A bizzare and unique experience.

So, I've been blogging more often. It almost sounds like a dietary supplement, like: "Blogging regularly has been scientifically proven to help reduce cholesterol along with a balanced diet."

Speaking of freaky-stupid diets, I'm kinda on one. It's called: "food combining". Firstly, I know what you're all thinking, and I want you to know, I'm right there with you. I'm not much of one for "miracle cures" or "alternative remedies", because they generally just sound like snake oil to me. But, due to my mom's recent illness, she's placed herself on this method of eating because it helps her with abdominal pain, and stuff like that. She prepares unique meals for herself, and she offered to make some for me if I was interested. Truthfully, I kinda was. From her explanation, it kinda made sense, and I think that how most of us eat todat could be considered unhealthy (well, depending on how you eat!). Not that I'm eating especially healthy right now, but, well, to sum up: It was a new fangled thing, and I thought : "I'll give it a go!" And if it doesn't do anything, screw it. And if it does do some good things but is too big a restriction, still screw it. But if it works without too much fuss, hey, sure, why not.

The general idea is that certain foods don't digest well when mixed together, which makes enough sense, I suppose. Our mouth produces alkaline secretions to aid in the breakdown of starchy foods like potatoes and various other foods, and our stomach produces acid to aid in the breakdown of other different types of foods. And as any chemist would tell you, alkaline substances and acidic substances cancel each other out. So that's bad for the breakdown of foods and whatnot. The proposed solution is to try to eat conflicting food types seperately, like not having proteins and starches together in the same meal, or protiens with fats or oils. That's the idea, anyway. Interestingly, you can have green vegetables with just about anything else on the face of the planet, so that's prompted me to start eating more veggies, I had my first tuna fish salad a few days ago, I may even work my way up to tomatoes. But one step at a time, I don't want to do anything crazy, now. :P

I don't have fantastic digestion, so I thought I'd give it a go. If anyone's ever sat through a quiet movie with me, they can testify that my stomach makes a great series of noises, which are equal parts curious and frightening. Obviously I was relatively fine before I started the diet, so there's not really that much in need of fixing, but, hey! I'll try anything once, if it's beneficial. I'm usually quite hesitant about things like this, I always imagine specific diets to be almost like religions, where you try to convert people and stuff, resulting in a horde of atkins people outside your door, shambling about, murmuring "one of us, one of us", repeatedly. So I'm remaining rather cynical about the whole experience. You can still mix foods if you want, like the occaisional sunday roast with mashed potatoes, but the idea is to generally adhere to the plan. I'll know the tree by it's fruits; if it helps, hooray. If there's no positive change, out the window it goes. So that's my wacky new thing.

BUT! Not what I originally wanted to talk about. Ever been part of a dying world? It's a once-in a lifetime experience, really. Here's an example: Yes, quite a bizzare experience indeed. I had one of these recently, in a game of Team Fortress 2. Quite strage. Mid-game the server shut down, freezing everything. My turret, enemies, allies, even my arm was frozen across the screen, still in mid-swing, with a wrench in hand. The upper-right hand corner of my screen displayed "Server connection lost: terminating in 27.45 seconds." Sometimes it's just a spot of lag, and the game kicks back into gear, like a sputtering engine, and the game continues. But this was not one of those times. It was strange, looking around, knowing that even in this simulated world, it was all going to end. The very fabric upon which we were existing would unravel and cease to exist, with us ejected from the server, into some sort of multiplayer purgatory. All characters were frozen mid-action, I could see the fire erupting from a pyro's flamethrower to defend a sniper, it was all just so surreal, as the timer rapidly shrunk to nothing, ejecting me from the server. Bizzare. Similar scenario in one of my fave video games, "Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask". The world is ending, and everyone is panicking, some in denial, some seeking nothing more than reconcilliation to see the end of the world with their loved ones, it's all so strange. Just interesting that through this medium, we can experience something that in theory, we should only ever know once: The end of the world. Just an interesting thing to go through, really.
Oh, and PS: Just in a further thing about how Obama is pretty awesome, look up "beer summit" on google. He decided to help resolve an issue that represents so much tension in american society about racial inequality by taking the two parties, the instigtor and the instigated, and invited them up to the white house to try and talk it through over beers. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I would consider a step in the right direction.

"It's the end of the world as we know it/ It's the end of the world as we know it/ and I feel fiiiiiiiine" - R.E.M. "End of the world as we know it"