Unsolicited Advice

I learn new things every time I volunteer for a research study. Today, I learned that neuroimaging researchers have no idea how the fMRI works. Oh, they're aware that there's a very large magnet in it, and that the people who paid for the very large magnet said NO METAL IN THE MRI ROOM in equally large block capitals. Beyond that they don't really have any idea. They know they're measuring brain activity, and I think  some of them know what marker they're using (blood flow), but they don't appear to know by what arcane sorcery big magnet + blood = animated GIF of the brain. [Hemoglobin is magnetically susceptible. Only very, very faintly, hence the mad scientist-grade 4T magnet in the MRI scanner. Hemoglobin that's carrying oxygen has a slightly different response than hemoglobin that's already dropped it off, and brain regions that are active get an influx of the oxygenated stuff. Awesomely powerful, but also awesomely picky, and if you don't do...

Curiosity got the better of me again, and I went out to try to investigate why the hell people are so fascinated by television shows about 600 lb humans. I should know better than to do this. I always just end up wondering how people get into such goddamn stupid arguments. Body image issues are always something I have to approach like an alien anthropologist. I have plenty of problems, but hating the mirror is not one of them. I ran into a picture of Mae West when I was maybe eleven or twelve and thought to myself, "I want to look like that when I grow up." And lo, for it came to pass. I am wasp-waisted and hourglassy. It's not necessarily the fashionable shape of the day, but neither does anyone complain at me about it. Nothing fits quite right when I buy it, but when your problem is "I always have to take the waist in several inches," you don't get a lot of sympathy. Worrying about weight is especially weird to me. I don't normally know exactly w...

You know how, if people find out you enjoy something you have a talent for, they like to tell you to "follow your dream"? They give you this advice on the assumption that the terrible consequence of not doing that is that you will have a tedious mundane life in which you will always wonder if you could have made it. The dichotomy there is 'stay safe' vs 'challenge yourself', with a side order of 'you can always go back to being boring and normal if you totally bomb'. Nobody ever gives you career advice for when the arts are your only option. I assume there was some at some point, but it was discontinued when 'circus freak' stopped being the only choice that won out over 'sidewalk match-seller' and 'homeless beggar' as the prestige career for the terminally different. Although, I seem to have accidentally run away from home and joined the circus already, so maybe there's still some merit in that plan. I try not to post to...

My trip to the urgent care clinic got me, in addition to some pretty decent drugs and a set of X-rays done by a tech who also has EDS run in her family, a referral to Sports Medicine over at a nearby hospital. I never in a thousand years would have thought to ask for that. Sports medicine is for people who do, you know, sport... type... things. Right? I just dance. Maybe a lot. Like an hour a day. Or so. Plus I'm at the studio twice a week. And I'm starting to pick up students. Someone recently asked my rates. Unprompted. Shit. I'm not good at this, okay? My computers can all update themselves without supervision, I don't know why I can't. I did tell the doctor at the urgent care that I was aware that I should stay active so that my joints didn't rattle around quite so much, and that to that end I'd taken up dancing. The referral to SM suggests that she took "dancer" and filled in "serious" or possibly "professional" on her ...

It is a bizarre fact of life that, if you click on a documentary on YouTube and let it autoplay through for long enough, it will eventually try to serve up a television program about a fat person. I have no idea why this is, other than "because internet". It's not exactly my favorite sort of reality TV pap -- I watch lurid true crime shows, myself -- but I do occasionally let it run through out of sheer curiosity. I categorically refuse to get into any fat acceptance/Health At Any Size discussions here, except to comment that, while I am absolutely positive that fat people are people  and should be treated as such, I am getting less and less sure about reality TV producers. The two most common thoughts I have while watching these things are, "Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to put this on the air?" and "Is it possible to reach backwards through space and time to punch the insensitive jackass presenting this program?" The third thing I think...