Mind Steroids

All this talk about 'roids in baseball got me thinking... there's stuff you can take to make your muscles bigger, but is there anything you could take to increase brainpower? I mean, if you're a professional athlete and you want to win at all costs, steroids are there for you. What about for the rest of us? I was on math team in high school (that's right, a mathlete haha) and basically there's no shortcuts there, no matter how badly you wanted to stomp the competition.

Or, say you were one of those kids at the National Spelling Bee. There's thousands of dollars at stake there, you know? I'd think that somebody, somewhere must have found a way by now to give them an edge over the rest.

I heard once that some Chinese herbal medicine or ginseng or something is supposed to clinically increase the rate of firing in your brain's neuronic network, but I have no idea if it's true. And there's that thing about listening to Mozart before taking SAT's or whatever. For the most part, though, it seems like if you want to be smart, you're gonna have to be born with a good brain and exercise it frequently by educating yourself and stuff. There's no cheap fix there, just how it should be in the first place.

Still, wouldn't it be funny if there was some sort of mind steroid out there? They'd have to test those Spelling Bee kids before competition. Once in a while some hapless fool might overdose and his brain would melt or something. Maybe they would also have that lovely side effect of shrinking your testicles like real steroids do.

Call me crazy, buy with the way biological research is progressing nowadays, I have a strange feeling that we might see something along those lines in the not too distant future. But you won't ever see me go near anything like that. I personally feel that shrunken testes are probably too high of a cost for increased intelligence. Plus, nobody really likes smartypants anyways.

Whitewater Rafting

Well, I spent the past weekend in Wisconsin doing some camping and Whitewater rafting. It was a good experience and I've now returned with some more scattered thoughts....

Mosquitoes suck. Can you imagine a life lasting only a few hours or days, during which the only way for you to survive is to make the lives of others miserable? These little vampires serve no useful function in the ecosystem, yet they are so highly evolved that it's doubtful we'll ever be able to get rid of them. Kind of like those Campus Parking workers at U of I.

I don't need a cell phone. I don't really need high speed internet or cable TV either, for that matter. Technology is great, but how much do we need it all? I remember last summer taking Leisure Studies 100 down at U of I (that could be a whole blog in itself probably), and they were telling us that studies showed people were making more money now than 20 years ago or so, but they were less happy. It's easy to forget, but the key to happiness is not adding to our possessions, but subtracting from our wants (no, I didn't come up with that little saying myself). That doesn't mean I'm gonna go cancel my cell phone, internet, and cable, because those things are still useful to me even if they aren't a necessity. But one thing I realized is that if I want to live a happy life, at some point I will have to be satisfied with where I am and what I have. Right now, I sometimes think that I will be happy once I have a good job, marry the girl I love, have two or three kids, and drive a BMW M5. Yet I have a feeling that even if I make it to that point, I'll only want more. I'll want a better job, expect my wife and kids to be perfect, and trade in the M5 for a Ferrari. So the point is, it's not necessarily bad to want certain things in life, just that you shouldn't expect them to make you happy. It sounds cheesy of course, but happiness comes from within.

My car makes for a better sleeping spot than a tent with a hole in it set on rocky, uneven ground. Leather seats and a quiet night's rest. Can't beat that. Except maybe on a waterbed. Or a normal bed. Or even a cot.

It's nature's world, and we just live in it. I've always grown up in a well developed area, surrounded by technology and nice amenities like clean showers, air conditioning, and ESPN Sportscenter. But up there, it's all trees, fields, rivers, and then a couple people and a few buildings. I always kill these spiders and flies that get in or around my house like a badass, but I think all those bugs got their revenge on me this weekend. It's like they were saying, "welcome to our house, biatch" and proceeding to feed away on my blood. Well, now that I'm back home, maybe the little experience will make me more merciful to these guys. Actually, that's not too bloody likely. It's on, little bloodsuckers, I'm a hard man and I don't forgive easily...

So there's a little of what you all missed as I was away. I'm still recovering from the many many bites, the blisters on my hand from rowing, a little headache possibly from mild smoke inhalation or sunburn, but it's alright. I'm gonna be fine.