1. Quit caffeine. Strategy: Replace coffee with caffeine pills, then slowly taper down. This is the big one. I’ve been addicted to caffeine for years and years, and the fact that I’ve quit and keep on coming back to it makes me realize I have a true-blue psychological dependence on it. Lots of people know me as a ferocious coffee drinker, which is my method of choice for caffeine delivery. In the past, when I tried to get off caffeine, I drank decaf coffee to maintain the ritual/habit but quit the caffeine. I think, though, the problem is fundamentally rooted in the institution of coffee. I enjoy waking up in the morning and drinking coffee. I enjoy drinking coffee with friends. I enjoy drinking it right after a nap and feeling the synapses in my brain turn on again. I enjoy how it looks, how it smells when I’m brewing it, and, of course, that when I drink it I am more awake and get more ideas. My psychological addiction, then, lies in coffee, while my physical addiction lies in caffeine. If I replace coffee with caffeine pills, then I’ll be able to still get caffeine without the experience of coffee, decoupling my desire for coffee from my need for caffeine. Caffeine pills will also allow me to (somewhat precisely) control my caffeine intake, and I think tapering down should be not-that-bad compared to going cold turkey as I’ve done in the past.
2. Learn a martial art. Strategy: Join a club sport (like Judo or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) at MIT, or start going to the MMA gym at Redline Sports on Mass. Ave. I think knowing some kind of martial art is a good “life skill” to have, and it seems like decent fun, too. Obviously, I’m not going to learn a martial art in a year, but I think if I make significant progress towards it I’ll be likely to keep it up after the year is over.
3. Work less; specifically, do less school work. Strategy: take fewer classes.  This goal may be sort of weird to some people since many people tend to have the opposite problem–that is, they have trouble getting motivated–but I think I get way too focused on school during the semester and end up neglecting my personal health, both physical and mental. I’ve been a fairly student my entire life, and so thus far my life has really only been about school. I don’t really know what life is about, but I definitely know it’s not just about grades and impressing your superiors. So, this semester I am determined to do more things outside of school that make me happy and that have meaning to me outside of my traditional, academic metric of success. Examples: Volunteer work, likely in teaching/tutoring; reading and writing more; exercising more; etc., etc., etc.

Well, that’s it for now. Tomorrow, I leave for Jeju, South Korea(!) to teach chemistry for a few weeks with a bunch of MIT and Harvard students. I’m really excited! I will certainly be posting pictures…

Meditation has been a strange antidote to my MIT-induced workaholism, since meditation–the act of closing your eyes, sitting completely still, and focusing on your breath–is an extreme opposite to constant, frantic work. It’s difficult to stop and convince myself to sit for thirty minutes, but when I do it’s always worthwhile. On the working scale, I go from 60 to 0, and on the doing nothing scale, I go from 0 to 60. When I go back to work, I feel cleared and like my mind is not going a million miles per hour. It’s useful.

When I don’t meditate, though–when I can’t get myself to sit and meditate, or to read a book, or to go socialize or whatever, I end up going to computer and checking the same three or four websites over and over and over again. There’s a dopamine drip-release that occurs whenever something new comes up, and I’m constantly hunting for that to satisfy that work-hole that’s widening in my mind. It works. Sort of. It doesn’t go fast enough, because I don’t look at sites like Twitter which are updated literally constantly. But it becomes an addiction, an obsession. If I’m in my room, it is very difficult for me to not be screwing around on the Internet. Done looking at Metafilter? Back to Facebook. And after I’ve spent time on Facebook, I must have a new email, so then I go to Gmail. Then back to Metafilter, because something must have been updated in that time frame. It’s an antisocial, eye-blurring, time-wasting cycle, and it makes me feel like I’m doing something when I’m really doing nothing. But that just treats a symptom, and not the root problem, which is I don’t know what to do when I’m not working.

For now, I have no good solutions. Normally, I pick up new projects and just end up feeling stressed, which is again not the solution. It’s a difficult problem, and I wonder if other people at MIT/people who work hard for months on end feel the same way. Luckily, for the here and the now, I have things I have to work on (e.g., lectures for when I go to Korea to teach chemistry), so I won’t have too much free time. But I will be thinking about how to solve this problem, and will hopefully be able to share an answer.

I will now go down the periodic table (starting with F) and present and discuss the results.

In trans-[Co(en)2F2]+, we see a wide range of neutral pictures including a picture of a library, a purse, an owl, and what appears to be a screenshot of Farmville. However, we also observe two pictures of the same shirtless man rubbing himself with some kind of liquid, a woman in a bikini, and a very moody photograph of a topless woman smoking a cigarette. Rating: Kind of sexy. Perhaps F is the most sensual ligand? From here we would expect our erotic response to decrease, since we are starting off pretty strong with F.

In a sudden reversal from our X = F compound, trans-[Co(en)2Cl2]+, we observe no sexiness whatsoever! It’s nothing but graphs, line structures, and what looks to be a Boeing 747. Fascinating!

trans-co(en)2br2 -- marginally more sexy?

Continuing on with the trend of patently unattractive compounds, trans-[Co(en)2Br2]+ is about as unsexy as X = Cl. However, based on personal judgment, pictures of homes and that steering wheel make this data set a little better more erotic than the previous set of search results. Nevertheless, the two are roughly the same.

However, when we look at the results for trans-[Co(en)2I2]+, we see a remarkable jump in erotic character. Whereas before we had X-ray structures, homes, and steering wheels, now we have breasts, penises, and underwear! Incredible! And even the neutral pictures are fairly good, including a plaintext picture of “FUCK I WANNA BE A UNICORN” and a beautifully mustached, smiling man.

And finally, we look at trans-[Co(en)2At2]+. Just as quickly as we went up on the seduction scale, we’re now back to our base level readings. Some of you may point out that there’s a picture of a shirtless man, but since he has a trollface on his head, I’ve decided to discount the picture. It’s difficult to argue that this set is better than X = Cl and Br, but I think if you compare the two you’ll agree with me that a picture of two men with helmets, a puppy (or cow? goat?), two snails, and a joystick would turn you on before chemistry and interior design.

Looking at all of these together, we derive the following aphrochemical series: Br- ~ Cl- < At- < F- < I-. Faced with this result, questions abound: How do we account for the nonlinearity that we observe? Is there an intrinsic, additive erogenous-moment associated with each atom, and ergo with each molecule? How does symmetry affect position in the aphrochemical series? Do singlet and triplet states have different sexual effects? Only future studies will tell. Now to pick the best tags for this post to throw off people who are doing real work…

]]> http://backwrds.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/nonlinear-sexiness-in-a-series-of-halogenated-trans-coen2x2-compounds/feed/ 0 backwrds trans-co(en)2f2 trans-co(en)2cl2 trans-co(en)2br2 trans-co(en)2i2 trans-co(en)2at2 http://backwrds.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/if-i-were-a-boy/ http://backwrds.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/if-i-were-a-boy/#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:11:10 +0000 backwrds http://backwrds.wordpress.com/?p=265 ]]> Yesterday in WGS.110 (Gender and Sexual Identity) we talked about drag and gender as performance. We watched a few videos, and one of them was a drag performance by Ongina of the song “If I Were A Boy” by Beyonce. I found the performance very moving–the juxtaposition of a woman who was stripping to become a man while performing such a loaded song was really powerful. I watched the official music video of the song afterward, and found the dichotomy between Ongina’s vision of the song and Team Beyonce’s (i.e., Beyonce + cloud of business associates) vision of the song to be really fascinating. Specifically, the Beyonce video features her in the very masculine role of a police officer and interacting with men from that position of power, eventually metamorphosing into a more explicitly feminine persona when it seems that the world of men fails her. In the context of the lyrics, the flow of imagery is a logical choice for the music video. But what gets me is that Ongina’s video has the exact opposite gender transformation–woman to man–rather than the man to woman transformation of Beyonce’s video. And both make sense! It’s fascinating!

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Anyway, here’s an article I read recently in The Atlantic that I thought was pretty interesting. It’s an essay on how the pool of “marriageable men” is “on the decline,” and how it’s fostered the growth of a hookup culture where a small minority of men get all of the women while the rest of the men get nothing. It also explores some of the current paradigms in marriage, and how marriage as an institution is changing and arguably becoming obsolete. I thought it was a pretty interesting read, even if it was long.

Here’s the link: theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/?single_page=true

Inspired Flight — “It’s the Chemicals.” I like the spacey sound, the lyrics. Calming song.

Class Actress — “Weekend.” Brainless electro synth. pop. Terribly catchy and a fun song.

Alela Diane — “To Begin”

In other news: I recently got Spotify! Spotify is sort of the Netflix of the online music. You pay for a monthly subscription service, and then you get essentially unlimited access to a huge variety of artists. So far, it’s pretty awesome. I’m having trouble finding some more obscure people (e.g., I can’t find the Silver Jews. WHAT), but suddenly being able to have an entire album of an artist after I listen to one or two songs on the Hype Machine is quite nice.

I feel like patience is more than just having restraint in thought/speech. I think that in order to be truly patient, you have to have a patient mindset that can’t give rise to negative emotions that lead to rash decisions. I think that patient actions coupled with impatient thoughts lead to emotions getting bottled up in destructive way, eventually leading to an outburst that can harm yourself or your relations with other people. When you’re patient in thought, though, being patient becomes much more natural, and perseverance becomes second nature.

Now that term has started, I’ve found that being patient with myself is extremely helpful. When I don’t get overly upset at myself for not doing well or being efficient, I find that it’s much easier to keep on slogging through and get things done. And I don’t end up feeling as anxious when things aren’t going well. It’s a bigger challenge to apply that to my relationships with other people, but I’m working on it. If someone hurts you, I’ve found that stopping to understand someone’s motivations and then working with them to resolve the issue makes everything run a lot more smoothly, and makes everyone happier in the long run.

All right, that’s my Buddhist-esque $0.02 for the day. Back to work.

*Okay, maybe that’s not true–I remember hearing about a study recently that showed that people are much less able to resist, say, tempting foods once they’ve been doing cognitively taxing tasks. Interesting! And also explains why I’m way more willing to eat an excess of cookies during finals.

Anyway, bearing this in mind, I grew up reading the comics in the newspaper at breakfast every day before school–from elementary school all the way up through high school, when I stopped reading the comics and started finding humor in the opinion section. At some point fairly early on, they quit being funny and started being horrible, and yet I still read them for some unknown reason. I always walked away from the breakfast table at 6:30 AM feeling sleepy and annoyed, and then the next day I would read them again and think about how stupid they all were, a vicious cycle of comedy-driven angst that would repeat itself day after day after day. Well. As stated, I eventually did break the cycle, but growing up reading the comics has given me a soft spot for depressing parodies of some of these comics. I’ve already blogged about Garfield Minus Garfield, which I love. Alec recently introduced me to 3eanuts, a Peanuts derivative in which the fourth panel of every Peanuts comic has been removed. Peanuts was never, ever funny, no matter how hard it tried–but once you remove the fourth panel, it becomes absolutely hilarious. It’s depressing, awkward, and talks about some of life’s most uncomfortable truths in the form of poorly drawn, overcommercialized, blobby Peanuts characters. And, since Peanuts is such a long-running strip, there’s tons of these comics! I’ve been reading 3eanuts at breakfast lately as an offering to my inner child/adolescent, and I feel like I can finally put my humorless soul to rest.