Feelings

Majority of people experience feelings, but how we express them is a function of cultural, personal, and conditions in the immediate environment. For instance, if someone yells at me, of course this is going to lead me to being angry, but how I express this anger is dependent on the situation. For instance if it's my boss that's yelling at me, I very much doubt I will yell back or reveal my emotion in an explicit way because this obviously could lead to me getting fired.

With experience it becomes easier to identify what a person is feeling based off of their emotional expression. Something I've noticed is that it's become much easier to know when someone is faking an emotion i.e. sounding happy about something they really don't care about and unfortunately for them - the lack of genuity in their emotional expressiveness is more telling than the emotion they try to convey in the first place.

For instance, why would someone fake happiness? Today I heard a girl meet a guy who she was tutoring in English. When he came to the table (without ever meeting eachother) the girl instantly threw out a fake smile and in that forced happy voice sound uttered how glad she was to meet this person. How can someone be glad to meet someone they know nothing about? What if this dude was an animal rapist who carried a machete and was waiting for her to look away before giving the ole slicy and dicey?

But that's not the point.

What does it say about someone when they fake an emotional expression? First, it says they understand how a person with a genuine feeling would react in a circumstance. So, even though they don't have this genuine feeling they want to convey that they do. This is a form of manipulation, but why do people feel compelled to manipulate in circumstances such as these where it really doesn't matter what the other person thinks?

Emotions are no doubt how we connect with eachother. Emotions are just as important as the words in conveying a message. I can generally tell what a person is feeling or thinking based off of the emotions they convey. People realize this of course, and so often times they manipulate how they express their emotions either out of fear of being judged or just a subconscious fear or even a malicious desire to manipulate.

But the thing is, since emotions are so widespread and accessible to everyone, people know when someone has a genuine feeling or not, and really by hiding our emotions and by hiding our expressions we're in fact stating that we can't be trusted entirely. That we're manipulating for some reason or another.

Update

I've since completed the entire park jogging course. 3 miles of jogging! Hey, for a fat*** such as myself that's an accomplishment. I'm thinking of maybe training for a Boston marathon, although you have to post a marathon run of 3 hours and 30 minutes which averages a little over 8 minutes a mile for 26 miles.

I can do 8 minute mile...for maybe a mile and a half. So there's a long way to go before I post the qualifying time.

However, if you have the will then any goal is dependent only on time. Well at least when it comes to personal goals.

Will power itself is heavily dependent on your thoughts and expectations of yourself. Your willpower is directly proportional to your ego.

I feel like I don't have the will power I used to have. Back in the day my mind would flood with thoughts and feelings as if a river had been unleashed each and every day, but now my mind feels as if it's been bunkered down and constrained and pressurized to exist only in some sort of contained vessel.

I'm entering a new phase in my life and unlike other people I perhaps don't have the equipment to make the venture a successful one. I feel as if my only chance is to follow my own path, a traditional lifestyle just seems out of reach for me or maybe I'm not reaching hard enough. Either way, I have to work harder and harder. There is hard work I can do, but in order to accomplish what I want, I have to work harder than that.

I want to become a doctor, and somewhere in me I feel it's inevitable that I will get into medical school. Even though I have such disability I feel as if my body has become a sort of ancient seaship, the kind of folklore that suffers the many assualts of the sea and yet still somehow manages to sustain itself and navigate.

I have a feeling within me that even though the divide between me and medical school seems to be analgous to the pacific ocean, I feel like it's destined. Like as if another force is in control and I will get there.

I feel so sorry for my body which has suffered so much. I assign human values to my arms, legs, head, neck, etc. And I feel though if they were alive themselves, that I have tortured them so much. Yet they seem to hold together and serve their purpose for me, through it all. In some ways the inanimate objects of my body are my closest friends, both figuratively and literaly. Throughout all the pain and storms of my life they've held steady and healthily, just as that mythological ship which has sailed through the many storms.

Certainly armed with this body of mine, I know I can make the journey a successful one. It's going to be rough, but it's also going to be fun.

Running Regiment

So for the past few weeks I've been running everyday. I go to the same park to run, so I set a goal to run a little further than the previous day's run. So far I'm now able to run continously for longer than 10 minutes getting well over a mile of running in.

The course itself totals about 3 and a half to four miles long, so I'm quite a ways away from being able to finish the course in a continous run, but that is my ultimate goal.

I haven't weighed myself in a few days, I'm approaching this differently than I have in the past, instead of constantly needing instant gratification and results I'm focusing instead on the goal-oriented aspect of my exercise routine. I want to be able to run further, faster, and better. Those are the results I'm concentrating on.

I can already feel the benefits, I feel more flexible (from stretching), I feel more energetic, I feel more alert and sharp - overall I've been feeling a lot healthier and that translates into more self confidence that I've been lacking.

Next week I'm going to incorporate weight lifting.

Favorite Shows

As of right now, I'd like to compile a list of my all time favorite shows.

At number 1 of all time
Seinfeld

Yes, I understand one of the cast turned out to show racism and Jerry in real life is so arrogant and full of himself but Seinfeld was a show that could put you into another reality. What I mean by that is, when I used watch the show as a child and adolescent I could buy into the carefree and humorous reality that Jerry seemed to view the world with and that view was so unique and so uplifting that I cherish all of the episodes to this day. I can't really describe how much I liked the show, but suffice to say that the last episode really and completely ripped me apart.

And besides, who can forget "NO SOUP FOR YOU!"

Number 2 Family Guy
I understand the controversial humor Seth Mcfarlen uses, but if you can't absolutely lose yourself in laughter after watching an episode of family guy, then you really have no soul.

Number 3 Simpsons (1994-2003)
Simpsons for the past 5 years or so has really transformed into something awful. just awful. It's become so political and unsubstantiated jokes. I don't know if they lost their original writers or what but I really can't watch the new stuff anymore. However, back in the day, the simpsons was the de facto program of primetime. In school I can vividly recall the classroom trivia games we would play about simpsons, and what's more - is that everyone was capable of answering the questions because we all watched the episodes - several times.

Number 4 That 70's show.
Awesome. There's not much more I can say about this show, but I feel like the cast really bonded together and made the drama and humor that much more intense. In some ways I could relate to their problems when I was in high school, and I always envied Eric's basement. I wish I had a basement.

Number 5 Law and Order SVU
Of all the Law and Orders this is the best one, the actors seem so much more personable, the stories are so much more complex, and the relation to real life forms a reality check that I feel we all need. Again the stories were very compelling and I usually always watch this show when it's on TV.

Number 6 NCIS
Ziva is too hot not to like this show. No, this show also has very compelling stories and I'll always watch it when I see it on.

Number 7 The Daily Show with John Stewart
This is how I get my news, and what I like about him is his willingness to show bad sides of both political parties. There's a lot of ill in the world and it's always better to absorb it through a filter, and J. Stew is that filter not in the sense of censoring the news but painting a lighter side of things which his own unique brand of comedy.

Number 8 Monty Python and the Flying Circus
No comment.


So, what are some of your favorite shows? (to anyone who reads this)

Getting healthier

For the past few weeks I've been entering into a process of change when it comes to my bad habits. I've come to realize that I've lost so much physical fitness since high school and that as a result of this I've lost energy, attention span, happiness, and opportunities.

As I say I allowed myself to get into bad habits I mean I couldn't even label my diet as "poor nutrition" because it goes beyond what an adjective "poor" can describe, and the phrase "poor nutrition" still contains the word nutrition.. no what I ate and my diet can be described as no other than "septic" pure septic crap.

Wendy's double cheeseburgers, french fries, taco bell, donuts, just about every type of fried animal meats and fried foods in general x 100's of days. Each day!

but now, I'm changing. For the past 3 weeks I've replaced eating out at restaurants with eating assortments of packed fruits, whole grains, and healthy snacks such as granola. I still drink sodas but I stick to diet sodas although I want to slowly wean off of that as well and go to just water.

I haven't fully replaced restaurants because frankly their convenience is so valued when I'm so time strapped, but I try to eat healthy as I can when I do eat out. Still, I'm keeping track of the types of foods I eat and I try to get fruits such as bananas, apples, oranges, and watermelon in as I can a day.

Also I've started exercising. Every morning I go to a local park and I run as long as I can until I'm forced to walk then recover and run again.. today was a sort of revolution for me, because while running instead of getting out of breath, I started out feeling tired but then my body recovered while I remained jogging!

I hadn't felt that way since I was in high school and I was fit. I ran an entire mile without stopping which for me is huge!!!!!! like seriously, when I first started I couldn't jog half a mile barely at once. Now I feel my endurance building and I'm able to go with a faster pace.

These changes I've made have resulted in me feeling happier, having more energy, and being more self-confident. It hasn't been long since I've been doing these things but the results I've gotten thus far have been enough to show me this is a path I want to continue on.

Just random thought

I had a conversation with a friend of mine about religion and I got to thinking. What if your conditioned view of the world, reality, the universe was completely false? What if instead of there being millions and billions of different things - people, mountains, molecules, stars, etc. They were all just apart of a god. A singular omnipotent and omniscient being that controls and is all of the things you come in contact with and you are the only independent thing in this universe.

What if this god has simply made the perception that you're interacting with different things, when in fact you're only interacting with it? The news you listen to, the people you meet, the things you type on your computer - all being apart of this greater being?

The human mind is incapable of proving a negative, because the way our logic works forms truth only from other things being true, but what if all things - even the axioms we rely on - are not what we perceieve them to be?

What do you think?

The sense of feeling is something we take for granted. The english phrase I just used does not quite convey the message I wanted to say, it isn't so much that we have a naive or fleeting view of the importance of touch or tactile senses, it's that we don't have a thorough philosophical and physiological knowledge of what tactile senses mean.

Of the many particles in the universe, occuring either singularly or in bulk very few of them (to current knowledge) are animated. Certainly the things they come into contact with are purely the result of involuntary adherences to physical law. Thus they are constrained to meet only a very tiny fraction of materials in this universe of the nearly infinite.

However, the natural sense of touch of a human or animal seeks to synthesize information about any particulate form the body comes into contact with. Even if the constitutent matter, being born from atoms primordial to this world, has never before contacted such materials. No remark in evolution could say that the inorganic and organic compounds have built a memory of all possible combinations of atoms into materials.

Indeed, it is not from a memory bank that unconscious nervous tissues responds to materials, a sabertooth tiger or any other ancient animal, would feel a computer just as we feel a computer, even though it was impossible for its nerves to memorize how to respond to a computer, having no such entity to build memory out of.

The same can be said of a wide variety of things, and the consistency of feeling to each human being - similar responses to physical phenomena - (electric shock, bee stings, fire) shows a remarkable and seemingly infinitely complex system. The nervous system.

How can the nervous system be built of such general stuff, such that anything new to it, anything foreign to its ancestry, can be synthesized into information so intimate and so revealing that it would not be an exaggeration to say that the things we feel are information that we most understand.

The end-bulbs of Krause were described by Henry Gray as being located in sensitive areas of the body, the conjunctiva of the eyes, the clitoris of the female and the penis of the male. They are termination points of nervous fibers, that is to say that medullated or grey nervous tissue follows a path through the body from the CNS and ends in connects into these bulbs. Indeed, from an anatomical viewpoint the same constitutent nerves white or medullated nervous fibers and grey or non medullated nervous fibers run along the human body and terminate in many different structures (one of them being the end-bulbs of Krause)

The other things they terminate into, exist in the muscles, the tendons, and various other human tissue. From the selective nature of how our feelings from touch are communicated to us, it would not be a stretch to say the origin of feelings comes from the qualities of the termination points.

That is to say, that obviously the end-bulbs of krause being located specifically in sexually sensitive organs is what makes these organs sexually sensitive. This feeling is unique to the structure of the end-bulb of Krause. If this statement is true, then it should follow that the qualities of other feelings namely soreness, heat, cold, pain, pleasure all come from the particular structures the nearby nerves are connected to. (The structures of the termination points)

What I've always wondered, was that if what I say is true, and that feelings can be reduced to a system of physical (chemical, biological, and physical) properties, then can we make some chemical or something that generates some reaction (in the nerves) that is similar in response to the real physical thing?

If someone for instance generated something similar to lactic acid and poured it on my arm, would my arm then feel sore? Even if I haven't lifted weights, if the physical manifestation of lifting weights is reproduced, will my nerves tell the difference? Will my arm feel sore?

Another thing that has confused me, and that is tickling.

What evolutionary purpose does tickling serve? What possible use could come from someone being able to render someone laughing? Apes to a diminished extent show a response to tickling, but for the most part no other animal has a significant physiological response.

I say significant, because tickling is a severe reaction in the nerves, if you have someone tickle you, you will notice your muscles tense to such an extent that would normally be seen under heavy weight lifting. The sensation is strong enough to immobilize a person, and it results in laughter.

But some people are not ticklish, they do not laugh and their efferent nerves do not tense their muscles upon being tickled. What possible quality are they lacking or what chemical do they have that makes it so their nerves are not susceptible?

For that matter, how does tickling work? How do fast movements along the surface of the skin produce such a strong response? And in fact it's not constrained to fast movements, slow movements, rubbing movements, and poking movements all produce the reaction. Indeed no movement at all can still illicit the nervous response from in vitro anticipation. (wiggling of fingers above skin surface)

Is it the energy in the frequency, the psychological response, the construction of the nerves, a combination of these things?

Laughter is healthy, but I think most people interpret tickling as painful, but then how can such a dichotomy exist? Laughter is something that should show happiness, and yet pain is the physiological response.

Tickling has social and physiological questions to it and it's one of the main mysterious of the human nervous system.

Sports

I'm beginning to enjoy soccer more than American football. I suppose this isn't anything particularly noteworthy in that this seems to be the prevailing opinion of most people in the world, however for me it is significant. I grew up to football and basketball, I played basketball throughout middle school, and I played football since middle school and into high school.

In Texas American football almost ranks as important as your mom or dad. Even in mere high school regular season games there would be around 5,000-10,000 fans watching a division 5A (highest division) football. Not to mention that most games are broadcast on major radio stations and some are even broadcast on television! Practices are held 3 times a day, for 2 hours each in the summers and springs. During the football season, there are again 3 time a day practices, and in the offseason there are 2 a day practices. That is to say that football as a teenager in Texas is a year round full time job.

Once you get into state playoff high school games, they're broadcast on local ABC/FOX networks, radio stations and many tens thousands of fans flock to NFL sized stadiums (see Jerry World) to see mere TEENAGERS play.

When it gets to the college level, there's a 100+ YEAR history of football tradition in this state. The Texas Longhorns have a stadium that can seat over 100,000 people, there are perhaps only 10 or so such stadiums in the world with this type of capacity. It easily trumps any major soccer stadium in Europe. Televised games are broadcast throughout the country, and millions of people watch.

Football is beyond fathoming in its importance to Texans.

And yet, for me - I'm beginning to enjoy watching soccer more. Yes soccer has its downsides with player behavior and lack of video review, but the drama associated with goals as well as the insane strategy, finess, and skill required make them makes the sport so enjoyable to watch. I'm sad that the world cup is over, but USA has shown a lot of promise and I believe that there is a large upside to this sport that can't be neglected forever in this country.

Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm60ZIVnXZw



This video is perhaps my most favorite video on youtube. The music is perfect to the plot, it creates the feeling of a cold descend down stairs into a hell. A hell consumed in hysteria, of insanity, the mind of a psychopathic surgeon in a dungeon of captivated patients. The ambitions of a psychiatrist to his lobotomies, the symbols of all that is come to be known as unmitigated departure from the mind.

Whenever I watch this video, it moves me so - it can turn my emotions at once from a still lake into a primitive, raging, flushing river full of rancor and passion. Whoever created this video should do more - Undoubtedly on the French Revolution.

On Maraviroc

Maraviroc to me represents progress, I can faintly remember in my youth the news about the (then new) protease inhibitors and that mankind had finally found a way to stay (or perhaps more accruately subdue) the wild raging beast that was HIV/AIDS. To me, this new generation of treatment will be the "cure" of the disease.

Maraviroc has a simple formulation that has a binds highly selectively to the CCR5 also recently defined as CD195 "cluster of differentiation" 195. Upon binding to this chemokine receptor it blocks it! I don't know, ask a biochemical major. What I do know is that CCR5 is a corecepter used by HIV-1 to gain access into the cell. CCR5 is (coincidentally) present on all major classes of cells that HIV-1 infects - that is, CD4+ T cells, dendritic cells, microgliac, as well as macrophages. Studies in years past have shown that northern european men and women who had double homozygous mutations of the delta-32 gene (the gene that expresses CCR5) could not be infected by HIV-1. Indeed, a patient in Germany three years ago who had HIV as well as late stage leukemia was given a bone marrow transplant with a donor who had the delta-32 mutation. The operation was successful and the man has not had detectable levels of HIV.

The human body can no doubt live without a functional CCR5 chemokine receptor and as such it basically represents a naked vulnerability that must be perged, blocked, and destroyed. Ideally doctors could give bone marrow transplants to everyone - but of course even with modern technology a bone marrow transplant has a survival rate around 33% and donors are certainly not universal.

However, Maraviroc is universal. Studies have shown that it is highly tolerated with minimal side effects and with high binding efficiency. It was only recently released (2008 I believe) and so studies have not shown its efficiency when used as post prophylaxis treatment or as a general preventive drug.

However, theoretically and perhaps with a small dose of faith, I believe this drug can, will, and should be used for preventive care. If one is on a constant dose of this medication, the amount of cells an introduced HIV vector could potentially infect is dramatically lessened. If the virus is unable to achieve reproduction quickly enough the body will remove the inert substance by natural means - this is the theory behind current protease prophylaxis treatment. However, giving Maraviroc as a single pill at a precautionary dose is much more practical than the expensive combination of HAART preventative treatment and is without the severe side effects.

Unfortunately the second strain of the virus, HIV-2 predominatly located in west Africa does not use the CCR5 chemokine receptor and so maraviroc would be of little use. However, the theory should the same - the coreceptor is known for HIV-2 and a drug could be synthesized - perhaps outside of the united states where regulations are not so costly..

I've been working on a chemical compound using the same ideas from the maraviroc formulation - but without any means of testing and with very little current knowledge of biochemistry I feel it's hopeless. Also my general ignorance of pharmacuetical regulation. These problems can be remedied with time and effort. Perhaps I'll have to wait until medical school.

but the thoughts of the suffering. Pneumocytosis pneumonia, toxoplasmosis, ADC, induced cancers, tuberculosis, Kaposi sarcoma, Flu, rheumatic fevers - all multiplied in the thousands of people suffering.

One wonders if those who work on pharmaceuticals - the scientists not the businessmen - feel the collective pains, the souls in need of a hero. Does it keep them up at night?

I will bear witness.

Currently I'm reading a translated version of Victor Klemperer's personal diary of life in Nazi Germany. Of course the majority of the diary entries are constrained to personal influences of the Nazi regime it nevertheless provides sufficient broad details of the systematic choking of the Jewish people under Hitler's political machine. Klemperer was a literary professor at a technical institute in Germany who had an interest in the French enlightment particularly with famous writers such as Voltaire. It is no wonder then, that his diaries contain sufficient and often candid depictions of life as a Jew.

If read in the right frame of mind, one begins to live the life in situ of a Jewish citizen. Such a horrid existence, early on Klemperer knew from 1933 at the beginning of it all, that impending doom would come to him and his people. Einstein had the same insight and left Germany that year. The freedoms were taken quite suddenly actually. Jews in professorships were quickly removed of their posts within weeks of Hitler's rise to power. Jewish professors were not allowed to give examinations to students (one colleague of Klemperer's did and was subsequently removed from his post) Telephone calls and letters from Jews were monitered by state agencies. In this year Jewish people did not necessarily fear for their lives in so much as worry about their livelihoods. Klemperer however wrote of accounts of men within only a month of time wearing SA uniforms and swatiska's although still treating him politely the writing was on the wall.

... when you turn on the news and you hear someone was murdered, your heart feels for the victim and their family and rage builds against the aggressor. This is a very natural instinct, because one recognizes injustice based off an internally and externally grounded sense of morality and virtue. Men fight wars voluntarily based off their grounded ideals of virtue. Cultures across the world adopt laws protecting their people from crimes against humanity such as murder, rape, burglarly - these concepts of morality are not new to modern civilization it can be shown since Hammurabi's code and Roman and Greek as well as Egyptian law that men have shared common sense of virtue for millenia.

One thing that has always confounded me is that people can be programed so easily to turn against their long grounded and perhaps even natural belief in morality. When Stalin called his fellow communists to pillage and burn at the stake the Kulaks and other "rich" persons people of course followed his orders and slaughtered them. Hitler infected millions of Germans to share his hell borne ideas of Jews to the point where they willingly slaughtered them as if they were less than animals. Mao convinced the Chinese communists to purge each other in the great cultural revolution. All of these dictators were able to spread a message that was completely against what is the natural and grounded beliefs in morality.

But how? Psychologists describe the phenomenon known as group think and obviously this is what was going on in each of these tyrannies, however if the original group thought was inclined to morality - what change in that group think allowed the tyrants to gain power?

Clearly in Nazi Germany it was the fall of Germany in WWI, the treaty of Versailles, the French occupation of German territory, as well as the bout of hyperinflation these seemingly unrelated phenomena is what cracked the German people and allowed their normal equilibrium of thought and practice to be guided by..well Hitler.

It leaves one to wonder, that the true threat to freedom is not necessarily to tyrants themself for they exist indefinitely within a population. Rather the true threat to freedom is extreme environmental conditions to a culture. Like the financial collapse of 2008. Obama is too stupid to take advantage of the American people(well in the sense of becoming a dictator), but one must wonder what future hell can await modern civilization if America were to suffer a catastrophe similar to what happened in the 1920s to Germany.