Proband M012

"HaHa, look, there is a doctor in the picture with you!"

I am sitting in a hospital in Cologne, Germany. I am not sick and nothing is wrong with me, which makes this scenario really weird.

I wasn’t able to find any decent jobs for the first 3 weeks here, so I decided to participate in a medical trial. It pays well and it’s totally harmless. But it still comfortably ranks among the most uncomfortable jobs I ever did (right up there with a job I once had setting up a stage and was working on building a tower in 10m height without any safety equipment).

The uncomfortable feeling doesn’t come from a imminent danger for my physical health (like pulling up huge speakers up a shaky tower) but rather it is a weird psychological strain.

Coming into this microcosm that is the medical trial world, I really didn’t know what to expect. The people that work here seem to feel overqualified for their work (really just laying catheters and handing out the pills and food at the right time) and the ones that are the test objects seem to feel shame at seemingly being underqualified for any other job.

There are some people who hide this shame behind bedazzled purple shirts and big sunglasses and others that act like they don’t need the money, showing up suited up and with a small carry-on suitcase as if they were about to have a business flight to L.A. for 2 days.
All hail advancements in medicine! - my ass.

And then there is me. Showing up here in my absolute average clothing and a backpack filled with books, my laptop, and a small ensemble of chargers [iPod, electronic clippers (why the fuck did I take them for 2 days of medical trial?), MacBook, cell phone]. What I learned too late was that they didn’t give us any clothing or towels… or for that matter anything but catheters, small amounts of food, warm carbonated water bottles, and strict limits of when to drink, eat, walk, sit.

I even called before I came here to ask what I needed to bring. “Hmm, nothing really.” Now I am spending 2 days straight in the same clothes.
Visitors only in emergencies.

On top of that, out of obvious necessity, I am currently successfully and quiet consciously ignoring my fear of needles that had me passing out in doctors office already twice in my life. But the thought of that catheter in my hand still gives me shivers and makes me cling my toes. Constant thoughts about this dreadful device along the lines of…
One wrong move and it will poke out of the side of your skin. What keeps it from scraping and poking into my forearm bone and tissue when I make a wrong move? Can this fucking doctor stop wiggling it around like a 7-year old trying to get all out of his milkshake?
… keep popping into my head.

The "catheter", or "I.V.", or shitty-ass bloodsucking device.

Talking about milkshakes… I am seriously starting to feel this whole “being sucked empty” as a very real sensation. Every hour several nurses/doctors (who fucking knows?) walk around collecting small doses of blood from all of “us” - 24 patients (all male). Although they are trying to be nice and give the impression that we are not just mere test-mice, it doesn’t change that they employ all the same moves and sentences with everyone.
“Are you feeling alright?”
“Wow, it’s getting really warm today!”
“Maybe we should lay a new catheter.” FUCK!

Also, I keep saying “thank you” once they are done taking my blood. I really don’t know why I say that. It just freaks me out, that they wiggle the catheter around, poke it in and out, push on it and pull it up. I am probably just really thankful once they are done.

It’s not all bad though, I don’t want to be all whiny about it. I get to spent 2 days in bed doing nothing but surfing the Internetz (sadly slow AS FUCK, so not really pleasurable), reading books (Augusten Burroughs - A Wolf At The Table | Great read!) and I was able to get How I Met Your Mother (Season 1-4) from my mother before I came here. So I am basically breezing through the seasons like no ones business. I think I already watched over 8 hours of Barney, Ted, Marshall, Lily and Robin falling in and out of love/beds.

A sense of a little parallel world with new friends is starting to set in. But I am not yet in love with any of the characters from the show. Which is really bewildering me. Everyone who has known me for a while knows why.

Maybe I will throw The O.C. back on my laptop next week for the second cycle of this testing.


I wish I could watch The O.C. all new all over again.
Fuck Anakin.

Yeah, that’s the thought I am leaving you with.
Yeah, that’s right!
Yeah, that’s right!

Who is more scary?

I am back in Germany. Hooray!

Still, here I am currently watching a video from a TV show called "Fault Lines."

As my theme here has steadily been religion in the U.S. from my viewpoint and from what I hear and think about I absolutely had to quickly write about this.

Here is a link to part 1 of the episode:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TME6X9LQ4y8

It is about the indoctrination of religious extremists in the U.S. military and I think it is a legitimate question to ask...

Is a world power with the largest military capabilities (by far) and christian extremists deeply entrenched in it's rows more scary/dangerous
THAN
A group of terrorizers (yeah, I just watched Harold and Kumar - Escape from G.B. again... it was on TV give me a break!) that has neither the financial means nor the amount of "soldiers" to be a real threat to a whole country? (<-- the long awaited questionmark. 2 years of almost exclusively writing english still are unable to keep me from writing irresponsible, reader-killing, ridiculously sentences like this one right here right now. Thanks for reading.)

9/11 was horrible, vicious, despicable, and totally evil.

But I am scared that western civilization is quietly accepting (or not moving against) a religious extremist movement that proclaims their way (namely evangelical Christianity) as the "right" one and the other (Islam) as the wrong one.
And that also is horrible, despicable, evil, and really fucking stupid. It's another prime example of the "black and white"-world that I have been pointing out as so dangerous in earlier posts.

This time it's really actually dangerous physically and not just a totally messed up mind set.

Maybe more later. Right now I am watching in awe and with a scaringly high amount of non-surprisedness (yeah, I can make up words. So what? I am German. We do it all the time.).


Post scriptum:
Currently I am wondering if there is a function that will enable the average reader who is sick of my paranthesis-comments to just blend them out automatically? Maybe I just invented the NEXT GOOGLE/YOUTUBE/TWITTER/FILL IN THE BLANK ______.
A giant new awesome thing that everyone will totally use all the time and I can then sell to some company like Yahoo or Microsoft or (preferably) Apple for like approx. $2.5 billion.
Maybe...?

Kevin Devine and such...

So, I am still on a family RV trip around Lake Michigan. The weather is horrific but this amazing 21st-century-embracing camping site has WiFi.

I thought I'd give you a couple of pictures and a good song/good song lyrics.

A couple of weeks ago (May 26th) my mother, Katie, Katie's brother (David), the singer of The Get Up Kids, and me attended a small (approx. 50 people) concert in Lawrence (this sentence definitely has too many brackets/parentheses). I never heard of the guy (Kevin Devine) but it was a concert and it was in Lawrence and it was 1 day after my mother had arrived, so I figured - after listening to one of his songs online - that we shall go see him. So we did.

And it was a lot of great fun. Here is a picture my mother took at the concert:


And here is one of his songs which was REALLY great live but sadly not as good on the Album and not as good on YouTube. Live he played it with the whole band and it was really good stuff.

Also, when you click this you will find lyrics to that same song that are just as good non-live as they were live (another proof to why lyrics are so fucking important :) ).

Here are a couple of pictures from our trip:

Katie and me playing a round of golf in Lawrence. What else?

At Royals vs. Tigers game

Mother and sister meet again.

Dinner in Chi-Town.

A homeless guy singing "Somewhere over the Rainbow" in a Chicago subway station.

Where The Wild Things Are


Family at Bleachers in Wrigley Field

Find Mo/Jo/Mom! We are on ESPN! Hooray.

A little bit of baseball at Wayland Academy

Cheesehead-Mo

Canoeing on Lake Michigan

So long and thanks for all the fish.



P.S.:
I found an amazing new (?) function on facebook that allows me to have this Blog published in facebook notes AUTO-fucking-MATICALLY! If that is not the greatest invention since the light bulb then I don't know what is, snitches! Facebook wins.

Dear Internets,

I know I have been kind of on and off with you in the last couple of days. But look at my dedication now!

Here I am sitting in a trailer park laundry room just to spend a couple of bytes with you.

And now, when my disappointment over not enough e-mails from mere mortals kicks in, I understand that your way of telling me that I am missed is through a list of YouTube subscription updates I can work my way through. Then I turn on my iTunes and the podcast updates seem to just flow in (actually stumble in most of the times due to bad-trailer-park-internets - you have to work on that!) and give me new pleasures.

Twitter has shown a total disregard to my existence and catching up is utopian. Facebook seems to be just fine without me (which breaks my heart after all the hours and days I spent with it). At least my fantasy baseball teams seem to have a sincere longing for my time and effort.

So, I will try betterment knowing that the future is dark as most trailer parks seem to neglect you and rather elect to live in a world of seclusion, pain and suffering.

I will bring you pictures from my mothers facebook albums, I will print out what you need me to print, I will update my status on twitter, I will update my status on facebook, I will keep neglecting my MoSpace, I will look up when the Marlins won the World Series again on Wikipedia, I will also google what the fuck these power plants at Lake Michigan are up to, I will keep my Azureus running as long as I can, I will catch up with The Onion, and now I will leave you tonight for a better tomorrow.

Good night Internets. Although I know you never sleep and always watch over me and my binaries.

Mo.

Some Personal Updates

Ok, a little less religion and a little more "What the fuck is Mo doing?"

Right now I am sitting in a Best Western in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin where my mom and me pick up my sister from the school she attended this year.

Yesterday we had a 10 hour drive up here from Ottawa.

I will push my facebook-agenda again a little bit. My mom has a great photo-album about our trip on there. Get an account, check it out. :)

Other than that I don't think I have too much to say right now.
ESPN needs my attention.

Biased towards Evolution

This is slowly but steadily turning into a religious blog. Who would have thought?

To continue on from where I stopped earlier, please check out this awesome video that gives a really nice insight into how early spread and deeply rooted the believes in creationism are in some communities in the U.S.
"54 Million people do not believe in evolution"

I mean, most schools here are not even allowed to teach evolution and then the parents/these preachers teach creationism to the kid.
I love the quote, "It makes sense, it's just easy to explain to your children."

The danger is not just that it's totally fucking crazy to declare "war" or science or say evolution is a religion, but that kind of thinking promotes a irrational, simplified, black and white world view. And that from the earliest ages on.

That is just really dangerous and leads to a set back in human evolution. Oh wait. Evolution is bullshit, so progress is bullshit.
The bible says it all, so let's build a little house, praise the lord, go to heaven, and pity the fool who will most certainly end up in hell.

Hell will be fucking packed with an awful lot of awesome folks and heaven will be a stinky place with douche-bags that ended up being right. Fuck that!

Diary/Dump

So, I was talking to a friend of mine about Religion - seems to be the dominant topic here now - today and it turned into a quite heated argument, nothing that wasn't accurately covered in the blog entry from Wednesday though.

A severe weather warning was out and we just got done throwing on the Baseball field when our argument started. As we argued the heaven got darker and darker, the winds got heavier and some slight thunder noises in the distance could be heard. We argued on and the storm got closer. At one point we abandoned our discussion when we thought a Tornado was forming above our heads.

Half joking and half sincere we both pointed out how it seemed that god was getting really upset with me. After we gotten inside the storm really started picking up and it pored down like crazy.

It was pretty funny, and I am now a full-blown religion-is-awesome man!

No, I am not.

2 hours later I watched this fucked up shit...

...

... yeah, definitely not going to happen.


I also really want to start Video Blogging, but I think my skill of what could be interesting has not transcended the process of writing it in a Blog yet.

3 Easy Ways to Make it to Heaven

I have a lot of very emotional and heated debates with some people here at Ottawa University about religion. I think, because I come from a completely different spectrum of belief systems but still from a similar western-industrialized lifestyle, both sides, me and them, have a hard time even grasping the other persons ideals.

The first time ever I was exposed to a person that believed every word in the bible to be the plain truth (for sake of simplicity I will just refer to those views as creationist views) was several years ago, when a baseball player from New Mexico told me that dinosaur bones were buried in the ground by evil scientist. I was struck and couldn’t believe that a person actually could be this paranoid and uneducated while from a alleged educated country.

Here at OU I meet people with those believes deeply rooted in them every day. They are my close friends, and everything I do with them is absolutely normal. But at one point or another we come to points in our discussions where their and my believes shine through. It turns into a heated discussion that most times ends with both sides agreeing that the other person is a total idiot. That’s mostly what I was ever able to accomplish in these conversations.

While I try to pose questions that are absolutely logical, it just seems that logic doesn’t apply to a talk as soon as it is about god or religion to these friends of mine. Everything else (psychology of others, sports, some physics, some biology) is possible to be discussed on a very rational and logical basis.

I started to really try to see it from their point of view, but many arguments are just totally not working. They argue with me, that everything in the afterlife will be awesome for people who believe and that I will end up in eternal damnation for the lack of my believe. As soon as I then question how their god can be loving and do that to a perfectly fine human like me or other non-believers, they can’t really give me any satisfying explanation besides that “god’s ways are higher than ours.” So basically, they would argue with me to a certain point and as soon as a dead-end in their argumentation is reached, they pull out either the “faith” or “higher ways” card that is absolutely impossible to argue with.

I respect Christianity and religion in general. But when it comes to views that are dangerous because they imply not the ideals of loving thy neighbor or thy family or thy whoever, but rather “watch out for your own ass” and “the only love that counts is your love to god” or other imaginary friends, than I only see that ending badly.

The way they can justify these extremist views to themselves are through disregarding science and calling science “just books” when I call the bible “just a book.” It’s an absolutely frustratingly doubt-proof system that protects itself from three different ways of attack.

First it protects itself through claiming a bigger picture that’s not understandable for us. That would already be a nice enough way out of every discussion, but it would make all conversations a little too plain.

Secondly it protects through disregarding human accomplishments and findings that are not coherent with the bible as evil and just plain false/fake; without realizing that you really can’t disregard parts of science and still respect other parts – evolution is a religion has to be one of the top 5 stupidest things I have heard in my lifetime, Jesus riding dinosaurs being number 1 because of the awesome hilarity factor.

Thirdly, and most scaring, is the fact that if the first two explanations happen to fail to protect them from an incoherent/blasphemic view, fear takes over. Sometimes I hear, “I see where you are getting at, but I am scared that if I think about this further, I am going to have to go to hell.” I am not going to go into depth about how this is really messed up and controversial in so countless ways. After this statement a dropping of the whole subject will most certainly ensue because ignorance is a bliss that will still enable you to make it to heaven.

My favorite question right now: If god is almighty, can he make a stone that is so heavy, that even he can’t lift it? (Thanks to my godfather for this question – I don’t have a god, but do have a godfather, hooray) The replies I get are priceless and so perfectly following the three protection methods mentioned above.

Message of Faith

I didn't think I would ever write one, but this Sunday in Newspaper production the Message of Faith needed to be written.
I got assigned to do it quickly.

15 minutes later:

Faith is a interesting word. It has two main ways of being defined. Most popularly or commonly it is understood in the context of religion. Faith in a deity, many deities, or in something similarly supernatural. But it can also be the faith in a person - reliability and trustworthiness – the sincerity of ones intentions.

My message of faith is the message of the latter. I never had a lot of use for faith in a spiritual sense, which I don’t deem as a good, better, or smarter attitude than people who have faith. All I can deem it as is my view and sometimes – especially in times of hardship – I wish I had faith in something spiritual. It seems to be very soothing and comforting for many people.

But I have always been scared of the spiritual faith, because it seems irrational to me. And how some people feel about blasphemy or disrespect towards their g(G)od(s) I feel about irrationally. So, I guess I have a distinct faith in rationality, logic, and science, which consequently is a strong faith in doubt.

Back to the “other” faith. I feel many faithful people to be projecting their faith on a deity because of the lack of being able to have that same faith in a person. When one does not know the sincerity of intentions of people around him/her, they can quickly be led to trusting books and imaginary friends (that are ultimately shaped by the individual) more. Deities just tend to be more reliable.

So, ultimately, I think my message of faith is to have more trust in the person next to you. If you have been hurt a lot and feel driven away from trust and faith in other mortals, try to rethink. No matter whether there is an afterlife or not, right now you are here with the people around you. While this life lasts (and it might be the only one you have) you should try to make it work. And almost any other person tries to do the same.

If we live in a world full of individuals, then we live in a world full of people that reflect on their own actions and that ultimately strive towards happiness. How messed up those ways can sometimes be is indisputable, but I think you can always count the good intentions. No one acts to be unhappy, and if they do, they do in unconsciously.

And that’s where communication and faith comes in. Trust other people like you trust yourself and you might get hurt, but you will be able to tell yourself that you can still trust. Reward of trust by far outweighs the negative of being hurt once in a while. And if you can’t see that, I will dare you to try. We are creatures of habit and mirroring, and if our habit becomes trusting, we will experience that same trust mirrored back to us more and more.


For more stuff that's in our Newspaper (and some more of my articles):
www.thecampusnewspaper.com

Movie! Documentary! Vampires! Dinosaurs!

Hach, good old Hellogoodbye references.

I haven't been dating up for a longer time, and it has not been due to lack of activities.
On the contrary.

But now slowly the time starts, where things get slower. And therefore I will slowly update you with what has been happening and is happening.

Let me begin the blogging month of May with a bang.

BANG! - Here is a video I did for a class where we needed to tackle a social issue. It consumed a lot of my day and night time over the last week (actually the week before that), but I think for putting it together in 2 weeks it turned out pretty good.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it out, wha-wha-wha-wha-what's it all about:

This is clickable and will turn into a documentary!


Tell me what you guys think!