It’s not very often that you’re asked, “Are you wearing deodorant?” and then handed a wipe to remove it. (Deodorant shows up on the x-rays as calcification.) The mammogram wasn’t for especially urgent matters, just luck of the draw.

I had heard that it was painful if you had small breasts, so I was ready for pain. It was an ordeal, but I’ve experienced much worse. The tech helped shoved me forward into the machine. The procedure involved much shoving and maneuvering my torso forward while a glass plate flattened my boobs in a way I didn’t know was possible—a type of magic trick/medieval torture technique, I believe?

It only really hurt for my right side, but the discomfort was tolerable otherwise.

What is most valuable is the raw data, which is available for download in a non-proprietary format. Through using 3rd-party software with the raw data, I’ve been able to learn more than 23andMe reveals. (The raw data also comes in very handy if you’re not 100% European because 23andMe has a self-acknowledged Eurocentric model.)

For example, how Neanderthal I am from Interpretome: 11 out of 84 identified Neanderthal SNPs. I like the little meter it uses.

Interpretome is a great resource for digging through your raw data since it involves using your browser, instead of downloading and installing something such as R and then running available scripts. Not everyone is comfortable with the latter so the Interpretome interface makes it highly recommended.

Some things I learned from 23andMe:

• I’m 100% European.
• My mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup is H11, from “Central Europe.”
• Compared to average, I have nearly twice the risk for Alzheimer’s disease and about 1.5x the risk for Coronary Heart Disease, lung cancer, Restless Legs Syndrome, and ulcerative colitis.
• I have an “increased risk” of gout and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
• I’m not a carrier for any of the various things they tested for: Cystic Fibrosis, Tay-Sach’s, Connexin 26-related sensorineural hearing loss, etc.
• I am norovirus-resistant.
• My blood type is likely B (it’s B positive).
• My eyes are likely brown (they’re green).
• I’m not resistant to HIV/AIDS.

Some things I learned from the raw data + third parties:

• I have 19 “European alleles” and 1 “East Asian allele,” whatever that means. (Interpretome)
• At maximum: my ancestry is 93% Northwestern European, 7% Southeastern European, 0% Ashkenazi Jewish. (Euro-DNA-Calc)
• I have 11 out of 84 identified Neanderthal SNPs (as seen above from Interpretome)
• From Doug McDonald’s BGA Project (search the 23andMe forums for his email address):
  

  Most likely fit is 43.0% (+-  6.4%) Europe (various subcontinents) and 57.0% (+-  6.4%) Europe (all Northeast Europe), which is 100% total Europe. The following are possible population sets and their fractions, most likely at the top.

  Italian= 0.386 Lithuani= 0.614
  Spain= 0.381 Lithuani= 0.619
  French= 0.538 Lithuani= 0.462
  French= 0.416 Belorus= 0.584

  For some reason the above and the spot on the map, which both look like Germany, seem to contradict the scatter plot, which looks quite like plain England. So I would say that it could be anywhere from England to Germany.

• I have 21 out of 32 Coronary Artery Disease risk alleles. (Interpretome)
• I have 19 out of 36 Type 2 Diabetes risk alleles. (Interpretome)
• My combined risk of narcolepsy and Restless Leg Syndrome is 3.63x the average. (Interpretome)
• I have a ton of alleles associated with an elevated risk for mental health issues (such as depression, bi-polar disorder, and schizophrenia), and being less likely than average to respond to certain antidepressant medications. (Promethease)

A couple other things you can do with your 23andMe raw data involve submitting it to CureTogether or GEDmatch, and cross-referencing your SNP data using the FireFox extension SNPTips. If all four of your grandparents are from the same background, you can use DIYDodecad. (Mine aren’t, so I didn’t use it.)

By the way: my advice is not to pay full price for a kit, but to wait for it to go on sale because this seems to happen pretty frequently. The wait isn’t long for them to process your sample (of your spit inside a tube), it was only three weeks for me. “6-8 weeks” is the maximum time frame given.

A total of three centipedes have drowned themselves in my cats’ water dish. This did not appear to affect the quality of water as far as the cats were concerned. It may have added flavor and vitamins. Once, there were two centipedes in the water dish. It was likely the aftermath of one centipede forgetting it couldn’t swim as it dove to save another centipede from drowning.

I encountered a centipede in the kitchen sink that was so large, I stood there for a moment to ponder how I was going to kill it. The centipede looked positively tropical in size. The body was almost as long as my pinkie and nearly half as wide. I can’t squash it; the guts will fly everywhere and then I’ll need to do extensive crime-scene clean-up. I didn’t want to touch it, so I decided to scald it to death.

I don’t even want to get into the centipede that touched my bare thigh while I was lying on my bed or the centipede that scurried over my bare foot. I am usually not squeamish, but there’s something about the centipede. I can’t pinpoint exactly what is so frightening. I think millipedes are pretty cute, so it can’t really be the number of legs on a centipede that are scaring me.

One of those “For real, this is my life?” moments—yet I still wouldn’t change anything about it. I know that sounds alien and ridiculous, but the best way to explain it is that you’ve been given a strange mysticism. You woke up one day into a life that you never thought would be yours, couldn’t possibly be yours, but is. And while you feel like your mind had always operated very differently before, it really works differently now: You were different before, but now you’re really different. “It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street…“

Short, shaky video of the blizzard happening outside my front door, and a miserable squirrel trying to find his way home. (He does, don’t worry!) Taken around 3PM CST on December 11, 2010 — total Minneapolis snowfall was around 14.6″ [Source].

My early life experiences gave me a certain maturity, self-reliance, and critical thought process that I didn’t see reflected in the majority of my peers until at least high school. There weren’t many (if any) people my own age to bounce my thoughts off of and be understood. Even now, I’ll have a good experience and marvel at how nice it feels to be grokked.

Within the past ten years the internet grown from being a novelty to becoming a necessity. All of the cringe-worthy writing from my early teenage years were scattered across multiple sites which no longer exist. Twitter has replaced my original outlets for venting, and has become a place to throw my inner monologue and all the profanity that comes with it, in 140 characters or less.

Komen ingrained themselves deeply into the breast cancer world. They are synonymous with the pink ribbon and breast cancer itself. They surely realized that when a loved one is affected, you will do anything if you think it will help stop their pain. And when it just wasn’t meant to be, you will do anything to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. All they needed to do was create a community, make it uplifting and valuable to participants, sell them pink trinkets… and profit.

Throw in capitalism and business savvy, some massive profits, and it was only a matter of time before they hooked up with the GOP and lobbied for atrocious bills that favored the HMO over the consumer. In return, the Komen founder was made an ambassador by George W. Bush in 2001.

One day in early October, I walked through the Mall of America and was barraged by pink. It was impossible to escape. Nearly every store was selling something specifically for breast cancer awareness. Later that same day, I stopped at a Walgreens location and discovered that there was even a pink Snuggie.

Every time I encountered something pink, I was reminded that my mother was dead. My mother had died of breast cancer at the age of 38 in 1996–I was eight and my sister was five. Over 13 years later, my family is still experiencing the aftershocks of losing the person who glued us all together.

There is nothing that stops a company from slapping a pink ribbon onto a package and toting it as “breast cancer awareness,” when there is no donation to anything but the company. The pink ribbon is not regulated, and is easy to abuse.

Often, a portion of the proceeds are supposedly going towards research, and other times the product (in one case, General Mills’ Cheerios) mentioned that the company was going to donate money regardless of product purchases. In Yoplait’s “Save Lids to Save Lives” drive, you mail in lids from yogurt cups. A single lid fetches 10 cents for breast cancer research. If you sent three lids a day for four months, your total donation would be only $36.

I find it hard to swallow the sincerity of commercial interests. If marketing things for breast cancer awareness weren’t a guaranteed way to make money from consumers with a conscious, companies would not be doing so.

Today, T-Mobile finally admitted that all of our data is gone:

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.

(The way it works is that while your information is on your phone, it’s not really stored there, it’s in the cloud. You sign-in to your account and the phone downloads your contacts. You can replace your phone without having to worry about contacts because they are stored in the cloud. However, if something happens to the cloud, you’re screwed.)

Too bad there’s probably something in fine print somewhere that prevents anyone from being sued over this.

"The Hypaethral Temple, Philae" by Francis Frith, 1857

One of my favorite blogs, Borei Hoshech, focuses on Jewish prayer in light of mental illness. It sounds like that could be a pretty narrow niche, but like most things in Judaism (at least for me), it is bottomless. Particularly insightful are the entries from around Passover, specifically from Missing Egypt:

I thought that once I left Egypt, which pretty much happened several years ago, things would be easy. The Promised Land glimmered hopefully in the not-too-distant distance. The Promised Land of being able to go to sleep at night, get up in the morning, and do something useful, fulfilling, and interesting with my day in between. The Promised Land of a husband, children, and a full professional and communal life. But it turns out that there is a vast desert between slavery and the Promised Land. I am traversing that desert right now.

As for me, I don’t even know whether I am still in Egypt or if I have made it to the desert. Maybe thinking about it means I’m in the desert? Years from now, I’ll have the time and perspective to be able to look back and pinpoint where exactly I was as I wrote this, and see how far I’ve come.