"The only thing anyone will ever have in common with my ex is they will be male."

I feel like this is a good quote for today.

Idiot Ink

Here is a collection of some of the ugliest tattoos I've ever seen: http://tinyurl.com/4bkhfy8. They are a great laugh...

It's actually a contest that DC101 (a radio station, for those of you who aren't local) is putting on; the winner of the ugliest tattoo gets a free, painless tattoo removal. Which somehow makes this whole thing even funnier..

Of Note: I'm not sure why getting a tattoo of your significant other's name/initials still happens. I liked the story behind the tattoo a guy got with his gf's name- all a couple of days before he found her in bed with his best friend. I mean, how clueless can you be?

From Acquaintances to Friends

I was recently looking through "short films" on youtube, and I stumbled across this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy0HNWto0UY). Sometimes I feel exactly like the main character in this clip does. Which makes me think.. why is it so hard to make friends these days? Is it just harder to make friends as you get older? Or are people busier now? Distracted more?

I don't know about you, but I have a LOT of acquaintances. I'm outgoing, love meeting new people, get along well with others. Most people like me, some think I'm funny at times.. But for some reason I haven't been able to turn many of my acquaintances into friends. And I don't know about you, but most people would not mind having more friends. So why is it that so many people act like they don't want to be friends or take the acquaintanceship further?

Well, I'm obsessed with writing lists. I love lists. Sometimes a list is different in your head than on paper. When you write out a list, it's easier to figure out what you want to add or subtract from it. Today I wrote a list of the people I truly consider my friends. I came up with 11 people (Yes, now you know that, world-wide-web). But out of those 11, I only really talk to 4 or 5 of those people on a weekly basis. If I had made this list last year, there would have been at least 20 people on that list.

I think that as people get older, they become more self sufficient. In the States, we have this idea that needing help from others, needing others at all, is a sign of weakness. We know this isn't really true- but as far as making friends, people stay away from needy individuals. So we act the opposite. The only problem is, then we come off as cold and unfriendly.

So the self-sufficient ones only seem like they don't want friends. Then there are the busy ones, who are truly too busy to get together outside work or school. They think, "If you don't know someone that well, why potentially waste your precious free time when you're guaranteed a relaxing time drinking coffee by yourself?" Or sometimes people just don't want to be your friend. Maybe they already have a lot of friends. Maybe they don't get your sense of humor. And maybe you turn down offers of friendship more often than you realize. Remember, people don't want to look needy, so offers to hang out usually aren't too persistent. And hey, maybe we're the one who's too busy to realize that this person really does want to be our friend.

So, instead of letting people become stale acquaintances, what if we made time & invited them to things. Went to the school basketball game with them (even if sports are our worst nightmare). You never know who they'll introduce you to. I looked at my list of 11 people, and noted how I met & befriended each of them. Most I met through other existing friends or school. I think that sometimes we aren't open to making new friends; we want more friends, but we aren't always ready to make time or put in the effort to get to know someone new when the opportunity comes. And then the opportunity seems to have passed, so we let it fade into a forever-acquaintance. Or it really does pass.

And on that note, I am going to get off the internet & back into real life. Because I have people to invite to a concert..

"People Need People"

It's funny because the older you get, the more you realize what is really important in life.

It's so easy to get caught up in what matters right this second. I try to keep myself grounded by thinking what's gonna matter at the end of my life, when I'm on my deathbed? I don't mean to focus on the negatives of life, or to worry about what death will be like; but quite the opposite. I want to make sure my life is full, important, worthwhile.

When my life is over, will working and making money be what mattered? Will that have made a positive impact on the world? Probably not. I'll wish I'd spent more time with friends, family, put more into relationships with people. I'm not sure how to explain it, but there's something about connecting with people. As a neighbor once told me, "People need people." The more I remind myself of this, the easier it is to keep up healthy relationships and connections with people; because you aren't focusing on the negatives of the relationship or the negatives of opening up to people. The more you expect to get positive experiences out of relationships, the more you allow relationships of all kinds into your life. The most important thing I've learnt is that, in general, worrying too much about how a relationship will turn out is crippling.

Being thankful for the chance to get to know someone, even before they move away or leave your life for one reason or another reason just changes your focus. I mean, think back (or forward) to your last year of highschool or college. Even if you know you're going to go separate ways from people you meet in that last year, you probably didn't decide, "Oh I'm going to avoid a friendship with this awesome person, just because I know we're going to different colleges or moving far apart after college." You would have missed out on so much. It's kindof akin to the saying, "It's better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all." Hard to explain why, but experience tells us it's true.

You're never going to have meaningful relationships if you're constantly afraid of being abandoned or being hurt. Sometimes these things will happen. Sadly it's part of life. But you'll also make new friends. Maybe you had a best friend for a year or two, or a brother you used to be close to, who doesn't bother to keep in contact with you anymore. It's not about how they hurt you (though you do need to acknowledge that & prevent future hurt), but the important part is how the relationship affected both of you. Did they teach you something new? Did you help them get through a rough time? That's the important part. I think everyone needs a healthy flow of new and old friendships/relationships. You'll never have enough time for everyone at the same time, so naturally some relationships will fade, especially as people move away. They don't have to, if the person is important enough; you'll just have to put in more effort.

Let me know what you think. Have you stayed close with a friend who moved away? Have you moved away, but kept in touch with good friends who live in the old town? Is it possible to stay friends with highschool/college BFF's even after you all move apart?

Electric Cars

So the whole idea of having (100%) electric cars is great. Actually, I think it's really cool. But is there a reason why electric cars are still so ugly? I'm not buying one until I have the money they start designing them to look less like squashed bugs and.. leaves. Yes, you, Nissan.

Anyway, it's like any product when it first comes out. Take, for example, the new Mac Air Laptops; they made a couple preliminary ones, basically, to prove they could even make laptops that small.. Now Apple can work out all the bugs & put some actual storage on the things, so people will buy them. Until then, people aren't getting excited about buying a computer with a 128MB (flash) drive. I, personally, don't need to buy a new laptop in 2 years when the new 11" models come out with 256MB. Thanksss.

Which brings us back to electric cars. They're still so early on in their species, that we're fine about waiting until our current cars get totaled by idiots backing up in the parking lot these things have proven to be reliable... and look less like bowel movements.

I would also like to mention that our school (UMD, College Park) is going to start charging ~$200 for people who drive cars onto campus. Unless, of course, they drive ONE of TWO cars. You guessed it, the Nissan Leaf and/or the Chevy Volt. In which case you would get a discount on your parking permit- though I'm not sure if this is after or before the $200 charge. In any case, my college is charging penniless students unless they buy a new car.

Oh, or I could take the bus. Except I value my time & life more than that (For those of you who didn't hear about the UMD shuttle driver who drove drunk & crashed into another bus; and those of you who have stood at the bus stop & watched the bus drive by because it is too full of students to stop). I also like waiting out in the cold an extra hour when the bus apparently came 15 minutes early.

So. Let me know what you think about this post/electric cars/charging impecunious students unless they buy a new car/& the Mac Air! I would love to hear your thoughts.

Oh, I thought it was caffeine addiction.

So I was looking up the amount of caffeine in a sugarfree Redbull. I thought my happy emotions after drinking Redbull were due to caffeine addiction. I've been feeling pissy before I drink caffeine, and afterwards I'm always in a better mood; I thought this was simply because my body got what it was craving.

Along the way, I also wanted to find out how much taurine is in Redbull & what exactly this molecule does. I mean, it's the third ingredient on the nutrition label (after things like water & citric acid, for god's sake)! I gotta know what this thing's doing to my body. So I come across the Redbull website, which says, (among other interesting things), that Redbull "improves emotional status." That makes sense because plain coffee/caffeine doesn't give me the same emotional high that Redbull does.

So one of the main reasons Redbull improves your mood (besides satisfying caffeine addiction) is due to taurine. Taurine is this weird molecule.. it's an amino acid that has a million different little functions in your body. One of them is it can act as an inhibitory neurotransmitter in your brain. It's not actually a neurotransmitter (you know what neurotransmitters are- they're things like serotonin & dopamine), but it can act like one because its structure is similar enough to GABA, (an inhibitory neurotransmitter in your brain) that it can sortof copy what GABA does (I'm trying to explain without getting too technical for you people who aren't in my Mammalian Physiology class). Taurine also makes GABA more effective by preventing it from breaking down -->which multiplies its inhibitory effects. An "inhibitory" effect means that an "excitatory" message has trouble going through the area that has been inhibited.

GABA's inhibitory effects are related to mood stability. In diseases like Bipolar Disorder, the GABA pathway doesn't work correctly, which means it can't balance out opposite (excitatory) messages in the brain like it would normally; so moods can easily fluctuate between extremes, as random excitatory messages rampage through your brain, undampered.

It's interesting to relate this to how alcohol works, since we're more familiar with that than neurotransmitters. As we all know, alcohol depresses the central nervous system. Thus, it acts as a depressant; and like many depressant drugs, it activates this same GABA pathway. This means that alcohol keeps neurons in your brain from relaying excitatory messages, which initially results in relaxation, feeling tipsy/high/"fuzzy", and pain subsiding.

So now I understand why energy drinks with excessive amounts of Taurine can cause you to feel similar to that first drink or two of alcohol; they activate the same neurotransmitter in your brain!