if they say “namaste”, run

Baker B and I signed up for a study the university is doing on quercetin, which is a flavonoid. Or a flavonol. I’m not too sure of the difference, but it’s a substance found in lots of fruits and veggies that they hope has benefits for just a huge variety of problems like upper respiratory tract issues and mood issues and high cholesterol and mental function and even shrinkage of tumors. I’m hoping it will improve spelling, as I’ve just wasted a whole lot of my valuable lunch hour (which I’m spending in the office with my door shut because it’s nasty and cold and snowy outside) trying to figure out how to spell "cholesterol". And, sadly, "variety".

ANYHOW, we’ve both volunteered for this 12 week study because all you have to do is take some tests at the start and at the end and pop the quercetin chews twice a day. And keep a log of how you feel. And they pay $300 a person. So, hey, why not? This morning, at 8 AM with no coffee in my system since you couldn’t have anything but water 9 hours prior to the tests, we showed up at the labs. Actually, it’s the Health, Exercise and Leisure Sciences department. There were bunches of people there- I think they’re using 1000 people. So we had to fill out questionnaires about our current mental states ("I NEED COFFEE NOW!!!") and have our blood pressure checked (both ours was quite good, surprisingly for me at least. Whenever I have it taken at doctor’s appointments it’s always bordering on high, if not over the border. Today it was 108/70. Proving that it’s my reaction to the doctor’s office. And possibly not being hopped up on coffee). And let all those smiling people in lab coats shuffle us around and weigh and measure and suck blood out of us and ask us more questions and give us mental agility tests on computers.

It was very Dharma Institute. Which is only funny if you watch Lost. As is my title. "Namaste!"

I don’t want to know how I did on the mental agility tests, since I had not had any caffeine whatsoever all morning long and I was just going, "waaaaaaaiiiiitttt…..whaaaaat??!!???" during most of them. We had a word memory test (I think I actually did at least marginally okay on that one since there were words I DID in fact remember seeing previously) and a symbol memory test which I’m sure will prove to them that I need to be on some sort of cognitive function medication since I couldn’t decide if I’d seen ALL of them before or NONE of them before and neither was an option. And there was one where they’d flash names of colors onto the screen and one test you clicked if the word was the color of the….word… ummmm….. like, say, if the word "green" was actually green, you click and if the word "green" is actually blue you don’t click. Then you did it backwards. Clicking if the word was NOT its color. Then there was a really fun one where you have a square on the top and bottom left and a circle on the top and bottom right, and you had to click depending if the shapes matched or the colors matched – it would flash "SHAPE!" or "COLOR!" at the top and you had to click accordingly. That probably makes no sense because duuuude, my brain still hurts from that one. Finally there was this test where they flashed one letter at a time on the screen, and whenever you saw "B" you clicked. Which is all easy and no problem and even I can remember I’m clicking the B, until it goes on for like FIVE MINUTES. I think that was an ADD test. I’d start sneaking looks at everybody else and thinking about other things nearly miss the B when it finally flashed. B was certainly for "booooooooring".

ANYHOW, it was interesting. Mostly. I’m glad we only do that twice. Because I felt REAL dumb and slow and cognitively impaired afterwards. I guess we’ll get to see the results at the end. We actually weren’t supposed to see our blood pressure – we looked in the file when they were done and had laid our files down on the table in front of us. And one nice smiling labcoat guy said, "NO, no, you aren’t supposed to look at your file!!! Only Ben can look at your file!!!" Well, okay, he didn’t actually mention Ben by name. </yet another Lost reference>

And now I must get back to work. I’ll leave you with an awfully cute kitten picture –