God is Pain, God is Pleasure

Did you know that pain and intense, intense pleasure are activated in the same part of the brain, at least in a study done on women?  The Count of Monte Christo once claimed, and continues to claim to every reader who reaches the end of his lengthy vengeant story, that he would not have understood joy had he not understood pain.  Yet this study shows that somewhere, some more significant binding ties together pain and pleasure, not simply "understanding by contrast." 

This study also brings to mind the verses that call out for God's children, the benefactors of Prometheus, to live ever in sorrow, ever in deepest joy.  "Rejoice in the Lord always" (Phillipians) and yet "sorrow is better for the soul than joy" (Ecclesiastes)--"mourn with those who mourn and rejoice with those who rejoice," when somewhere in the world someone always has a reason to begin celebration and someone else a cause to weep.  I have often read these as a dual life, in which our deep internal joy for the love the Lord bears us carries us through the sorrows that prick us to the heart, as if our beings were marbled with joy and sorrow.

Yet perhaps, rather than marble, the joy and the sorrow come from the same stone.  This is a wondrous mystery, but perhaps God allows sorrow not that we might understand joy, but that we might be able to experience it.  It could be that the exercise of pain that we receive now only prepares us for the ability to feel the intense pleasures of heaven.  Pain itself does not harm anyone, and only serves as the warnings of unhealth, but the terrible practice of the intensity of its sensation perhaps strengthens the weak desires and tastes of our beings to really indulge in unbridled enjoyment.  Of course these things are metaphorical speculation...

But on a higher level, does this not lead us to consider the mystery of the nature of God himself?  Consider the consequences of pain to a God who feels so much more intensely than we do--after all, our vision carries a tiny piece of the visual spectrum, our smell only a bit of the possible sensations of the nose, surely our feelings and the emotions in that tiny hypothalamus must be very limited indeed compared with those of the Being of Infinity Himself!  Consider also how every time someone we love experiences joy, our hearts beat a bit faster--how much more must God, in whom exists ultimate love, thrill at the prospect of our happiness?  And if pain and pleasure are intimately connected, somehow, perhaps God is not merely marbled with pain and pleasure, but He himself is the severe, dangerous, yet incredibly beautiful source and combination of the whole intensity of both!  This thought makes me tremble and admire and love.

Information on pain and pleasure from Discovery Health
P.S. on the title--if p=true, reverse p does not necessarily equal true.  Neither pain nor pleasure are God.

Ben 10 Ultimate Alien: Because Teenage Infidelity is TOTALLY ookay

I absolutely adore Ben 10, and Ultimate Alien has some crazy cool aliens and fights. I'm really peeved, though, because no matter how many worlds you save, or how many times Man of Action (Ben 10's producer group) tells us about forgiveness, honor, friendship, loyalty, and courage, there's this gross slimy feeling creeping up my spine about the new series. Not only does it enforce clear gendered stereotypes, it's (I hope accidentally) making preteens imbibe this idea that infidelity is just a part of any relationship. Because guys can't help it.

Kevin Levin, the anything-absorbing half-Osmosian powerhouse, has a bad attitude and a hard history that makes him the most impressionable and endearing character in the show. Like Beast Boy, the voice actor's previous role, he's generally comedic relief. However, the infidelity in our nation's relationships is no joke, and Man of Action consistently makes it funny through Kevin's ogling of women other than his girlfriend, the magical pink-mana-blasting half-Anodite Gwen Tennyson. This wasn't such a problem in "Ben 10 Alien Force," where when he did stray, he faced horrible consequences and quickly learned his lesson. In Ultimate Alien, Kevin never actually cheats on Gwen, but wow he has some serious problems keeping his gaze set on her! Almost every blonde on the show becomes an object of his wandering eyes. Kevin probably won't actually do anything, but jokes alone enforce the stereotype that men just can't help looking to other women; infidelity seems normal and funny.

As I said, Kevin may not do anything, but the season premier that came on last Friday shows that Ben might. The 16-year-old shapeshifter's had relationship troubles the entire last season, but supposedly cleared it up by saving his girlfriend's life. Well, Julie, we've got news for you, because suddenly a blonde's appeared on the scene. This time, the story's more serious and perhaps Man of Action intends to make an object lesson of it. Man of Action, this is not the way. Pre-teens want to follow what looks fun and normal. You're making it look totally normal for a guy to "girl-shop" rather than choosing to love the girl he's with. Should shows reflect reality? Yes, and infidelity is commonplace. Commonplace does not equal normal; normal implies healthy, right living, and wanderlust does not factor into that picture at all. Leading by example says way more than leading by "oooh that was bad, let's do it the right way" because your characters have amazing adventures as a result of "being bad." Yes, they suffer for their wrong--but it's exciting! So stop it right now. Just stop.

Gwen's sarcastic, correcting, and frankly really annoying responses to her cousin and her boyfriend only enforce gendered stereotypes that women have hearts and men's hearts lurk somewhere down between their legs. Crude? Yes, but honest. Setting the girl up as the defender of fidelity and the boys up as immature blonde-hungry creatures only tells boys that it's normal to be unfaithful, and tells girls to accept that as their cross to bear. Teaching girls that it's normal for men to cheat also only empowers the double standard that guys deserve whatever happens to them in a relationship. This probably doesn't reflect the nationwide statistics, but in my circle I've seen more girls mistreating (and cheating) my guy friends than vice versa, and it seems to me that saying "girls are nicer than boys" makes girls think it's okay. After all, if men have no hearts, women have the right to break them. Yes, Man of Action would never intentionally send these messages, but the unconscious gendering of the right and the wrong does not benefit women.

Finally, what's with blonde and white always equalling beautiful? Yes, there exist some lovely white blonde girls out there, but seriously, every girl set up in the show as "beautiful" is as Caucasion as Hitler and blonde as Rapunzel. Not to mention stick thin. In a world that pretends to embrace diversity and to battle anorexia, you'd think Man of Action would know better. I wanna see a chubby black girl set up as a model of beauty. Or maybe I wanna see Julie struggling with body appreciation issues, or Gwen learning a lesson every now and then rather than standing out as the judgmental lie about moral perfection we see now. (Don't even get me started on her) Man of Action, please show me something that really reflects the real world problems teens face, rather than creating new subconscious traps to screw up their lives.

The Intron--Nature's April Fools Joke?

So in the last post I indicated that I wouldn't be posting for a while. I suppose that wasn't true--I just hate wasting my time, and at this moment I am rather restricted in what productive operations my excited fingers can bring forth.

Let us cozy up in a tree outside your dorm room and discuss DNA, that vast library that determines what you are and some believe, to some extent, who you are. Such a vast, vast library--if one of the haploid chromosomes within your cells, one of the "stacks" if you will of the library, were to be laid out end to end, the resulting string would be taller than you (unless you're more than 2 meters tall). We call the books, the instructions for the proteins that arduously manage your entire existence, exons. Strangely enough, only about one percent of the pages in your library are books--exons. They are buried within long chains of non-coding sections, and then even within and between all the books lies shelves and shelves of gooblygunk.

These gooblygunks, seemingly random strings of letters, are called introns. I have heard people say they are evidence of species-to-species evolution because they are useless. Since they do not code for anything, they must be left-overs from our distant past, before all the mutations that made us human, that haven't been deleted yet. I had the pleasure recently of discovering that introns actually serve a legitimate purpose.

Your genes are intensely regulated to ensure that you only read and copy ("transcribe") the "books" that you need for each moment. It would be silly and possibly dangerous if you JUST needed an organic chemistry book, but someone threw the entire physics section at you, too. To prevent this, your genes have switches that turn reading on and off for each exon. You have switches to modulate HOW MUCH you read, too. They even have switches that send messengers to flip switches to turn reading on or off. It turns out that a lot of your switches that are controlled by other switches are written into the introns.

Let me just take a moment to totally praise God for this. He is so clearly showing us that just because you don't see use for something doesn't mean it doesn't have a purpose. I will go farther and say that many times, things that are useless are absolutely bursting with infinite purpose. So judge not, for "whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do it all for the Lord Jesus Christ." Remember that verse? All things can be a glorious expression of worship...all introns may hold a deep message that we have simply overlooked.

Intron/Exon information from my BME 2104 class at UVA, taught by William Guilford

Agh my brain hurts

And unfortunately I will have to make an admission.

I can't update each week. I can't even update biweekly. Heck, there are things I'm supposed to update monthly that I can't keep up with.

This will change after the MCAT. This will change. But I cannot keep pretending that I have time, when I do not.

Please pray for me, because it is so hard to focus on that which matters. It's a lot more fun to focus on nothing at all.

God bless,
Jen

Prometheus Studies: Orgo Chem Video Series

A'ight people, so in addition to commenting on sci fi that no one cares about, over the weekend I did a few quick "Jesus Geek" videos. Check 'em out.





While you're at it, stop by my other Prometheus Studies vids on youtube. If anything interests you, be sure to subscribe so I can try to throw you more.

Who are you? Who am I talking to? Well, I don't know! But I hope whoever "you" are that you enjoy what you see.

Hopefully you're not me. 0_0

God and...Cartoon Network!

SO it's been a while, but if you check the dates, you'll notice I'm doin' a once a week thang, and I'm sticking to it! So don't be judging me y'all...and broadjam is about to take my primo membership away, so if you want my music, you better get it now.



OKAY so time for a little sci fi. Hopefully you don't know me, but if you do, you know that this new children's sci fi has completely captured my heart. Why the crazy over Ben 10 and its sequel, Alien Force? Well, let's start with the sci fi.



Admittedly, the "science" part of this kid's show is somewhat lacking at times. The producers expect that throwing out the word "DNA" every few minutes and mixing it up with "turbo" will impress their audience, and since it's made up of ten-year-olds, they're probably right. The Omnitrix, the alien watch that melds itself irreversibly with the child protagonist's DNA, stores genetic information from all over the universe and then mutates the wearer into one of "ten super cool alien dudes," as Ben says. How is not explained, but the awesome transformations Ben undergoes takes our nine-year-old minds out of the realm of magic and into that elusive imaginative world of the possibilities of science. What if genetic instability and the universally horrible effect of mutation on the human body could be REVERSED? What if, in the light of the progression of gene therapy, in vitro gene transformation could go BACK AND FORTH? And, more importantly for the target audience, what if a ten year old boy can be a superhero? THAT kind of question, the wonderful what if, is why science fiction is a good thing for kids, and why it didn't hurt to throw a little more science into Ben 10.



However, after doggedly tracking Ben 10's spin-off, Ben 10 Alien Force, I have discovered why it is a good thing the original series did NOT delve TOO much into the science. Sometimes Man of Action, bless his soul, does not merely offend the intelligence of children: he stomps on the beauty of science fiction itself. I made sure to go back and put in the word "sometimes", because sometimes Man of Action very nicely hints at how the Omnitrix works by relating it to topics he/they know about, such as Wi Fi. The diverse alien creatures themselves really do form the backbone of the show, making for some terribly interesting daydreaming, especially in the first series. The danger lies in easily obvious scientific fallacies. The moment any sixth-grader with a periodic table realizes that there cannot be a Uranium isotope with as many neutrons as posited in season 3's "Fool's Gold," the flaw rips attention away from the fiction. Add to that injury the insult of watching a character bounce on Uranium deposit explosions--an absolute impossibility-- and people like this critic show up. Fiction is great, and fantasy is great, but when you're making science fiction, vague is better than pure WRONG, because it allows us, the viewers, to come up with our own explanations. Vague spurs our imaginations; wrong limits them and turns us into critics.



So what is it about this show that makes it somehow awesome, and why am I about to tell you that Christians should enjoy it? Is it the way Ben often learns how he should have listened to his grandfather? Not really. Don't get me wrong: the idea that a child should listen to an adult's loving advice is a refreshing breath of life amidst all the stale, putridly justified rebellion in children's films today. It does bother me that Ben's constant bickering with his cousin Gwen and the tone of voice Gwen uses when addressing her elders (I'm not a parent, but she really makes me cringe) counteract the entire premise of kindness and respect; parents should understand that this show, like any other, is probably not for the littlest ones who are still learning about obedience unless parents are willing to sit down and discuss things with their kids. I do adore the didactic way the bad guys' mental states are extrapolations of common childhood "badnesses", but my satisfaction with the show does not come from knowing that Dr. Animo's mutant guinea pig is showing kids how easily "I've earned it, I deserve it" goes too far.



So, if it's not in the episode lessons...do I simply love the plot? I do admit that I am a biased sucker for kids defeating the same bad guys over and over and over, and will never tire of the old squid-faced supervillian revenge spiel. This may not be your thing. The sci fi aspect of each story, however, makes it an intriguing watch for kids, and despite my harping on Uranium isotopes, I really have to hand it to these guys for talking easily with preteens about carbon dioxide exchange and cell immunity. Each episode leaves us wondering what the heck kind of demented and freaky bad guy they will come up with next and how an ordinary kid will have to deal with it.



Therein lies part of the illusive attraction. Unlike most superheroes, Ben Tennyson does not hail from a troubled childhood filled with science experiments or depressing manipulations that turned him somehow into the hero he is today. No matter how many times he violates the "10" part of the show title's as he collects over 20 new aliens to turn into, he will always be the normal kid who just happens to wear a weird watch. In the original series, Ben often ultimately defeats the "bad guy" by coming up with something clever as an ordinary kid. His powers are a tool, not who he is, and Man of Action tells us over and over that normal Ben is awesome. Christians should be all over this. The idea that every special ability is part of a gift we use to bless others, rather than part of some the search for self-expression: doesn't this sound like Jesus' tale of the talents? Jesus made a point of explaining with his parable of the widow that what you have does not matter half as much as what you do with it, and unlike Ben's genetically gifted sidekicks, Ben is a hero because he does his best with what he's given. The producers did even better when they made a hero in the audience's age range, subtly standing against the cultural obsession with Teen heroes for NON-teen kids. Like Paul to Timothy, rather than saying, "look up to the hip kids older than you," Ben Ten says, "Be someone worth looking up to."



There are so many ways this show could go wrong, but honestly, as long as Ben remains a normally growing kid and the aliens stay fresh foreign aliens, people will probably keep on watching. Writing science fiction shows for young minds is a challenge, and anyone who airs beautifully colored, decently drawn characters on a channel that has begun to produce badly animated crap like "Chowder" and "Total Drama Island" should receive support simply as a matter of artistic principle. In the name of art, God, and all that is sci fi, get with your ten-year-old in front of the TV at 8:30 Friday evenings, because as a Christian parent you can get one heck of a teaching opportunity out of that show! If you don't talk to your child about aliens, who will?



Unless, of course, you planned to go star-gazing or to valiantly defend planet earth from a giant tick--those really are better family activities than TV.

The God of the Endosperm

Two candidates wait, crouched eagerly for discovery within their dark hovel, both of them equally gifted--they are sisters, from the same cell--both poised to burst forth into glorious flowering purpose. Only one of them, however, will usher herself into colorful notoriety. The other, we will call, the endosperm.

HUH, you say? Well, when the megasporocyte (cool name, huh?) inside a seed-bearing plant divides, she produces two megaspores, one of which dies, the other of which divides again three times to make eight cells. Each of these cells is "equally gifted" with the same genetic material, but out of each three, one is chosen to become an egg, and the other two become "polar nuclei." These cells all wait patiently inside the pistil, the female part in the center of a flower, until a pollen grain lands on the pistil and sends a long tube of sperm down to them. The egg, when fertilized by pollen, grows into the embryo that grows into the main body of the beautiful flower. The two polar nuclei, when fertilized, fuse together in obscurity and form the endosperm, the triploid freak with three copies of genetic instructions instead of the customary two. Flowers are the subjects of poems, treatises, research, and poetry from every civilization. The endosperm? Not so much. We shall call it the historical loser.

Much like many biblical characters, actually. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Jesus' ancestors, failed miserably over and over and over again. And again. Abraham, an unloved nobody in a strange land, repeatedly sold out on his wife to save his own skin; Isaac treated one of his sons better than the other so that they nearly killed each other out of jealousy; Jacob not only followed in his father's favoritist footsteps, but also lied to his brother, cheated his uncle, and proved helpless against the rape of his daughter, loss of his son, or the slaughter of an innocent town. Successful guys? Not so much. Each of them lived in sorrow in their old age, not only because of their own failures, but also because of the trickery of others. Classic losers. Classic endosperm.

Yet it is the endosperm that is most crucial to the survival of a plant. A seed would have no purpose, and in fact no body, without the endosperm, for it is this strange entity that feeds, protects, and provides the living foundation for the plant before it fully sprouts. The endosperm really lives on in the spirit of the flower itself, for while the endosperm doesn't need the embryo, the embryo desperately needs the endosperm.

Sometimes our lives, like that of the endosperm, seem to us like pointless failures. We assume that because we aren't rich, or popular, or right all the time, or fit, or A plus students, or ________, we aren't serving our purpose in life. However, over and over in the Bible God refers to himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and they certainly didn't have it all together. So why would God essentially call himself "the God of the Losers?" Because just as he builds a flower on the foundation of the endosperm, he builds his kingdom on a foundation of losers who can testify to the power of love and sacrifice. So don't give in to the lie of pointlessness--if you are His, you are NOT a failure. In the words of two lovely songs, "Little is much, when God's in it," and "there's nothing about you that's plain."

I know it sounds funny to say, "I am precious endosperm in God's sight," but hey, I say it, and the laughter makes me live longer anyway. We have a tremendous God. Never forget that.

Information gathered from my Bio 2040 Lab at University of Virginia. Music linked to: Little is much, by downhere, and Plain, by Zoegirl.