Excelsior!

"Excelsior!" means "Ever upwards!" and is the state motto of Maine or New Hampshire or one of those states over to the upper right if you're looking at a map. It's also the name of a street and highway exit to the left side of Minneapolis (again, if you're looking at a map). While driving past that exit, I could never resist saying "Excelsior!" in a very superhero kind of way. Never ever.


So what does "Ever upwards!" have to do with me now? Well, I'll tell you: I am ON MY WAY UP. Yep. Totally.


First, I finished my medical experiments! Neato! In these experiments, they stuck electrodes to my head, fed me sleeping pills, kept me awake, and watched my brain. It was super-cool. Nay - supra-cool! Also, if you haven't noticed yet, my Excelsior! post will have lots of exclamation points. Also, there will be lots of pictures of me. ME, ME, MEEEE. In stages, then:

I had to spend a night at the H. Ford Centre pour Dormiendo (he was from everywhere. Trying to make content unsearchable is hard.). In this part, the electrodes were stuck on with a mixture of superglue and beeswax. Taking them out of my hair in the morning was not quite as bad as childbirth (as you know, I have had many, many children).



They went into this thingy over my shoulder (to the south, if you're looking at a map) that got plugged into the wall so they could watch my brain while I slept! This is me at my most coy:



I was told that if I didn't sleep well, they could use me. I actually had one of the worst nights I've had in months or years, so it was like taking poop from a baby: easy, but not especially pleasant. They told me in the morning that it took me something like three and a half hours to fall asleep and that I woke up multiple times (like, closer to twenty than to four) during the night. However, that weird red thing under my nose monitors my breathing, and I don't have apnea or anything like that. It's all in my mind. Or in my BRAIN! I'll let my cog sci peeps fight that one out.

Next, they took me to the neuromagnetism lab for my neuroencephalogram!!!!


SCIENCE!!!!!

The very cool Ukrainian (I think) researcher had to use a VHS tape demagnetizer to jumble the polarity in my one filling so that it wouldn't interfere with the pulses coming out of my brain - their machine is extraordinarily sensitive. Makes me wonder if sometimes fillings do drive people crazy. I think I'll pull mine out just to be safe.

This is me with even more electrodes!

No, it's not a toilet bowl.




It's the machine they put me in!



I did all of these attention and divided-attention tasks, like following a circle around a computer screen with a mouse and clicking when it changed color, recognizing within a few milliseconds whether a group of characters had more numbers, letters, or Sesame Street puppets, watching a subtitled movie while they fed beeps and odd noises into my ears, and trying to fall asleep in a dark room. Everything I had to watch had to be projected through this hole in the wall onto multiple mirrors and then to a screen over my head, since you can't have anything magnetic, like parts of a DVD player, inside the machine area - they sealed me off during the experiment! It was really, really neat. I was almost certain that I could tell which days I had the drugs and which was the placebo day, but then I did another experiment for UMAA (no brain scan this time) and realized that I find it very easy to fall asleep during a very specific sort of computer task - something to do with not blinking or having images flashing at a specific rate. Odd.

So all of that was way cool! Then Twelfth Night happened, and Quest and Hawk came over one weekend to watch the show, and I went to GR/Holland with Q and the Penguin, and things were awesome. I'll really do a catch-up post on such happenings soon, but I promised Atalanta I'd tell her all about the experiments, and I was way behind on all that already. So up next in the Excelsior! post is: becoming a real teacher-type person!

I'm in process of trying to teach different places. And - yay! - I have two classes already (also at Henry Ford - coincidence? I think so.). They're both Developmental Writing classes (i.e., how to make sure your sentences have verbs in them) and they don't pay very well, but it's a start!

I was looking for another in for classes, and Ivanovich (who just got over a touch of the ol' meningitis - you should give him a call and congratulate him on still being alive, which is kind of ironic for him) suggested U Phoenix. So I looked up their website and tried to guess where the employment section would be located. I hit the drop-down "Faculty" menu and there was a link called "Become a Faculty Member." I clicked it and then thought well, that was easy! and then giggled to myself until I had tears in my eyes.

Ever upwards!