The Top Five Brain Misunderstandings That Will Drive a Neuroscientist to the Brink

I was reminded by a comment on my last post that there are a lot of common misunderstandings out there about the brain.  So here they are, the top five TOTALLY RIDICULOUS things said about the brain that make me want to fly into a homicidal rage when I see them being propagated in popular media:

#5. To grow old is to grow senile.

This one is kind of personal because my research is on human aging.  My grand design when I was fifteen was to cure Alzheimer’s disease, so I’ve been cogitating on it for a while.  The truth is that there is a normal, healthy aging process, and there are a host of separate pathological aging processes that unfortunately tend to get lumped in with healthy aging as What Happens To You When You Get Old. 

Diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s aren’t normal.  Dementia is not – I repeat NOT – something that happens to everyone.

This isn’t to say that healthy aging doesn’t involve some declines in certain cognitive functions.  First and foremost, the speed of information processing decreases (meaning older adults are simply slower to do things than they used to be, and we young things must cultivate some patience).  Also, older adults have also been reported to show declines in focused attention, meaning they can be more easily distracted.  Finally, older adults tend to show moderate declines in some aspects of memory – for example in remembering certain names, or where the keys have run off to, or coming up with the right word  in a sentence.  Healthy aging is NOT, however, associated with the profound impairments of memory seen in diseases like Alzheimer’s, which at its worst robs people of the ability even to remember who they are.  See the difference?

Older adults also show improvements with age in other cognitive abilities.  Vocabulary and other crystallized knowledge (i.e. knowledge of facts) both increase throughout the lifespan.  Empathy and the ability to reason emotionally and socially are also far easier for older adults than young adults.

We are a society that fears aging and death, so much so that even words like “old” and “elderly” have acquired a negative connotation.  And misunderstandings like #5 here serve only to help propagate this fearful, antagonistic sentiment toward older people.  News flash – unless you plan to jump off a bridge at age forty, you’re probably going to reach old age someday.  It’s a stage of your life, just like childhood or adolescence or middle age.  And, according to a lot of the people I’ve interviewed at my job, it can be totally awesome if you let it.

#4. You are born with all the brain cells you will ever have.

First off, I just want to tackle this notion of being born with all of anything.  In and of itself, that idea is kind of silly, because I think we all recognize that the version of you that existed a day before the miraculous moment you were born is just about the same as the version of you that existed the day after – minus that whole breathing and eating through your mouth instead of your bellybutton thing.  It’s not like your fetal body is busily building and building right up until you pop out of your mother’s vagina and then all of a sudden you’re in decay mode, you know?

So with that aside, I’m here to tell you that not only are you not done making neurons when you’re born – you’re not done when you hit adolescence, or adulthood, or even that dreaded old age.  You are probably done when you’re dead (but then again, that’s leaving aside the whole philosophical argument about exactly when that other mysterious life-capping moment actually happens and whether your cells still do their thing for a few hours after you’ve reportedly kicked the bucket).

The word we’re looking to investigate here is neurogenesis, or the creation of new neurons.  For a long time we couldn’t find any brain regions that continued to make new neurons on into adulthood, but this was mostly a problem of detection – we didn’t have the right tools to find neurogenesis, so of course we assumed it never happened.  Now that we can properly search for it, neurogenesis is cropping up everywhere – in our friend the hippocampus, the cerebellum, any number of cortical regions – and it appears to be a very important part of continued brain maintenance and function.  (Actually, there’s a really cool story here about hippocampal neurogenesis that was still sort of hand-wave-y last time I checked, but even my two fellow brain researchers fell asleep during the talk we went to about it, so I’ve elected not to share it with you fine people.  Count your blessings.)

Here are some fun facts about your brain growth after birth.  Your head is disproportionately big when you’re born, but it’s not as big as it’s going to be when you grow up (otherwise your mum would be complaining a hell of a lot more than she already is).  That increase in brain size from birth to adulthood comes with a slight increase in the number of neurons you have, but more importantly a large increase in the number of connections they make.  In childhood your neurons shoot out all sorts of projections all over the place, and then during adolescence your brain goes through this massive pruning binge to take out the connections that aren’t doing you any good.  Throughout your teenage years your neurons continue to gain efficiency as they get wrapped in layers of cell membrane called myelin, which is required to allow neurons to effectively propagate their signals.  Therefore, your brain isn’t even fully developed until your early twenties.  You heard me right – your early twenties.  And boys, your brains take a couple years longer to get there than girls’ do.  Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

You can tell this is an old chart because the “cell birth” line (among others) doesn't keep on going out through adulthood.  Also, see how we’ve known for a long time that myelination and synaptic elimination and pruning continue into adulthood.

The upshot is that at this very moment, your brain is still making brand-new neurons.  It’s a very modest amount compared with the total number of neurons in your whole brain, true, but new neurons are still being born.  It’s happening right now.  And it’s going to keep on doing that for a very long time, hopefully.

#3. Smoking copious amounts of pot has no lasting detrimental effect on your brain.

Seriously?  Are you high?  First off, if you’ve ever met a chronic pot smoker, you already know this isn’t true.  You know it.  I shouldn’t even have to back this up with studies, but I’m going to anyway so we never have to have this argument again.

Here’s a very select smattering of the results from papers published since 2010 alone: (A) Chronic pot users perform more poorly on measures of executive function (that means planning, reasoning and decision-making) than non-users, and this effect is worse for those who started before age 16; (B) rats given cannabinoids in adolescence showed reversible impairments on many cognitive tasks but irreversible deficits in short-term memory measures; (C) chronic pot use has been associated with reduced hippocampal volume (although, to be fair, having skimmed that paper I have some concerns about the methods – for a better review of the effects of pot on brain metabolism and structure I encourage you to look at this paper); (D) and luckily, treatment for pot addiction with gabapentin significantly reduced pot use and increased performance on cognitive tests.  Hell, if you want a recent review of cognitive deficits associated with pot use, just read this paper.

People make similar arguments about alcohol, and I’m here to say that large enough quantities alcohol will totally mess with your head over time.  (This one I have some personal experience in!  I swear I used to be quicker than I am now, and I’m blaming vodka-tonics.)  I won’t take you through a lit review here, I’ll just leave it at Korsakoff’s syndrome.  If you think that’s unfair, fine, I’ll tell you all about run-of-the-mill alcoholics’ impairments in perceptual-motor skills, visual-spatial function, learning and memory abilities, abstract reasoning and problem solving.  Don’t make me go there.

Please don’t try and justify your habits by saying they don’t affect you.  It’s a no-brainer (pardon the expression) that excessive amounts of intentionally mind-altering substances will, over time, affect the brain and its function.  I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.  Just embrace the fact that you’re willingly damaging yourself and move on.

#2. Pretty much anything movies ever say about brain disorders and treatments.

As a writer, I struggle with convincingly portraying anything about which I know absolutely nothing.  I understand the plight.  But let me give you three of my favorite examples that will let you know just how disastrously misguided most movies and shows (and news outlets) are about the brain:

(A) One episode of Boston Legal starts with William Shatner’s character animatedly yammering away in an MRI machine spouting off baseball statistics for a pair of scientists who are quizzing him while watching “brain activation” blobs flit across a still image of his brain.  The scene cuts to a doctor’s office where the neurologist (?) informs him he has Alzheimer’s disease.

PROBLEMS (well, some of them): You cannot move more than a few millimeters in an MRI scanner or the image will be totally messed up; No one watches brain activation patterns real-time because (a) it’s not feasible and (b) some guy watching a bunch of blobs real-time isn’t remotely as valid as running actual statistics on the data; THIS IS NOT THE WAY YOU DIAGNOSE ALZHEIMER’S and it’s a disgrace to imply that it is; Using an MRI to detect Alzheimer’s is only now becoming a realistic possibility but it hasn’t reached clinicians yet and also people are focused not on brain function but structure; Semantic information (like baseball statistics) is one of the few things that’s preserved in early-to-moderate stages of Alzheimer’s; You would never ever tell someone, “the tests show you have Alzheimer’s disease,” because Alzheimer’s can’t actually be diagnosed until you are dead (while you’re still alive you really have probable Alzheimer’s), and a good doctor would break that news more gently and with a caregiver around to help assimilate what the doctor is telling a probable Alzheimer’s patient.

(B) In my favorite example from House, House has been in a bad situation he can’t remember because he was blitzed out on substances at the time.  He gets his buddy to perform deep brain stimulation to jog his memory.  The first jolt allows him to see a fuzzy, silent, black-and-white still image or two, so he says to crank up the juice – and then suddenly he can see the full memory playing like it’s a proper modern movie.

PROBLEMS: I don’t even know where the start.  The House show always pulls out a single term like deep brain stimulation (DBS) and makes a total mockery of it because apparently not a single writer on that show has ever even taken a single class in medical school.  So to summarize a bare minimum of points – first off, your brain simply does not behave in this way when you electrify it.  When electrically stimulated, you will probably perceive some anomalous sensations, but you will not replay the one memory you’re looking for, and it will not be a 1920’s silent film at low voltage and a modern movie a high voltage.  Also, memories do not ever play back perfectly like that for you anyway, and you all know that.  Finally, DBS would never be used for such a purpose – mostly it’s an extreme therapeutic option for people with Parkinson’s disease, severe depression, and certain other disorders, and no one has a good handle on why it works.

(C) Any movie in which “getting amnesia” means “losing all knowledge of yourself and sense of who you are.”

PROBLEMS: This phenomenon of losing yourself is real, and is called a dissociative fugue.  It is psychological in nature and usually occurs in response to a deeply traumatic situation (not a blow to the head).  It’s also transient, lasting a few days or weeks at most.  Amnesia is a totally different thing, best characterized by the movie Memento.  It can be caused by head injury, surgical resection of temporal lobe areas, oxygen starvation, and a number of other insults.  When a neuroscientist (or even Wikipedia) talks about amnesia, by default they mean anterograde (forward-looking) amnesia, in which patients cannot form new memories (remember HM…?).  These patients often, but not always, also show retrograde (backward-looking) amnesia, meaning that they cannot remember past events.  Amnesia is not transient.  These patients will live their whole lives in never-ending cycles of few-minute increments.  Also, they will never forget facts about themselves like their name and birth date and where they grew up, because this is a different type of memory unaffected by amnesia.  This whole movie problem is really one of semantics – how freaking hard would it have been for that first major movie exec to do a little research and say, “Hey, this isn’t amnesia, it’s a fugue – let’s say this guy has a fugue instead”?  They could have avoided decades of ridiculous misunderstanding! 

And let me just make this clear: You will never – under any circumstances – get hit on the head, lose all memory of yourself and your past, and then regain it miraculously a few weeks later.  Never.

(Update: Dammit, okay, I thought of a circumstance.  If the blow to the head is part of a deeply traumatic situation, you could enter a fugue state - but that's not due to the head bump! My point stands.)

#1. You only use 10% of your brain – imagine how much smarter you would be if you used 100%!

You know what happens when you use 100% of your brain?  EPILEPSY.  Freaking epilepsy.  That’s the definition of epilepsy.  If you want to have a gran mal seizure, go right ahead and “use 100% of your brain” all at once.

This “10%” notion gained credence because when we first started imaging human brains (using methods like MRI), researchers found that the little colored blobs lighting up during performance of any given task covered only a small portion of the total brain.  Why?  Because different parts of our brains do different things.  During verbal tasks, language areas light up; during reasoning tasks, reasoning areas light up… you get my point.

Suggesting that we should find a way to use 100% of our brains is like suggesting we should use 100% of our cars when we drive them.  It would obviously be totally efficient if your car drove forward and backward at the same time in all gears while also honking the horn and wiping the windshield and flashing the lights and blaring every possible radio station and opening and shutting the doors.  That’s clearly the best way to get to your local grocery store.  

Our brains are, in some ways, no more than a conglomeration of specialized little parts which each do their own mental tasks.  At any one time, you “use” about 10% of your brain to—

No, you know what?  I can’t even say that oversimplification in good taste.  This whole “10%” thing is 100% bullshit.  What does that even mean, “using 10% of your brain”?  I dare anyone to quantify with our current methods (A) how much of our (B) brains we (C) use at any one moment.  All three of those points need a better definition before you even start down that road, and anyone who takes the first step on it is asking exactly the wrong question based on a host of incorrect assumptions – for one, that the brain is a singular computational entity operating at X capacity like a damn CPU.  The idea is utter crap on every possible level.

Actually, that CPU bit brings me to an important historical point – brains have always been, by default, equivalent to whatever latest technology is hot at the moment.  In this day and age, we equate it part and parcel with a computer.   

It’s such a handy metaphor, right?  Like they were made for each other.  You know what people said your brain was like in the old days?  A switchboard.

 Extra points to the kids who know what a switchboard is.

We don’t have a good sense for what the brain is really doing, so we associate it with metaphors and then generate silly notions based on what we know about those metaphorical devices.  The point is this: Our brains are well optimized just the way they are, using different bits for different jobs.  Just know that you do NOT want all your neurons to fire all at once.  You will immediately die.

Déjà vu

Déjà vu is one of the coolest phenomena ever.  I know I already said that about change blindness.  I also said I’d change my mind.

I love déjà vu in the same way that I love sneezes and yawning and blind spots and dreams and migraines.  These things all make me very happy.  They’re small reminders that my brain is still there, it’s organic, it does things I can’t predict.  They point out that we are laughably unaware of the mucky mushy underpinnings of our lofty cognitive musings.  Déjà vu makes us remember we’re only human.

Well, maybe that’s not true for everyone.  Déjà vu means different things to different people.  What it certainly is not is a literal re-experiencing of a moment that happened in that exact same way at some previously unspecified time.  This is an incorrect interpretation of the phrase, because even though the direct translation of “déjà vu” is “already seen,” the definition of the word includes the notion that one is re-seeing something one knows one couldn’t possibly have seen before. 

Now, some say that déjà vu is some special form of extra-sensory perception, or it’s a signal the Matrix has been altered, or it tells us things about our past lives, or it’s some sort of breakdown between all the versions of our lives we’re simultaneously living.  Here’s the thing.  Déjà vu is already a beautiful miracle without making it anything paranormal or supersensory.  It’s a truly incredible process and a delightful experience.  This may sound weird coming from an urban fantasy writer, but I just don’t like the taste of forcing supernatural elements where they don’t belong.

Scientific theories posit numerous explanations for déjà vu, most having to do with the medial temporal lobe (remember the hippocampus…?).  Keep in mind that researchers very rarely have the opportunity to study déjà vu, given how transient and unpredictable it is – in fact, apparently only about 60-70% of people report having ever experienced the phenomenon at all (yet another variable thing I thought was common to everyone!).  So even some of the so-called “scientific research” discussed here tends to wax philosophical.

According to these researchers, déjà vu may occur because:

(1) Some aspect of the current experience excites the brain pathways that produce a sense of familiarity with the event, but not those that support proper recollection of a previous event, creating a disconnect that makes us feel like we know it without being able to pull out exactly when or where we experienced it before.  

(2) Our brains probably store memory in such a way that a small stimulus (a smell, a color) can trigger the incomplete recall of a real but different memory… and in some cases this might give us a sense that the current experience has already been experienced.  (The first part of this is certain – it’s the second that’s up in the air.)

(3) Our two brain hemispheres might sometimes get slightly out of sync when processing an input, such that one side gets that direct input fractions of a second earlier than usual and therefore misinterprets the added information from the other half of the brain as a repeat of an already-experienced memory. 

(4) We “experience” many types of things in media like books and movies, which allow us to feel strong familiarity for things we’ve never actually experienced in real life – and when we see it in real life for the first time we might accidentally think we’ve already seen it. 

Alternatively,

(5) Some researchers believe that precognitive dreams (i.e. dreams which predict future events) may create a sense of déjà vu later on when they are properly experienced.  I’ll tackle this one shortly.  

(6) And lastly – and this is the least controversial of the theories because it’s the most testable – déjà vu can occur as a result of an epileptic event, like a seizure, in the medial temporal lobe. 

(There are plenty of other theories I’ve decided to let you discover on your own, seeing how long that paragraph has become already.)

I like aspects of a lot of these, but I want to put my money down on the first and last – the disembodied familiarity thing and the seizure thing.

There’s a lot of evidence that one’s concrete knowledge of a previously-experienced event (call it recollection) and one’s comparatively vague sense of familiarity with an event are different things that are processed differently by different brain regions – recollection by the hippocampus, and familiarity by… well, parahippocampal and/or perirhinal cortex, depending on who you talk to (they’re both structures basically adjacent to the hippocampus).  In the rare déjà vu experience, it’s possible that something about the current environment differentially stimulates the familiarity and recognition brain structures, creating a detached sense of familiarity.

Notice that in the previous sentence, I said it was something about the external environment causing the brain activation.  But it’s also possible that your brain just does this stuff to itself, without any outside help.  For example, people with temporal lobe epilepsy sometimes report feeling déjà vu right before a seizure strikes.  But you don’t have to have epilepsy to have epileptiform brain activity, and in fact every single person on the planet has endured some level of seizure-like activity in his or her brain.  Basically, every once in a while some tiny group of neurons goes a little haywire and activates for no good reason, but it’s natural and nothing to worry about.  Mostly these events don’t impact our conscious lives at all.  But maybe, sometimes these events occur in just the right place at the right time, activating our familiarity structures out of the blue, and suddenly the whole world around us feels like we’ve done it before.

Regardless of whether it’s externally or internally generated, it makes sense that déjà vu is an innocent brain mistake which makes us feel something that’s not really real.  It helps explain why we sometimes feel recursive déjà vu – the sense that we’ve even had this particular sense of déjà vu before, and that we’ve had a déjà vu of that déjà vu of a déjà vu, and so forth.  That’s just our brain accidentally and repeatedly triggering a feeling that this event has occurred before when it hasn’t.  So I’m pretty darn confident that when you experience déjà vu, that exact experience has never happened to you before – no matter how much you want to believe that.  That want, that need – that’s just your brain talking.

Which brings me to precognitive dreams.  I will certainly insult people with my opinion about this, but I’m willing to take that hit and say that the ability to actually foresee future events in a dream is literally impossible.  Let me rephrase that so I can be totally clear – precognitive dreams cannot be the true experience of a real-life event before it happens.

There are just too many problems with the idea that dreams can be pre-plays of real events (not least the violation of causality).  I’ll name a small few.  (1) The vast majority of things that happen to us happen repeatedly, so it’s practically impossible to avoid dreaming up scenarios which will be similar to later life events; also, “similar” is not at all the same as “identical”.  (2) If you compare every dream that you’ve ever dreamed with every event that has ever happened to you, you will absolutely come up with matches, and it has nothing to do with foreseeing anything.  (3) Our brains can make us feel conviction about things we actually can’t remember very well, so when those similar real events happen we can be duped into accidentally overwriting our dreams to match the events (someday I’ll write a post about this point).

Okay, enough of that.  I don’t want to give the impression I don’t believe dreams can be predictive.  Brains are prediction machines.  Especially human ones.  It’s arguably what we do best.  So it’s totally reasonable that your brain makes very, very good predictions about the future while you’re dreaming, using information you might not consciously piece together while going about your daily.  I am a happy believer when someone tells me that they always dream of a white elephant before someone dies – so long as they also tell me the white elephant is their brain’s way of assimilating a host of (subconscious) clues indicating those other people were about to die.  Such a dream would be entirely plausible, and maybe even probable.

What I’m saying is that déjà vu serves as a reminder that our brains are doing a lot of things behind the scenes.  In fact we don’t have conscious access to the majority of the things our brains do.  (Go ahead, try and stop your heart just by thinking it.)  When magical things like déjà vu and prescient dreams happen to us, we can congratulate our brains for being so gosh-darn brilliant without us even knowing it.  They really are capable of miraculous feats.

P.S. I got really sick of seeing the phrase “déjà vu all over again” in article titles as I looked all this up.  I used to love saying that and now it’s tainted for me forever.  So sad…

The object of your dreams

Every single one of my writing ideas has surfaced in a dream.  The making of Canine, for instance, started with a dream about my departed dog – well, about a sentient dog-creature which I identified in the dream as both my sweet girl but also a male wolf-dog.  You know how dreams go.

I had occasion recently to question the nature of dreams – specifically, dream protagonists.  And I was shocked to find that not everyone dreams the same way about dream protagonists.

I want you to think about all the dreams you’ve had – recently or over your life, I don’t care.  Actually, it would be interesting to consider whether your dreams have evolved over time, too.  But I want you to think about the main characters in those dreams, and to assess the following three qualities (please keep in mind that it is feasible to have all possible combinations of these qualities as you consider them):

1. Identity.  Who is the protagonist in your dreams?  Is that person yourself, or someone else?  In other words, what does your protagonist look like?  (If you answer, “Well, it’s like a version of me that does things I would never or can’t do,” then for this purpose, your answer is “yourself”.) 

2. Agency.  Are you the protagonist, or are you more like a camera following someone else?  Do you identify that protagonist as yourself, no matter what they look like?

3. Perspective.  Are you seeing things from the protagonist’s perspective (first-person) or are you watching the protagonist from the outside (third-person)? 

I ask you these questions because I was really surprised to hear the answers from my friends.  Many people, when I’ve queried them, have said that (1) their real self is the only protagonist they dream about, (2) they always identify as the protagonist, and (3) because dreams will be dreams, they see it in first person or in some combination of first and third person.

I thought this was CRAZY. 

Like seriously crazy.  Since I can remember, I’ve been dreaming either as myself or as other people or animals or characters (I told you about my dream where I was Raphael from the Ninja Turtles, and in the first dream I remember I was a deer, and I’ve been my stories’ protagonists and strangers I don’t recognize).  Generally when I dream as a woman, I’m myself – but even that changed a couple weeks ago when I finally had a dream as another woman.  Most of the time I identify as the protagonist, but I’ve had dreams where I’m just following someone else around, like I’m the camera.  And lastly, I’m pretty consistent with everyone else in that I have dreamed in the first, first-and-third, or third person (it’s ever-changing within single dreams, usually).  I still have a hard time believing my friends have never had a dream like that.

The point it really hammered home for me is that my experience is not everyone else’s experience.  Of course I knew this, but not in so concrete a way – and it took me 26 years to figure out that not everyone has dreams in which they are a different sex or species.  I wonder now how many other assumptions I’m making about so-called “human experience” that are just my personal idiosyncrasies.  It’s really kind of concerning.

Please fill up my comment field with your answers to my above three questions, because I would really, really like some more data about this.  You may answer in proportions – e.g. you dream as yourself 80% of the time but someone else 20% of the time, etc.  Thank you!

Blog Stats

It’s been over a year since I started this thing, so I’m totally qualified now to inform you about the world as viewed from the perspective of a seasoned blog veteran.

No, just kidding.  I just wanted to tell you some things I’ve learned from obsessively checking my blog stats this past year.

Things I Have Learned From Blog Stats

1. Firefox is a very popular web browser.  So is Chrome.  Explorer, not so much (but who’s surprised by that?).  Safari’s lagging even behind IE.

2. There’s a browser called Iceweasel.

3. I have kind of a big following in Malaysia.

4. Number three may have something to do with the fact that for some reason I keep getting a lot of traffic from a teeth whitening webpage.

5. I hope number four is because I have nice white teeth.  I really can’t tell what the hell that site’s spamming.

6. I’m *this close* to breaking 6,000 page views.  This doesn’t include my own views of my blog.  It does include the teeth whitening views of my blog.

7. There are a LOT of people getting misdirected to this blog by running Google searches about muscles.  My muscle post has 395 total page views – more than three times the page views of my next-most popular post about the hippocampus, and more than ten times that of an average post.

8. Number seven happened because I stole a really useful image from someone else.

9. Outside of muscle terms, neuron terms, and my blog name, “love like woe zombie” is the only Google search term that made it into the all-time top ten search keywords used to access this blog. (Apparently someone used this term eight whole times to link here.)

10. In the past month, these search keywords led people to this blog a total of 35 times (gosh, I’m sorry!): “hippocampal relay”, “neuron”, “sex chromosomes”, “how to make sarcomere structure model”, “26’ uhaul truck total length” (P.S. I can totally answer that one for you – it’s 26 feet), “let them eat kait” (oh my God someone actually typed this into a search engine!  Maybe!), “sarcomere model on paper”, “3x3 inch wall tiles photos”, “axon synapse”, and “bathroom tiles”.  As far as I can tell only three of these 35 clicks were meant for me.

11. I have earned exactly zero dollars from my lack of advertisements. You’re welcome.

These all seem really self-denigrating, so I wanted to send a shout-out to the guy who sent me an e-mail saying he’d found my blog by searching for something like “zombie apocalypse survival” and stumbling onto this post.  Man, you made my freaking year.  Thank you for letting me believe that some of these accidental clicks are luring in people who actually read some of the rest of what I put here.  I hope your novel-writing is going swimmingly!

Thank you all for reading this blog.  I am in awe of all of you and am deeply humbled by your support.

P.S. – Guys, seriously, if you ever see me making a typo please let me know.  I found like three today and it was depressing.

DO NOT PEE ON THE TOILET SEAT

Okay, ladies.  I’ve tried to be nice but enough is enough.  It’s time for you to be told.  DO NOT PEE ON PUBLIC TOILET SEATS.

You would think this would be like saying “Do not jump parachute-less out of a plane” or “Do not pit chimpanzees against badgers in a cage fight”.  It should be a ridiculous mandate because the eventuality against which you are striving is unrealistic, deeply irresponsible or even impossible to realize.

Ladies, I should not have to inspect a public toilet seat for your urine every damn time I sit down on it.  The toilet seat surrounds a big, wide hole full of water.  That hole (it’s called a toilet bowl), that’s what you should be aiming for – not the seat.  You put your legs on the seat.  Your entire private area should rest comfortably in the big wide open space into which the pee is supposed to directed.  Your water, ideally, should all end up pleasantly comingling with the toilet water.  It was designed that way!

I know why you’re scared to sit on that seat.  I know you have reservations about where other people’s butts and legs have been.  I know the concept of restroom etiquette may be new to some of you.  So let me outline my three solutions to this pee-on-the-seat problem for you, in order of personal preference.

Number one.  If we all band together and learn how to pee correctly on toilet seats (and again, that’s legs and butt on the seat, privates over the hole), then we can all sit our butts down in comfort and get on with our respective days.  Because let me reassure you, you don’t get herpes from toilet seats.  Or AIDS.  On a day-to-day risk basis, you really don’t even have to worry about infections or rashes caused by whatever awful flora inhabit other women’s thighs – you should probably be more worried about getting hit by a rickshaw on your way to work.  Just take a deep breath and get over your weird bathroom phobias and just sit the hell down on it already.  

Number two.  You can build up those quads and learn to hover more accurately over the really big water-filled hole (remember, that’s called the toilet bowl), rather than the little plastic ring around it.  Like I said, that hole is really big.  Your pee stream is comparatively small.  This is not NASA, this is hitting the broad side of a barn.  Even if your pee goes all wonky and starts spattering and running down your leg and whatnot, you should still be able to accomplish peeing into the toilet rather than onto it.

 Number three.  In a worst-case scenario, go right ahead – pee on the seat.  Pee all over it, and the floor and the walls and the ceiling, for all I care.  You know why?  Because right there next to the toilet – and I really, really hope you already know this one – there’s a roll of paper which was created for the express purpose of wiping bodily fluids off of surfaces.  Ideally that surface is your body, but if you want that surface to be the toilet seat then fine, I’ll happily support your right to wipe the everloving piss out of it (literally).  And you know what?  That paper is free.  Even in public restrooms.  You can use half a roll to clean up your waterworks festival and no one will complain.

Just please, for the love of God follow any one of the above three techniques to spare the rest of us the full tactile glory of your excretions, because I am tired of sitting on your pee.  I’m really damn tired of it.  Don’t make me come after you.

More Weird Juju

I told you about our weird juju weekend last March.  We had another weird juju evening this January that I thought you might like to hear about.

This time the juju object was very clear – it was this ugly beast (and don’t you dare say “but the truck it’s leaning on looks just fine…”):

That, dear friends, is our U-Haul truck that we drove from Arizona to Chicago – and the juju object is that horrible auto transport trailer attached to the back of it.

Husband is terrified of my driving.  I don’t think it’s warranted, but every time I drive over a curb when he’s in the car I have to concede he kind of has a point.  He was okay letting me drive the truck – he made me the night driver! – but he kept cringing and gasping and offering helpful pointers and advice and by the time we pulled into Chicago I swore that if I could just navigate the damn truck to our hotel destination without crashing then I would get Shut The Hell Up About My Driving (STHUAMD) rights for the rest of my life.

That oath was my downfall.

I swore that oath in my own head just as we were turning from the 55 onto the 94, which during nighttime rush hour was nothing less than an overwhelmingly congested evil many-laned Cerberus nightmarish unholy beast of a feat to attempt in a U-Haul the size of Texas.  I had to get over two lanes in about a block and NO ONE was letting me in because Chicago drivers are all (excuse my language) total assholes.

But out of nowhere, some angel decided to pause and let me in.  He waved, I waved, and I started to merge.

And then the bad juju exploded.

See, when that gentleman got to telling us the story later, he explained that he had thought our auto transport trailer with our car on it was just another sneaky Chicago driver trying to get in behind our U-Haul.  So what does my angel do?  He jumps forward to try and cut off the other car.  The other car which is attached to my truck.

All I know is I’m going along just fine and then all of a sudden that car is way too close and then there’s a screech and a thunk as the trailer and his bumper collide.

Simple as that, in a span of seconds, away flew all my STHUAMD rights.  Evaporated.  Forever.  And I still had to figure out a way to get back across three lanes just to get off the damn freeway and exchange information.

So after a lot of merging and getting shunted to other freeways and off ramps and neighborhood driving trying to find a spot big enough to pull over our four-axle cruise liner, we finally managed to stop and get things squared away (with a sprinkle of good juju, because his bumper was scraped up a little but our trailer was fine and we had damage coverage anyway even though we never buy damage coverage or insurance or warranties for anything in our blessed lives).  And then there we were, stranded in the dark in a strange city in a strange neighborhood about which we knew absolutely nothing.

We didn’t know what the hell to do.  We just turned right and right and right (and maybe right and right again, for all I remember) – and then the juju rollercoaster hit a new high.  Within a single nerve-wracking minute, there loomed a sign – for the 94 heading north!  Seriously, if you’d seen all the damn turns I had to make to get off that damn freeway, you’d be way more impressed.  Imagine we were in Wonderland or the Labyrinth or something.  It was like that.

Anyway, a few miles later we came to our exit… and the juju coaster plummeted again when we failed to locate our hotel.  I had thought the directions I had memorized would be easy (ha!) and instead we circled forever through a maze of one-lane tiny neighborhood roads searching fruitlessly for the damn place.  We eventually pulled over and the husband excavated his iTouch only to relearn that its battery was dead, and then booted up the laptop but found only poorly-named secured wireless networks in that isolationist little yuppie backwater neighborhood in which we found ourselves. 

So I called my sister to beg for internet help – and gave her the wrong hotel name because they all sound the same to me and I was being an idiot.  And still she managed to interpret my idiocy and sent some good juju our way in the form of accurate directions to our hotel, which was apparently only two short blocks away.

As we pulled into the hotel parking lot all full of jubilant relief at the realization that our horrible post-car-accident trauma was finally over, we caught sight of a Chipotle across the street.  Dinner secured!  The good juju meter was off the charts by now.

So we checked in and got back in the truck to re-park around the back of the hotel, got out all our belongings including our stuffed animals and overnight bags and musical instruments and potted plants (so that they all wouldn’t freeze in the car), and got to the door – and the juju flat-lined again when the husband started searching for our room keys.

For ten minutes we sat there rooting through all our stuff out in the cold trying to find those keys which we’d just been given mere moments before.  Nothing.  Finally some lovely ladies showed up and let us into the building, but that still couldn’t get us into our room which stood so agonizingly nearby around the corner behind the first door on the right. 

Husband finally gave up and bade me wait with the stuff while he went off to get a new room key from the front desk.  He was gone awhile, and I got bored and wandered over to the door to our room…

…And found it ajar.

I was already unpacked and watching TV by the time he showed up again.

Which Turtle were you?

I freaking love Ninja Turtles.  More so now than I did back when they were age-appropriate, certainly.  I miss my youth and am retroactively constructing a fictional fantastical view of how important TMNT really was to me.  This is aided by a relative dearth of readily available photo and video evidence to the contrary.  It’s further aided by continuing reminders in our (technically) adult household:

Recently discovered in a chocolate egg.  

Current home: Displayed prominently on the piano in the living room.

Modern turtle enemies.  What the hell are these guys?  

What happened to Bebop and Rocksteady?

Potentially the husband's proudest possession.  

Also on display on the piano.  Right next to the wedding pictures.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were pretty much the coolest thing my generation’s TV had to offer (kids these days think TMNT was made for them but they are SO wrong).  Any one word in the title would have been amazing enough for a little kid:  Teenage.  Mutant.  Ninja.  Turtle.  But you put them all together and suddenly you’ve got an unstoppable tsunami of Awesome.  With a capital A.

Who doesn’t still remember the theme song?  Who didn’t love pizza almost exclusively because of the turtles’ singular culinary obsession?  Who didn’t want to own all the action figures? 

That was the best Christmas present I remember getting as a child – a big-ass box of Ninja Turtles action figures.  And I got a life-size plastic version of Leo’s sword too (it was a sword to me back then, not a katana, because I didn’t know better).  And I promptly hit my sister over the head with it and got it taken away.  But those few fleeting moments of well-armed glory, they were magical.

The best part about the Ninja Turtles was that they were each unique enough to allow for favorites.  I think my interest in each of them has vacillated regularly throughout the years, but the truth is my heart is sworn to Raph and always will be.  Never mind that Leo dominates our household – that’s mostly the husband’s doing – or that most people think Raph is a whiny angsty baby (cf. that scene in the first movie where he spends the entirety of his farmhouse hideout time moping in a bathtub).  Raph isn’t exactly my favorite, but he’s my turtle.

Let me break it down for you, those of you who don’t know the turtles like familiar friends.  Kids tended to base their favorite turtle choices on one of three major attributes:

Yes, some kids chose their favorite turtle based on which Renaissance artist he was named after.  So what?  You got a problem with that?  You want to start something?  And clearly the makers of TMNT knew nothing about the Renaissance, anyway – the turtles’ names were totally misattributed in my opinion.  Leo should have been the tinkerer.  Mikey should have been the tortured brooding one, and Raph ought to have been the partier.  I had a really hard time in Art History class thanks to the Ninja Turtles.  Bastards.

Misattribution aside, I always wanted to be Leo.  I wanted to be a leader and have an awesome weapon and kick ass.  Or I wanted to be Donny, I wanted to be all scientific and technical.  But I got Raph.  Standoffish angsty hot-headed annoying Raph and his stupid useless sai.

This is because I had a dream when I was little.  Real little.  It was one of the very first dreams I remember, and it was long and perilous – I was a ninja turtle and I was stuck searching for hours through a neverending labyrinthine sewer system in a fruitless attempt to rescue April O’Neil from certain peril.  I was Raphael.  I can’t just ignore that kind of sign.  My subconscious chose for me.  It’s always going to be Raph.

Maybe this is why I always fall for angsty fictional characters, eh? 

It’s all Raph’s fault.

P.S. I just took an online quiz and I got Donny.  Figures.  You can also take the quiz here.