Nobody ever thinks it will be them

I never thought I'd be the one to get so down as to be called "depressed". That word used to be one that I understood conceptually, but the concept was so foreign to me that I couldn't comprehend it. How could somebody possibly get so sad that they ceased to function normally?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a stone-walled stoic. I get sad just like anybody else, and sometimes that makes my day pretty shitty and I do nothing but wait for the next day to make it all better. I've never experienced anything like the past few days though.

I won't say why I was (am?) depressed, because that's beyond the scope of one blog post. Let's just say that as proud as I am, sometimes being gay fucking sucks dick (puns!).

Regardless, the last few days have had me waking up feeling hopeless, going through the day in a haze, and going to sleep so terribly depressed with myself that it's no wonder I wake up feeling like nothing matters anymore. I woke up Saturday morning thoroughly believing that the sky was falling and that everything I had been doing up until that point in my life no longer mattered. In my post-sleep stupor (coupled with the heaping help of depression) I convinced myself that friends I held dear hated me and cared nothing for my feelings, I felt worthless and beyond hope.

I never thought it would be me though. It hit me so hard and so quickly that I didn't know how to react. There was no warning; no slowly easing into the feeling. It wasn't the slow descent into sadness that I thought it would be, I just woke up feeling hopeless and lost. 

After lying in my bed feeling like that for a couple hours I decided that I didn't want to be the type of person who lets depression rule their life. I'm not going to pretend like that decision made it all better, like I'm not still feeling depressed and slightly numb; but remembering that the earth keeps turning while I'm lying in my bed crying helped me realize that no matter how hard I cry, it will continue to turn. Life goes on.

I don't really know what to expect from the next few weeks/months; maybe I'll get better and maybe I'll get worse. I'm going to seek counseling some time this week and I'm hoping that'll help. Regardless I have some fantastic friends and I'm not non-functional, so maybe being out and about will help me feel better. Hope so.

Current feel-better song: The Middle (actually helped a lot)

Dear Angela Cummings, you're a hateful bigot, but I respect your right to preach.

Today I got out of lab a half hour early and decided to walk to the library to study a little bit (didn't happen) and I was greeted by a street preacher by the name of Angela Cummings (she said her name several times, I'm not a stalker I promise.) who was preaching about god's "love" and how he hates homosexuals and how Obama is the anti-christ and how Ron Paul is the only good presidential candidate because Mormons are evil and have stupid beliefs. How ironic right? The crazy street preacher insulting another (admittedly equally as stupid) religion's belief system.

Here's a link to a video of her hatred, which was taken in Long Beach at their pride parade last year.

I have to say, I was surprised by the amount of hatred that was spewing out of her mouth, which was completely unlike any other street preacher I'd seen in person. She insisted that her message was one of love, and yet she turned around and insulted a straight male walking by for acting effeminate and defending his gay father after she asked if he was a homosexual (he had some choice words for her, much clapping by the crowd was had).

She initially had a crowd of about 5 or 6 people just standing around apathetically listening to her spew her hatred, but as more people started heckling her, the crowd got bigger. A half hour after I got there there was a crowd of maybe 50 people standing around challenging her, asking her probing questions about her bigotry. Every question she answered (or completely ignored) was fuel for the crowd's anger, and in turn the crowd's anger was fuel for her spiteful anti-gay rhetoric. Eventually, though, she gave up and left, presumably because the crowd was too much for her, but maybe she was just tired, DM;CL (doesn't matter, crazy left). Regardless, she spent about 4 hours shouting about the evil sodomites.

She'll probably go home and brood about the "sinful idolaters and fornicators" at that yuppie liberal school all night and continue to think that she's fighting the good fight, and that makes me sad because she'll never understand why she is coming from a place of hatred and not love.

I just wish I knew her thought process, did she think that everybody was going to flock to her and repent? Did she think she was doing a good thing by telling the numerous non-believers in the audience that she was right and they were wrong and they were going to hell? How does anybody begin to think that that's a good way to convince people of something especially on a college campus? How many people have come up to her and said "You know, I was really on the fence about the whole god thing, but your diatribe on 'fudge packers' and their sinful ways really just opened my eyes to the truth"?

 My guess? Nobody.

A few liberal Christians came up to her and very politely told her that they didn't think that she was doing what Jesus would have wanted, she responded by misrepresenting the interaction to the unhearing crowd as one of acceptance. "It's so good to see real Christians on a college campus! These Christians get it!", making it seem like these kids (some of whom I knew) were somehow alright with her hate speech.

I don't think I'll ever understand the way these peoples' minds work. But I will forever fight for their right to look like idiots in public.

I feel rather unaccomplished

So I just found out that my best friend Linda works here (pictured above) and I couldn't possibly be more jealous. Apparently they have robots that retrieve your books for you and again I could not be more jealous.

More than jealousy I'm beginning to realize that, although Linda might just be working at a minimum wage job that isn't exactly prestigious, she's still working somewhere really interesting and I'm not working anywhere at all.

My roommate Andrew has a really cool internship this summer at a company that does analysis for phone call marketing (or something I don't really know).

My other roommate Matt is currently working in a lab that researches membrane trafficking and chromatin structure and function. (But apparently he hates it...what a jerk)

My other roommate Jared is working at a company that's developing a product much like Dropbox that's potentially worth a couple million. (no link for that one, they have no website)

My point is that I feel terribly unaccomplished living and being best friends with these people who are doing absolutely incredible things. It makes me realize that I'm not a child anymore, and as hand-holdy the whole college system seems I really am on my own at this point.

At the same time as feeling under-accomplished I also feel like I'm not even good enough to be working at places like that, what discernible skills do I have beyond being an average student? I've been meaning to apply to this lab over the summer that's working on stem cells, aging, and regeneration but I haven't worked up the energy or the courage to write the email that is required for that.

I'm honestly terrified that I'm not going to get into a research lab that interests me, and that is literally the most important thing to me. I need to be working on things that I enjoy learning about or I will end up hating what I do, just like Matt does.

Caffeine and Depression?

I know there are probably plenty of studies out there that can verify what I was thinking about this morning, but it's so much more fun for me to come to conclusions by myself. If you're a neuroscientist studying caffeine and you're reading this and you would like to tell me that I'm completely incorrect...well I don't know leave a snarky comment or something.

Anyway, I was reading yesterday about how caffeine works, namely by inhibiting the binding of Adenosine to neurons in the brain, and I started thinking on the possible linkages to depression...I found them.

Adenosine is a neurochemical that naturally slows down our brain when it has been working for too long. As you use your brain you are also producing adenosine, which slows down the firing of neurons in your brain and makes it slow down so that it can rest. Caffeine binds to the same receptors as adenosine does, and thus your body is tricked into thinking that it's not producing adenosine, however caffeine does the opposite of slow you down, it speeds up the firing of neurons (or, depending on how much you intake, keeps it at the same level).

The downside of caffeine intake is that your body continues producing adenosine even when your receptors are blocked by the caffeine, this means that when the caffeine finally gets broken down by your body -which can take up to 12 hours- you experience the effects of the built up adenosine and you get the all too common "crash" attributed with the working man's elixir.

Now the conclusion I came to this morning was that the massive amount of caffeine I regularly consume might be correlated with the rather tumultuous mood swings that I get. I did a quick search just now for "adenosine and depression" and it turns out that higher levels of adenosine has been attributed with depression in mice. So when you're experiencing a caffeine crash, you're also opening yourself up to increased levels of depression. And since caffeine has a fairly long biological half-life (Wikipedia says 5 hours), its effects on depression can be prolonged indefinitely (since, you know, you generally have coffee several times every day).

Also Mayo Clinic lists several other ways that caffeine could contribute to more depression.  

This is a distressing conclusion I came to because I adore coffee and despise decaf....

WORTH IT.

I'm paying upwards of $20,000 a year to be "average"

Isn't "C" supposed to be the average grade? Shouldn't people be content (or at least not be distraught) with getting C grades? So then why am I made to feel so shitty about "average" grades? 

This is the grade distribution for the midterm I took at the beginning of this week, my grade lies exactly at the average, and so does the grade of about 100 of my peers to the left and right of the average, with about 100 more being just slightly off of the average, higher or lower.

So 200 of the 500 students (40% which is consistent with a normal distribution) who are in this class got around the same grade on the midterm, and that's apparently about the level of understanding that students who study a moderate amount can reasonably be expected to get to, at least for this test.

So why are Cs seen as such a bad thing? If they're what everybody else is getting, why do I feel like shooting myself in the face for not getting a 90 instead of a 73?  Because letter grading sucks, that's why.

I hate the way the school system works, I (and my intelligence) should not be judged on an arbitrary letter grading system that employers can look at to see how good I was at memorizing what clade the genus volvox falls into and what it looks like (they're actually pretty cool, and they're "green algae" in the plantae kingdom if you were wondering). Actually, I just looked up what wikipedia says about the subject, and apparently ecologists can't even agree where they go in some photogenetic trees. Why am I being tested on things that we can't even agree on? But anyway...

What irks me the most is that I'm getting decent grades in the classes that I care about and that are going to be relevant for me in the future when I hit the job market, but I'm just not doing well enough in the bullshit introduction ecology courses that have information that's relatively useless to me. When I start working in a lab I'm not going to need to know what type of fern was the precursor to the modern day plant, it just won't be relevant. Sure it might be good to have a general understanding of this stuff, but the teachers are testing us on the minutia and it's pointless.

I put an alarm on my phone yesterday to remind me every day at 10AM that I'm paying $20,000 to be labeled as average to the general populace and future employers. Hopefully that will be a good motivator to bite the bullet and study this useless information. (Sorry ecology fanatics, I hate your science.)

ANGST.

Care Package Madness

Did she realize they arrivedon
4/20? Probably not...

Okay, did anybody else know you could buy food and hygiene products on Amazon? Apparently it's true because my mom sent me a ton of snacks from amazon about a week ago and I've already gone through about half of the Reese's and about a third of the chips (I'm a fatass I know).

She also sent me a ton of shampoo, conditioner, soap, and deodorant. Guess she thought I was dirty or something. DM;HS! (Doesn't matter, had snacks).

I totally look like a hobo right now actually because I haven't shaved in a week and a half. True story.

Being alone is an art form.

What an angsty thing to say right? It's something that people say when they feel bad about not having a boyfriend or girlfriend, or when they feel bad for not being socialites and going out every night. I stand by my statement though because screw you I like being an angsty college teen.


I've had this video saved in my YouTube favorites for a while now and I periodically go back and watch it every once in a while, just to remind myself that being alone for the better part of my week is pretty normal, and can even be a fun experience if I let it be.

I think the fact that my social circle has expanded so exponentially since coming to college has sort of spoiled me into subconsciously thinking that I need to be hanging out with somebody at all times, or at least texting someone at all times. I like being alone though, it gives me time to just be with myself and think about my life and stuff. Deep right? I know. 

I've been meaning to write something about this for a while, and coincidentally Reddit had a post on the frontpage about just this sort of thing. Ah, serendipity. Don't be afraid to go it alone sheeple, wake up.