Tag: Children

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1746 and Processed Pizza Hangover

Yesterday was my birthday and we celebrated it in grand style and semi- tradition by spending two hours walking every single aisle of Costco.

Now you might think all that walking around would leave your body feeling invigorated, and honestly it did, but we finished our grand tour by eating at the Costco food court. Now there are probably ways to eat healthy there but not how we did it.

We went for the classics including the dollar fifty hot dog and soda combination (a bulwark against inflation that has stood longer than seems possible) a slice of pepperoni pizza, a strawberry smoothie and a chocolate chip cookie. I had the pizza, some of the smoothie and half the cookie while Alex had the hotdog, a root beer, the rest of the smooth and a little bit of the cookie.

Our mutual and biohacker in chief Bryan Johnson gifted me a birthday roast of this meal. Which was not only hilariously funny but absolutely true.

Happy Birthday.

We didn’t feel immediately worse but we woke up today with what I’d qualify as a hangover. We can enjoy the above roasting as we generally don’t eat junk food and when we do it’s in more of the local beef category than the hyper processed and hyper preserved category.

Before you think this is a show of virtue, this preference never did anything for my aesthetics or metabolism, it’s just that it always makes me feel bad.

I am quite sensitive to preservatives and refuse to eat most forms of American bread and most varieties of prepared meal. No matter how good the ingredients are, the preservatives just do not agree with me.

It’s not that I’m a healthy eater naturally so much as hyper palatable foods are often hyper preserved foods and that sends my histamine response soaring into cytokine storms. So it’s no wonder I woke up feeling hungover.

I did real damage to myself as Bryan pointed out. We had a lovely time and I like to think the joy and happiness reduced our cortisol enough to bring us some balance. But it was easy to quit drinking for the same reason as it is easy to quit fast food. You feel like shit afterwards.

One of the most amusing fights I recall my parents having was my father taking my kindergarten class to tour a Carl’s Jr kitchen. They gave us a kid’s meal at the end, and while I turned up my nose at the burger, I did eat the french fried potatoes. My very crunchy and wise mother was not happy. “Now she will have a taste for French Fries!”

And damned if she wasn’t right. I still haven’t ever eaten a fast food hamburger. The idea of it is revolting to me and I’ve no clue how that came to be programmed in me. I may be one of the few people in America who has never eaten a Big Mac. But I love french fries. And good potatoes fried in a decent oil never leaves me feeling awful. But bread that doesn’t go moldy? That gives me a hangover every time.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1742 and Ensorcelled

My mother’s great passion is children’s literature. She is a Waldorf teacher & minor luminary in the world who started several schools.

She believed that there were texts which are “medicine for the soul” which teach children through the enchantment of stories.

Sometimes a story is the only thing that can save your life – back cover of Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper

She raised me with many amazing stories from Grimm’s fairytales to Madeleine L’Engle. Michael Ende and J M Barre were the storytellers which taught me to love reading and left in my heart the joys of literature through stories of adventure & growth.

J.M Barre’s Peter Pan in Kensington Garden and Peter Pang and Wendy. Michel Ende’s Momo and Eliot Pepe’s Ensorcelled

It is with great pleasure I read Eliot Peper’s enchanting novella Ensorcelled. It’s part coming of age story meetings great adventure in the wilds and a delight for young at heart & young readers of literature.

I don’t know if he meant it as a story to be enjoyed by children, as it was such a delight for me as an adult that I went through it in one sitting. Though I do think it would be wonderful reading for young people.

It’s a beautiful printing so you might be inclined to want to keep it pristine but it’s perfect for an afternoon outside. Maybe go touch grass with it in hand. Find the enchantment for yourself.

I’ve been a fan of Peper’s science fiction so it was a real change of pace to see his range. I felt lucky to have an early copy and I genuinely enjoyed its spirit. I went I was going to read a near future thriller and got joy & delight. Which I very much needed.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1738 and On The Far Side

It’s been a weird week. I’ve kept a slight distance to the logistic of it for sanity, but my father’s memorial is being held tomorrow. He passed over the last long weekend of summer. I found out by voice mail.

It is a complex family dynamic and I am not (insofar as I can tell) invited to event. I know it sounds odd to be unsure, but given how the information has flowed, who has been prioritized, and the reactions to condolence communication I’ve done my best to keep a respectful distance. My grief isn’t the most important grief.

Neither of my father’s children nor his previous wives will be in attendance. It’s not necessarily our choice, or even our place, to have an opinion as he had a third family who welcomed and loved him and I am grateful for their generosity. He had no further biological children but he had another family.

We’ve spent the last few weeks doing a comical amount of legwork with the help of kinds souls, friends and my mother to acquire the ideal floral arrangement and make sure it arrives alive and healthy.

Two Venus fly traps carefully placed in a cardboard box for travel from Colorado Springs to Boulder

In an age where Miss Manners would find few remaining social mores, a respectful but symbolic floral display seemed the most likely to be acceptable and held the most meaning for me and the father I remembered.

He loved Gary Larson, and in the early nineties convinced him, through a bouquet of carnivorous plants to participate in calendar application for Macintosh. Gary decided the Internet wasn’t for him later but that early desktop computer program and its genesis remains a favored family story. A creative and bizarre tale of making something happen.

The Far Side Computer Calendae

Alas it’s not all charming anecdotes. Yesterday a large box arrived with a return address in Big Fork Montana. That is where my father had retired so we knew it was likely from his estate. Part of our hopes in moving here was to be closer to family.

Inside was a mess of the broken glass, old picture frames and hundreds of photograph of a life that my mother, my half brother and my father lived quite happily for a time.

Hiking, fishing, skiing, my first golf lessons, and horse back riding photos filled out the details of a childhood between spectacular eighties family portraits.

Little evidence of the hard years of poverty in tiny apartments was included. It was entirely the glory years of boom times. They were happy memories.

There were also glamorous soft core pictures of my mother in lingerie or swimwear which my father had apparently taken himself. I was initially quite shocked.

Nigh professional grade photos of my mother posed like a pinup are not exactly what one expects in an estate dump of memories. Especially as she is very much alive and well.

My mother’s has given me permission to discuss the images, though she was a bit shocked to learn they still existed.

She swore she had them destroyed but I’m glad they were not as I enjoyed seeing her beauty and vitality. Everyone deserves to remember the years where they were at their physical peak.

My father was a man of many talents and interests and he loved to learn new skills on the latest gadgets. I just didn’t expect to learn he was that sort of artist.

I hope the flowers and our card will be accepted tomorrow. I’ve been reeling slightly from the photo dump and its unheralded arrival. It felt like one last piece of unkindness when magnanimity would have been simpler.

I don’t know if anyone will understand the story behind the flower, so we have made arrangements for the plant’s well being if they are not. It is an imposition to send a living thing and it was my hope to do as little imposing as possible that might cause distress.

My grief is my own. A whole life was in that box and I have no idea if anyone will remember or recall any of it as anyone who was there isn’t invited. But I remember and I will treasure it. He’s on the far side now and free of petty concerns. I love him and I always will.

Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1718 and The Abyss Stares Back

The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.

We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.

The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.

I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.

Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.

Someone acquired a new piebald

Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.

The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.

I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.

I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.

What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.

Die unendliche Geschichte – 1979 Michael Ende

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 103 and Regret

It’s culturally acceptable to say “oh I regret never having children” but somehow we rarely hear the opposite. I understand that parents who regret having children do not want their children to feel unloved. For that reason perhaps it’s the kind of feeling you take to your deathbed.

Or you post anonymously on Reddit. But for the sake of children feeling loved and wanted, I do think we should discuss it openly and in public with more honesty.

At this point in my life I don’t think I feel joyful about having children of my own, despite having pursued fertility treatments (which if I’m honest about was partially an insurance policy to let me put off the decision). If I have a child, I will need to resolve my anger and regret about how egg freezing lost me a decade of my life. It sent me on a path of severe chronic illness and I wouldn’t want my child to feel that my anger about being sick was ever any fault of theirs.

And maybe this is why we have no cultural space to discuss regret. We don’t want our kids to ever have access to the complex feelings we have as humans about our anger or sadness.

Imagine how a child could extrapolate feeling anger at a sickness that was related to their conception. Jesus fuck. I don’t think I’d regret having children. If I ever bring my health challenges up, I ever hear is “you will regret it if you don’t take the risk to have them” which just isn’t that helpful.

But you know what isn’t helpful? Never discussing regrets till it’s too late. Till you are doing something because it’s culturally normal. What kind of bullshit is that to put on a child? “Mommy got told that she’d regret it if she didn’t have you.” That seems like a recipe for Mommy very much regretting her decision.

I pray that the hormones that bond us to our offspring work well enough that no parent or child is ever put in this position. I pray that evolutionary instincts make it so unlikely that one regrets having children.

I worry some people simply didn’t want to have children but the expectations of life and culture didn’t make that feel acceptable. I hope more people talk about that fear. I don’t know exactly how I feel but I do know that no one should do shit on the advice that “they will regret it if they don’t.”