Blue People

When I was little, I saw the movie A Little Princess.  There were a lot of things in the movie that I liked.  However, my favorite parts of the movie were the ongoing story she was telling the other children at the school about Rama and his lovely wife, Sita and how Rama defeats the Demon Ravana.  Now, anyone who knows anything about Hindu mythology knows that I've basically described the plot of the Ramayana.  Now, after hearing me talk on and on about my thoughts on romantic love and such, you're probably wondering what I could possibly love about the Ramayana.  The answer is simple:

The clothes are pretty too....

Yup... the blue guy.

I'd heard of people with all sorts of skin colors, but I'd never heard of anyone with a blue skintone.  It freaked me out, stirred my imagination, and intrigued me.  I mean, why not?  They say you turn blue when you can't get enough oxygen, maybe it was the same thing as that?  Or maybe it was just like The Wicked Witch of the West and they'd painted some guy blue...  I didn't really care; I just liked the idea.  Of course, after a while, I stopped thinking about it and moved to other interests such as learnign how to swim so that I could someday swim with the mermaids which just had to exist.

When I was older, I learned about Hindu mythology and found all sorts of photos of the same thing: BLUE PEOPLE.

Shiva

Krishna

Rama

Yup, Hindus apparantly worship blue people.  Actually, the skin color is symbolism that they are not of this world, that they come from above.  Ergo, they are the color of the sky: blue.  All that means is I get to look at pictures of a bunch of blue people whenever I want to take a look at my favorite god.  Interestingly enough, mostly only the men are blue.  The women are generally normal-colored.

Saraswati says, "I like my men buff and blue."

Lakshmi says, "I concur!"

So, while I took an Eastern Religions class and looked in wonder at the beliefs that other people hold and how strange they are, yet similar.  For example, they have an equivalent to Jesus known as Vishnu who has been incarnated into ten different avatars throughout the ages.  The first incarnation was that of a fish and his last incarnation (which hasn't happened yet) will be at the end of our current cycle of existence seated on a white horse and holding a blazing sword... and he will separate the righteous from the wicked, destroy the wicked, and restart creation.

Yup...  That's not familiar at all.  I know of no other religion that talks of the return of a deity at the end of time to destroy the wicked.

We all agree we have never heard of such nonsense before, correct?  Right!  Moving on!

Blue people!

So, around the same year I discovered that Hindus worship a whole race of blue people, my admiration of the skin color got a very funny wake-up call.

Has anyone ever heard of argyria?

No?

Here, let me show you some pictures of what this illness looks like...

The blue man?  He has argyria, a disease caused by being exposed to so much silver, the body starts to store it in its skin cells.  Not just exposed; to get such a generalize manifestation, that little old man would've had to eat silver.  Now, I know what you're thinking, why would someone eat silver?  Well, it turns out, proponents of Alternative Medicine have been promoting colloidal silver (microscopic bits of silver suspended in a liquid, usually water) since the 1990s.  Any doctor will tell you that silver has no business being in the human body at all.  It isn't a necessary chemical for function like, say, iron.  Alternative Medicine proponents will tell you all sort of unfounded crap about colloidal silver just to make money.  Never believe them.  There's a reason they're called Alternative Medicine and not just... I don't know... MEDICINE.

The facts are as such:  The silver will possibly turn you're skin blue without any prior warning.  Once you have argyria, there is no way to stop it or to reverse the process without Michael Jackson-style plastic surgery.  Silver itself isn't toxic, but once silver salts are incredibly toxic and may even cause cancer.  How does one get a silver salt? Chemical reactions... which the human body is a furnace for...  Oh shit.

The minute we get to silver salt territory, the prognosis looks darker and darker, especially once argyria sets in because if your body is depositing silver and silver salts in your skin cells, then it's probably doing the same thing in other organs.  Once silver salt deposits are stored in your other organs, then you're dead one way or another either the seizures or the renal failure or liver problems or heart disease will kill you.  All because you thought you were getting cured of all illnesses.  Well, if you're dead, then you certainly won't get sick...

I found out about this condition from a lovely movie adaption of the book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven.  In the movie, one of the first people the main character meets is a blue man who took too much colloidal silver as a child.  This was before I found out the various drawbacks, and I was in awe.

I immediately hatched a plan, where if life sucked too bad, I would take colloidal silver until my skin turned blue, then I'd movie to India and become a great guru.

Then, I did my research, realized I'd insulted a whole subcontinent and very nearly signed my own death certificate in blue and decided that I would never speak of it again.  Now I'm looking at my blog and thinking, "Oops..."

In short, I like the color blue.  I like Hinduism.  I like the idea of people with blue skin.  I'm not sure where I was going with this blog other than to just tell you one thing.

I like the color blue.  And maybe Hindus got their idea of blue people when someone turned blue from colloidal silver.

Sweet dreams.

... Oh yeah, and books should contain more blue people!