My body was rejected. Ever since I moved to
There are usually about 3 or 4 pages of these colorful ads asking for the young and old, ladies and gentleman, and peoples of all kinds of backgrounds and usages.
There are always ads are egg donation at NYU or sleep studies at some fancy sleep institute. Lately I have been seeing some interesting ads asking for senior citizens in good health ages 65-85. I got curious about that one and called to see what it was about but only got a machine.
Senior citizens don’t seem like the usual type of person seeking out money through clinical trails, they especially don’t seem like the type to be reading the back pages of the village voice. After the clinical trail ads and Ask a Mexican, the VV descends into a colorful wallpaper of sex ads and “escorts” services.
There is also a borage of studies for people with various drug usage, cocaine users, marijuana, meth, and lately ecstasy ads have been popping up. I called the E ad. They wanted people to come to
She individually asked me what drugs I had taken, some I had never even heard of. I lied and said I had taken E twice, which I hadn’t even done once. Not because I was against it obviously, but because when I was in high school I had a group of friend whom has E parties and they always told me how sexual amazing it was. I guess I always want to save such a sexually amazing experience for someone special. Why waste it on some d-bag I would come to not care about years later.
The girl told me I wasn’t right for the trail, I didn’t have the type if drug usage they were looking for. This was a familiar rejection. I had previously been rejected from a depression study because I was too anxious, rejected from a anxiety study because I was to depressed, a sleep study because my sleep pattern wasn’t consist enough, a sex study because I wasn’t active enough and most recently I after 4 trails of testing I was deemed not a good candidate for egg donation because of alcoholism in my family and my possible learning disabilities. Well, as NYU put it. I tested high in intelligence and creative reasoning but also high for odd or unorthodox thinking patterns consistent with ADD.
I tried to lie about my ADD but it seems I couldn’t get around the 500 true/false questioned tests that determine personality and behavior. I took that rejection that hardest because it most felt like a rejection of me, the fundamentals that make me up. I felt rejected as a genetic specimen, unusable and undesirable at my biologic core. The rest I could write off as a quark of my personal inconsistency not making me, as usually, the obvious choice.
But this reject was of me, my family, and the things that make me up, my mind, how it works, and how I could pass on a part of my dysfunction to others. It still hurts.
In college I read Rebel without a Crew by Robert Rodriguez and I was fascinated by his resolved to get his project made. He sold himself into month long in-house clinical trails where he’d take the time to write and make a couple grand at a time to finance his upcoming project El Mariachi. This is one of the few things I find endearing about RR. Actually its knowing that he was so desperate to make his film happen he was willing to literally sell himself and risk his future health, makes me less judgmental of his possibly being a douche in real life, as I suspect he may be.
Besides being painfully broke all the time and having student loan officers calling me on a daily basis, my main intention for wanting to be apart of a study was just plain curiosity. I was curios about the process of it all, the organizations, the selection process, and most of all my own bodies’ reaction to being intentionally manipulated.
Ever since I got my tattoo I have become acutely aware of my body, my flesh, my blood. It occurred to me as I laid there allowing some stranger to poke needles into my flesh all so I could control the way a patch of my skin will appear for the rest of my life.
We don’t really think of how much we do and do not control of our own bodies.
Who is really in charge? Though we have a conscious mind much of the rest of our form just seems to take care of itself. We may feed, and cleanse ourselves, work a few voluntary muscles but for the most part, our bodies are made up of systems of bit and pieces that really just do their own thing.
Some people have made it an obsession trying to have greater ownership of their mind and bodies. Body builders for instance spend a bulk of there energy focusing on there form and sculpting I to their ideology. Some academics have dedicated their lives to expending their mental energies, studying ways of thought and how to greaten their ability to retain information.
The vitamin and well being industry is a money making volcanoes, spewing with ways to expand your memory, build lean muscle, have greater energy, have greater control over your emotional state, sexual state, improve your digestion, make your blood flow better, or just “improve” what ever system in your body you come to think isn’t doing the job well enough on its own.
So far I have had little luck getting to experiment; I fit none of the parameters so far. Perhaps it’s for the best. Maybe I would get addicted to this kind of experimentation; maybe I would try to push it further. Try something further invasive, like plastic surgery. Which I too have a curiosity for.
The idea a person would voluntarily go under the knife, not only volunteer but orchestrate the procedure. Selectively choose their torture. I am very curious about the mentality and physical experience of plastic surgery. Luckily I cannot just volunteer and benefit from it financially in the same way I could clinical trails. Plastic surgery is a risk you pay for with more then just a risk to your body. Too poor for such indulgences. For the best it all seems.
Ideally I want to get into a sleep depravation study. Spend a few days being watched as I am kept up doing word puzzles and mental challenges. But as I said I am not even qualified to be kept awake. Too irregular for even sleep.
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