There is a pause…. Oh wait, its over.

(—)

Ahem. Now I am on break. But I had to refill my water bottle and go pee, and that took most of the time.

Can you use milk chocolate to make chocolate milk? Making it milk chocolate chocolate milk?

(—)

Waiting  for my drugs at the pharmacy. Needed  a refill on my psychological drugs. REALLY  needed it, as it turns out.

See, I got the script yesterday, but figured I could wait till today to fill it. Ha ha ha. I was out of Quetiapine. As a result, I did not sleep well last night.

Ironically, in the same session in which he wrote me my prescriptions, my therapist suggested that I might want to consider cutting back on the Q now that I am on Trazadone. I was not keen on the idea. What I have now works and that makes me disinclined towards any tinkering with it.

And then, that night, I end up stumbling into doing a no-Q experiment anyway. And the results were not promising for the “cut back on Quetiapine” agenda. I slept some, but it was lousy quality sleep.

And to cap it all off, when refilling my little pill box, I discovered that I was not, in fact, out of Quetiapine. Meaning I went through a night of lousy sleep and the inability to stay asleep for nothing.

Life must find me hilarious.

(—)

Aaaand now I’m home.

I’ve had a really good day. Class was great! We were studying sensation and perception, and that’s a very cool topic. We learned cool stuff I didn’t know about the eye, like how there’s a part of the retina called the fovea centralis and it’s the focal point of the eye…. literally. It’s the spot on the retina upon which the light gathered by the eye is focused by the lens. Speaking of the lens, I did not know before today that it does this focusing job by growing thicker or thinning.

I am not sure how I thought it was done before today. I guess I assumed it was passive. That the lenses in your eyes were the same as the lenses in your glasses or in a telescope : a fixed object manipulated by other things.

But nope! Your lenses are pretty amazing, and without it, you would live in a very blurry world.

I also learned that rods and cones are not distributed evenly at all. In textbooks they always make it look like your retina is one uniform sheet of rods and cones, side by side.

But in fact, cones are mostly found in the fovea. In fact, the fovea has no rods. The rest of the retina is rods with only a few cones here and there.

Now cones are extremely precise, but they need a lot of light to function. Rods are not nearly as precise, but they can operate with way, way less light.

You can kind of see why we need both. Early humans on the savannah would have needed high detail vision for hunting and gathering. But they would also need good night vision because the only way humans can be safe on the savannah is if they surround themselves with fires to keep the animals away, and that takes people to stay up and keep those fires burning as well as remain vigilant in general.

I am pretty sure that’s where us night owls come from. We are the ones who tend the fires. (How awesome does THAT sound?)

We also had the time to do some of hearing, and that’s very cool too, although there is always a part of learning about hearing that I don’t like, and that’s the part where you realize just how fucking complicated hearing it.

I mean, we all know about the eardrum, otherwise known as the tympanic membrane. The layperson understanding is that the eardrum vibrates, and thus, we hear.

But nooooo. The eardrum vibrates, and that vibrates a bone, which is connected to another bone, which is connected to a third bone, which vibrates into your bony labyrinth, which vibrates the fluid in your cochlea, which vibrates this little flap, which vibrates these little hairs, and it’s the little hairs which actually generate the electrical impulses we experience as “sound”.

Even though the number of moving parts is around the same, that seems so much more complicated than the clean simple design of the eye to me. And ridiculous. I mean, look at this :

Pictured : your bony labyrinth. Not nearly as goth as it sounds, is it?

THAT is your bony labyrinth. The spiral bit is the cochlea. Looks like something that would crawl out of a Lovecraftian sea, doesn’t it? Crossed with Doctor Seuss.

So hearing isn’t nearly as simple as vision. And it’s only going to get more complicated from here, because next, I assume, will be touch, which is a pressure sense of an entirely different kind and actually incorporates a bunch of different senses running in parallel on the skin, and then it’s on to taste and smell, otherwise known as the chemical senses, which are so simple and primitive in their structure and function that they are actually really hard to figure out.

Kind of like our livers. We know the liver does a lot of super important things, some that don’t seem at all related to one another, and yet it’s just this big blob of liver cells.

Anyhow, to sum up (I can do that now and then!), I have had a great day. Class was great, I chatted a bit with the prof after, took the bus home, missed my stop for the pharmacy but walked there and back anyhow (fuck you, Jagoff), came home, fucked around on the computer some, masturbated to completion (not easy with all the drugs I’m on), had a pleasant dinner, and then came in here to get my blog on.

And now, I will lay down, do some crossword puzzles, and maybe nap.

All in all, an excellent day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.