop reading, and quite possibly might need to check if you've eaten right, today. They don't have the money to outdo Americans, not really: In fact, ¿how many of them even have decent shoes for most of their running lives (because I don't fucking know, really)? Yet there they are, winning nearly every competition. When they don't, they make 70+% of the lead pack, and they cross within a 3-second span of each other. They must be doing something similar, and it's all technique, then (if we get back from racism really fucking quickly, you'll notice a fair amount of physical variance in these runners on even just a visual level. They're not being grown in some amazing cloning vat, but they're doing similar actions, then.). When you get around to seeing them, I ask you this question in advance: ¿Do you hear them coming, or do you basically nearly miss them if you're not staring and looking for them as they float right on by? No, you're not getting acid flashbacks, that just happened. Sure, they're lean, but I bet your gym observation day resulted in you seeing some fairly lanky folks slamming that defenseless treadmill like it owed them money, too.

In basic, they're letting those graceful legs stretch out (and by getting used to that, you can end up making yours graceful, too), because they're doing distances running, not sprints. The foot starts contacting the ground softly, a bit of the heel first, putting the weight gently on that outer edge (let's say the right foot, so the right landmass of the bottom of your foot, then) as you roll that foot onto the flat surface like it's part of a tire, rather than a smashing robo-foot from a Mega Man game (don't tell me I just lost all of you with that... ¡I'll cry bitter old man tears, then!), continuing forward until you spring forward with the middle-to-front of your toes (it might vary a touch, it's true, especially considering speed, but I think that you're getting the idea), using that arch to provide the launch of that spring forward and those muscles to carry that foot briefly upwards in an elliptical arc until it becomes the front foot again, while the other foot is doing the exact same thing in the meantime. If you're doing it right, you're barely hearing it at all.

Think about it, though: You don't need to have even taken an intro to Physics (for non-majors) class in order to viscerally understand the benefits of this...

If you're doing this, you're not losing a lot of energy to gravity, because most surfaces won't have that elastic give-back, even though there's technically a counter-force for when you push down to push up, which is why that shockwave isn't the end of your mobility altogether. You then use that energy to keep the foot moving, rather than scraping the ground or losing the energy by pinpoint static friction. That adds up over a long distance, or even anything more than 3 feet when you really get neurotic about this matter. That's not just something that could apply to running, that could apply to walking, as well.

Ah, now I have some renewed attention, so thank you, guy/gal who might have managed to stick this entry out long enough to get to this point: Walking is something that most of us do every single day (no offense intended to people injured in serious accidents or differences of birth: Most of you actually tend to have some appreciation for what you do have, unlike the people that I am addressing. Just don't run me over/run into me with your electric wheelchairs, for those of you that have them: That is seriously not cool), yet most of us put very little attention to it. Just watch this when you do your people-watching (don't try to pretend like those of you who happily watch other people's thoughts on your computer screen don't occasionally just watch people out in the world... I do it too, in case that hasn't become obvious)... watch people walk. Not just stylistically, either. Make a BINGO card of it, if you absolutely have to. Some suggestions: Feet pointed outwards (instead of relatively straight), feet pointed inwards, tight-rope walking, wider-than-shoulder-width zig-zag stepping (might combine with something just listed), scraping steps, pounding steps, favoring one part of the foot considerably, favoring one leg considerably, other silly walks, etc.. Give a scowl anytime one of these individuals talks about being really fucking tired, and tell'em Karthik sent you, because these people are losing energy just by going somewhere. I don't mean using it, I mean energy is being lost that is really not actually resulting in any real productive movement whatsoever.

As I mentioned previously, the muscles above and below the knee are incredibly important for being not just muscles of locomotion, but as stabilizers so that the knee isn't ground away [from having the weight of the whole body on it] to the point where that articulation cartilage (which we don't yet have a perfect replacement for) is gone and the bones themselves are getting destroyed. This is ideally accomplished by a combination of both leg-muscle strengthening (through resistance systems or machines) and simple repetitive (but correct) motion to get them working together. Yes, other exercise forms are great, but there's a lot less gear just to enter into running. Go to a good running store, and they'll even analyze your form enough to get you an ideal running shoe to compensate for the shape of your foot (mine is particularly flat, apart from the intervention of orthopedic arch supports at the junior high age) and your particular locomotive style, which you'll shamelessly demonstrate in the store itself. Maybe then you get some sweat-wicking shirt(s) and some breathable shorts, and that's about it for gear, apart from anything additional to keep you warm if you decide to go out into nature with your new hobby.

For the love of everything, you start out small. That's okay, I promise: You might not even run more than a full minute at a time, at first, but it's the intention and the slow and steady build to more regularly running that small amount amidst all of the walking, along with that good amount of regular stretching that you end up doing (I recommend some easy yoga routine for those of you new to proper amounts of stretching) before and after, that leads to you then stepping back how frequent you do it, upping the amount per time, and then making it more frequent slowly, and...

...this allows the bones and muscles to become accustomed to the new demands. It allows them to get damaged, but then repair themselves better and more badass than before. It gives you time to get a better diet going to give the nutrients necessary for this new lifestyle choice. But with the increased ability to undergo these extra efforts, you'll find the simple shit (like getting through the day) to be not a big deal, by comparison. You're working towards getting better limb muscles and core tone, but also towards getting a stronger heart. A stronger heart allows you to have it beat less frequently: Each beat is more powerful, moves more blood, tires out the organ a lot less, which basically doesn't take any REAL vacations (until it maybe does take a break... and then you're properly fucked, frankly), and therefore you get less tired during the daytime. You're shooting for raising your heart rate quite significantly (check this chart in relation to your age range for a better idea of what you're shooting for, depending on your stats and individual circumstances) for 20 minutes before slowly lowering it back down, ultimately, at least 3 times a week, amidst all of this, but you have to go through all of those middle steps before you get there, no matter how simple and easy they may seem. This way, you don't get yourself injured, or in over your head. You'll eventually be Flash, but doing it slow and focusing on form allows that to mean something later, and not cause it to self-truncate. It's easy to get yourself injured by being an idiot, but that could be said about a lot of life, ¿wouldn't you agree?

I've been quite committed to improving my running form overall, even though I've had middle peaks of intention, along with backslides. However, my dedication is true and honest...

...I have a confession to make, for those of you who haven't been Following for very long. Including today, I've ran at least a mile, every single day, for 390 days, now. That's right, it's been over a year.

I read an article on an old man that had finally given up the technical definition of a running streak after three decades of having one, even though he still runs most days, now. I loved his reasoning process of not wanting to bother with "wondering, 'Am I going to run today?'" and having to wrestle with that. This way, it's just a given (and for me, that used to be a pretty big problem that would cause momentum crashes on the effort, for me), and I focus on running at least a little every day, and making sure it's just good, and doesn't injure me, etc.. The fact of the matter is, I'm not challenging you to do that, yet... I'm suggesting you give a try, a smart try, at that. I don't know how long my running streak will go, presently, as I have some private goals that need to be met outside of running before I give anything that comforting and dependable up, but I'll keep you all posted.

The endorphin surge is incredible when you get past the initial bits of the training. Like I've been saying before in the previous entry, it also leads to great potential for the endorphins that come from some great sex, as well (and if that's just not happening right now, at least you have these endorphins, too). There's a certain clean feeling that comes from endorphin surges that aren't triggered by outside, laboratory sources, and it's practically required if you believe in being a Loner or just simply self-sustaining (and I admit that I would be quite miserable more often without this support from within my own body). The social politics of this are obvious, even before taking into account how many national health problems (and thusly the economics that come from them) have a lower incidence if we all took just a bit more effort towards our heart and lower-muscular health.

That said, go ahead and bike if your knees or legs are already unable to handle any running or fast walking at this point in your lives, but do give this serious consideration, especially because of the minimal amount of gear necessary in this pasttime, and having it as another option, at least (there are entirely different muscle groups that do get extra work from biking, so it has its own spot in all of this, although many of the same help for health is entailed in this). I also highly endorse swimming for it being non-impact, but then still encourage the attention towards walking form in general. I admit to longing for more pools to use more organic means than chlorine to keep clean, but we're not quite at that point, just yet, so there's also that problem going.

I digress yet again, though. I think that I've made my case for exercise. See you at the gym/track/pool. I'll be the tall, scruffy Indian with a big grin on my face, quite happy to see you.

“¡Y’know, considering I’m 27, I certainly seem to be outlasting a lot of the people that are 5 years younger than me, tonight!”

In case you haven’t figured it out via the Spanish punctuation, that quote is definitely from me on the night that continued from my technical birthdate of December 21st, as celebrated in this year of 2009.

Most people in the room seemed to be bewildered by the state of this moment.  The fact of the matter is that I clearly played 5 of the 8 sets that occurred on Monday, and 3 of them were entirely set up and performed in a solo presentation.  I composed (or set the parameters of) everything, and I owned most of the equipment, which itself has hours of work invested into it.

Let’s start with the physical.  Yes, I eat well.  I cook curry, which itself tends to have antioxidants, the spices elicit endorphins naturally (one of the main reasons why I don’t need to bother much with drugs, honestly), and isn’t Americanized to have higher amounts of fat so that it’s quite lean (and why I thusly happen to look so fucking handsome).  I get in multiple major foodgroups between this and making yogurt, along with having sensible shopping habits for individual ingredients that predominantly tend toward the local and organic for non-spice items (although I do have a curry tree that my parents are babysitting, right now), and cut corners mostly for relevant things (like having the occasional stock of bananas to flood my body with potassium in counteracting upcoming muscle cramps, which could occur if I ask it to do quite a lot, like in a situation where I am doing a huge amount of activity in one night).  Since I don’t worship corporations for killing my health, this leaves a fair amount of money after saving by cooking to buy some outside food specifically so I don’t actually eat too few calories, along with exercise.

I sort of covered my running previously (and will a bit later, again), so let’s note the muscles themselves…

It’s really no surprise that a well-trained muscle can perform more activity for longer and prevents fatiguing to the point of temporary uselessness.  This is why conditioning them is a good thing, and not just a jock thing to do.  In particular, consider that many of these are stabilizer muscles: They are going to be forced to do their jobs whether you help them out or not, ¿so why not make things easier for them by leaving them stronger, and thusly more capable?

An example:

Picture your knees.  Now, imagine how your legs around there felt when you last had to stand for more than 2 hours straight, or 3+ if you’re someone more like myself.  They started to wobble, ¿didn’t they? If so, that’s because your knees are joints: They aren’t designed to support weight, per se.  That cartilage is an articulation surface, and no more: It gets worn away with constant shifts of large pressure.  That is, however, exactly what the hell you’re allowing to happen if you don’t condition your muscles above and below these joints: Those muscles stabilize the legs, instead of leaving your knees fucking screwed out of having a future where they’re not replaced with robotic workers that won’t bitch so much about the “good ol’ days.”

It doesn’t take a scientific genius to apply these principles to the support of the upper body by the abdominal muscles and the lower back, or the “core” muscles as the grinning fitness trainer will call them as you scream out in pain for being such a sedentary cow of modern convenience to not use muscles that any idiot from the 19th century would normally have to use just to fucking get anywhere at all of importance.  Of course your back hurts, and of course you want to lie down more readily now than when you were younger, your lower torso muscles have atrophied a bit, but they’re being asked to do the same amount or even more work than before (¿How’s that posture working out?  ¿Gained a little weight there, SANTA?).

But really, let’s be honest: You’re going to come up with a shitload of excuses for not strengthening a single muscle…

“I know I should, but I just don’t want to be a running dork like my Dad.”

“I don’t know, ¡I guess I just consider it more dorky to break a hip from something simple like walking!”

…despite the fact that, the more tension is put on your skeleton at various points, the more building of bone matter occurs, which is a good defense against osteoporosis in later life, and thusly bone fractures from total simple shit.

But let’s get off of that track for a second, because you’re going to become a whiny little jerk if I refer to something that you decided was jock territory when you were getting picked on in high school.

¿Why wouldn’t you want to work on every little thing (nutrition, exercise, etc.) that would guarantee you more energy without having to buy an “energy shot” container?  Work might not be quite as soul-destroying (because you won’t be fighting gravity so viscerally the whole goddamn day, let alone won’t be on an energy rollercoaster of epic proportions all the time), vacations might actually involve more than just getting “real” sleep, and sex might not be such a chore.

Oh yes, fine, tell me that the last part doesn’t matter to women, because that’s the line you’ve been fed… just don’t come crying to me when your girlfriend leaves you for me because I can make love for longer than 5 minutes and you can’t, ¿okay?  Yeah, they didn’t go with you for your looks per se, because you’re “sensitive” or whatever bullshit line they fed you, but you being too exhausted at the end of the day to really attend to her when she’s feeling feisty once in a blue moon just won’t work as an excuse forever.  Neuromuscular tension and repeated actions are the core of quite a bit in love-making techniques, so it behooves you to actually maintain some of that (either gender, here) muscular contractile capability and good cardiac health if you’re not wanting your sex to be limited to fuzzy drunken blurs in your early twenties (I know that some of you had sex in high school, before you understood most of the concepts involved and before you developed a distrust of everyone, I was avoiding mentioning that because I don’t want to be depressed!), and your romantic relationships confined to a stagnant sort of Hell by your late forties (because the lack of that does destabilize quite a bit of those dynamics).

Then again, I’m also not burning out my receptors off of the artificial surges from externally abused drugs of various sorts, so this is going to all seem very confusing to you, this energy and vigor of mine.

On top of it, my own neurochemicals, let alone anything that could be externally introduced, aren’t being prematurely metabolized by hyperactive P 453 enzymes, so I get to experience the full brunt of my natural brain chemistry not just sometimes, when I have a stimulant in me, but nearly all the time.

At this point, I continued writing, but it branched off into other topics, which will be posted as I finish editing them.

“That’s the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard for not smoking.”

Um, what?

Again, another honestly stated thing that I had to run into, this year.  Again, we need to keep in mind that I happily go out and about amongst the people, and don’t tell them to necessarily quit doing anything they’re doing, unless it’s affecting or damaging something that I happen to have a vested interest in.  It seems like a fair deal, until apparently I’ve been somehow asking to hear the phrase above.

¿Really, guy?

I could have sworn we were past peer pressure after high school, but yet again, this is the kind of thing that most people will use the excuse of “oh, don’t get annoyed, he’s just high.”  The thing is this: That kind of statement isn’t really said by a first-time smoker, so the fellow has made a free choice to smoke, and therefore to say utterly inane and stupid bullshit.

This is another one of those situations where I wouldn’t have a problem, if people could just wrap their heads around the fact that I already am wired in a different enough way and can relax readily enough without pumping smoke into my lungs.  Look, I appreciate the offer tonight, but I don’t want to: That okay, maaaaan?

But I digress: This is a combo entry, and no one’s going to be happy with me for doing it, because everyone wants to separate one kind of smoking from another in order to feel better about themselves, much like various alcohol drinkers separate themselves so readily, as if the container and coloration are going to fool anyone who knows what’s going on into thinking that these individuals are not consuming alcohol.

The same effectively goes for various classes of tobacco smokers, even.  This shit simply kills me, so it’s going to get addressed:

Yes, I’m very proud of you paper rollers for stickin’ it to The Man and not having a bunch of other chemicals involved in your cigarettes.  You are not fooling me into thinking that you’re being healthier than someone who isn’t smoking, however.

The list of ingredients that lie within a factory-constructed cigarette puts the side of cereal box to shame, so it’s clearly a good thing to not smoke those, if there’s any ability to move away from them.

However, I’m going to skip the effects of tobacco and various cloves.  Oh yes, I’m about to pull the curve ball pitch of cutting directly to what the problem with smoke itself entails.

Now then, I’m not going to claim that I don’t get the romanticism behind smoking and such things.  I mean, the invention of human-guided fire is one of the founding bedrocks of civilization, and without it, my genetic line would probably have not survived enough generations to produce such a mean-spirited jackass of a 27 year-old boy/Man.  However, all of that volatility hints at volatility: Nature doesn’t really gussy up anything for any function other than indicating how much time has passed (layers of sediment and such), hiding from hunters by mimicking something dangerous or innocuous, or hunting other creatures by blending into the surroundings.  For the most part, everything else tends to have some hint of either present (or past, for vestigial organs/traits) function.  Nature doesn’t really write mystery novels at the macro level: If you can see something, it’s going to indicate quite a bit (you’ll notice my wording for subatomic quantum physics consideration, of course).

As such, fire involves a very volatile reaction.  Now, there are different colorations and properties to fire in relation to other compounds existing within, but combustion reactions tend to use air as the oxygen source, a fuel (generally of carbon and hydrogen), and perhaps other materials (each category of metal tends to have its own gorgeous tendencies of color when part of a fire).  As a result, we get major products of water, carbon dioxide, maybe some nitrogen gas, and heat, ¿but what about those minor products?

Y’see, no one is telling the flame what to do (unless your beliefs about the universe are that anchored in a system of determinism, in which case I have absolutely nothing to say to you, other than wondering why you’re going to treat me like I had a choice in writing this, by comparison), so there are a lot of byproducts.  A goodly amount of this is carbon monoxide, and thankfully we have developed detectors more directly geared towards picking this up (as opposed to carbon dioxide, in which case breathing too hard might set one off, and you wouldn’t be prepared for when I set fire to your house).  Another general product involves the randomized creation of cyclic hydrocarbons.  If you’ve ever had your eyes glaze over from deciding to be cute and browse your friend’s organic chemistry book, you’re at least remotely academically familiar with what I’m referring to, in terms of the preferred conformational structure that long chains of unsaturated carbon atoms take when they get up past 4 carbons in a row in the chain.  Now then, imagine these being created outside of laboratory conditions, being inhaled into you.  Forming under the speedy heat of provided by that nice warm cigarette and the tiny raging infernos involved, these cyclic hydrocarbons are hardly finished fully forming, are they (P.S. They’re not)?

So, these volatile rings have multiple binding sites that will attempt to react in order to reduce the entropy that has been introduced into the system, and they don’t give a flying fuck if your trachea’s involved.  It’s random, so go ahead and roll the dice if you’re a gamblin’ man/woman.

On top of it, such volatile aromatic hydrocarbons also have been shown to speed up other reactions through their accidental mischief, and I am particularly referring to the reactions governed by the P 453 enzyme.  To keep this from going completely out-of-control, I’ll keep it short by saying, if there’s a chemical whose metabolism is important to you, than P 453 probably has a hand in it, and about 70+% of your medications are going to be affected by this as a result.  There is a reason why you’re being asked if you’re a smoker when you’re being prescribed that medication.  If those reactions are getting sped up, you’re basically looking at drugs and internal body chemistry being metabolized so fast that they frequently doesn’t even have a chance to reach its target location/receptor.

¿Do you really honestly think that your marijuana smoke doesn’t contain carbon and hydrogen, and that oxygen doesn’t have anything to do with the combustion reaction?  If you do, then either you don’t have any respect for science (which resulted in the computer you’re reading this on, jackass!), or are quite possibly high.

So yeah: I will bracket it in with the other kinds of smoking, for that very reason.

Nicotine is habit-forming, and as it is, the stuff’s getting fucking expensive due to the fact that the government is taking its role as the servant of the larger populace very seriously with the insanely stringent rules and regulations that it is passing down the pipes, so it’s not even a great financial solution for pepping you up from all of the misery that you’re experiencing from your life getting shorter (which of course has nothing to do with your smoking).

I mean, this shit is so blatant, that it’s even something that can affect you by eating blackened barbeque food, as more recent studies have revealed repeatedly (which, when you primarily keep in mind the chemistry principles that I am hinting at, can make sense, even though it’s a bit distressing for our summer activities).

Obviously, in any of these cases, antioxidants (read: vegetables, regardless of whether you’re an omnivore or otherwise) clearly combat the damaging possibilities of these oxidizing molecules, but you are still playing dice, and no one should pretend otherwise.

On a sidenote, I know that marijuana isn’t habit-forming as a chemical dependency, but to say that it has no psychological dependence at all is sheer folly of an epic proportion.  As such, I engage in such activities rarely, as I find my ambition to be a critical aspect of my personality, and don’t find it necessary to hamper it anytime soon.

Oh yes, there’s that romanticism in burning out, rather than fading away, that inherent danger that’s enhanced by the danger in smoking and having a devil-may-care attitude.  That’s fine, but I don’t want to hear a damn thing about you ever being old, and… that’s another entry altogether.

I do miss rock ‘n roll shows above ground with smoke, but I can get over that association readily.  I happen to like not damaging my yelling/singing voice by any means other than what I actually do to it by exercising it, frankly.  I will jump back on this is in an upcoming entry.

(None of these are ranked: The numbers are present in order to keep track of these)

“Why aren’t you drinking, man? Relax, have a good time!”

This was seriously said to me a few days ago.  It’s the kind of stupid bullshit that people sometimes say when they’re sober, but is guaranteed to occur more often when someone is intoxicated.

I don’t know, man: ¿Could it have something to do with the fact that I was already having a good time without the alcohol, so that I don’t want to change that mental state and risk falling out of that?

I have more fun when I have more money at my disposal, it’s true.  Call me a wanker, say that I’m sheltered, chide me for acting better than you or anything of the sort.  Go ahead and fucking talk down to me for stating something that’s hardly wrong and is a perfectly good set of values for an individual to have if he’s not pushing it on someone else… then bitch and whine about how harsh I get when I’ve had enough of it, like now.

The fact of the matter is that my liver and I are friends.  I understand that it breaks down protein, fats, and carbohydrates that I take in, and it accepts the abuse that I give it on a regular basis, escalated periodically by nights when I want to pretend like I attain some sort of bullshit natural state by making the free choice to impair my ability to sift through everything that I’ve learned in order to make better choices and inhibit my natural impulses at times when they would prove to be an inconvenience.  I might not make the right choices based on such inhibitions, but I’m able to remember things that much more readily and sort through them to determine how to make a better decision, should that opportunity come up again.

Too much alcohol damages the liver by interfering with that.

Too much fat ends up accumulating in the liver (but you’re reducing it through all of that exercise and great eating [along with taking a break from drinking]… ¿right… right?), and while some is to be expected, too much buildup will cause the liver to be swell and become inflamed, damaging it, and forming useless scar tissue, known as alcoholic cirrhosis, which has similar symptoms as alcoholic hepatitis.  Some overall symptoms of liver disease also include:

• Kidney failure

• High blood pressure in the liver

• Accumulation of fluid in the abdomen

• Changes in mental function, and coma

• Bleeding from veins in the esophagus

• Enlarged spleen
• Liver cancer

Now, here’s the thing: Moderate drinking will not cause these symptoms in most people.  However, if you already have chronic liver disease, especially from too much drinking, any alcohol will only contribute to these problems further.  What I’m saying is to be better to your liver now, instead of later, when you’re forced to and won’t be able to indulge at any point because you’re too fucked up.  Some is good (yes I read those studies as well [no, not the summaries of them, the studies that were actually written by the researchers]), but that doesn’t mean that more is better, you modern fools!

This isn’t even including all of the other things that are affected by these problems in the rest of the body.  ¿Do you have a magic number of things at which you might change your mind a bit? Of course not, but how else am I supposed to tell you that I give a shit about what happens to you?

So the fact of the matter is, I’m not perfect at this in the slightest.  At least two of you have seen me on a night where I’ve pounded away somewhere between half to a full bottle of whiskey while barely batting an eye, and getting miserable far, far later into the night at the very worst.  Now, ask yourselves: ¿How often had he been drinking in the week, let alone the two weeks or even month before? The tendency is that I’ve barely drank, and while this does not justify binge drinking in the slightest, it does keep things in perspective, as to how my liver is able to handle the strain at all in the first place.

I’m also kind of tall (I don’t know if this has become obvious, yet): 6’5”, but so close to 6’6” that I basically have to be barefoot at the end of the day to not be 6’6” for all intents and purposes.  I also drink a good amount of fluids at nearly any point in that day.  What I’m setting up is the notion that you can basically presume that I have a sizeable blood volume, so that the same amount of alcohol simply is NOT going to equate to the same percentage when it enters my bloodstream.  In lay-speak: It’s going to take more than that light beer to get this guy fucked up.

It gets more insane, though: I’m going to remember nearly everything I saw and heard, that night.  I basically have only had a couple of instances where this wasn’t the case, and they were when I shouldn’t have been drinking at all due to being ill, and another time where I was only a few days recovered after a bout with the flu, drank coffee way too close to the time of drinking, had punch heavily infused with vodka, involved the end of someone’s Schnapps bottle (peppermint… ugh), whiskey, and possibly something else, leading to a blackout drunk not long after the strike of New Year 2003.  I choose to remember: Until I manage to accumulate enough Philosophy of Mind readings that can reliably suggest otherwise to me, I do consider the ability to remember as a critical tie in the sustaining of constant identity, that the past does inform the present.  As a result of such willfull self-conditioning, it’s basically not worth the money or agony to drink so much that I forget, drink so much that I can’t think straight.

I like the taste of a good alcoholic beverage.  If I drink too many, I don’t get to have that sensation at all, I’m just left with this hollow, empty, vapid idea of “ooh look I’m getting… oh wait, no, still sober!”

Sex… oh, sex.

Show of hands: ¿How many of you guys have tried to have good sex after drinking heavily, and how many of you succeeded?

I have a 50% success rate on how that’s worked out, and that’s because alcohol’s a fucking depressant. Why the hell would I want something like that taking effect when I want my systems excited, so that I could have blood circulate to fill capillary beds at the climax of making love?  Yes, I do get the idea of getting the woman drunk: Most women seem to convince themselves that they need to forget basically everything that they saddle themselves with that has nothing to do with sex (and then everything that does have something to do with it, like babies and such things) in order to let themselves enjoy the communication and mutual runaway excitement that swirls into the passionate activities of having sex and making love.  No, I don’t want to hear a complaint about how I’m judging you specifically, because I know for a fact that I thankfully have many friends that this doesn’t apply to (even if I need to dryly note that this fact has very little impact on me personally).  I’m referring to the need to put up a pretense wall: that’s what falls under the influence of alcohol (and in any case, the female anatomical analogs don’t need to be erect for the classically-defined view of sexual intercourse to take place, even if the erectile tissues do end up getting around to such states, as opposed to the flaccid male genitalia being quite useless for such activities.

By the way, alcohol is a fucking depressant.  I don’t want to be depressed, I want to be happy, damnit. Since I don’t get drunk, if I drink an excess of alcohol (as in, a lot in a short amount of time, as opposed to a lot over a very long, insanely harmful period), I’ll just end up sleepy, and that means that it caps off my ability to keep raging on through the night.  That, my friends, is lame.  I don’t even get good R.E.M. sleep after a night of drinking, although my self-conditioned reflex to drink large amounts of water has saved me from ever getting a hangover a single time in my entire life.

I didn’t have a single drink on my 27th birthday, and frankly, I had a fucking fantastic time.  I was happy that people I enjoyed had a few relaxing brews in the midst of the madness and similarly had a good time as well.

I have this ability to have good, healthy sex, to stay awake for entire nights if necessary or desired, to spend money on things that last longer, and all of my body is going to last a great deal longer.

A lot of people I know are going to start falling apart in a few years, and they’re not going to necessarily connect it to their excessive drinking habits or other unhealthy vices until it’s too late.  I’m either going to have to be hanging out with new people by that point, or listen to them bitch at me about how much stupid shit they can’t do, now.

I need a drink.