Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in lockoutlass' LiveJournal:

Sunday, September 3rd, 2006
9:52 pm	Help! Need gift ideas for bris ASAP! The title basically says it all -- what is an appropriate gift for a bris? And something that I can find/order/get to Ohio by Wednesday? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 28th, 2006
8:02 pm	Finally, a direction in life! All you people who said "dentistry", I 'feh' in your general direction. I have found my true educational calling! Witness: http://www.bu.edu/met/adult_college_programs/graduate_school_program/post_graduate_degree/food_science_degree/index.html Stoat, weren't you looking for something to do? UPDATE: OMG! I just discovered they have a Cheese Certificate Program! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, May 12th, 2006
8:55 am	Evolution gone awry, or How the mighty fall quickly For anyone who's been watching "How I Met Your Mother" (and if you haven't, shame on you -- Neil Patrick Harris is my new hero), there was recently an episode where Ted, our lovable protagonist, makes a big deal out of his gastrointestinal fortitude, even making up a little chant, "vomit-free since '93!" This was sort of amusing, as far as it went, but I have to admit a certain smugness that I experienced when I saw that, because my chant (if I were so crass as to have made one up) would have had a much earlier year on it. In fact, since I was about 7, I have been spared that particular problem. Don't get me wrong -- I have been afflicted with a whole variety of other illnesses, so I'm hardly immune girl, but I have unusual GI fortitude, at worst getting some cramping and the lesser side effects. Even when I picked up some kind of nasty GI bug thing on a trip to Italy (memo to self: ordering salad in the boondocks of Sicily is a BAD IDEA, and should have taken the waiter's look as an indication of just how stupid that was), I only got about half the symptoms that most normal people would have, though that was bad enough. So I've felt pretty smug for about two decades now, until yesterday. I have the ick. I know I will recover sooner or later, but on top of the usual symptoms (could be food poisoning, could be stomach flu, who knows, doesn't really matter for practical purposes) is an unpleasant feeling of having been humbled. In my refusal to believe that I of all people could have such a thing, I went to work yesterday AM. Sitting in my office, getting progressively worse and being unable to focus on anything at all, I ended up doing a lot of thinking about the wiliness of bugs. People sometimes ask why I went to microbiology, of all things. I immediately tell them that I didn't, I'm a *biochemist*, and it's mere fluke that my lab was in the microbiology department. But that's not exactly true. I sure didn't set out to be a microbiologist, but the more I was around labs working on salmonella, cholera, diphtheria, malaria, and a variety of viruses, the more grudging respect I had for those bugs. Pretty much every major disease that we humans get from a virulent microorganism (i.e., something that can and regularly does kill or incapacitate us) is thanks to that organism's ability to exploit and/or subvert our own systems against us. Really, it's pretty amazing. Take Borrelia burgdorferi, for example (Lyme disease) -- it hides out in our synovial areas (the fluid between joints) where when our immune system tries to attack it, all that ends up happening is that we end up destroying our own joints, further incapacitating us and making us ever easier to invade. Plasmodium falciparum (malaria) hides *inside* our cells, and there are plenty of bugs that masquerade as normal human components, either tricking our immune system into ignoring them or wreaking major havoc if our immune system does not ignore them and begins attacking itself. And then there's the category of bugs that activate some of our latent responses, in an effort to so stop us in our tracks that we become easy prey -- too weak to respond normally -- while also propagating themselves. Cholera is one of these, as is salmonella, and most stomach flus. They trigger major stomach upset, nausea, vomiting, and the worst of them also block uptake of water in the intestines, so even if you're able to drink anything, it doesn't much help you anyway. So then a combo of fever/dehydration pretty much gets you, along with the total lack of nutrition due to the inability to keep down food. What fascinates me is that nausea/stomach upset is a normal human response to a bad stimulus. When we eat something that isn't good for us, we feel bad, and then we don't ever eat it again. Nausea is one of the most primal of responses, meant to keep us safe. In fact, I've heard one explanation for morning sickness (other than extreme hormonal shifts) is that because the body is now eating for two, it goes into hyperdrive overprotective mode, and the nausea response is so amped up that it becomes difficult to find things that don't make the poor pregnant woman sick. Nausea is so powerful, that once we've gotten sick off something, we generally can't ever look at it again (just look!) without feeling the same queasiness. So I know that whatever's got me in its grasp is very clever, and I also know that eventually I'll beat it. But in the meantime, I am functionally incapacitated. Isn't it amazing that something I can't even see can bring me, a mighty, large, human being so low? Current Mood: nauseated (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 11th, 2005
5:18 pm	A really stupid way to spend a half million dollars, or "why do I live here?" Minding our own business, we innocently went to get a sandwich at the local chain sandwich place today in the nice part of town. Imagine our shock to see one of [these] parked right outside the fruit smoothie shop, in candy-apple red. Where *are* we?!! Current Mood: shocked (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 23rd, 2005
8:13 pm	Angst in a Western Town I am feeling very angsty today. I can't exactly pinpoint the reason, and there may be many. Is it because I live in a part of the world where land is so expensive that I probably won't ever have a yard as long as I remain here? Is it because my local friends are all lawyers and thus I only see them once every couple of months and my older friends all live thousands of miles away? Is it because my chosen career is just plain hard, and my perfectionist streak won't permit me any slack as I desperately try to learn what I need to know on the fly? Or is it because I've been watching way too much Degrassi, Degrassi Jr. High, and Degrassi High? Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Degrassi. I also loved Degrassi Jr. High back when I was in high school myself and it turned up on the weird sister PBS station that used to show strange TV from England and Canada. Spike, named after her hair, and the churning plotlines about teen pregnancy, drug use, AIDS, mental illness, and lack of a date for the big school dance. IMPORTANT things. And all actors were actually kids, of the correct age, and looking pretty much exactly what regular non-hollywood kids look like. Some cuter than others, many just regular folks like me. Plus they all had those cute Canadian accents. What was not to love? So then when I found out that there's a new show 20 years later featuring the children of those original Degrassi characters, what was not to love? Desperate Housewives has nothing on this show -- we've got teenage emancipation, a school shooting after particularly nasty bullying, relationship between a student and a teacher, sex, sex, and more sex, bad hair, mental illness, gay parents, gay students, grand larceny, drugs, STDs, bad bands, good bands, cultural differences, class differences, and more angst than you can shake a giant stick at. Plus an episode about a penis pump (I kid you not). I was hooked instantaneously. And now the network that brought it to me, Noggin, is bringing me not only new episodes of Degrassi, but also has begun re-airing the original Degrassi Jr. High and Degrassi High episodes. My TIVO has gone into overdrive. In order that it can continue to record Lost, Gilmore Girls and Iron Chef America, I have to watch a LOT of Degrassi of all sorts to free up space. Which means that over the past five days I've seen probably 12 hours worth of Degrassi. This is too much. The net effect of seeing so much teenage angst is crushing. I feel like there's drama and bad hairdos lurking around every corner. Worst of all, it's dredging up all of my own past teenage angst. And 'so what?' you say? What really gets me is that my own angst was so incredibly pathetic by comparison. Such are the travails of having gone to an all-female school. I actually kind of wish that I'd had the kind of angst that these kid actors portray, stupid as that may sound. Would my life have been richer for it? A sheltered upbringing is not all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes the free frogurt is cursed. Current Mood: distressed Current Music: rich silence (1 Comment |Comment on this)