As we do our yearly family planning retreat (such as startup couple cliche) I’ve been balancing the stress of the wider chaos of the moment and my body’s turmoil.
It’s contrasted with the calm and removed relaxation of a hotel with excellent hospitality. The soft attention to detail is a blessing on a body that is not quite up to factory standards.
As we go over goals, budgets, allocations and timelines the stress is buffered by being able to take breaks to walk alongside the waterfront or swim laps in the quiet infinity pool.
That might not seem like a triumph, if you don’t know me it sounds like a stupid humble brag about my very fine life. But I’ve spent years unable to wear a bathing suit at all because of the pain cause by Lycra’s pressure on inflamed tendons and tissues. Three years ago I wrote about the bathing suit I’d never work
And today I was able to dive in and do the butterfly and the backstroke as if it were the kind of workout I do all the time. The possibility of improvement is here.
One of the planning goals is to see how far we can take my health with nutrition, sleep, physical therapy and other modalities that rely on movement and self healing over the many intense drugs I’ve needed to calm the flares. I almost believe it’s possible. And I sure plan to try.
As I continued my journey through southern Europe yesterday, I encountered one of the most striking protests I’ve ever seen. At every major intersection and city limit there were hundreds (if not thousands in instance) of tractors lining the streets.
From enormous modern combines to Jeremy Clarkson style esoteric speciality vehicles, I saw more tractors yesterday than I think I’ve seen in my entire life. It was majestic. And it continued for my entire drive through the country from border to port to border.
Mind you I drove a tractor before I drove a car, and I live in farm country so trips to the local John Deere dealership are a monthly ritual for us. And I’ve never seen such a variety of tractors. It made quite the spectacle and was deeply emotional seeing so many of them empty and lined up in a row in quiet dissent.
Crossing an intersection over Greek Farmers protesting the Mercosur trade deal
The tractors flew flags and banners indicating their disapproval of the signing of the EU-Mercosur Trade Deal. The European Union will be trading with the Mercosur bloc consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. It is set to create the world’s largest free-trade area covering 700 million people.
European farmers are not happy about it. Yet the protestors did not disrupt traffic at all. The roads were open and passable. A blessing given that in many areas it either snowing or had recently snowed and the temperatures were below zero.
Mediterranean olive land covered in snow on January 11th.
The snow is not a very common experience for an area that farms olives and grain. And yet on top of changing weather patterns, the Greek farmers I saw protesting (along with 27 other European countries who are signatories) must now contend with farmers in 4 Latin American countries that do not have their standards or rules.
Economic collaboration and global ties were touted in all the press from Brussels as they condemned America’s retreat from trade. And the part of me that is a committed free trader wanted to agree. But the part of me that struggles with illness and the American food system was on their side.
And yet Europe is saying damn their own farmer’s opinions, stick it to America and our government’s trade wars. Ursula von der Leyen will let in Brazilian fruit and glyphosate saturated grains come to Europe.
I am no stranger to protest movements from the Battle of Seattle to EarthFirst! I picked up Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a child. I remember the era where organizations like the WTO were criticized and concerns about trade and agriculture were front and center. We forgot along the way and the politics went horseshoe theory but the problems remained.
I don’t farm or ranch, merely keep chickens, garden and maintain our land in Montana, but my husband’s beloved electronic free Deere is practically a family member. We are sympathetic to farmers and care about topics like soil earth, permaculture and the endless glyphosate lawsuits.
I’d rather America be trading with Europe than Europe be trading with Latin American countries. The land some of them work is meant to be rainforest not grain fields.
I’d be furious too if I were a Greek, Irish or French farmer under restrictions my competitors didn’t face knowing that they produced a better product on land cared for under high standards and almost impossible conditions. They know what they yield is destined to move on their ports somewhere. Thats what their ports do. But protest they must.
The Thesolonikki Port as seen from a hotel
And yet here the farmers were, placing their precious equipment on the roads silently condemning the entire lot of politicians who care neither for the people or the land.
Seeing like a state means we are just numbers to them. I couldn’t count all the tractors I saw. There were too many. At every crossing I saw there were more. And that’s the point. It will affect all of us in the local and global balance of the land and the people it feeds.
The land and its stewards ultimately don’t matter where no matter what Brussels says. Neither does America’s politicians and their economic foibles. It’s all a numbers game.
So the farmers showed them their numbers every where I turned. I noticed them. And I hope others do too. What we can do is not for me to say. I see them and am sharing so you can too.
I’m packing in one of my favorite small countries in Europe to head to one of my favorite cities just a little bit further East.
Alas the weather has been very dramatic this week with strong downpours, gusty winds, and flash flooding. The city I’m in is rapidly becoming a major hub but still has issues with drainage and paving.
Just about fifteen minutes ago the power went out in the entire block as a burst of thunder and rain came down. It may be more of the city but I can’t yet tell.
Luckily for me I’d just had a Wolt delivery arrive with my meal and groceries for the trip. I’d made a point of freezing extra ice packs for the pop up cooler so my food should be fine.
Because I’ve been a tad paranoid about the weather’s impact on grid stability, I have made sure my electronics were charged and ready including my power bank.
I’ve gotten into the habit of carrying tea lights with me anywhere I go along with purchasing a lighter on the ground wherever I go. I also always have with me a powerful flashlight so I’ll be fine as night falls.
I even downloaded the latest episodes of my favorite silly reality television show Love is Blind.
The only rule I didn’t follow was making sure I’d showered and cleaned up the remainders of laundry and other things like dishes. Hopefully it won’t matter and the lights will come back on.
If not well I am posting my daily writing now in case I lose the capacity to post as obviously I have no internet but I still have cell tower service. Those tends to go down once their batteries run down and I’d hate to lose a day in my five year routine because I didn’t plan ahead.
It being the new year “the new thing” to talk about is “the new you!” As if you weren’t the same person as you were a few days ago. But you have this convenient convention that allows you to decide now is the time for change.
I used to call this time of year “eating disorder season” but GLP-1s have turned down the volume on that noise. We still have New Year’s resolutions and media just love having a topic tentpole to discuss new trends, habits, and opportunities.
We may not have as much of the fat chatter to contend with anymore (thankfully) but I do have reams of biometrics and plenty of concerns about my own health so the season of changing yourself remains even if the material conditions have improved. The app chatter is still in my head.
My Whoop continues to nudge me on the “aging” metrics and which ones are hurting my healthspan the most. I hide it for a peace of mind but on the latest update it is openly admitting that it’s given me goals that are impossible for me given my limitations.
It’s a relief to see the application get better but of course I’ve know the algorithm and my limitations don’t always mix. It’s been workable when I’m in Montana walking outside but it swings my numbers a lot when I’m in a small apartment in a polluted city. It’s a “short hallway” problem.
I move a lot inside (safer and less polluted) but it doesn’t those short bursts and turns as steps so I push to get more steps counted and it overwhelms my nervous system and immunocompromised state.
I hate to use a dictation software to write a piece that I typically write with my own two hands and ten fingers but I’m not entirely sure that I see the difference between typing out a hundred words a minute on a mobile phone versus saying something a little more slowly to a stenographer application. I use Wispr Flow
I’m sure if you are a Paul Kingsnorth type, you would be happy to remind us that we’ve lost the “steno-pools” filled with women whose job was knowing just how to speed their notes to keep the dictation flowing. Those jobs are gone as the personal computer made its debut.
I don’t mind writing as I can write just a little bit faster than I can talk. And I often find that my dictation is less pulled together than my writing. But isn’t it funny that we should have reached this point so many centuries later? Yeah.
It’s one of life’s truisms that we may wish for prestige, power and money, but none matter without your health.
“The first wealth is health” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
I don’t think it is self flattering to admit I have got some amount of respect, influence and capital. And yet every spare dollar and moment I have I spend trying to improve my health.
The other types of wealth I have don’t matter if I’m in too much pain to think or I am so regularly infected that my resting heart rate is in the mid nineties.
Yesterday I started getting what I call itchy and twitchy. It’s often the first sign of an infection that has broken through an altered window of immunity.
My entire body will itchy. Sometimes it will be accompanied by a rash like eczema. If the rash is bad enough to be opened through itching I can easily get a bad infection. The discomfort of all that makes me twitchy from the anxiety of it all.
I suspect I am itchy twitchy at the moment as I am in a city with polluted air from major construction and high air mold counts from the winter rains. It makes me want to hit the road immediately for dryer climates but I’ll take prednisone first.
That should make me very pleasant. Anyone who has taken the steroid knows it’s a joke as the drug makes everyone who takes it feel a bit crazy. And you get fat and moon faced for added insult to injury. So apologies in advance if I’m going to be a bit bitchy.
The New Year shouldn’t really get going until after Epiphany. I’m not a Catholic, but I think the Holy Nights are a time for prayer and looking inward.
Alas, we seem to start the new near with a bang every year now. Concerns about Iran’s currency crisis was the big story in geopolitics as the chattering classes concerned themselves with socialist mayors in America were going on about collectivism’s warmth. I will take frigid individualism thanks to
Today I woke up to news of an early morning “snag and bag” of the President of Venezuela Nicholas Maduro and his wife being taken my American troops to stand trial.
The front page of the New York Times around 11am GMT
I’m in Europe so we had a bit more time with the news before Trump addressed the nation. It’s a little chilly where I am and I’m still worked up about the the warm fuzzy communism of the Zoomer youth who seem to think all problems are solved with more money and never seem to realize that it comes at gunpoint.
And despite running on an explicitly anti-war platform, Trump is now giving a press conference suggesting American oil companies are up for a forever war run by Marco Rubio. Rough day for our Secretary of State who is also probably as worried about Iran as anyone.
I suppose it’s now or never for a number of things. Toppling regimes named as narco-states and cutting off oil and capital flows as China does exercises in the straits. Things are malleable indeed.
I didn’t feel like writing yesterday. That’s a weird way to start a commitment to a sixth year of writing every single day in public on this blog. I do intend to keep writing daily.
Maybe I should restart. My life was so full on the last day of the year, that the writing I had intended on doing on the last day of year five I simply couldn’t do. I fell asleep. It’s alright I had a beautiful synopsis of the emotions of the experience even if the links didn’t get passed may.
I felt the urge to sleep come on so strongly I wrapped up with a few “oh that happened too” sentences and I was out. Poof! Exhausted. Thankfully fireworks woke me up at midnight so I could ring in the new year.
I was midway into May doing a “best of” round up review by hand when that sudden “consciousness loss is imminent” feeling hit me. I’ve been driving the Dinaric Alps on an adventure that ended up in Sarajevo. I am sure I’ll write about the experience soon.
But now I have a meal and some unpacking to do. My 2026 is off to an interesting start. I’ve crossed three borders today. You can see how I might be tired.
Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.
I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.
So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.
It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.
Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.
I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.
The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.
I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.
Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?
With all of the preparations that go into a day of rest, it can be oddly easy to forget that the purpose was of rest is to restore one’s mind and body.
Rejuvenation, be it body or soul, doesn’t occur immediately. I don’t find anything that involves refilling one’s energy happens quickly.
Jouissance in the Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition suggests that embodied enlivened enjoyment goes beyond pleasure and pain. To rest one must have exerted oneself first.
Now being French, Lacanians mean sexually but I mean generally. Embodied things take time and not all pleasure is free of pain.
Maybe that’s why it there can be as much enjoyment in the toil of preparations for travel or a day of rest as it is to reach one’s destination or take a day off.
The Lacanians must know something about the nature of women (and men). I’ll let Star Trek’s Spock explain.
After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.
Maybe it’s good to spend so much time in preparation and waiting. Christmas comes but once a year but the preparations can be endless if you so desire.
