How to suck at cleaning

After we had exchanged a few stories, a friend of mine commented, "When you need money, you just find something to clean, don't you?" And he was right. I do tend to be drawn to cleaning jobs. they suit my temperament. Once my hands get into the flow of things, my mind can go anywhere. Cleaning jobs give me space to think.

Every cleaning job has a daily routine - things that need to be taken care of every day. Bathrooms, trash, mopping, vacuuming. If you've landed a good cleaning job, there's an important bit of information they'll tell you starting out. If you've landed a bad cleaning job, you'll have to figure it out for yourself: if you stick to the daily routine you've been given, the area you're responsible for cleaning is going to look terrible. Your corners and ledges are going to accumulate dust. The windows will get dingy. The floors will be mostly clean, but they could be better. If your area is going to be truly clean, you need to work some things into your routine that don't need to be done every day, but that definitely need to be done. If you're in a healthy work environment, there will be some wiggle room in your schedule to work those things in. If you're not in a healthy work environment, you'll have to occasionally cut some corners in your daily routine to make them happen.

I've noticed similar patterns in the rest of my life. There are certain things that need to be done every day, or at least most days, just to keep things going. But if I were to just focus on those things all the time, my life would not be that great. I would just keep things going.

Currently reading about: soil microbes
Currently making: a dark, mysterious sweater
Next post: Tuesday, 2 April, 2019 (ish)

You can't read every book in the library

When I was in junior high, I thought a lot about collections of written material. Libraries. Dictionaries. Encyclopedias. The thing that struck me about them (although I don't know if I could have put it into words at the time) was that we were only meant to access whatever tiny portion of that information happened to be of interest at the time. Not only were we not meant to access all the material available, it simply wasn't possible. After making my way three or four cards into the "A" drawer of the card catalog, it became obvious that I could not read every book in the school library. And I was in a rural school with a tiny library. I've seen bedrooms bigger than this library, and even that library's material would be a challenge to read in one lifetime! Especially if you wanted to do anything with your life other than read books.

But what if your interest were simply to learn or experience something new? What portion would you access then? You could just start at the "beginning" and work your way forward from there. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and works of fiction in the library were alphabetized, while nonfiction in the library was organized according to the Dewey decimal system. But I realized that "social sciences, sociology, and anthropology" isn't necessarily more important to know about than "earth sciences;" they just happen to have different Dewey decimal numbers. Reading a book by Thomas Hardy isn't necessarily a more interesting experience than reading one by Michel Tournier; the authors just happen to have different last names.

It had come to my attention that some people had compiled lists of potentially interesting material. The big one for young people at the time was the list of Newbery Medal recipients. But, I realized, the people compiling those lists couldn't have read every book in the world, either. In the case of the Newbery Medal, they couldn't even have read every work of fiction for young people. So why should I confine my exploration to the books the list-makers had already read?

Currently reading: How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan; anything I can get my hands on about the workings of the hypothalamus, especially how it interacts with the immune system

Currently making: Tom Baker Doctor Who scarves

Next post: Friday, 1 March 2019

Interrupted songs

I love to sing. I never received or pursued enough training to be really good at it - and I've never been comfortable enough with own physical presence to be a truly good performer of any kind - but I do have enough raw talent to be a very happy amateur. But unless I'm completely alone when I sing, actually finishing a song is a rare treat. It's very common for people to talk in the middle of my singing, and they often say things that I feel deserve some kind of response or acknowledgement.

Maybe I just choose bad times to sing, I thought to myself. So I would look for moments when no one had said anything for minutes at a time, start a song, and sure enough, someone would say something.

For a long time, this felt a little insulting. Are my songs really so inconsequential that people feel they can just burst in on them like that? Is what other people have to say always more important than what I have to sing? But lately I've been wondering if that's not
the way to look at it. Maybe my singing inspires thoughts worth sharing. Maybe my singing makes people feel safe enough to share their thoughts.

Currently making: blanket made of leftover yarn

Next post: Sunday, 17 February, 2019

Desire and knowledge

I have made a few attempts at writing (for a potential audience) before now. It always ends with the asshole voice in my head asking questions like, "What do you really hope to accomplish here?" or "Who really cares, anyway?" I don't want this attempt to end that way, but those uncomfortable questions haven't stopped.

A few days ago, a question popped into my head: "What do you wish more people knew about you?" I'm not sure where it came from, but it's a question I'd like to ask more people more often. I think it could reveal some interesting things about them. It doesn't exactly reveal a truth, because what we want people to know doesn't always correlate to what is true. But it doesn't exactly reveal a wish, because wanting people to know something suggests that it already has some connection to reality.

I asked my husband this question, and I was pleased to find out that what he wishes more people knew about him, I did know. But then I decided to try that question out on myself. It's something I'd never thought about before, and I realized something interesting, and a little sad. The thing I wish more people knew about me is something that I don't think anybody knows. Some people know parts of it, but I don't think anyone knows the whole thing.

Now this attempt at writing has an advantage over the others. This time I know that there is something I want known. If I never figure out how to state it explicitly, maybe I can surround it in a border of expression and eventually imply it.

And if any of you ever want to tell me what you wish more people knew about you, I will listen.

Currently reading about: metabolic stress

Currently making: Tom Baker Doctor Who scarves

Next post: Saturday, 9 February, 2019

Finding new rhythms

One of the frustrating things about my current health issues is that my instinctive cues about what my body needs are often unreliable. My appetite can be bad, I occasionally deal with bouts of insomnia, and it can be hard to tell how much activity my body will tolerate until it's too late. For that reason, I've been exploring things I can easily measure at home to help me figure out what my body needs at any given time. I believe I have figured out how to use that data to identify good times to eat, appropriate sizes of meals, good times to be more active, durations of activity my body will tolerate at that time, and good times to rest. For now I will just say that I have had some very encouraging results using this tool, but I will probably go into more detail about it in the future.

Something interesting has emerged from this practice. I've noticed that it's common for me to have a day of light meals, light resting periods, and frequent activity periods followed by a day of large meals, slow movement, and lots of rest, in approximately a forty-eight-hour cycle. Like there's a day to be still, gather up energy, and plan my next moves, and there's a day to execute, back and forth. I have found ways to perturb this cycle if necessary without being too disruptive, but that usually involves carefully reshaping the waveform for a limited time, rather than disregarding it completely. I find myself wondering if other people's bodies follow similar rhythms. It's possible that I just incur harsher penalties for ignoring them.

However, there is a thought that keeps nagging at me. Suppose I do gain enough strength using this technique that I can think about stretching out beyond ... whatever the hell it is I'm doing now. The world around me does not operate according to rhythms like these. I'm not even sure how capable it is of arriving at some kind of harmony with them. I could spend all this time establishing these intricate patterns that allow me to kind of function, only to have them washed away in a rush of noise. Or maybe I could keep getting stronger, maybe even become capable of doing amazing things (Sure, why not dream big?) that hardly anyone benefits from, because the world and I are just too out of phase with each other. It's possible that everything I have to do to get back on my feet could only succeed in further isolating me.

This is where it starts to feel like fate is fucking with me. I often feel like I'm being presented with parodies of choice. Theoretically, I could do nothing, but I know exactly what would happen, and I refuse to allow it. Theoretically, I could turn away from these promising rhythms, except my world would be diminished so much by it, I really couldn't. So, I continue to explore them.

I've been very bad about following my "next post" statements in the past, but I feel like the stakes just went up. Sharing the contents of my mind is the one way I'm relatively confident I'll be able to consistently contribute to the world. Also, somewhere down the road, I hope to explain why I do things this way, instead of simply saying "I'm going to post every Friday," or something along those lines.

Currently reading about: Foxglove

Next blog post: Friday, 1 February, 2019

Primers

Overall, my husband found what I had to share about programmed cell death to be very interesting, but he had a few observations. "When you say 'protein,' I think about meat. I think 'amino acids' are kind of like vitamins? I sort of know what a 'catalyst' is, but the 'enzyme' just makes me think about saliva."

I don't want to bog down my sciencey posts by stopping to explain everything from the ground up. But I do want them to be understood. So as I go along, I'm going to try to identify terms and concepts that a person really needs to grasp to get anything out of what I'm writing, and then give them their own page that I can link to as needed. I'm going to label them "primers" and include the word "primer" in the title so they can be easily found and identified.

So far I have written primers for amino acids and proteins and catalysts and enzymes. I have edited the post about programmed cell death to link to those pages.

Please keep in mind that I'm not an expert in what people do and don't know. I'm open to suggestions for topics that need a primer. Right now those suggestions are coming from my husband, but there's no reason why he needs to be the only one.

Next post: Thursday, 15 November, 2018 (ish)

In the meantime, please enjoy this glass of hydrogen peroxide solution (I was a bad chemist; I didn't label it!):

Primer: catalysts and enzymes

If you pour a glass of hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) solution and watch it for a while, not much happens. It sits there, looking very similar to a glass of water. If you get distracted for a while and come back later, you might see a few bubbles on the surface of the glass, but that's about it.

If you know a little bit about chemistry, you know that hydrogen peroxide is not a very stable molecule. Oxygen is one of the biggest electron hogs on the periodic table, and two electron hogs are not going to like being that close together. Oxygen (O₂) and water (H₂O), on the other hand, are very stable molecules. If you know a little more about chemistry, you know that less stable molecules tend to react to form more stable ones. So, where's my water and oxygen?

Molecules don't just react willy-nilly. They need to orient themselves properly for the atoms to interact in new ways. They also need to bring enough energy to form an unstable, temporary, intermediate arrangement of atoms between the reactants and products - a transition state. In our example, the hydrogen peroxide molecules can tumble around in the glass for hours before enough of them meet those conditions for us to actually see oxygen bubbles. But if we drop a little steel wool into the glass, there will be oxygen bubbles everywhere!

The iron in the steel wool is acting as a catalyst. Catalysts increase the probability of molecules reacting by guiding them into the proper orientation, lowering the energy requirements of the transition state, or often both. What catalysts do not do is contribute to the net result of the reaction. Even with the steel wool, our hydrogen peroxide reaction is still only producing oxygen and water. The iron temporarily interacts with the peroxide to form a different, more attainable transition state than the peroxide would form by itself. Since the iron is left behind after the peroxide has reacted, one atom of iron can catalyze any number of hydrogen peroxide reactions.

The chemistry of living things uses catalysts all the time! Life as we know it would be impossible without them. When catalysts appear in a living system, they are called enzymes. Let's look at our hydrogen peroxide example again. Peroxides are damaging to living tissues, so many organisms utilize a protein called catalase, which converts hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen. Catalase is acting as an enzyme, and similar to our non-biological example, it incorporates iron in its molecular structure.

Primer: amino acids and proteins

Amino acids are a family of molecules that contain an amine group (NH₂) and a carboxyl group (COOH). The ones you'll hear about the most in the context of biochemistry are alpha amino acids. An alpha amino acid has the amine group on one end, the carboxyl group on the other end, and a carbon atom between them. Attached to that middle carbon atom is the molecular structure that gives that particular amino acid its unique properties. It could be a hydrocarbon chain, an benzene ring, an alcohol. For example, the simplest alpha amino acid, glycine, has the structure H₂NCHCOOH. The possibilities are nearly endless, but we tend to focus on the twenty amino acids that are encoded in our gene sequences.

The useful thing about amino acids is that the amine group of one can react with the carboxyl group of another, forming water (H₂O) and two amino acids joined together by an amide link (...NHCO...). This can be done over and over again, with the amino acids becoming the links in a long molecular chain that can bend and coil into a unique shape. This is called a protein. Proteins provide structure, transport needed (or unneeded) materials, transmit signals, and facilitate chemical reactions in living things. Aside from water, proteins make up more of our mass than any other type of substance.

There is a small group of amino acids that we humans have to get from our diet. Since all living things utilize proteins in one way or another, we get those amino acids by breaking down the proteins of the organisms we eat. That's why you hear about needing to eat protein to stay healthy. From those "essential amino acids," our bodies can synthesize all the other amino acids we need, and we can make proteins of our own.

Square 1.1

For those of you who don't know, I struggle with some health problems. The whole mess was originally touched off by an Epstein-Barr infection that didn't follow any of the usual patterns. I have never fully recovered from that experience.

I have managed to assemble an arsenal of techniques that allow me to function somewhat. Not enough to have a regular job, or even a less conventional job, but somewhat. Last weekend (just in time for my birthday!) that all came crashing down. I am currently experiencing symptoms that feel very similar to when I first got sick.

I do have some things going for me this time around. I feel awful, but now I know I'm probably not in any serious danger. That gives me a confidence to keep trying that I didn't have when I first got sick. Fear and uncertainty can be almost as debilitating as physical symptoms!

So, I'm going to work on getting healthier and stronger again, and I'll make another attempt at this blog thing at a later date. I have some ideas that I hope people will find very helpful.

Next post: Wednesday, 31 October, 2018 (ish)

Recipes for the soul

I took another opportunity to voice my displeasure with organized religion. As much as a part of my mind wants to inhabit the mystical world, I have yet to find an organized religion I don't have a problem with. Every one of them has, in one way or another, severely abused their power. I would trust none of them with any part of who I am, least of all my soul.

I'm sure there are some people reading this who are part of an organized religion. I'm sure most of you try not to abuse or oppress people, and I'm sure you have your reasons for living your life the way you do.

There are probably some people reading this whose paradigm does not include a spiritual world at all. I get what you're saying, but my mind stubbornly refuses to live in that world. And it becomes very distracting and unproductive when I try to make it.

My husband is familiar with my feelings, but it came up again in a conversation earlier this week. He asked me, if that's how I feel, how would one build a spiritual community without organized religion?

I think that's an important question, so I gave it some thought. I started thinking about food. Food preparation wasn't well understood at first. We had a few things that worked, and some aspects of it were heavily codified. Now we have millions of recipes that we exchange among ourselves. And I don't think the sense of community that cooking evokes has been diminished.

Perhaps we should start exchanging "recipes for spirituality." We could even throw pot-luck blessings for our family and friends.

Next post: Wednesday, 24 October, 2018 (ish)

Life and (programmed) death

I woke up yesterday feeling like I should try to get out of the house. Much to my disappointment, it stopped raining almost as soon as I stepped outside. It made me wish I had brought my umbrella, or at least one of my big hats. I saw a hawk diving for a squirrel. I rescued an earthworm. I was made aware of a music video that I was really excited about. Overall, I rejoiced at life.

The middle of my day was spent reading about death. Programmed cell death, to be specific. I had actually planned to make this a science post. It's still going to be, but my reading never crystallized into a focused topic, so this stream of consciousness shit is what you get this time.

I have been aware of a lot of the ins and outs of programmed cell death for over ten years now, starting when I took a course on the molecular biology of cancer. A major group of players in its regulation are a family of enzymes called caspases. I've known about these enzymes for years, and it wasn't until yesterday that I bothered to pay attention to why they're called "caspases."

Caspases are proteases. They break down proteins by transferring electrons to the protein's structural backbone. The caspases achieve this with cysteine, which is incorporated into their amino acid sequence. Cysteine is good at transferring electrons! But caspases are very specific about where in a protein's structure this reaction occurs. They cleave proteins specifically at the site of an aspartate amino acid. They utilize cysteine to catalyze a reaction at the site of an aspartic acid, and it acts as a protease - caspase!

I really should have picked that up years ago ... but then I might not be telling you about it right now, would I?

Here are my interesting and slightly dark thoughts for the day: 1) In the absence of a malfunction, our cells are always maintaining the infrastructure to bring about their own death. They rely on signals from their surroundings instructing them not to use it. 2) The reason interfacing with our world is bearable is because our outermost layer is dead.

That was my day yesterday. Much reading about death. One title even referred to the river Styx. Eventually my husband came home, and I took a break. He was feeling unusually adventurous, so we decided to go to a bar we've heard about but never visited before. When we got there, what do you think we found? A print of Persephone by Thomas Hart Benton on the wall!

I can't even go to a bar without it suddenly being about life and death.

Next post: Tuesday, 16 October, 2018

What I'm not offering

I have relied heavily on my science background to deal with some health problems. That has strongly influenced my choice of science reading, and I intend to share some of what I read here. I've been especially interested in nutritional biochemistry.

But, the human body is a complicated system, each individual system is unique, and there are a lot of practical and ethical constraints on studying that system. My handling of any given topic will attempt to include a healthy amount of respect for that complexity and for the limitations of a given method of investigation. There will be no statements like, "We should all be eating a pound of x a day," or "Doing y will make you lose weight," or "Doing z will cure your migraines." They will probably look much more like, "Doing w produced v results in u model organism. Here's why this is interesting ..."

There will also be no statements that begin along the lines of, "Why don't you just ..." or "Everyone should just ..." If I make a choice in my life, and it works out well for me, there is probably some kind of privilege at work. Some avenue open to me that probably isn't open to every single human or wouldn't necessarily work out the same way even if it is. I will do my best to be mindful of that.

Oops! My post is a day late from the goal I had set. I'll keep working on that, because setting goals seems to be constructive for me.

Next blog post: Tuesday, 9 October, 2018

What I'm offering

"I've never told this to anyone before, but back when I was a janitor I figured out that if you pull sharply backward and slightly upward on your vacuum cleaner, it puts a little downward pressure on the brushes, and they pick up better if you have a stubborn patch of dirt to clean up."

I had just finished vacuuming, twelve years after the last time I worked as a janitor, and I was still using the same little trick I had taught myself. But unlike all those other times, I decided to put what I a was doing into words and share it with my husband.

He was more enthused than I thought he'd be. "What?! That makes so much sense! This is a game-changer! Why have you never told anyone about this?!"

"I don't know, it just never came up. People don't have conversations about vacuuming very often."

This was one of several clues that certain parts of the life I've put together might be useful to a wider circle of people than the ones I talk to every day. Another was my husband's repeated insistence that I need to write a book. Or a paper. Or an essay. Or something. Yes, that's a pretty blatant one, but I don't always catch on right away. It at least persuaded me to start keeping a journal. I figured that depending on how that went, it would either prove him very right or very wrong. Yet another was the friends and relatives who specifically ask me what science topics I'm reading about at the moment. I've made previous attempts to share the information I gather about health and nutrition from a biochemical perspective, but it was only a few months ago that I started to realize what kind of an impact it might have had on people.

Because I have been given the opportunity for a rich, full life, I'm often looking for things I can offer in return. Over time I've collected knowledge, experiences, and thoughts. I've developed ways of approaching my life and my world. And the clues are piling up that what is useful or meaningful to me might be so to someone else.

Happy equinox, everyone!

Next post: 30 September, 2018

Edit: I moved back the date of my next post.