Sunday 28 March 2004

Pic of the day: WC revisited. You probably don't want to eat while reading this.

Shit!

It amuses me slightly that the Americans "swear" by excrements. While the stuff is among the least appetizing things I can think of, it still seems kinda tame compared with the Norwegian tradition of invoking Satan and his future destination Hell, and various colorful variants thereof.

***

This all came to my thoughts because I believe I have found a kind of lead on the mysterious pains in my lower right side. Since this has been my major health topic for months now, anything is of interest. And it definitely seems that the pain occurs mainly – or practically only – when my bowels are loose. At first I assumed that the pain was the cause and the running stool was the effect. However, these things are testable. If I drink sweet milk and eat pasta, and keep the meals not too big, the digestion slows down. Salt also helps. If I drink cola or eat chocolate or fruit, it speeds up. So I can to some extent, barring food poisoning and such, predict the nature of my bowel movements a day or two ahead in time. And it turns out this is also a pretty good warning of the pain in my side.

This pretty much blows the fear that it might be the appendix, even though it is nearby. The appendix is at the very start of the large intestine, and the large intestine is the slowest part of the digestive tract. Thus there should be several hours delay at least between what happens there and the actual defecation. A more likely explanation is that there is some damage to the colon, probably from my years of constipation, and it just happens to activate pain nerves close to the ones around the appendix.

***

Yes, improbable as this may seem now, I used to be anal-retentive. But only in the literal sense. While I tried to avoid emptying my colon as long as I could, and was chronically constipated from my early childhood onward, I was never given to order, routine, ritual or discipline. I have been chaotic for as long as I can remember. This, I believe, is because there is no actual connection between people's potty training and their personality, unless something severely sick has been done to them during the process.

I frankly have no idea how the weird idea came into being. I tend to suspect that this guy came up with it while drunk. "Hey, what if we classify people by how they shit? Now that would be really ridiculous. A good joke on all the idiot theories that run around in psychology." And then to their shock the idea caught on, and people wrote serious books about the problems of anal retentive people until it became a household word. By then it was a bit late to admit that it was all a joke. Oh well. At least it can't be more ridiculous than the wild foaming madness about girls generally being envious at their brothers' penis and wanting to marry their father, and the boys being afraid their father would castrate them because they secretly wanted to kill him and marry their mother.

The soul isn't all that difficult to observe. It is right there, people. No, there! It continues to amaze and amuse me how the wildest ideas are meekly accepted as gospel in this area.

In short, I think Sigmund Freud, while meaning well, has introduced a lot of shit into the then fledgling science of psychology. The sooner he is written off as a weirdo, the better for the world. Though I love his collection of misprints and misspeaks. He should have been a toastmaster. Instead he became the "founding father" of psychology. Oh, shit.