Twins were in the news like crazy this week, and because I'm fortunate enough to be a twin, I read the articles because I like to see what they are saying about us.
The New York Times ran a story on Monday about astronaut Commander Scott Kelly and his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly (husband to Gabby Giffords). Next year, Scott Kelly will return to space for an extended stay, "and after his return, scientists will closely monitor Commander Kelly to see what changes space has wrought." NASA will also be monitoring Mark Kelly (now retired). As the Kelly's will be the only identical twins to have flown in space, scientists plan to do a full genome analysis of the brothers to study how environment changes genes.
Because the twin birth rate in the U.S. is climbing (twin birthrate rose 76 percent from 1980 to 2009, according to the National Center for Health Statistics...yes, someday, we will take over the world), more "twin" studies than ever are being done, which means more articles, more myths, leading to more fascination.
Another interesting fact (not mentioned in the article): Though rare, it is possible for identical twins to have different blood types. Identical twins come from the same egg and the same sperm, so we share nearly identical DNA, but some small changes in DNA can happen.
So, because it is Thursday, I dug out a TBT picture of me and my identical twin sister, and a selfie we took in 2012. Wonder twin powers. Activate.
"Do you have synesthesia?" This was a question my massage therapist asked me last week. I had no idea what that even meant, so I said, "Probably."
He laughed, then he explained that synesthesia is a condition where a person can experience two senses at the same time. He used an example of a person smelling a distinct smell when they see the color green. I've had similar experiences at Phish shows, but totally unrelated to synesthesia. I didn't bring that up.
Coincidentally, that same evening, Poseidon and I were having a beer with one of my coworkers and her husband, and we were noticing the details on some of the pint glasses, when she mentioned that her friend assigns gender to inanimate objects, including beer glasses. If a pint glass is "plain" it is male. If a glass has a stem, it is female (which seems a bit backward to me), if the color of the logo is yellow, it is female, etc.
I then blurted out, "Wow, I assign gender to numbers and letters, and months." I've imagined genders for letters, numbers, and months since childhood. Guess what? There is a name for this! Yup. It's called ordinal-linguistic personification, which is a form of synesthesia.
Here is what my brain thinks when it sees numbers, letters, and names of months:
NUMBERS 1 - male (a tomboy) 2 - female 3 - male (usually with a moustache) 4 - male (very aloof) 5 - female (an overweight female) 6 - female 7 - male 8 - female 9 - female (a tomboy and a bully) 10 - male
LETTERS A - female B - female C - female D - male E - male (a bully) F - male G - male H - male I - male J - male K - female L - male M - male N - male O - female P - female Q - female R - female (a loner, very independent) S - female (dainty, prissy) T - male U - female V - male (another loner) W - male X - female Y - male (arrogant) Z - female
MONTHS January - female (tomboy) February - female March - male April - female (usually sad) May - female June - female July - male (when I was younger, July was female, but now it is male) August - female (overweight female) September - female (tomboy) October - male November - male (always brown) December - male (he always wears a hat)
I'm glad I finally looked this up, if anything, just to give it a name. Seriously, I assumed everyone did this, especially as a child, but today when I did an impromptu survey during lunch, and out of the six of us at the table, only I thought the letter "A" should be wearing a dress. Any other ordinal-linguistic personification folks out there?
"Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?"
In March, Poseidon sent me a link to an article published in The Atlantic, "How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy," and I intended to post about it immediately, but it slipped my mind and burrowed its way to the bottom of my potential blog post pile. I just found the link and re-read the article, and holy canoli Batman, my cats are trying to kill me, or at the very least, plan to possess me and make me wreck my car.
The article centers around the research of Jaroslav Flegr, a Czech scientist, who suspected that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family "was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others."
This parasite exists in...you guessed it, cats, or rather the feces of cats, which can be transmitted to people, where the parasite lies dormant in our (gulp) brain cells. That's right y'all...we can get it!
"But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia."
Egads, Kwinn and Kat might somehow make me decide to broil Poseidon with some red potatos or make a meat loaf, then I might start distrusting my neighbors and feed them the meat loaf.
My cats are my babies (I blog and blab about them ad nauseum), so without proof that I have this parasite floating around in me, I won't turn my precious cats out in the street, or put them in a basket and leave them on someone's doorstep, or toss them out of a cab Holly Golightly style, but this article is fascinating and gives new meaning to the term "crazy cat lady." Now, where is my big cooking pot?
When we first started dating, my (now) husband, Poseidon (he formerly prefered to go by "Zeus"), for some (or many) reasons came to the conclusion that I must be an alien. I can't say for sure why, but his convictions remain strong, and he often makes comments about my alleged extraterrestrial heritage. I finally feel obliged to acknowledge his pseudodoxy that I am froma distant galaxy, yet to be discovered by mere earthlings; however, he accepts me anyway (and for this I'm grateful...or should I say, "And for this I'm grateful?").
Last night while watching television, we were having some discussion, on what, I don't recall, but he looked at me and said, "You were released from your vial too soon, weren't you?" He then asked me to tell him all about the portal to Middle Earth because he heard it was somewhere in West Virginia, and I am originally from West Virginia and an otherworldly oddball, so I must know, but I had no idea what he was talking about (has anyone else heard of this "portal" to Middle Earth in WV?).
I play along with the alien bit, because frankly, I've been programmed to do so, and I don't want to blow my cover or 'they' will beam me back up into space (or down to Middle Earth). I simply told him that I was not released from my vial prematurely but that I had lost my instruction manual early on and had to wing it.
This seemed to satisfy his need to remind me that he knows where I really came from and I might as well be honest about it, like he's going to turn me in to the CIA, or NASA, or whatever incompetent agency handles E.T.s these days. Turn me in? Seriously, who would remind him to set his alarm clock every night (I have to do this every night)? Who would buy his bagels and organic yogurt every week? Who would do the laundry...oh, wait, he does the laundry. So, when the mothership decides I've collected enough data and they come to take me home, Poseidon will starve, be late for work everyday, but at least he will have clean shirts.
I recently blogged about a particular scar I received as a child during one of my many crazy childhood antics, and as an aging Gen Xer, it started me down a nostalgic path, urging me to write about some other childhood tales. You know, sort of get them off of my chest, confess, but most importantly, relive those daring days of old; shocked as all get out that I'm still breathing and all of my appendages are in tact after all.
When my twin sister and I were in the third grade we were living in a quaint little town in Georgia (I won't say the name because I don't want to bring shock and embarrassment to the town). Our very best friend from across the street, Jenny (that is her real name; I don't think she would mind me using it) was a tomboy and so were my sister and I, which made getting into trouble altogether easy. The three of us were inseparable and we played outside literally from sun up to well beyond sun down on the weekends and when we weren't in school. Our parents usually had to come and find us to come in for bed at night. We were also in constant trouble. By trouble, I don't mean insignificant negligible things like accidentally running into the neighbor's car with our bikes (though we did do that), forgetting to take the garbage out when it was our turn, leaving my little brother down the street (we did those things too), etc. I'm talking about precocious, cheeky, avant-garde escapades that should never enter the mind of 3rd graders.
You see, as members of Generation X (though that term didn't exist when were 8), we thought the world was at our feet. We we were determined to be important female scientists when we grew up, so we wanted to start early by doing our own experiments, creating concoctions made up of every household cleaner we could find (we even created our own rocket fuel, but I'll write about that later), documenting everything we did to improve on our experiments, etc. We even had our own science lab in the woods at the end of our street (our street, Elder Drive, was a dead end street with acres and acres of woods at the end). We chopped down small trees to make a clearing. We cut steps into the Georgia clay dirt to give our lab a split-level design. We had notebooks and pencils and a cheap toy microscope. We even had a mason jar with change we collected in order to buy "supplies" for our lab when needed. It was this science lab that got us into many predicaments and the cause of much of our parents' and neighbors' vexation.
Our first order of business one Saturday morning, as up and coming scientists, was to find something we could study under our microscope, because after all, isn't that what scientists do? From TV, we learned that scientists usually look at blood under the microscope so after a long day of brainstorming, we agreed that is what we needed to study. The question was whose blood would we "study"? We didn't think we needed to look at our own blood because we were the scientists after all, so we decided that we would get blood samples from kids at school on the playground during recess.
The next Monday, during recess, we started asking kids if they wanted to be part of an important scientific test. Much to our surprise, we had a few takers. The problem was that we didn't have any glass slides for our microscope, so we had to find some glass. We got some sticks and began to dig up pieces of broken glass we found in the dirt on the playground. The glass was mostly from soda bottles, and it was clear glass, so we were in business. We wiped the dirt off the best we could and began to round up our victims, I mean test subjects. What we didn't know was the word spread around the playground about our important scientific work and many kids wanted to be part of it. We weren't just budding young scientists, we were also little capitalists in the making, so we decided we would charge these kids 25 cents to let us get a sample of their blood.
We began making small cuts on the fingers of those who wanted to be part of history with the broken glass we found. We smeared the blood all over the glass (it really wasn't much blood, so don't be too concerned). By the end of recess we had made enough money to buy ice cream for the next day's recess and we had some blood we could study under our microscope. Alas, like most 3rd graders, our attention span was short, and by the time we got home from school we were already bored with the microscope idea and we never viewed our blood samples. But, there is good news. We (the Elder Drive Scientists) were so popular with the gullible students now because they thought we were big time scientists in the making that we made enough money to buy ice cream at recess for many, many days.
