I Don't Know Shit About: Antioxidants

I was recently reading an article in the New Yorker called Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds. In it, they talk about how reason is primarily used to dissect other people's beliefs and not our own, which leads to confirmation bias and Trump. Then they mention this toilet experiment. Some dudes decided to ask some peeps how well they understood toilets, and everyone thought they understood toilets fine just fine. But then they asked the peeps to write out a detailed step-by-step explanation of how toilets work, and nobody could fucking do it. I can't say exactly how this connects to confirmation bias but the morale of the story is that when you write an explanation of how something works, it requires you to ACTUALLY know how the thing works. I am also aware of many massive gaps in my understanding of things. So in the interest of being less dumb, I've made a list of some of things I want to be able to understand as well as I possibly can. As I write this, I come to terms with the fact that I have essentially given myself homework essays for fun. And my first assignment is Antioxidants.

I. WHAT THE FUCK DO I KNOW

I know the green tea I drink has antioxidants. I have seen this heralded as a good thing. I assume antioxidants prevent or reverse oxidation, which I believe is the process that makes rust. I also know that I don't want my bones to get rusty. Honestly that's all I can say I know about anti-oxidants right now so on to the next section.

II. WHAT THE FUCK IS AN ANTIOXIDANT

Thanks, WebMD. So I still don't know what an antioxidant is, but I know what it does. It protects the goddamn body from goddamn damage caused by goddamn free radicals. The good news is that I know what "the body" is. The bad news I do not know what a free radical is or what the damage is or how the antioxidant protects the body. ONWARD TO KNOWLEDGE!!!

III. WHAT THE FUCK IS A FREE RADICAL

Ok so a free radical seems like it's basically a molecule with an unpaired electron. And thus let us venture into the world of electrons to figure out what the fuck this means.

(If you don't want to get down to the nitty gritty, we can just say that certain atoms/molecules have a certain amount of unpaired electrons, and electrons really like being paired, so an atom with an unpaired electron is gonna steal that electron from another molecule, or give its unwanted electron to another molecule, and that's gonna fuck that other molecule up. And in the case of your body, that molecule might be a cell membrane molecule, or it might be a cell nucleus molecule, or it might be a DNA molecule. So if you're continuously fucking up DNA molecules, at a certain point they're not gonna get repaired in time (DNA is constantly getting repaired), and they're gonna start propagating mutations, yada yada cancer. If you're satisfied with that, meet me in section V. In the meantime...)

IV. WHAT THE FUCK ARE UNPAIRED ELECTRONS

So, unpaired electrons. This gets into the theoretical structure of atoms. Atoms have different "shells" of electrons, with each shell corresponding to a different energy level of the electron. Shells are referred to by numbers. Each shell/energy level can contain up to four different types of orbitals. Think of an orbital as the shape of the electrons' path around the nucleus. The four orbitals are referred to by letters (S, P, D, and F). And each orbital can contain a certain amount of electrons, which are referred to by little superscript numbers.

This takes us back to something we probably learned in high school chemistry, and then immediately forgot. Basically, to uncover the unpaired electrons, you have to write out the electron configuration of the atom. So let's say we're figuring out how many unpaired electrons are in Co.

 

The different orbitals correspond to certain columns, and the shells basically correspond to the rows. Why? Because the periodic table is beautiful. Anyways, you pretty much just fill out the atom from the top.

Co is atomic number 27. I put a little green box around it above. We basically just have to work our way down to 27 through all the other atoms. So starting in the top left, you have shell 1 (1 because we're in row 1 of the table), orbital S (S column), and two atoms in that row, which means two electrons. So your first shell is 1S². Row 2 has orbital S with it's next two atoms, and orbital P with six atoms, so you have 2S²2P⁶. Row 3 has the same orbitals and number of atoms, so you have 3S²3P⁶. Row 4 is where our Co atom lives. So starting from the left you have 4S². Then Co is 7 atoms deep in the D orbital section. BUT for those middle D atoms, you subtract 1 from the row number, so instead of 4D⁷ it's 3D⁷. So the final electron configuration you have is 1S²2S²2P⁶3S²3P⁶4S²3D⁷. That's step one.

In step two, you take the highest energy electrons and pair them off into funky little boxes. I know it would be nice if the highest energy electrons were in the highest energy shell, which in this case would be the two in 4S², but the universe doesn't give a single fuck about who you are or what you think. For the atoms in that D section (which are also called transition metals), the highest energy electrons are whizzing around UNDER the fourth shell, in the third shell. Fortunately, that shit we did in step one makes them easier to identify because it's just whatever the last number is. So we're working with 3D⁷.

So about those funky little boxes. Basically each box can contain up to two electrons, and a full box represents a happily-married electron pair. So each orbital has a different number of boxes. Like the S orbital only ever has two electrons, so that fella has one box. The P orbital gets three boxes. We're working with the D orbital, which can have up to ten electrons, so it gets five boxes. So we get five boxes, and we have 7 electrons to box up (the 7 in 3D⁷)(God bless you if you're still reading this holy shit). So what you do first is give each box an electron.

For some reason people draw the electrons as arrows. I think it has something to do with quantum spin but at this point who the fuck wants to figure out what that means. So now we have five shitty, lonely-ass electrons, but two of them are about to get motha fuckin girlfriends, because we started with seven electrons. In the spirit of the times, I will say that the two left-most electrons are Adrian and Deanna, while Scott, Rich, and I are represented by the three arrows on the right.

And there you have it. This atom has three unpaired electrons, making it unstable and ready to mangle.

This represents copper in its neutral state, meaning it has the same number of electrons as protons. It's possible for it to have less electrons than protons, so a free radical can probably be any atom that has its electrons fucked with. But I'm not gonna look into specifics because I want to finish this goddamn

V. WHAT THE FUCK WAS I TALKING ABOUT

So where I left off the reasonable readers, I was saying how these free radicals, with their unpaired electrons, are ready to steal electrons away from wherever they can. If you're wondering where they come from like I was, I should mention that these free radicals come from ordinary metabolic processes, immune system responses, and external sources like fried food, alcohol, tobacco, pollution, etc. So you can't avoid them.

Since this post is supposed to be about antioxidants, I should probably talk about those. An antioxidant is a molecule that comes in and A: takes that unpaired electron away, B: donates an electron to the unpaired one to calm that shit down, C: nip the formation of free radicals in the bud, D: break down the entire free radical molecule, or E: some other shit that seems complicated and I don't want to get into because I really want to finish this goddamn post.

Antioxidants are very complicated and scary looking molecules. What you're looking at here is Phytic Acid, an antioxidant found in grains, corns, and legumes. It is complicated and looks scary. Maybe someday I'll dive deeper into the chemistry of how this works, but today I really want to finish this goddamn post. Suffice it to say, somewhere in this behemoth monster is a mechanism that deals with a free radical.

VI. I REALLY WANT TO FINISH THIS GODDAMN POST

Ok let's get to the takeaways, because I have to go to work in ten minutes, and since I started this post I've thought of like ten other, funner things I want to write about. So free radicals: some occur naturally, some come in from the outside, bad if you have too much of them. Antioxidants: same deal. I guess a bunch of studies show that antioxidant supplements that just dump mass amounts of antioxidants into your bod end up causing more harm than good. Besides Vitamin C, which you can pretty much just pee out if you have too much. But then you'll have to pee more and who the fuck wants that. Anyways what we have here is a classic yin and yang situation. Your bod is ready for the free radicals it produces, and creates the proper antioxidants to deal with those, but since you're getting more free radicals from pollution and shit, you should help your bod out and eat foods and drinks that can offset these radicals with more antioxidants. As with all things in life, nature works in a perfect harmony within and without our bodies, and since we fucked the world without, we gotta try to unfuck the world within.

VII. BYE.

Thanks for reading. I hope you learned something. I'm not sure if I learned anything.

I'm High And I'm All Politically Juiced Up On A Sunday Night

I put the movie that put the goddamn cherry on top of this weekend on the bottom of this post.  But I watched a lot of shit this weekend, and it reminded me that the people who make the laws are more and more just the mouths of some money-controlled puppet monster.  And that's super-fucked up but they think it's fine that's just how it works.  (Also does Steve Bannon really want a war?) Dan Carlin talks about it all the time.  And that was a huge problem forever and now the forces at work just squatted over this whole horrible problem and took a big shit on it and now Donald Trump is the president.

Some striking tweets from the weekend:

I think it's crazy that someone who's been working in talk radio/US political commentary for decades is at a complete loss for words. Also, someone said Russia was considering giving Snowden to the U.S. (Trump) as a gift. Tonight I read in the news that Russia's official people were denying it. What the fuck? Who said they were considering it? The Russians? Trump people? Irresponsible media? Any combo of those options? I'm right back to essentially having to ask "what the fuck is going on?" and I have to ask myself this question everyday to keep up, and I can't keep up because I have to go to work, so I feel like I can't know what's going on, and that's fucked up!!!! Give me some goddamn answers, blog!!

Anyways, sleep calls because I also have biological functions to fucking worry about. But here are some vids.

Bless the Blog.

Behind The Curtain 2017

As the book of 2016 comes to the afterword section, I'd like to revisit the ideas of Behind The Curtain, and get some last thoughts in before the glossary. I just read that post again for the first time since January. For some reason I remembered it being a way longer and messier post, which kept me from going back and reading it before tonight. As a consequence, I think I forgot some of the nuances of the Behind The Curtain philosophy. I still like the philosophy, so I'm going to review how it worked for me in 2016 and refresh some of the ideas in my head to keep it powering through 2017.

BTC spreads to all nooks and crannies of our lives, but for the purpose of this post I'm gonna break it down into three categories:

1.) Doing things to make the world better that nobody will know you're doing
2.) Doing things in alone time that will make your life better
3.) Taking a step back from "reality" to look at it from another perspective

In 2016 I definitely did a lot of number 2, a little bit of number 1, and kinda forgot/still trying to wrap my head around that third one. That one's a little out of reach for me right now, the way I described it in the list is just a starting point towards something else. In the night that inspired the first BTC post I had a revelation of sorts where looking at one aspect of reality in a certain way allowed me to see this other aspect another way and it was kind of like looking in a mirror at just the right angle to see the reflection of another mirror and another mirror and so on, until you're seeing this little nugget of reality down this channel of mirrors that you wouldn't have seen otherwise.  I was high out of my mind when this happened but I'm pretty sure this mirror thing reminded me of faith, like the mirrors were beliefs that aren't totally grounded in reality, but they set your intention in a certain direction, and once your intention is set in a direction, that's gonna have effects in reality. The intention is what's behind the curtain. So maybe 3 is creating some sort of quasi-religious system for your life, and if my system is BTC then by taking care or 1 and 2, I take care of 3. There's a bit more to it because I remember seeing a definite nugget at the end of the mirrors in that revelation, and I'm not totally sure what that nugget is in this metaphor. Maybe the future self, but I feel like it was a less specific nugget.  I'll revisit this idea when I'm high out of my mind.

Anywho, back to the grounded ones. Earlier this week, I was staying at my cousin's place and she went to pick up a pizza. When she went to the register to pick it up, she found out the lady in front of her had paid for her pizza. A documentary I was watching was mentioning how doing acts of kindness like this seems to make people happier, on both sides. I've been pretty broke the past few years, and now that I'm starting to be slightly not broke, maybe I could start doing shit like this. Leaving money in parking meters or paying for people behind me in line seems like more immediate ways to improve reality for people like me, which is in the spirit of BTC, but if I'm just giving away money it's probably better to go through that effective altruism stuff. Also I still owe Adrian money. So maybe for number 1 I should give more time than money this year.  Also more blood. I also think a lot of number 1 has to do with squashing beefs, forgiving people, not holding onto grudges, and that kinda stuff.

Number two is mainly about health. This is the one that I actually did for reals in 2016. Taking care of the mind-body-spirit. I did a lot more reading/exercising/meditation than in the past couple years and I definitely felt better because of it, and that better feeling helped me in other areas, like making new friends and dating a bit for the first time in millennia. It's still hard as fuck to meditate enough though so it's good to refresh that idea. That shit chills out your vibes on so many levels.

Anyways, I might try to fit in a little tate-sesh before I get too sleepy. Goodnight blog.

Arrival On The Blog

I just got home from Arrival and I had an edible and my mom and boyfriend are talking about an email so I'm gonna write a blog post.  I haven't word fucked this holy blogina in a long time, at least not with anything worth reading.  I'm not sure I have anything to say now either.  I'm sure I felt the same way about the movie as you guys did. And who the fuck wants to read about what some asshole thinks of a movie? Not me, so that's why I'm not writing that. But I feel like that's what I've been thinking about everything I used to write about in the past several months, and hence the lack of wordlove. I'll try to come up with a subject over the next few days. In the meantime if anyone has anything interesting to post I'd appreciate it, I'm so goddamn bored with the internet right now. I love you guys and I say we gangbang this blog all kindsa pregnant with blog posts, even if we know the blog is gonna die.

Peace among worlds.

Eclipse

We should try to see this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_21,_2017

Ruined

So Emilie and I broke up.

Well, in all honesty, Emilie broke up with me. And as I reflect on it, I totally deserved it.

We started our relationship way too fast and way too strong. I have a tendency to get excited about things and become very intense. In fact, this is what turned her off to me and ended our relationship. I was too attached to her and the idea that I had finally found someone who could fill that void inside me in order for me to become my best self.

Towards the beginning of our relationship, I remember thinking to myself that I was going to ruin this for myself, and I did. I put too much pressure on her and tried to force her into basically living a lie to herself. I was so thrown off by how quickly she had fallen out of love with me that I clung on to whatever I could. In all honesty, she should have broken up with me two weeks prior, but I convinced her to try and keep us together. All of this for selfish reasons. This is not how you treat someone you love. And I do truly love her, she is wonderful and I just can’t shake these feelings. It’s going to be a long healing process, but I’m trying to persevere.

I’m surprisingly not as broken as I thought I would be about this. Obviously, it’s hard not to talk to her and see her at all, but what I did to her wasn’t fair. I blamed her for things that were all my own personal choices. I was too intense about spending time with her and it drove us further and further apart. I just have to accept this and move forward and try and work on the things that really drove her from me.

Part of me hopes that one day I can rekindle something with her. I’m currently giving her the space and time she needs to recover and we have talked about how we’ll be friends after we heal. As I continue to reflect, I just know I want her in my life in any capacity. She didn’t deserve what I did to her, she deserves the universe. I’ve never felt so selfish in my life. She showed me that I do deserve love, and I pressured her into being someone she didn’t want to be.

Right now, all I can do is focus on myself and making myself into the man I want to be. I need to figure out how to channel all of this raw energy inside of me into positivity and working energy. I’ve been getting better at dealing with my anxiety and depression. I’ve been so-so sober for the last month, having broken it only 5 times, including this past weekend when we broke up. But I like the way I feel when I’m sober. No coffee, no weed, no cigs, no alcohol. And I’ve been vegetarian for the past month or so, due to her, and I don’t plan on stopping that either. I want to be a healthy person, physically and mentally. I want to build the self-confidence and self-love I know I deserve. I want to start pursuing the things I want to, like starting a music blog, jumping into Improv and Stand Up, learning how to play and write music.

I want to live more presently. My planning out of events and being so intense about going to them turned her off to me completely. I want to become easy going. I’m working on building a daily routine to channel my energies and take every day one at a time. Obviously, I’m still going to buy concert tickets and try and plan certain things, but the pressure I put on her to do these things with me ultimately drove her away from me. I want to ground and center myself. I want to be less attached to everything.

I need to learn how to accept “No” for an answer. The main thing she criticizes me on is that I know what I want and I can be insistent and forceful at times to get her to do what I want. And as I look back, it’s true. I never meant it as disrespectful, I only wanted to shower her with love, appreciation, and experiences, but it turned sour and ruined everything. All I wanted to do was make her happy because she made me happy. But I guess in turn it was a selfish desire to keep her in my life that made me do these things for her. And not being able to accept her saying “No” is what ended up crumbling us. I wouldn’t listen to her saying “No” to our relationship. I couldn’t take the “No” of loss of sexual attraction. I couldn’t take her “No” to going to certain experiences we had planned out. And because of that, I’ve lost a woman in my life that has meant so much to me in such a short amount of time.

I need to take what I’ve just written and encompass it. I need to learn from it. It’s definitely something that’s been hindering me for ages. I get way too excited. I get way too intense. I guess I’m not as good of a listener as I thought I was. I need to accept “No” for an answer. I need to not be selfish and try to fix everything just so it benefits me.

This short-lived relationship has taught me a lot about myself and it hurts to know I could have done better.

Animal Collective, 03/22/06