I hate to depress you right before a 3 day weekend, but this is some serious shit. mightgodking has been following it and I have been reading it all and I am scared shitless from it all. This is all related and all truly and completely awful.

A primeval tide of toxins

Dead zones off Oregon and Washington likely tied to global warming, study says

Killer jellyfish population explosion warning

Tripp, when did you start posting so many links?

I don't know. Probably in the last couple of weeks when I realized:
1. end of the week sucks. And you could use some pick me ups.
2. that not everyone reads the web as obsessively as I do.

Let's go:

a u.s scientist has cloned himself from skin cells. Only a matter of time. Still a bit freaky. But hey, maybe they can grow me a new colon. Who am I to argue with progress?

The coolest piece of junk I've seen this week (I forget last week's winner, 2 week's ago, it was this japanese masturbation aid): a tentacle arm. Ah yeah.

Some more words about ffffound, which I am still addicted to. Having it's front page feed in my reader is a source of constant happiness. Don't believe me? How about this, this, this, this or this or this?

No? How about some fun and silly nerd flickr pictures then?

And finally, a couple of articles on io9 — future newspapers in movies and such and info on a new mini-series on the history channel called "life without humans," which really just sounds like 'the world without us' which i still really really really want to read.

i meant to write about this weeks ago, when i first made the appointment.

knowing i was job-shifting, i held off for many months making doctor appointments. and they racked up. when i started work at the big C, i decided that i needed to get my ass in gear. and in one afternoon, i made appointments for all the things i had avoided the previous 10 or 12 months.

dentist. optometrist. dermatologist. couple those with my urologist (remember my lovely kidney stone?) and my gastroenterologist. and finally, allergist.

and here i am today now, at the allergists. getting tested for foods — the foods i can't. the food i haven't eaten since junior year of high school.

soy and peanuts and shellfish.

i had skin tests an hour ago. the scale for these things is a bit loose — foods are ranked 1-4 based on mm of the resulting rash. 3 and 4 are considered 'allergies.' soy gave me a 2. peanuts and shrimp a 3. and oysters a 4. none were huge or bad. none seem serious.

the doctor doesnt think any of these will be a problem. considering i was told years ago that i could eat shrimp, i'm not worried.

i believe we just finished soy. with no reaction. i'm sure i need the doctor's confirmation, but i appear to be all clear for soy. i have asked that peanuts be next. we might not get to shellfish today, so i'm not sure what that will mean.

but yay! soy!

it's going to take a long time to be over this mentally. it's been 14 years of avoiding these foods. man.

things that have happened to me recently:

1. i just had a filling. it was a little one, so it wasn't bad. but the right side of my mouth is all wonky now. i can see it being a little sore as the novocaine wears off. such is life.

2. i just read a 'made in 24 hours' comic about crohns disease. it's really good and sums up a lot of the experiences i had prior to surgery. unfortunately, crohns doesn't have the 'cure' colitis does — namely, removing the offending organ (because crohns impacts both the large and the small intestines). the only exception to my experience in this story was the energy fro 'roids. i was so sick by the time they threw me on them that i didn't even notice — in fact, most of them seemed to almost make me feel worse.

the story about food ads on tv is especially true. i don't talk too much about being sick anymore with anyone but rachael really. if you're new to the game, the hospital saga seems to start around this post — but petunia and carter and roxy all posted stuff around then too from their experiences.

here is a morsel: i was hospitalized and my parents flew out to la. they basically lived in my apartment for the 40 days i was stuck in a hospital bed, making a few flights home to hold down the fort. one of the things they did in the mornings and evenings was clean the apartment. they had nothing else to do and no other outlet for the stress my illness was causing them.

and one day, cleaning, they found the list i had made before i got super-sick. it was titled "foods i will eat again when i am well". it was a solid sheet, though written in sharpie, of foods i missed eating. everything from pizza to biscuits n gravy (which i still haven't had — i'm unsure if this is due to my not really wanting it or just sheer laziness). anyway, the list is depressing and it made my parents cry. and i still have it; i found it in a box last week. maybe ill scan it. but it really is depressing.

so yeah, this comic is pretty much what life was like for me for a (short) while. and now it isn't. it's still not ideal but i have less than zero room for complaining or whining.

3. hima wrote me the other day about patrick. we all know i enjoy the 'the world is so small!' stories. well, this time, it turns out that hima has a friend. this friend is dating a boy. the boy is the brother of patrick's wife. so it seems i am connected to both sides of the family.

hima knew a few details i didn't, but we had to agree that nothing seemed to make sense. of course, we have little information and are sitting a continent away, but still.

that too, is what makes this so weird. i was attached through vcu peeps to all of this, because patrick taught there. and because i know meg. but hima, she is all the way out here with virtually no connection back. but yet, there is one. a fairly direct one. and the fact that she an i know each other just makes it all the more odd.

seriously, how many people do i know that are connected to other people i know, independently of me? the world is tiny.

* * *

seriously, i can't be the only one that freaks out over this article: Tests reveal high chemical levels in kids' bodies

But that fascination soon changed to fear, as tests revealed that their children — Rowan, then 18 months, and Mikaela, then 5 — had chemical exposure levels up to seven times those of their parents.

and then on npr this morning, i hear someone say that the earth has had 5 major extinctions. and we are about to be number 6.

sigh.
its enough to make me want panic in the streets.

from the new yorker, an excellent article on race, soul and music: a paler shade of white

i haven't finished reading this yet, but it highlights a feeling that i have never been able to articulate, and, as a result, i have never really discussed with my friends: i just don't like newer indie rock.

a small gaggle of us went and saw lcd soundsystem and arcade fire at shoreline about a month ago. i went for lcd — arcade fire does very little for me. this article talks about how the rhythms in indie/rock music have moved away from sould and blues, at about the same time that rap became a dominating force.

for me, the guy who played bass drum in high school, who got sucked into rave/electronic/industrial music, this explains a ton. i like things with heavy beats. it's not that i don't like indie stuff — but the 'colege rock' of the 90s sounds amazing different than the stuff that comes around now. for a long time, i thought it was maybe nostalgia. but it isn't — i'm still listening to new music. it's just that most of the rock i hear doesn't have a soul, doesn't pack a punch for me.

anyway, i found the article to be really solid. highly recommended read — john, chrispy, kurt, mike…i'm looking at you all specifically.

and just in case you aren't into music, how about reading about how cloned meat is slipping its way into the food chain.

Note: I realize posts about my kids might get tiresome for some out there, but frankly, this just knocked me on my ass.

It’s the morning hustle and bustle, as usual. I’ve actually got the kids fed, dressed (with shoes on!) and headed towards the door and nobody’s crying. And I’m only like five minutes late. Amazing, right? But wait, there’s more.

Sure. I stayed up late fixing lunch and laying out clothes and stuff. But we had to get to the auto shop to drop off the car and pick up a loaner before heading off to the rest of the day. I hadn’t stopped moving since 6:30 when ’Bekah got up. Play, change diaper, feed, play, dress, cook, wake, dress, potty, feed, pack, go. I was moving. My sweet boy is trying to tell me about the words he made yesterday with his letter puzzle, pulling the letters of the alphabet and making words with them. We’d been playing with A, T and R. He made ‘rat’ and I suggested switching the ‘t’ and the ‘r’ to make ‘tar.’ So this morning, as I’m swiftly moving everything toward the door, he tells me he rearranged them to make ‘art.’ Which, hey, I thought that was pretty cool. And he had other letter combinations laid out on the floor, too, I noticed.

“Is N-I a word?”
“No, sweetie, N-I is not a word.” He had the ‘n’ lying next to the ‘i’, and of course I start making dumb jokes about the Knights of Ni. Sure. A four-year-old is going to get that.
“Yeah,” he says “It’s an abbreviation.” Abbreviations are our new favorite thing. I had to explain to him that you couldn’t abbreviate T.V. to just ‘T’ because TV was an abbreviation itself. I don’t think he bought it.
“An abbreviation?” I ask, continuing our movement to the garage and thinking he’s just playing. “Of what?” We’re going through the door.
“Nickel.”
He continues walking to the car with his little hat on and his socks pulled up to his knees and I stand there in my tracks, bags over my shoulder, baby in my arms, keys in my hand, running through the abbreviations from the periodic table in my head.
“Yep. Yep, Ni is an abbreviation for nickel.”

Holy. Crap.

Reed started his first science experiment today. I guess having just turned four, he’s ready to start working on that Nobel. We have five cups of water, each with a white daisy in it. Four of the cups have different food colorings mixed into the water: blue, red, green and orange. The fifth is our control. Granted, he got the idea for the experiment from the back of a book he was reading, but then, how many four-year-olds are reading books and interested in doing experiments to demonstrate how plants transport water? I’m a jaded sack of shit, and even I think it’s cool to see the flower petals change colors.