Yes my friends, it’s true. Another Friday Without Science. And we just had one not that long ago, too!

But there just has not been enough truly interesting science stories lately to justify doing an FSW, and so I will skip this week and catch up with all you science fans next week, hopefully.

Plus there is the fact that I am sick. That sleepy old monster Irritable Bowel Syndrome woke up and is giving me trouble today.

I knew I was in for a rough patch when I realized how blocked up and backed up I had become. Sometimes the syndrome causes a “soft blockage” when the lower intestine becomes inflamed and irritated, which makes the passage narrower and more likely to spasm or contract.

But the thing is, there is a significant delay between the onset of this issue and the symptoms it will eventually cause. It’s usually at least half a day and sometimes even more before any serious cramping or pain occurs, and by then all I can do is stay hydrated and ride it out.

What happens (this is going to be a bit gross, skip to “All clear!” if squeamish) is that the soft blockage causes the digested food to clog the pipe somewhat, which causes the contents of the pipeline to compress, turning into a bolus and furthering the blockage. This also causes all the liquid in the contents to be squeezed out, causing a lot of urinary need and, eventually, very dry stools.

None of this is good for the system and it takes a while to sort itself out, during which time I am at the mercy of swinging cycles of congestion and release.

And because the bolus has to pass first, what tends to happen is that I can feel something like a fist inside me that slowly moves down and, mercifully, out.

During a period like this, hydration is vital. The problem wreaks havoc with your hydration levels and you can end up losing a lot of water that never got properly absorbed in the lower intestine. We don’t realize it in our daily lives, but we get around 20 percent of the water we need from the food we eat.

Also, of course, drinking enough water keeps the whole system lubricated. That’s extra important when things are inclined to end up backed up.

All in all, it means I do not have the most reliable plumbing down there, but luckily, serious or even moderate symptoms are pretty rare for me. I am very familiar with how my particular syndrome works and I know how to handle its various manifestations.

The most important thing is to keep calm. Stress has a strong effect on the tension level in your gut, and the last thing I need is more tension down there right now.

So while I feel pretty crappy right now (no pun intended), I know it soon shall pass and I will have a lovely if brief euphoric period while I bask in the endorphins.

ALL CLEAR, squeamish people! Wow, that went on longer than I thought it would. Sorry about that. I guess I focus on the science of it all as a way to soothe myself.

Yes, I am such a nerd that science comforts me like a security blanket. Some people have faith. Some people have strength.

Me, I have science. It might not be the warmest companion but it’s always lots of fun.

Anything else… hmm. Still feeling that strange combination of calmness and tension, although not as bad as the last time I mentioned it. Perhaps this attack of IBS is a wakeup call telling me that I need to pay more attention to what is going on inside my psyche as well as my guts. Something is brewing in there and I feel like it may be something pretty big.

I talked about shedding my skin before, and it might well be that. If so, I wish I could just take a knife and split open that rotten old skin so I could speed this process on a little.

I am eager to emerge from this cocoon of mine, spread my wings to dry them in the sun, and then fly away to bigger and better things.

But part of me is not sure it is completely done being a caterpillar yet. After all, I have been one for far, far too long, and it is all I have ever known. I have adjusted to being a caterpillar. I can cope as a caterpillar. I have friends as a caterpillar. I can get through the day as a caterpillar.

So no matter how wondrous and golden a butterfly future might seem, the truth is that deep down, I am still too scared to try it. And so, I remain a bloated and very ancient caterpillar.

I cling so hard to what I have that I can’t let go long enough to find a better perch. And the more scared I am, the harder I cling, and that is a really big problem when what you are clinging to is the problem.

I have this growing feeling of frustration with my own mindless mentation. I know that the solutions to my problems lie outside the realm of the rational and intellectual, and yet I continue to try to analyze and solve my problems as though they were some kind of puzzle.

And you can do a real job on yourself by convincing yourself that doing that is progress. After all, you feel a lot better once you have figured things out, so it must be doing some good, right?

But not all activity is progress, and all this running around in circles is doing for me is wearing a hole in the ground.

The problem is, I feel like I don’t really know the way out. I have lived within the world of my own rational mind for so long that I find it hard to imagine there being anything else.

I have not entered the darkness within in a very long time.

And I’m afraid of the dark.

Well, here I am at Blog Writing Time with no groovy links to share, so I guess I will have to actually talk about my life or something.

I’ve been in a strange emotional state lately. Very mixed. A lot of the time I am split between feeling anxious and feeling fine. Part of me is relaxed and going through my life and part of me is on the razor’s edge of going completely mental.

I guess I am kind of in denial. I keep just pushing those anxious feelings down below the conscious level and not dealing with them, and that is the opposite of healthy.

And as a result, they are building up on me and I feel like I am going to pop.

I think this is all a result of my spirit trying to shed another skin so it can grow another size and become stronger. And that is a good thing. I need all the strength I can get. I have been brittle, dark and cold inside for far too long. I need strength and light and heat.

But the process is difficult. The old skin struggles mightily to contain the new, greater self, and thus maintain the status quo, even though the status quo sucks. There is always a part of us that resists change, even if that change is assuredly positive.

Thus, there is always a certain amount of struggle in growth. Like Nietzsche said, we must always overcome ourselves. The new Normal, the better one, comes only at the price of a long and painful journey, and we must let out goal inspire us and pull us forward if we are to make the trip.

And that means that, on some level, you have to have faith. Faith that you know what you are doing, even if your conscious mind does not. Faith that your heart knows what will make it happy, and that pursuing its aims will take you to your own Promised Land.

Faith that while the path might be difficult indeed, you can overcome all obstacles and become stronger and more resilient for having done so.

All of this is instinctual to human beings. We strive to grow without ever knowing that is what we are doing, any more than a salmon knows why it is fighting its way upstream or what it will do when it gets there. And normal, healthy people benefit from following these instincts.

But us intellectual types typically demand far too much of reality for that. We only want to do things which make sense to our rational minds. “It just felt right” is not nearly sufficient reason for us. Murky and indistinct things like instincts are something we ignore and suppress in favor of the cold clear light of reason provided by our powerful minds.

Thus, we suffer in ways that people of normal intelligence do not. We drive ourselves mad by demanding such exacting logic of the world and ignoring all the rest. We tie ourselves into knots trying to “figure out” why we do things when the answer is often just “because we felt like it”.

And while the cold clean light of reason is a very powerful tool that is the very wellspring of human progress, and its products have created the world we live in today, logic and reason have light, but not heat. They can’t make you less sad, less lonely, less isolated, or even less crazy.

Only emotion can do that, and to let emotion in is to accept the unreasoned and unresonable into your mind. In order to do it, you must learn to accept that emotions are not rational and that in life, you have to do some of the things that others do, things your rational mind thinks are “pointless” because it cannot accept that some things are worth doing purely for the experience of doing them.

There are times when following your heart is the only way to find the way out of your own labyrinth. The heart might not be smart but it can be very wise. It can know the solution when that rational mind that seems so powerful is merely chasing its own tail in circles and thinking it is making progress.

To try to live as either reason or emotion is to try to be half a person, and half-people can never be happy. Without emotion life is not worth living. Emotions are the sole reason any of us does anything. We all seek pleasure and avoid pain. The manifestations of that are quite complex in us human beings, but the guiding principle remains the same.

We just want to feel good.

On the other hand, emotion without reason leads to an unhappy and unwise life. We have excellent brains for a reason and if we go around simply doing whatever feels right at that moment, we are bound to end up with a very unpleasant life indeed.

My concern is with my own intellect’s dominance over emotion. As a lonely intellectual with access to the Internet, I have had extraordinarily rich opportunities to develop my mind. Practically everything I do of a day that isn’t eating, grooming, or eliminating is designed to stimulate this big bad brain of mine.

But what about my soul? What about my spirit? What happens to them when they are trapped behind these mirror-smooth walls of ice? Do they suffer? Do they cry? Do they yearn to be free?

Yes, they do, and the result is my own misery. I know damned well that I can’t think my way out of my problems, and yet that is all I know how to do.

I feel like I am still standing in the doorway of a new personal world, like a cat, not sure yet if I want to go through the door but trying desperately to summon up the nerve to do so.

And part of me just wants to smash everything that is holding me back and run off into the night, never to return to my old life again.

Hopefully, it won’t ever come to that.

Only get to use THAT trick once.

Let’s start off with a story about the number one thing old people want to tell young people.

You might be forgiven for thinking they would want to say “Get off my lawn!” or “Obama’s a socialist” or “Man, I love me some hard candy”, but the real message is something way less snarky.

What they want most to tell young people is “Don’t waste your life at a job you hate. ”

They surveyed over 1500 seniors and support for this axiom was not merely widespread, but extremely firm. The oldsters were adamant that young people should not waste time working at a job they hate. They should quit that job and go find something they enjoy or at least can stand.

And I find that quite interesting, and heartening too. They could tell us younger (ish) people anything, and the thing they really, really want us to know is that nothing is worth working a job you hate.

These are people with long biographies that have given them a lot of time to examine their lives and thinking about the things they wish they had and hadn’t done, and the thing they regret the most is staying in jobs they hated.

That is some serious food for thought. I bet there are a lot of worker drones out there who are working soul-crushing jobs purely to support their families and put food on the table.

It never occurs to them that they could get the same thing from a more rewarding job.

Next, we have a guy who is doing marvelously spooky art in spooky places all over Europe.

Just how spooky is it? It’s this spooky.

(oh and NSFW warning, shadow wang)

Yup. That’s one male ghost.

Is that amazingly cool or what? Being someone who loves a good scare, I adore good quality creepy art, and this Herbert Baglione is my kind of weirdo.

Oh, for bonus scares : said artwork resides in an abandoned lunatic asylum.

Sadly, that sort of means that it would be impossible to actually own a Baglione of your own. It’s installation artwork that stays installed. I would have to be crazy rich to be willing to go all Banksy and pay someone to rip down the wall so I can hang it in my home.

He’s done similar installations all over Europe, and I would love to see them all. That is some serious Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark shit, and I love it.

Even as a kid, I was attracted to scary things. I somehow missed becoming a big fan of horror, though. Perhaps I became too jaded about it too young.

There was no Goosebumps or Are You Afraid Of The Dark when I was a kid to maybe put a genuine scare into me, and of course, most of the “scary” stuff aimed at kids is quite pathetic, especially to a kid who grew up with a horror-loving mom.

Next up, we have a very viral video that just makes my heart glad when I watch it.

Yup. That’s a big chubby beardy old hillbilly dancing to Aretha Franklin with an honest to goodness fuzzy chubby live raccoon.

I thought that kind of thing only happened in those super-happy old-timey black and white cartoons, back when hillbillies were hillbillies and hadn’t turned into rednecks yet.

And sure, city folk thought hillbillies were pretty funny with their old fashioned ways, but there was always a certain amount of affection to it too.

And deep down, I think a lot of city folk felt a kind of longing for that simpler, more basic kind of living. Sure, the people didn’t have much money but, at least to us city slickers, it seemed like despite that, they might just have an easier life than us rats in the rat race.

Less things, less work. Might just be a better deal.

This came to the head in the seventies, of course, when all kinds of people got the notion to get back to the land, and intellectual liberal urban types were finding common cause with dirt farming rural families that might not have all the same views as one another, but they both loved good food and good music.

And back then, that was enough.

But then the Republicans set the rural folk versus the liberal “elite”, and we have suffered ever since.

I think it’s time we all got together again, don’t you?

And finally, naturally, we have today’s vid.

I started off to do another silly re-dub of a foreign language clip, but somehow it became silly subtitles instead. I did the subtitles for that German bit I did in a previous vid, and that was kind of fun, so I decided to give a longer bit of subtitling a try.

And it was still kind of fun, but also a lot of work, so I doubt I will be doing it again soon. Then again, there was a distinct flaw in the technique I used that made it a lot harder than it should have been, so maybe I will try again with improved technique some time.

At one point, I was thinking of re-dubbing some public domain animated short off of archive.org , but I looked a few up and, for some reason, the idea of re-dubbing them seemed just far too overwhelming to face.

Maybe it was overwhelming for one of the same reasons I love animation, and that’s because it is so much more vivid and intense than real life.

Watching that is one thing, but trying to insert my creativity into it is quite another.

Still, I will probably do it some day, when I am more psychologically prepared for it.

Or I could just have fun pulling an MST3K on one of the many old educational videos they have there.

Archive.org is really a treasure trove once you get past the clunk old-fashioned interface design.

Stay tuned for further bulletins.