Other than my headache, that is. Because apparently, on a day like today, even when I sick with nausea and a headache and chest pain and ear pain and tremors in my hand, the only thing I can do is get angry about a Huffington Post article, go into the scientific journals, just to prove one sentence wrong.

All I’m doing is minding my business, trying to rest up after my first class today, browsing the reddit’s, and I come across this article: 10 Reasons Why Every Athlete Should Meditate. First things first: any article that labels itself as a list in the title tells you 3 things:

1. They’re starving for attention and are looking for you to click. People love lists.
2. They probably spent 15 minutes on Google finding these things (more below).
3. Almost zero thought went into this article other than said-Googling and making sure they had proper grammar.

The biggest sin of science journalism, and by far the most common, and perhaps the root of all other sins, is thinking correlation equals causation. I know, I know, I know. It’s a CRAZY thing to think that just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean one must cause the other. But after working in a molecular virology lab, I’ve learned that if the molecular biologists have a hard enough time determining mechanisms, if it has to do with something as weird and barely defined as meditation, you are not going to get anywhere near causation, bucko.

Now, the way you can tell Robert Piper generated this list by Google is because his hyperlinks don’t direct you to the actual articles but rather to media releases. I mean, linking to the actual journal articles would take another…3 minutes/article * 10 articles…. 30 minutes. In the world of viral journalism, that’s like, a few lifetimes.

Specifically, the claim about meditation boosting the immune system intrigued me, because I thought, “There’s no way scientists have concluded this definitively, otherwise we’d all know about it!”. Sure enough, his hyperlink directed me to the Telegraph’s media release, which when I compared it to the media release from the journal who published the article, it was suspiciously really really close in wording but just enough off to avoid plagiarism. #classy. Sorry kids, citing a media release does not count! Definitely worse than citing Wikipedia.

So, screw it, I took the time to look up the what I thought would be an empirical article. Nope, it was a review! And a really long one (1). I specifically looked for the claims regarding the immune system, and the review cited 3 empirical studies. So I went and glanced those over. Here are the results! (disclaimer: I actually don’t know much about the immune system. Turns out, you don’t need to for this!).

Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation (2)

This article was the one I took most seriously, and the one I’ll give most attention to. Basically, they took a bunch of white people from a biotech company, randomized them, and had half of them go on a 8-week long meditation retreat. Talk about job perks, huh? 4 months after the retreat ended, they challenged their immune systems with an influenza vaccine, and measured antibody titers at 3-5 weeks post-immunization and 8-9 weeks post immunization, and then did a bunch of brain imaging as well. “Marginally significant” is a phrase used a lot in this study, essentially meaning that after manipulating their data, they were able to get it to be around p<0.1. (lol). In regards to the antibody data, they measured a 0.1 log difference in the growth of antibodies in the meditation group (those who went on the retreat built up slightly more antibodies. Like, just little).

However, let’s remember that on a meditation retreat, a person isn’t only meditating and then living the rest of their life exactly the same. Their diet, their exercise levels, and their recreation all change. So, there are too many conflicting factors, their data is only hovering on significance.

One year pre–post intervention follow-up of psychological, immune, endocrine and blood pressure outcomes of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) in breast and prostate cancer outpatients (3)

Cancer patients go on a similar 8-week long retreat. They show “good” gains in plenty of physiological parameters. I’m not going to say anything more, because the main critique is below.

Intensive meditation training, immune cell telomerase activity, and psychological mediators (4)

This one is even more lol-zy. These punks went on a 3-month-long retreat where they meditated for 6 hours/day. Enough said. They measured telomerase activity, which is actually kind of cool and the results are interesting for reasons we’re not concerned with.

Conclusion:

What does it mean if you’re taking people out of their daily lives, and changing them completely by altering their diet, their physical activity, the social structure they live in, and their recreation? How can you handle all of those confounding factors? And then, you measure things 3 weeks-1 year after these retreats, as though if after the retreat, the participants of the retreat have suddenly returned to the life they had before the retreat. LOL not likely.

And how can we apply this to real life? Who has the time to go on an 8-week retreat, let alone a 3-month long one, or who has time to meditate for 6 hours a day? We’re getting marginal results from participants who are putting in a lot of work. Furthermore, how can you apply this to professional athletes, who have to manage the daily stresses the rest of us face on top of being criticized by their fans and the media and working their body to physical extremes?

This all just beyond the pale of absurdity.

Look, I meditate. It helps me learn how to tune out the thoughts I don’t want to deal with, it helps me figure out how to lower the amount of ruminating I do, but it mostly helps me calm down and lower my heartrate before I go to bed. But we have got to stop calling out meditation as a salve for all of these problems when we have other things that work much better.

Sources:

1) Perspectives on Psychological Science, November 2011, vol. 6, no. 6, 537-559

2) Psychosomatic Medicine, July/August 2003, vol. 65, no. 4, 564-570

3) Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, Volume 21, Issue 8, November 2007, Pages 1038–1049

4) Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2011-06-01, Volume 36, Issue 5, Pages 664-681

I’m angry. This constant headache has robbed me of many things I enjoy–long days in the lab, teaching swim lessons, socializing.

Sometimes, if the chest pain is bad when I wake up, I take 800 mg of ibuprofen. Just after lunch I’ll take the nasal spray and Allegra; the doctors originally thought the headache might be allergy related. I still have the headache, but they insist I continue. For when the headache grows into a full-blown migraine, I can pop an imitrex or two. At nighttime, it’s always one pill of Zoloft and one pill of the drug whose name I can’t remember. And, sometimes, dropping two Vicodin when I need to forget, I mean, remember what things used to feel like. This also makes me angry. The warm, fuzzy, droopy feeling Vicodin gives me is the closest I get to what life was like pre-headache. I can’t even exercise, but luckily I can bike most places with very little energy. I’m not supposed to drink.

I’m learning how to cope, though. I think next week I’ll be good enough at coping that I could probably do an experiment or two in lab. The week after that…if the pain, the vice, the bolts…if they are all still with me, the doctors want to do imaging. Read: they’re no longer sure of why I have a headache. Read: they’ve ruled out common causes. Read: they are going to be looking for a tumor.

So I’m taking my drugs religiously. I’m trying very hard to take it easy. Because I want, no, I need for this headache to go away before that time is reached. I’m not sure I can handle having that be a reality, but it’s difficult enough dealing with the possibility.

I only have two more doses of Vicodin left. But there’s still lots of Bach. There’s still lots of time. And miles to go before I sleep. and miles to go before I sleep.

I’ve always had an inclination to enjoy tasks that require endurance. As a kid I would devour books, and in middle school I immediately signed up for the long distance track events. Today I still enjoy runs, going out on the solitary step, mindlessly bringing your feet forward, pushing your body past some arbitrary limit as you fly down the river. In tennis, you play many points, hit hundreds of forehands and backhands, and it is the mental endurance that pushes you through. If you don’t practice the mental endurance in sports like tennis and long-distance running, you won’t progress.

Studying for a straight 6 hours for OChem isn’t for everyone. Working on a thesis for 9 months isn’t for everyone (and, I’m still not convinced it’s really for me either…). Spending the majority of your college career hearing half  the state call you immoral isn’t for everyone, but we didn’t get to choose whether to deal with that or not.

When I knew I was going to be spending the rest of my life with Scott, I knew I was in for the long haul. Not necessarily to regards to spending my entire life with Scott. Rather, I thought it would be a really really long time before we could get legally married, and we would sit through countless political votes and legal battles until it became true. Our relationship has become something of a spectacle, and a marathon, at times. Partly our fault, since we post to Facebook (like every other couple?). But we ended up on the front page of our newspaper. People have PM’d me that our relationship gives them hope. And I don’t want to seem like I’m bragging–these things are all really nice, and I know how lucky I am to have someone like Scott. But I’m so ready for the attention to not be there. To just be like everyone else. And this spectacle, of our relationship being viewed by friends and colleagues in light of popular cultural fights, has been a bit of a marathon. Sometimes people talk to you and expect you to speak as a representative of the gay community. Sometimes they send you pictures of some thing decked out in a rainbow. I love the rainbow…historically. I don’t want rainbows in my life (sans my rainbow towel because it’s huge and cuddly). No rainbows allowed at my wedding or reception. It’s a political symbol, not a personal one. Sometimes people post to you any news item related to [gay rights]. Oh, they passed gay marriage in [another random New England state]. Okay?

Gay marriage is easy because it’s what the masses of straight people understand. It’s why these celebrations for earning equality are big. The rest–homelessness, trans* rights, serious health care disparaties–those aren’t easy. Because the masses don’t deal with it, because they look dirty, because they’re uncomfortable. Gay marriage is easy because it’s putting us into the terms of them. Homelessness, trans* rights, the rest: they likely will not be solved with legislation alone. That’s why gay marriage is easy. And that’s why I’m ready for it to be done, so the dirty work can get started.

-

My wedding is going to be small. Very personal. And definitely, without question, not at City Hall. Because my wedding is not a novelty for random people gathered at city hall to gape at, it is not for reporters from blogging websites to take cute photos of, and its not a political symbol. My wedding is not a representation of the sudden equality by brothers and sisters are getting. My wedding is a simple promise to a beautiful man, not to the common public.

I’m ready for the unobserved life. I’m ready for the time when gay weddings aren’t paraded as unique and just so ADORABLE.

That’s what equality looks like. It looks like everyone else.

The pelican that accompanied this morning on my run was gentle. He stopped on the bridge near me and gave me only a few seconds look. I’ve honestly never seen a pelican in the cities, but this one seemed friendly enough so I paused and enjoyed the sunrise with him. There are not many people out at 6:15 a.m., and I like making up stories in my head for why these folks are up this early walking to…the library? What else is open on the U this early? The pelican bobbed his head a few times and then took off. Til next time friend.

This week is the beginning of the rest of my life. I graduate, and I begin a one-year program to earn a license for my career. Today the Senate votes. I may get married this summer.

There are more than 400 ppm CO2 molecules in the air on average daily.

But I want to think clearly about this next year. What do I do, beyond student teaching, learning pedagogy, and continuing to help out with teaching swim lessons?

Running in the city, it’s smarter to run in the morning. There isn’t as much pollution in the air yet.

Next year, I want to discover new intellectual spaces. I want to write more, and I want to run more, and I want to learn how to program. I want to become more skilled at quantitative methods, and I wantneed to read more philosophy.

I want to explore the mystery.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

-Frost

When it’s warm, you can smell it. Maybe only people who go through winter can smell warm air. Because in both spring and winter you can smell the city, the asphalt and concrete, the exhaust, vague rivers of food aromas from Dinkytown. But in spring, it’s more than just the addition of flowers and leaves and grass. There’s something different in the air. Maybe it’s the humidity.

I know what death smells like. I’ve held it in my hand in the laboratory, fixed by the simple reactions of formaldehyde. I’ve smelled it after squishing an Asian beetle, it’s body juices sticky under my palm. A disgusting, waxy, vomit-like smell. I’ve smelled death after shooting a deer, tearing open the skin over it’s gut with my knife and pulling out all of the guts. I smelled it as I hung the deer in the garage with my dad, peeling off all of the skin, slowly removing the muscles, wiping our hands free of coagulated blood and loose hair. I’ve smelled death in the church, the dusty air mixing with the staleness of this place, lending an air of ultimate stagnancy to the funeral of my grandfather. I don’t remember much about that day. But I remember the cold, I remember the bleak grey sky above the place he was interred, and I remember the smell of the church. My experience with death is tangential, light, theoretical. It is for nearly all of us. My mother has tasted death, shortly after septic shock ravaged her small body. I love my mother so much, and the respect I have for her is paramount. She has looked death in the eye, she has dealt with the pain of many surgeries and infections. My mother is a warrior, and I mean that respectfully. Those who die of disease are not losers. My mother is a warrior for always holding her head high.

Once, in Colorado, after butchering a deer in the field, my father and I were lost in a blizzard. Total white-out. They tell you that sometimes, during blizzards, you stop feeling cold, you stop feeling tired, and you just have the urge to sit down and fall asleep. I never believed that, until I felt it. I felt death, offering his blanket to me while pure white chaos circled around me. My father led me out of the hills back to the tent.

A friend, lost. I don’t pretend to know what he felt, before or during. I know that there is no feeling left now. I wonder if, while he stood outside, he smelled the warmth. I don’t pretend to know his pain. All I know is regret, regret that this is what happens sometimes. Regret that we have lost a truly beautiful person.

It’s nothing now. It’s death. It’s simply…their chapter is done.

Yes, but, the pages keep turning. And they’re blank, and they’re blank, and they’re blank.

We go through life, and we lose other lives and subsequently gather more and more blank pages that we’re forced to look straight at, maybe not everyday, but it happens.

and they’re blank, and they’re blank, and they’re blank.

However, there’s a bad apple in every group. One thread started with “Androphilia – thought you guys might appreciate this book”.

Here, for you Reader, is the link to Androphilia: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Rediscovering Masculinity.

Even just reading that title, my gut reaction was

wuht

Semantic debates about what a “gay identity” or what being “masculine” really mean, what does it mean when you go to a group of guys who celebrate BOTH their gay identity and their masculinity and say: here’s a book to “rediscover your masculinity”.

Sorry, didn’t know it got lost.

But really, semantics put TOTALLY aside, this is only one thing: sexist. What happens when you piss on any trait in a man that you see as effeminate is that you piss on the entire female population as being inferior to you. Besides, what gives with saying [femininity+man by sex = gay]???

This is only another ugly arm of the beast of sexism and racism seen in the gay male population. If we don’t call these things out when we see them, thereby increasing the collective consciousness of society, things won’t get better.

Science is not ivory tower men with white hair and extensive vocabularies running experiments beyond our comprehension. Science is done everyday by millions of people, all who are totally normal and love normal things like Justin Bieber and Led Zeppelin and pizza and watching New Girl and constellations and corny poems.

Science is not done by the people who know it all, but by the people who want to know more, regardless of what they already know.

I have passed labs blaring music from Wicked, death metal, Mika pop (oops that was me), country music, techno, MPR (a bit too common), and 80′s love ballads.

I’m thinking about this because a student asked me today about college, and they were surprised when I told them I have done research in a lab. They were surprised because a laboratory feels like a place that is not accessible to them, just after they sat there explaining how different hormones affect the development of reproductive organs of men and females. Something is wrong.

In my most wild dreams, students don’t begin doing research as sophomores/juniors, but as high schoolers, who come into the lab to learn laboratory science alongside biochemistry, general and organic chemistry, cell biology, genetics, and everything else. In these dreams, the high schoolers start to craft experiments, and begin to realize the creative power inherent in this task, equivalent to a creative essay or love poem. In these dreams, the high schoolers are the ones who ask the wildest questions, questions that are sometimes laughed away with a quick textbook reference, but sometimes questions that silence the rest of us and act as catalysts for our cognitive thoughts, as we begin to turn these thoughts into new territory.

Making science feel accessible to students is more than just using rote examples of scientists who are not white men. Why are we still failing to realize that in so many classrooms? 

Then the leader of the group starts our meditation, and leads by asking us to observe with our eyes closed: our environment. And his one instruction re: drunks has stayed with me to this day:

Listen with compassion to all things. The sounds in the studio, your breathing, your neighbor’s breathing. Listen with compassion to the sounds outside.

Compassion to the sounds outside?! He must have been crazy, I thought. Then I did it. I listened with compassion to the drunks. And, yes, I went home with a sense of inner peace. Since that night, so often do I return to a meditative state when I’m frustrated and I repeat: compassion.

—-

I want to share this story because I think it’s a prime example of me, an unaffiliated agnostic, learning and growing from a faith tradition (in this case, the yogi told me afterward his meditations are derived from his Buddhist faith). And, since then, I’ve turned to faith traditions a lot, and I’ve taken a lot of what I get out of it what I call “cognitive tools” for living a peaceful, compassionate, life that is so worth living. And I want to write this post now, because I just recently read two articles. The first, from Jerry Coyne (who I respect a lot, as a thinker on social issues and as a biologist), who is lambasting this article, and in particular laughing at the idea that humanists could learn anything from religion, and this opinion from the MN Daily, which suggests that religion amounts to childhood indoctrination and is “not needed” in the 21st century. Really? It’s not needed? By whom, the individuals who hold their faith near and dear to their heart, or society? Because I bet even the believers agree on the importance of the first amendment. Is Dixon here implicitly suggesting we take away the freedom of opinion, such that we ask all people to stop considering matters of faith?

Dixon’s take on religion as indoctrination is not a far step from Dawkin’s view at the end of The God Delusion that paints religion as child abuse. And what really concerns me, as an agnostic, atheist, and ultimately humanist, is that I will get called a faitheist and an accommodationist for saying Dawkins is an ass for suggesting this, and that at the heart of our agnosticism is faith. Perhaps not the same type of faith that people hold for Jesus, but faith of a similar color that lies at the heart of all thoughts and opinions. I want to talk more about this later, but I think this sums it up well enough: all thinking must start at some assumption. Science starts at the assumption that we trust our senses (thanks Descartes!). Admitting we have to make assumptions means we admit we don’t know everything. And for this, I suppose that I’m a faitheist.

—-

If I were to hold any belief system of mine above the others I hold, it would be humanism (just hardly nudging out science to second), and I’ll be a humanist so long as I live regardless of what Gods I believe in or not. I think the idea that I have of humanism sits at the root of the solution for a few problems, both with society en masse, but also specifically to problems that currently exist within the American atheist/agnostic community. Or, as I should say, “community”.

Why the scare quotes? Because there is a community, but it’s not all encompassing. The community is defined by Reddit, by blogging websites and circles, and by some local groups who post billboards and sue cities for putting up Ten Commandments and cleaning up the highway. And frankly, not every atheist/agnostic feels welcome to go to the atheist/agnostic events that are in real life. Some community…

For this reason, I have chosen to shun the words atheist/agnostic from my vocabulary except when describing specifically where my belief system lies. I don’t think they’re useful terms. What determines my actions is humanism. And if we think we’re all humanists, we have got to stop creating communities that are only for atheist/agnostics. To elaborate on this, I’d like to explain more about what humanism is to me, and then elaborate on why a humanist community is an everyone-community, and why that’s good for people who are atheist/agnostics of all stripes.

Humanism for me is about my assumption that all morals are human-made. From an atheist/agnostic perspective, this is obvious and doesn’t need arguing. But what if you’re a believer? I would argue that you would think there exists an idea of an individual existing in a perfect moral state, ie: divinity. However, you also probably agree that this is impossible for all human beings. Morality, then, is a human attempt to reach it. And I believe the progress of morality is a lot like the progress of science. In science, we often describe the ultimate goal as “understanding everything, knowing the truth of the universe, being able to predict all things”. However, we cannot know or predict what that would look like. Aiming for that is a “top-down” approach, and although we use that in describing what science is like, it’s not how it happens. Science is definitely “bottom-up”, in which we take what we’ve learned as a foundation, and build on it, add to it, and improve it. We may or may not be on a good trajectory towards “truth”, but we’re getting closer in some way. If you’re religious, I argue morality is the same. You may have a “top-down” idea of understanding morality, but your approach must be “bottom-up”, as you learn and grow as a human being and start to develop concepts and ideas and interpretations of scripture about what it means to be moral. Because that exists in you, it is a human construct of morality, and without question human made.

The last nail in the coffin, at least for me, for knowing that morality is not God-derived is that it’s never useful to consider that. There are billions of people who think their morality is God-derived but they definitely all disagree. Morality may aim to be God-like, but it is human-derived. Therefore, for me, humanism involves looking at many historical and philosophical traditions to see what has worked for people in the past, to develop an idea of what morality means without belief in a God, and to build bridges with people from other faith traditions by discussing these ideas and building up from what we have to a better place. This is why I believe humanism is not a signifier of your individual belief, but rather a philosophical commitment to all human beings.

Therefore, if we want to discuss community building, we need to think seriously about multifaith ideas and efforts. While many atheist/agnostics bemoan the loss of their faith community and all of the programming and social needs their faith community fulfilled, atheist/agnostic groups are attempting to replace that, and I would argue, with limited success. I think at the root of that limited success is because if we want to be in a community (which we all do), this is going to be best accomplished by involving all persons. Multifaith efforts, at heart, are efforts to increase community and understanding of differences while strictly eliminating the possibility of evangelization.

I have been involved on campus with developing a multifaith student group. When people ask me why, the one sentence answer is “to build a better and more respectful multifaith presence on community”. My selfish answer: I want, or perhaps I need, a community. And already, I know I’ve found it. And I know that, even from the limited involvement I’ve had this semester, from group meetings sharing ideas to lots of personal coffee dates with lots of people, I feel better, I am better, and if this is fulfilling a need for me, it’s going to fulfill needs for others. This is a student need, but I just can’t explicate it very well yet.

Will students of the New Atheist stripe on campus participate, despite believing that religion, all religion, at root is bad? Maybe–but I hope that the success of this new group will convince them otherwise, that the best community for atheist/agnostics is the humanist community, which I see inherently as congruent with a multifaith community.

So, if you want, do it: call me a faithest. Call me an accommodationist. I wear those badges now with pride.

It will be better

And it will be, inevitably. Sometimes we have to force ourselves to remember that. By not just planning out projects (check-in days, work days, have-it-half-done-by-this-date days), appointments, finals and midterms and other due dates, but also by planning out celebrations. By planning out the time for us to relax and refresh and have the free time to reflect on our own terms.

And sometimes, there are days like today. Where you feel like it’s ten minutes to midnight, everything is piled up before you, and sometimes all you do is wallow in your anxiety and say “How the hell am I ever going to do it?”.

You will. You do it, one thing at a time. Prioritize, focus, produce lots of tea, channel the stress and fake resilience.

The beat of her voice reminds me of the idea of being at the grind. Grind it out, just a month longer.

We’ll make it. We will. Together.