02 27 00

suds and stupidity

I hate it when creepy people at the laundromat make comments about my clothing.

There's a guy who frequents the sticky laundromat. (He's not stalking me or anything - I hope. I just happen to do laundry the same time each week, and I tend to see the same people over and over.) Generally people don't stand out in my mind unless there's something strange about them. This particular guy always wears the same dorky outfit to the laundromat.

Now, I know I wear some strange things when I do my laundry. Everything "cool" is dirty and needs washed, and the proprietors of the laundromat look down on people stripping naked because they "don't have anything else to wear." But I don't wear the same thing every time! This guy... Wow. He wears ratty old blue jeans and this shirt... It's a button up shirt, blue in the front and yellow in the back, with a green collar - and it's sleeveless! You can still see the threads where the sleeves were ripped off. (I wonder if the sleeves were red and he thought they clashed.)

Anyway, Dorky Outfit guy wanders up to me while I'm taking my laundry out of the dryer and watches as I hang up one of my anime t-shirts. It's my Ghost in the Shell shirt. Admittedly, it's a pretty awesome shirt... It has a half-naked chick with a gun on the front; it's a real attention-grabber. grin

Dorky Outfit guy read the back of the shirt aloud: "It found a voice... Now it needs a body." He grinned at me, and his eyeballs got wide when he saw the front of the shirt. "Wow! That's a hot babe," he said, smiling wider.

And he wandered off with a stupid grin on his face.

What the fuck was that?

Dimming Awareness

While I was at the laundromat I noticed a magazine called Science. When I started browsing through it I realized that I recognized the name. In college, I had to write numerous papers on various things, and Science was one of the broad-topic journals that I used for research.

The long names of the papers baffled me, whereas three years ago I could have understood them. Some of the article titles were more self-explanatory than others. "The Role of the Southern Ocean in Uptake and Storage of Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide" was fairly self-explanatory. "Three-Dimensional Direct Imaging of Structural Relaxation Near the Colloidal Glass Transition" was not.

In the three years since I've graduated from college, I'm afraid my brain has started to atrophy. This isn't the first time I've worried about this; it's just that the magazine brought it to my attention again.

I subscribe to Discover, but that is science for the lay-person. Three years ago I wasn't lay, but now I am. Flipping through the articles in Science was a real eye-opener. I was able to struggle through two of the articles before giving up. The charts were meaningless. I'd forgotten how to read a scientific paper.

Studies have been done proving that if you don't use your brain you lose it - your brain cells start to die and connections are severed. Once you've lost a brain cell, it's gone forever. But what constitutes "using your brain?" I write, but nothing terribly brain-taxing (in my opinion.) I read, but never anything that requires me to take notes in order to understand.

Work has a lot to do with this. I do the same repetitive, boring and unchallenging tasks every day. Very rarely do I have to stretch my brain. Everything is neatly organized for me; first I do this, then I do this. If there is an emergency, I do that. No need for me to think. No need for me to make decisions. No need for me to bring my brain to work, so the brain is on vacation for most of my day.

Yahoo! has a new game called "Word Racer." It's like Boggle in that you have a certain amount of time to find words in a mess of letters while racing against other people. I've played it a few times and I suck. "Pig" and "dip" are the extent of the words I'm able to find, while my opponents are finding "choir" or "majority."

I used to have a brain.

I used to be a nerd.

Now I'm just a geek.

Sixth Sense

Going for Walkies

Go Somewhere