Rant-Rant-Ranty-Rant: When Your Teeth Get Stupid

            Yeah.  I know, it's a rant about something as small as "wisdom teeth."  But I have a few thoughts I'd like to share about the topic.  Seriously, I do!  Some of it is me voicing concern over being given general anesthesia, some of it is about how I have to fast before the surgery, but I hope that I'll give it a humorous spin.  Be warned: there is media in this post, so it's best that it gets loaded up on a laptop or desktop computer with a cable/wire/whatever connection.  It's also best not to be eating when reading this post….

            As for the optional theme song, it's "Hard Trance Techno Rave Music" by trancElovE.

            I've never expected this to happen to me; I just hoped that I didn't have to deal with this issue.  Unfortunately, my biology just laughed in my face with my own mouth.  In fact, it only started one or two days before I found out: my right lower wisdom tooth (which is number 32, in case you're a dental professional) was hurting so bad that I couldn't even sleep.  When I got up and talked to my parents that morning, I was terrified: what if they had to yank it out right there at the dentist's office?!?!?!  I was not mentally prepared for any of it!  Although I admit it's not my first rodeo—it's my second and I'm still not any better at it: my two front teeth had to be removed in two halves, the second being oral surgery with Novacain.  I hated it, since it involved the use of a scalpel inside my mouth!  (Sorry for the visualization, there.)  That and with Mama Squirrel's recommendation, I insisted on general anesthesia.  And with every choice, there are consequences: a whole new hellish hand basket of dread was delivered straight to me because I've never been anesthetized that way before.  But let me shed some light on the teeth themselves.

Unintelligent Design: Why Not Call Them Stupid Teeth???

            There's a lot of debate over how we got to be this way: Creationism vs. Evolution, Intelligent Design vs. Natural Selection, etc.  Of course, there is a shit ton of scientific evidence that tells us we evolved from monkeys, who might not be so thrilled about the connection:

Evolution is a FLAWED THEORY. There is NO WAY humans are genetically linked to monkeys. That idea is OFFENSIVE. -monkeys
— Joss Whedon (@josswhedon) September 17, 2014

And yet, we aren't perfectly evolved (Disproving Intelligent Design: why design us with these medical flaws, for fuck's sake?!), which brings me to this brilliant counterpoint from Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson: Unintelligent Design.  There are so many things wrong with us, and some of them were outlined by Dr. Tyson in the 277thepisode of the Nerdist Podcast.

            First off, what's going on between our legs?!  We've got an entertainment complex in between two sewage systems.  It's unsanitary and we have to use our hands to keep ourselves clean in that area, which is also inefficient.  That and there's a ton of foliage in that area!  It's gross and stuff, seriously.

            Secondly, we eat, drink and breathe through the same hole in our human faces!  This ensures that a percentage of us humans choke to death on what we consume.  Not with dolphins: they eat and breathe through two different holes in their body, which means that they'll win in a sardine-eating contest!  But even then, if we don't find an early exit from life, we live 80 years on average; in spite of this, we die from starvation in 8 weeks, we die of dehydration in 3-8 days, and we die from asphyxiation (suffocation) in 8 minutes.  We're fragile human beings who fall prey to many illnesses that are the result of this chemical and biological balance being off inside our bodies.  Too many cells in one spot causing a riot is cancer; not enough endorphins being produced in our brains leads to depression; too much stomach acid leads to acid reflux disease.  If we're so "perfectly designed," then why do we have this happen to us?

            Then we have our "useless" body parts: the appendix is not really needed in these days, and yet, we all have them, thanks to our ancestors hunting for whatever food they can get.  There was no cooking in those days, no discerning bones from muscles and feathers and fur and scales and whatnot, so they would eat the entire animal, including the parts that give us no nutritional benefit.  That's where the appendix would come in: it creates a sort of acid that helps the remaining solids (bones, beak, feathers, fur, etc.) dissolve so it doesn't hurt them when it comes out the other end.  (All together now: EWWWWW!!!!)  But now it's quite useless, as the appendix, being completely BORED, will sometimes malfunction and burst—appendicitis, which can only be resolved with surgical removal.  The gallbladder stores whatever the liver produces, even though the liver can perform the same functions as the gallbladder.  Tonsils would have to come out when we get tonsillitis, but nothing is as much of a pain as wisdom teeth.

            Why have wisdom teeth?  They're the farthest back on our lower jaw, and we don't even get them to come through until we hit our later years, well after we lose all our baby teeth.  But they aren't perfect in their emergence: 90% of all people have at least on wisdom tooth come in impacted, or at an angle, pushing against the molars next to them, causing pain and infection, perhaps even damage to the adjacent teeth.  There could even be a cyst that forms, which is even worse.  Yes, it's common as fuck, but here's another issue: why not just remove them at an earlier age?  These teeth are easier to remove when the patient is younger, since their roots are not completely formed, and the surrounding bone is softer than in your early 20s; not only that, there is less of a chance of damaging nerves and other structures nearby.  (Source: pamphlet I got from my consultation appointment.)  Thanks, AAOMS, for taking the wait-and-see approach.

            One more point to make: why call them "wisdom teeth" when they come in incorrectly?  When I first went in to my dentist's office, I made the joke of my wisdom teeth being "unwise".  This body part, in my opinion, is completely stupid.  They have no current purpose except to be a pain in the ass, causing problems for 90% of all people, which can only be put an end to by way of oral fucking SURGERY!  That's why I want them to be renamed as "stupid teeth," because there is no point to them in today's world.  Not to mention how many drugs are involved with treatment.

Anesthesia: The "Fun Part"

            I've never done illegal drugs, I'm prescribed medication for depression/anxiety and my ADD (squirreliness), and I don't like not knowing what my brain is doing, and even just being unconscious with people doing surgical procedures on me makes me anxious.  I'm just not prepared for that idea.

            That and me going like this after waking up:

I'm terrified of having a panic attack and freaking out like that.  Seriously, the loopiness, albeit fun for my parents, is frightening to me as I don't know how much control I have; my pre-frontal cortex could be affected in ways I do not know if I like it or not.  What also sucks is that I have to go into Gremlin Mode the very night before; I'll wind up hungry and cranky and panicked and anxious and stuff—I'll be a total mess, trying to find my copy of Let's Pretend This Never Happened and re-reading the chapter titled "Draw Me A Fucking Dog."  It'll be a total trip, for sure.

            That and I better have a milkshake waiting for me after I'm awake and mobile!  (I'm going to look for milkshake and smoothie recipes after this and the next time I'm online.  Suggestions are appreciated!   Just tweet them to me with the hashtag #SmoothieSquirrel!)

            At this point, I think it's best to look at it as a nap I so desperately need, followed by a liquid diet I hope to extend into a week-and-a-half.  Again, not my first rodeo: I was on a liquid diet before, and I lost a lot of mass that way.  Not that liquid diets are the ideal solution for "weight" loss.  I'll update you as best as I can, and I appreciate you reading this blog, but it could be a while before I post anything again.  My next post might wind up being the week after, but who knows?  #RECUPERATE

            In any case, ENJOY YOUR BURRITO MILKSHAKE!

A Review of the Great Cosmos: A New Journey Begins When Another Ended

            Wow!  WOW!  I know this is a highly verbose review, but I am typing this up as fast as possible so that all the knowledge and impression of the show doesn't fade away from my brain or attention span!  The theme for this blog post is Snow Park by Connect Ohm!

            On Sunday, March 9, 2014, at 9:00pm EDT on all the Fox and National Geographic networks, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, author and hilarious scientist, led us on our first steps on a journey that Dr. Carl Sagan started a generation ago, on the show Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (preceded by Cosmos: A Personal Voyage) with the (paraphrased) words, "It's time to get going again."  I've been treated to a perspective that the late loved Dr. Sagan has only introduced us to, to a thirst of knowledge that many scientists are trying to quench with new information about Life, the Universe and Everything (to which the Answer is 42!  HA!  Hitchhiker's Guide, people!  Come on, nerd out with me with that one shitty joke!).

            I have to say, the introduction was mind blowing!  I swear, all the visuals in the intro sequence gave my mind a blowjob!  I loved it so much, I think I was sort of drooling at the end of it, but only "sort of" because I was having dinner, my Soup of the Cosmos (which I will share the recipe to at the end of this post; it's perfect for people on the lower end of the income scale!).  Anyways, to have Dr. Tyson start the show at the edge of the very same sea cliff that Dr. Sagan stood on when he started his Personal Voyage is entirely poetic; it's like Dr. Sagan was still with us, continuing our journey through the universe that we dwell in.  I've been fortunate enough to be able to watch Cosmos: A Personal Voyage thanks to National Geographic airing it before the premiere of A Spacetime Odyssey.  We were taken on a journey of the mind, to the edge of our universe, being given our address in it, which I have to say is a little inaccurate: according to the Doctor of the Whoniverse, we live in the Sol system, on Sol-3!  Not just "the Solar System"!  So please, astronomers and astrophysicists, incorporate that into our universal address!  But I swear my brain was fried when we went a bit "Inception" with the Universe-inside-of-a-multiverse-that's-inside-of-another-Universe.  My nose didn't start bleeding, but at least my brain got a warm-up before the show: Journey to the Edge of the Universe, narrated by Alec Baldwin, describing our observation of the universe as we come across celestial bodies in the sky, such as "angry moons", dangerous hypernovas, etc, etc.; during that show, I managed to come across a realization of my own, Dr. Carl Sagan style:

If we were to travel across the Universe beyond our galaxy, we'd also be traveling back into time, as the universe is not only a bubble of a network, but also has a reverse sort of tree-ring effect to the point where the farther we travel from Earth to the edge of the Universe we live in, the more we travel into the older parts of the universe, and if we exited past the universe's threshold, we would've been able to witness the Big Bang, to which I ascribed the physical edge of our Universe, the Big Bang Threshold.

            Not only that, Dr. Tyson says that our Universe started out smaller than a subatomic particle; in a sense, it relatively still is if you're far enough past the Big Bang Threshold, outside of every Universe located within our multiverse; we're still smaller than sub-atomic particles in a universe before the Big Bang, like cells in the human body.  Yes, it's frustratingly confusing, but it really is Inception-like!  BWAHHHHH!!!

            I'm sorry, through that shared epiphany, if I made everyone's noses bleed and their brains hurt more than Chris Hardwick's and Matt Mira's did when Dr. Tyson described the Ascent of the Cubes in Nerdist Podcast episode number 139.  If you have to be redirected to it, I suggest you check out the bottom part of this ranty blog post.

            But I have to say, "Spaceship of the Imagination" is pretty cool, despite the name!  I would've loved to have kept the retro look Dr. Sagan had in his spaceship, but Dr. Tyson's ship is a bit cooler, having the ability to not just travel across space but also peer through time, with its poetic floor-portal to the past in the floor (archaeology anyone?) and ceiling-portal to the future (STAR TREK IS OUR FUTURE!  If we have not destroyed ourselves with the thermonuclear World War III or disastrous climate change due to our self-inflicted global warming!), and has a sort of gyroscopic sort of bridge in that spaceship (in a realm beyond ours that has no "up"?  Really, Dr. Tyson?), which, to me, is in the shape of a dandelion seed.  You see, the dandelion seed is quite an integral part of the Cosmos program, and Dr. Sagan used it quite a bit when he was hosting Personal Voyage, and it only seems poetic to be traveling on that seed throughout the universe as we know it, as the dandelion seed in the organic sense is actually an organism traveling in its own spaceship to someplace new where it can colonize the ground it lands on.  But I also have to say, "Spaceship of the Imagination," doesn't exactly have a good ring to it: I understand that it's, to put it in Dr. Tyson's words in Nerdist podcast episode #139, "a journey of the mind," but couldn't you just name it the "Tyson TARDIS"?  Or the A.S.S. Imagination?  Just saying.

            But the visuals were stunning, the inclusion of history in the science exploration, the addition of the multiverse inside of the lectures, the sharing of the perspective of our slice of time in the universe, how the birth of the universe and our existence would've looked liked spread over a Gregorian calendar year, how religion treated new ideas, all of it, to me, was pure GENIUS!  I was looking forward to this premiere, as my friend Jesse (who still needs to do that superhero blog post) also was, despite not having access to cable.  And I can't wait to continue on with our next steps in this journey of 13 episodes where we are enlightened over how scientifically accurate the theory of evolution is, and the whole Creationism issue may go back as far as the Big Bang, which I'm sure was not instigated by Stewie Griffin restarting his time machine.  Which is why during the show, I posted these tweets:

OW OW OW! My brain is hurting! Because @neiltyson mentioned the multiverse! #cosmos
— Eden Pyrithea (@LadyEden1337) March 10, 2014

Shut up, Hamm! #cosmos
— Eden Pyrithea (@LadyEden1337) March 10, 2014

            And I hate to spoil it for everyone, but I have to describe the end bit: I saw all the old footage, and the Sagan seaside cliff bit, and I can't help it but I cried a little much like Matt Mira teared when he was watching the last shuttle launch of NASA, but for reasons a little bit different from what Dr. Tyson ascribed to him in that first episode of Nerdist podcast that he was on all that couple of years ago.  In fact, I tweeted this when it happened….

Dammit. Tears. #cosmos
— Eden Pyrithea (@LadyEden1337) March 10, 2014

all because not only did Dr. Tyson talk about how much of a leader Dr. Sagan was, but he also suddenly pulled out Dr. Sagan's planner, and turned to the page where an appointment with a young Dr. Tyson was listed, and it was not only a tale of how a young man growing up in the Sky View apartments in the Bronx was influenced by his genius and his tutelage, but it was also, in Dr. Tyson's words, a sort of "passing of the torch," which made me think a little: Dr. Sagan would've been so proud of him, and he wouldn't have trusted anyone else to do the reboot of his show, because Dr. Tyson would've been the only one to do it right.  He influenced many scientists, much like Aristotle influenced many mathematicians.  He is the Aristotle of our time, and if he saw the show today, he would've approved, despite any flashiness.  RIP, Dr. Carl Sagan, wherever you are, whether you're in heaven, the great big observatory/laboratory in the sky or even in the fourth or fifth dimensions.  We miss you, even though I haven't watched your show before Saturday or Sunday, March 8/9th, 2014!

Our Universe Is One Giant Pot of Soup: A Recipe for the Soup of the Cosmos

            Because I was running a little low on food, I improvised my dinner, anxious to have it be done by the time Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (which shouldn't be "STO", because "STO" is already taken by Star Trek Online!  It should be ASTO, so as to not confuse people!  #addressingthiswiththehopethatIAmNotTooLate #longhastags #hashtaggingoutsideofTwitter) aired.  And I tweeted:

I think i just came up with a new recipe: Soup of the Cosmos. @lisar_m @dihard11 @nasagoddard
— Eden Pyrithea (@LadyEden1337) March 10, 2014

because I'm sure that it has not yet been done in detail!  Nerd-Chef Alton Brown might disagree, but goddammit, IT'S MY RECIPE AND I SHALL SHARE IT WITH Y'ALL FOR NEXT WEEK'S EPISODE!

Soup of the Cosmos (aka, Cosmic Soup)

Pasta In Potato Pot (aka, a saucepan that's the second to smallest you have)

1 ½ cup salted water

1/2 cup small pasta shells

Broth In Vegetable Pot (aka, smallest pot you have)

1 ½ cup salted water

1 chicken bouillon cube

1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon chopped basil

1 tablespoon (or more) dried minced onion

½ cup panko bread crumbs

Other

Fancy shredded Mexican blend cheese

Four packets of string cheese, unwrapped and chopped into 1/8-1/4 inch long pieces

1.  Boil pasta according to directions.
2. In small "Vegetable pot", boil water; crush and add chicken bouillon cube, stir.  Add basil, minced onion and panko breadcrumbs; stir, let sit.
3.  Drain pasta when finished, return to "Potato pot" without heat.  Add broth to pasta, stir.  Stir in shredded cheese and chopped string cheese, making sure it melts.
4.  Serve warm.  Makes two servings.

Isn't our Universe like this soup?  Isn't the basil like the asteroids and comets, the chopped string cheese like our planets, the pasta shells like our stars in the sky, the shredded cheese like the nebular clouds and the broth like the dark matter of space?  It's so poetic that I think it's appropriate for everyone to have.  Also, it's great for Lent because it doesn't have real meat!  It has chicken broth, but not REAL meat or poultry or pork!  Can't the bouillon be an exception to this, Church?  PLEASE?

           Anyways, I hope you enjoyed Cosmos ASTO just as I enjoyed my soup with it.  And I hope everyone gets to experience the enlightenment and pleasure of education in the hopes that we can all become smarter, we can all become nerds and continue to have intelligent discussions about science, the universe, the multiverse, and our place in the—SQUIRREL!  *scamper, chase, falls asleep and snores*

P.S. I have GOT to share this tweet!  This tweet won the Internets last night in my opinion....so go Favorite and Retweet this, because it's HILARIOUSLY TRUE!

The show #Cosmos is the perfect qualifier for my online dating: "If you don't find Cosmos fascinating we are not going to be life partners."
— Andy Johns (@ibringtraffic) March 10, 2014