This week I created some buttons that, if you have your own blog, you can put in your sidebar. Hopefully you find one of the two pictures inoffensive enough to have on your blog. If not, I should have one of me in a doctor’s jacket and stethoscope next week, which should be quite pleasing to those few girls out there that like their men in uniforms… Now, on with the show!

Dear Dr Moses, Parter of the Seas,

Is it true that you can’t go swimming until half an hour after eating or is it a myth? If not, why not?

- Naturally Buoyant from Boston [Perhaps I should provide a way of uploading photos to accompany questions... -S]

Now this is one I’ve always wondered about! First, the kind of exercise is irrelevant — running, cycling, swimming — they are all equally bad after eating! This is because your body requires a lot of energy to digest food. Your stomach and intestine require a lot of oxygen, and thus blood, to successfully process your meal. But if you exercise, oxygen is required by your legs and arms, and heart — and there’s only so much oxygen to go around! That’s when your muscles cramp: your leg muscles spasm because they’re not receiving enough oxygen.

The problem with swimming in specific is: if you have cramps in your legs you might drown. Cramps while running or cycling are obviously not as dangerous (unless you face plant the curb).

Also worth noting is that if you must swim after eating, eat something light — fruit or carbs. Fats and proteins are harder to digest and require more time (and energy) for your intestine and stomach to process completely. You should probably wait 2 or 3 hours after a big, fatty meal before swimming.

Apparently there’s also a rumour/myth that you can pass out from swimming after eating. It’s not impossible, but it’s much more likely to be caused by some other physical condition: a fever that raises your body temperature so high that jumping into cold water causes shock, and thus making you pass out (and then drowning!). Your body temperature goes up a little after eating, which is probably where this rumour comes from.

Dear Seb,

I have a blog stalker!

He leaves epic comments on my blog and is overly touchy-feely when we chat online. He hugs and kisses and…  he’s just too nice, creepy-like. This has gone beyond just ‘Mr Nice Guy’ and it’s freaking me out!

I think he’s made of marshmallows and vaginas [Beautiful imagery -S]. I can tell he’s a total Mommy’s boy, and he’s overly emotional.  He annoys the hell out of me, and though I’ve blocked him because I don’t have the heart to tell him he’s smothering me on the internet, he sends me emails every day saying he loves me and misses me. LOVES me?

I’ve had about four conversations with him, during which I found myself leaning back in my computer chair, gasping for breath as I felt I was being suffocated with false affections… WTF do I do?

Sincerely,
Smothered in the States

I think this is a problem that many bloggers might’ve experienced, or may experience one day: the scary commenter that both makes your skin crawl and drives other commenters away. The chat and email situation is another thing entirely — you can block his emails, don’t forget, just as you’ve already blocked his chatter!

But the blog stalking, well, that’s potentially a whole lot more sticky. If he’s as benign as he appears, you probably have nothing to worry about — but stalking is the kind of thing that starts off as a flight of fancy, a mere crush, but quickly turns into something a whole lot more sinister!

There’s a lot of resources on the Internet about dealing with real-world stalkers, but very little on the topic of blog stalking. I would suggest you take sensible precautions:

• Blog under a pseudonym — You’ll still have a problem here if you’ve given your full name and location in the past, but this should at least stop the ‘opportunist’ predators.
• Self-host your blog — If you host your own blog (WordPress or TypePad, for example), you have a lot of control over who reads your entries. You can always turn your blog ‘private’ too, but that’s admitting defeat, and you shouldn’t suffer at the grubby, spindly hands of a stalker!
• Change your address/contact details — This is the best real life way to escape a stalker too! Think about changing your blog and/or email address. Again, this is letting the stalker win — sucks.
• Contact his/her ISP — If you have their personal details (which is likely, considering they have probably made contact), you can probably contact their Internet provider and have them suspended for harassment. This isn’t a simple task though and you should probably contact the police before you try to do it yourself!

If all else fails: send him a photo of a hairy, fat trucking type that can’t see his own penis  — claim that’s what you really look like, and that pretending to be someone else is your method of escaping the daily grind.

Seb the Biologist!

Quickly, I don’t know how long I’ve got to live!

I’m swallowing and hence withholding burps; am I going to explode?!

Hiccup,
Suck ‘n Blow in the South East

No. You might fart more though, which could be embarrassing. Stop being a damn drama queen! (This was actually sent a few days ago, so the person that sent it might have exploded before reading my soothing words. In which case, I guess I’m partially to blame…)

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This won’t be a complete backstory, but it will fill in a few big gaps. It includes and expands upon bits from my childhood entries and the ‘about‘ page. This should illuminate my scattered, eclectic writings on this blog. This should spread light on themes that you may’ve noticed and upon which I will now elucidate. This post is actually celebrating a ‘blog milestone’, though in true, chronically-understated British fashion, I shan’t say what that milestone is. Enjoy this revealing expose of inner Sebbiness; I’ll be hiding in the corner over there.

* * *

As I forced the last piece of LEGO into position with a snap I decided then that I would be an engineer; I was only five at the time and didn’t know what the word meant, nor what they did. The only thing I knew was that making things — crafting intricate constructions from simple, constituent parts — was fun. Really damn fun. You start off with a box of bits and amorphous blobs leftover from previous creations, and you can make anything! Well, almost anything, as defined by the rules and mechanics of LEGO blocks.

It was those rules, those axioms, that interested me the most. My parents will tell you that I was never a huge fan of using my hands — I was never the kind of kid to make rickety tree houses or bird tables — they were just a means to an end: to discover rules! Hands were great at pulling apart and unscrewing video machines, toasters and televisions. I had no idea how things actually worked, but God-damn it was fun trying to work it out! I would look at the parts, at the wreckage of my latest interest, and try to somehow divine the magical rules that made them go.

As I grew up my LEGO bricks turned into Technic cogs and Meccano struts, and thus my education continued: I learnt about physics and the inescapable force of gravity; torque and various structural designs to nullify its effects; the fun that could be had with elastic energy! Most importantly, I learnt about the two forces that dominate our current understanding of the world: chemical and electrical energy. Heating mixtures of chemicals and watching in (pained) awe as they exploded into my face taught me the wonders of cause and effect; reactions. Adding electrical motors to my constructions added life. And that was the key: I’d finally found out how to make things happen.

Enter my first computer at the geriatric age of eight (I was spoilt, some might say). This is probably where the tale should take a dark and oppressive turn for the worse but fortunately… it does not! Unless you consider the abject horror and avoidance of all physical exercise, caused by continued computer use, a bad thing. Actually, that’s a lie: I enjoyed tennis and badminton, but only because my arms were so long that I could reach almost everywhere without moving. I won’t bore you with any more from my teenage years, but you can read my childhood entries if you’re really interested.

In short, my teenage years were… OK. Not great, and often introverted. I was bullied for being fat and far too intelligent. Fortunately the bullying didn’t impact my thirst for knowledge, but it did culture my antisocial tendencies. I don’t mean I went around throwing bricks through windows (I did this just once, when I fell in with some bad boys), I mean that I’ve been a hermit ever since. My teenage life wasn’t completely devoid of social interaction. I did have friends. But for example, the only parties I would attend would be those I couldn’t skip, lest I become a social outcast. Being social, for the teenage Seb, was an obligation.

Looking back, it was a sad, lonely way of living. I don’t know if it was caused by the bullying, or just my continued interest in learning. Y’see, I would be great company until I realised that I’d actually rather be somewhere else, learning how to make explosives or program a new computer language. The only friends I did keep were ones that had identical interests to mine, or were intelligent enough that they remained interesting to me. A bit of a pragmatic — some would say selfish — view of friendships. Again, I don’t know what caused it, but my thirst for knowledge compelled me to flit about from person to person and from book to book, devouring anything and everything that I stumbled across in my search for more data.

When you’re a teenager, mixing your friends up a little is a common occurrence — so what if one day you’re best friends with John, and Steve the next? Looking back, I guess that’s why no one noticed what I was up to. And I’m still the same today, though my years at university tempered my hermit-like tendencies and almost turned me into a social butterfly! Still, when it comes to friends — relationships that I nuture and tend to regularly — I still only have two close ones. The first, I talk to once a week if I’m lucky, the second I might see once a year, or less (does that make me a bad friend?) It’s not so easy to ‘bounce between friends’ when you’re an adult; when you’re a grown-up you can’t just chew, digest and unceremoniously dump your friends.

That’s why I travel and I guess… why I don’t have friends.

It feels lame to cite Fight Club of all things, but its popularity will help make my point: I like single servings. The people I meet on trains and planes are tasty enough to tantalise my taste buds without the risk of becoming dull or flavourless. I might only spend six hours with a friend made while climbing over ancient ruins in Turkey, but when you’re thrown into a similar situation together and share the same experiences, you learn a lot about each other, and you learn it quickly. Single, intense servings of personality; more than just a passing acquaintance, but less than a friendship. At the end we can both go our own ways; a single serving with no strings attached.

Finally, we’ve arrived at the contemporary Seb, where I understand enough about myself that I can attempt to define my personal philosophy. ‘Attempt’, because it’s hard to name and qualify thoughts that, without scope or definition, have run around my head for 25 years. So bear with me as I try to put it into some clumsy words: I demand rationality, but not in the conventional sense. As humans, we are exceptionally good at being rational, but only within the confines of a working, true set of data. You can only be as rational as your education allows — if you have been told that the world is flat, it’s rational to assume it is indeed flat. But that’s not rationality; at least not for me. Most ’stupidity’, as viewed from an objective point of view, is (unsurprisingly) caused by a lack of education. The stupid person probably doesn’t know he’s being stupid though — in his head he’s just doing as he’s been taught!

Rationality, for me, is an absolute: not simply a given, limited set of truths taught through nurture, dogma or education.

Rationality, for me, is the neverending search for a body of knowledge so vast, so all-encompassing that, one day, will hopefully allow me to understand the workings of the universe, and those that populate it.

There we have it: one of my most secret and character-definining traits laid bare for all to see. I hope it goes some way to explaining how I look at the world, and ultimately what I write on this blog. I am, in essence, trying to get my head around everything; I’m pulling the world apart, screw by screw, hoping to find the answers. As and when I find them, I’ll be sure to share.

* * *

There are some fun photos to follow tomorrow. They were meant to accompany this entry, but now it seems inappropriate. If you want funny pictures, go and look at the ones of me as a kid…

Phop, phop, phop.

The sound of a fan mere inches from my gonads. The slightest of  slips and, in spectacular fashion, all hope of future Sebastians goes down the drain. Earlier, some of my leg hair got caught between the blades and it hurt like buggery. A small price to pay for wind-chilled testicles though; if they get too hot it can make me impotent, right?

I took my shirt off hoping for a slight reprieve and it worked for a while. But now I’ve soaked through the chair I’m sitting in and not only am I hot, I’m sticky. Sticky.

I’m amazed that my keyboard hasn’t yet short-circuited. I’ve been looking into getting one of those plastic covers that they use in McDonalds to prevent them from getting gunged up with grease. Mind you, death-by-keyboard-electrocution has to be the best way a geek can go…

It’s made all the worse by spending 80 to 90% of my waking life in front of three computers, four screens and an amplifier that generates enough heat that my cats always flock to it in the winter. It’s about 3 kilowatts in total, which is great in winter… but not in the summer. Perhaps I should get out more I often find myself thinking as I swing around in my computer chair, waving my arms about like a retard and desperately trying to create a breeze.

But in a brief moment of clarity I realise I shouldn’t be moaning or despairing: melting into an amorphous puddle of goo in a bedroom surrounded by high-tech equipment with a tall glass of cold, clean water is a lot more desirable than passing out in the wild undergrowth of Central Anatolia, Turkey.

And so it is, with gooey stumps that would make a leper proud, with gangly digits that were once well-formed and finely-honed typing machines, I write this entry.

I had planned to write something else, something deep, but the pervasive heat is debilitating. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the few times I’ve almost died of heatstroke or dehydration. What a thrilling topic for a blog entry. I’ve interspersed a few pretty photos to make it less boring.

June 29th 2009, Sussex, England

(See picture at start of entry)

Consumed four pints (2 litres) of water… and sweated it all out again through my fingers. Laptops should be outlawed in the summer. Sat outside in the sun for a while hoping the breeze would somehow utilise the sweat that glistens from every part of my body. No breeze, just felt like my brain was being baked while still safely within the confines of my skull. The feeling of sweat dripping from under your arms onto your hips and legs is quite unique, but not entirely unpleasant.

July 2007, Cappadocia, Turkey

In hindsight it was perhaps rather stupid to take a taxi ride out into the middle of nowhere and then pick my way over the weird and wonderful ‘moonscape’ terrain of Cappadocia. On a normal day I guess it would’ve just been silly, but in the middle of summer with temperatures reaching over 40C (100F) and only a small bottle of water it was stupid. I was very nearly a winner of my very own Darwin Award. As with most of my recent exploits, it was obviously to take photos — and it was probably worth it, despite the near-death experience. Check out the lovely hand-carved cave that I found while crawling along the ground, gasping for air and praying that someone would find me, or I would find civilisation. This is probably over 1500 years old!

Somewhere in South England, 1996

I actually keeled over in some woodlands by school, back when I was 12. We’d been exploring (as kids do, when they go to private schools in the countryside and they’re skipping a class they don’t like) and… I guess I pushed it too hard. I’ve never been the fittest person in the world — the thought of exercising just for the sake of being fit is completely foreign to me — I always thought I’d rather be reading or sitting in front of a computer learning something.  The pen is mightier than the sword, right?

Anyway, where was I…

Yes, I passed out in the woods and my friends had to carry me back to school. I am told that, to avoid getting into trouble, they conjured up a great story that involved me being bitten by a snake. Unfortunately, we had leaves and twigs in our hair — oops!

Ostia Antica (30 miles from Rome), October 2008

Instead of Pompeii I decided to go to Ostia Antica, an ancient ruin that has always been overshadowed by its volcanically-preserved sister. I think Pompeii is meant to be in better condition but a) Ostia Antica is only half an hour instead of 4 hours from Rome, and b) it’s almost completely devoid of tourists — so I went to Ostia and it was awesome! Except for the nearly-dying bit.

For the 8 hours I was there I saw three people — and we’re talking about a large city that once had a population of 75,00 people! Originally it had acted as the harbour city of ancient Rome between the 7th century BC and 4th century AD, and some pesky Arab pirates finally caused its downfall in the 9th century. Anyway, I ended up very lost in some ancient Mithraic catacombs; lost and without water.. in the dark. Let me tell you something: ancient religious sites are scary. Dark and scary and damp and silent… except the occasional skitterings of creatures you will never see. I will write about it properly as my travel stories of Italy have finally reached Rome — but the point is… actually, I don’t know what the point is.

Why am I writing in this weather? I’m going to look for another fan…