Brain Fodder

I got sick of listing this on Etsy. It’s highly unlikely anyone would run across this, but it is just as unlikely on Etsy where I have to pay to list. So...

My joints are very bad and always have been. They are getting worse. I'm starting to reach for "unscientific" things... Things to try to slow down the destruction of time. Let this be the first post to describe my issues. I will check in here and there to say if changes happen:

My hands shake when I hold anything stomach high for longer than 5 min. If I am doing something higher in a more athletic way, my hands go numb after a few minutes and I drop whatever I'm holding. All my joints are bad, some are extremely bad.

My skin is thin, so fine lines show up like crazy. I have fine and thin hair, so if there are are any changes it'll be obvious.

Reshma Saujani

He insisted. Thus, I had to wait for the next hour or so for food that I knew would disappoint me, only to make something for myself in the end anyway.

This did come to pass. Even after phone calls from the establishment suggesting meat items that my husband asserted were 'not welcome', my burrito was full of bacon. It also had an entire onion that was not chopped as well as a heavy log of old refried beans.

I have never, ever thrown a burrito away before. Yesterday was momentus. The first time. It's hard to understand why it was so infuriating since it was just a burrito. We didn't even have to pay for it. In moments of being hangry it is hard to determine if our rage is justified. I had waited long outside my comfort zone for a disgusting burrito that killed my appetite the second I saw the contents. A true disappointment.

Tomorrow is my last day in Boston. In the last two days I've gotten three very strange messages-- one from a pissed off stranger on Craigslist who didn't like that I put my location as the northern most part of Dorchester. The next was an essay about religion, death, science and self realization from a boy who was in my brother's karate class 18 years ago. The last from my husband's ex.

In our own Milky Way there are one hundred billion stars. Of these, as a sweeping average, 1.6 planets exist per star. And for comparison, there are one trillion stars in our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda.

So, let's just say there are about 500 billion stars per galaxy and 1.6 planets for each star. That means there are approximately 8 x 10^23 planets.

For reference, there are about 40 billion Earth sized planets in the habitable zones of stars in the Milky Way. If other galaxies had similar numbers, there would be 8x10^21 Earth like planets in the universe.

So, if you lived to be 250 billion years old, the number of those planets would be equivalent to the cumulative MILLISECONDS of your life span. And estimating about 1 million reactions in a eukaryotic cell per ms, that would be soooooo many reactions in your enormously ancient lifetime that numbers cannot convey the magnitude properly.

“Now, about your hair.”

My hair.

“Your gray hair. It’s a difficult thing for most women, going gray, and most choose to color their hair. But you don’t.”

I did color it, for a while, and then it was just so much trouble. My father had gorgeous steel gray hair, and it turned silver quite early because he had been a prisoner of war in Korea. He came back to us whole and healthy, but I think he started to turn gray pretty soon after. If I didn’t think it looked good on me, I would color it. Women should do whatever makes them feel good, but I do wish that we would accept our aging selves.

“Our culture is obsessed with youth.”

Especially if you’re in the public eye. They think you shouldn’t age…