Not everyone has decent bathtubs. For a good chunk of my life and also in current chunk, I lacks for a decent bathtub. We’ve got an astonishing array of other marvelous ways to heal but not a good soaking tub.
I almost never get to enjoy a warm leisurely bath. I am not a hot tub person. I’ve got sensitive skin and the chemicals involved are not an environment for my skin. I am alas a great fan of bathing in epsom salts. It is a cure for almost every ailment.
So it was this attitude with which I tried to run myself a bath in a report location and I failed to consider the tank I was dealing with compared to the size of the soaking tub. Which was generously deep. A terrible and obvious mistake.
A lukewarm tub was my reward. And don’t I look silly for not obey a basic detail. Otherwise a very relaxing day which I would have enjoyed topping off with a soak.
Preparing for a closed world means I’ll have the freedom to close down myself. My body has been a bit up and down as it usually goes s these days so I’d like to log as many hours in restful response as I can.
Other activities I’d enjoy would be bathing in a warm tub, going for peaceful walks with no one around and reading for hours on end. Which seems manageable. It’s a time for prayer and contemplation.
My only wrinkle is the lack of available prepared food. I mentioned I’d be rather remote. And I did pack as much as was feasible
But if I can’t manage a few days of cooking simple meals like pasta and chicken that would be pretty sad. I’m lucky to have relied on that part of my life being handled by others as I do find the idea of cooking to be almost as tiring as the reality.
All of that moving around on hard kitchen floors as you juggle timers and fire is not a favored activity for someone with spinal issues. Still I’m optimistic if I stick to a quiet routine of reflection, rest and prayer maybe I’ll manage. Or perhaps a miracle will occur and I’ll be fed literally and spiritually.
I’ve been trying to coax myself into taking my final biological injection of the year for most of the day. It’s a very painful shot. The feeling of it is somewhere between stinging and hot sauce being pushed into your subcutaneous fat. It’s spicy
I was filled with optimism that this new variant called Bimzelx might be the one that finally brought down my biomarkers. And it did indeed show promising results. My CRP and SED rates have never been better.
Alas, the cost is quite high. I’ve got no immune system response to speak of when it comes to my skin and soft tissues. I’ve had four major skin infections requiring surgicalintervention and many minor skin infections.
My pain is better so long as I can avoid picking up an infection. I’ve been on antibiotics most of the year. Alas I’ve only had maybe 2-3 weeks without an infection brewing or being beaten into a retreat.
So today may be my last spicy shot. I’ve gone it a full year of adjustment. I don’t relish the prospect of adjusting back to my previous medication as it takes a full year to fully dose on and off these things. But maybe I’ll be lucky and on my final shot in the year I’ll see a change for the better
I had a really excellent massage recently. The body worker really got under some of the tension points in my body and the compensatory patterns I was hoping for them to work through. I felt like the flow of my energy was reset.
This type of relational work between two people, one with body issues and another one who knows an efficient path for soothing them, need each other. I need relief and they need a payment that reflects their expertise.
Typically this has been labor paid in some increment of time. I paid for an hour long massage but I’d be willing to pay for more hours and the knowledge and capacity to execute that work on myself or through another body worker or tool.
I’ve got a Theragun, a Tiger Tail, lacrosse balls and foam rollers and I try to work through knots and pains. But I know way less than your average massage therapist or Alexander Technique practitioner so these tools are in the hands of a poor craftsman.
I would love for there to exist some type of Open Source Bodywork Database. I’m thinking work flows, anatomy training from video to textbook and routines input by every type of knowledge tradition and patient.
There are humorously already types of open source startups that work on body based API calls. One is called buttplug.io so you get the idea.
I’d love to see workers get paid to contribute their video, audio, and tactile experiences to an open world and ideally be paid a percentage each time it’s used.
Imagine being about to boot up this massage with an automated massage options. Or open share the repo with a therapist with less experience looking to learn. You pay the therapist trainee and for the routine and everyone benefits.
It’s a bit of a fantasy now but I’m sure we are closer than anyone realizes to being able to train these movements into automated systems. Imagine celebrity osteopaths with programs built into something you can use.
I would prefer this be an open source program for human body knowledge so that we learn mechanically the many physical routines and options that exist to make our bodies function better thanks to aligned incentives for everyone to participate. Dare to dream right?
I have had way too many minor (and major) health problems emerge over the course of 2025. Adding in personal life tragedies (the death of my father) and I had a challenging year.
So I trying to keep the last few weeks of the year crisis free. I have already pulled myself out of the day to day to try for a slow wind down of the year. No holiday parties or appearances for me. I am gone.
As I slow down and put distance between myself and the world, I maybe stupidly see it as an opportunity to nudge myself on little health promoting efforts.
After the year I’ve had, I so desperately want to see improvements. Even if simply not collapsing into another infection cycle is a win.
I’ve been trying to consistently work on body basics like muscular compensation patterns and getting more steps each day, but I’m so terrified that even a minor miscalculation in exertion will upset my proverbial apple cart.
I went for a walk on a high mold count day and reached for prednisone. I’ve been teetering on the wrong side of recovery for so long I don’t think I can recall a genuinely good day. My sleep is similarly impacted. I want to have a long night of deep sleep and dream cycles but the best I can manage is just a long night.
The volume of communication we receive digitally has risen to deafening levels. I’m shocked we aren’t all in a civilizational stupor muttering “mawp” like the cartoon secret agent Archer.
As we attempt to balance the barotrauma of the increasing volume of dings, pings, tings and Slack bings trying to reorient our attention towards them, the temptation is level the pressure explosively. Shut up!
The noise is bearing down on us relentlessly. Just when we think the pressure might equalized and we have adjusted to the din, a new chime will force a recalibration.
MAWP!
Our phones become dysbaric monsters. The ambient pressure disorder that is leveling your attention span to the cacophony of alerts and aggravated existential noise leaves us deaf, dumb and disoriented.
Different people cope with this in different ways. Many of my friends have committed email bankruptcy including me. Some people make big claims of having screen free homes. Others go to physical therapy or osteopathic craniosacral specialists for cervicalgia. Isn’t it nice to know your text neck is killing you even if the tinnitus and vertigo doesn’t get you first.
This is all to say that my Signal Mobile application inexplicably stopped working this morning and the silence is causing me some degree of anxiety. If I were a woman with fewer scruples I’d consider it disabling.
Alarmingly, because I’ve been forced to mute virtually every other channel of communication to avoid the noise, this means it’s been largely impossible to get work done.
Hopefully I find a solution soon. I rebooted my phone, cleared my cache and updated to the new iOS. Nothing works. I’m afraid that I’ll be losing the one channel that actually functions for me.
If not, you may very well not hear from me again. Twitter direct messages still work. If you are looking for me check the nearest ear, nose and throat specialist. If I can’t fix my ankylosis in my thoracic maybe I can improve my posture in the meantime. The worst case scenario will be installing WhatsApp but I’ve not given in to that nightmare scenario just yet. I’m running silent in my attention submarine but I’ll have to resurface at some point.
A long time ago, in a past life so foreign I can barely recall, I made some bad choices in the hopes that I was making good choices for the people I loved.
That day never came. And it’s unlikely to change. My health is what it is and I won’t ever be able to carry them. We’ve spent a small fortune trying to get me healthy enough just to go back to work and being healthy enough to carry just didn’t happen in time.
The high costs of surrogacy are daunting and the extra help I would require to raise them isn’t forthcoming. Being somewhat disabled means I’d need a lot of help and not the kind you can easily pay.
The extended family who does want to help and raise them (not blood family but nevertheless family) has never succeeded in getting a visa approved for so much as a vacation in America. So that route seems rather shut and has remained a small beacon of hope that seems ever less likely.
I could go abroad and raise children near them but that would be admitting defeat on a level on life in America that feels like dying.
My husband wouldn’t be able to come. We have a home and a life and careers in America. Funny how we don’t really have family in America that cares one way or another though all our existing blood relatives are American it’s the extended not quite family that seems to care most about family.
So a day after a socialist won the mayor’s race in New York City I have to ask myself how can we make the suffering of so many feel worthwhile? What did I achieve through my sacrifices? What did America achieve with our choices that can be seen as worthwhile? if those questions cannot be answered I don’t know where America goes from here.
I feel like I got quite a scare and yet you’d think I’d be used to it, as this is all downstream of the interleukin-17 inhibitor that I changed onto at the beginning of the year for my autoimmune condition.
Every single quarter, and in some cases every other month this year, I have had some bizarre skin infection resulting from otherwise pretty benign situations. An infected gland in my eye (twice!) an abscess that turned into a deep tissue infection, and a tiny incision that allowed in a subcutaneous infection all rocked my world.
As much as I am thrilled to see all of my inflammatory numbers rolling in to baseline normal, I just don’t know if I can sustain having a health crisis this frequently for a medication that is supposedly working. It’s working at an extremely high cost to my sanity and body.
And you might say, “Well, the numbers don’t lie.” And I’d agree. But there are many other factors I have to consider, not the least of which is that healthcare access in America is so bad that I have managed two of the four crisis points with medical tourism abroad.
I am going to give my IL-17 inhibitor a full year as dosing on and off biologics is no easy matter and the compounding effects are quite real. But I do very much wonder if in order to go forward I must turn back.
One of my long standing theories, and a personal coinages, is the Thursday Styles Problem. It’s a theory of knowing directionally what is coming, but never being quite sure of when.
The New York Times publishes its “styles” section on Thursdays and Sundays. If you work in media, public relations or culture, you are aware of the general trends that will emerge on Thursday ahead of time. If you know “what everyone knows everyone knows” ahead of time, there is a lot of money to be made.
Predicting the trends sounds easy when I put it this way, but the timing of it requires quite a bit of foresight, and considerable planning.
The trend piece is researched and reported over months. It requires the editor to be familiar enough with the trend to approve the writer taking time & resources. That means other upstream media has to have covered the topic in the niche which requires its own planning and coverage.
And while hype cycles have shortened, culture still takes time. And really important cultural trends may even require years to be relevant enough to be Thursday Styles worthy.
And can you afford to wait for the cycle to run? Breaking news happens and a piece gets pushed. A hotter trend might push the piece for weeks or months. If your business can’t survive the long game of becoming a Thursday Styles trend, being first hardly matters. Being right doesn’t matter as much as being right on time.
There is an art to this. Publicists play long games. They seed articles with a long arc in mind. Prediction markets place bets on the likelihood of something occurring, but with many actors you can’t really control when and how a thing happens.
So naturally when something I am doing happens within a month or so of me doing a thing, I tend to feel smug. When Albania was on the front page of the styles section while Alex and I were vacationing there, I gloated. I’d been hip to the forgotten European country for years.
Today I got a push notification about women taking testosterone. It had the full ugly animations of a thirty minute reporting on a full blown phenomenon.
We’re started me with 10mg of estradiol (range 6-25mg with 8-10mg being most common), and 75mg of testosterone (range 50-150mg with the most common being 75-100). Day 1754
I have been very open about my dosing, my own bloodwork, and what went into why I chose to do it. Which, I’m glad, as the New York Times sure isn’t telling. Being very honest and open about details seems important as I have the privilege to experiment and I want others to benefit from that.
Because of minor complications, I’ve been attempting to be entirely transparent with those as well. The treatment itself is not dangerous and is tolerated very well, but I have had unusually high incidences of skin infections due to the IL-17 inhibitor I take for my chronic inflammatory condition, which led to a longer recovery than I’d have preferred.
Now that this is a full blown trend I promise to report back as I heal and as my blood work begins to show results. Until then, if you want to know what other trends I think will hit big and want to get ahead of the pack, remember I am just a message away. And I keep a shopping blog as well so you can buy what I buy before it shows up with a rave in the New York Times.
I’m at home with a freaky red light mask that could absolutely pass for a horror movie prop. My husband is sealed up in a hyperbaric chamber with two atmospheres of pressure and oxygen pumped in through a mask.
It may be Halloween but neither of those activities are horror movie material even though you could easily imagine them featuring as props in a serial killer series or Final Destination.
And yet these are things we are doing for health and wellness. One man’s horror movie is another man’s idea of a good night off and you can really tell we are tired childless adults that this is our idea of winding down on a Friday night.
The childless part wasn’t entirely a choice but we picked lives of professional intensity a long time ago so Friday night spent in self care is a sign that we’ve earned some respite.
Millenial success stories involve long hours. Millennials being all hallowed out on All Hallows’ Eve shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, given the current state of American politics.
I’ve never liked Halloween much as if I want to dress up I don’t need social permission and I really don’t care for parties or socializing. I got all partied out in my twenties when I had to do a ton of it for professional reasons. I know it sounds glamorous but nightlife is work.
I had a tequila client and I had a hotel with the hottest nightclub in the New York City. I somehow managed to have both Patron and Le Bain as a client in my advertising agency era, and while loved both clients it did mean eventually all I can associate with nightlife is work. When I had a night off I stayed at home and read science fiction with a face mask.
Which means some things never change. There is no suburban holiday with children to dress up and take out. And I barely have recollections of doing any of that as a child. It’s no surprise this holiday has no hold on me
I don’t know why I have no fond memories of it but I don’t. I have almost no memories of Halloween. The precious few years in which we lived in suburbs, where I had both parents and I was young enough to go trick or treating barely register. And I don’t feel sad about it
I am much sadder about the kind of world we fought to succeed in as adults. I am happy to be home and with the horror movie treatments to heal the ravages of the real world that have been enacted on both of our bodies.
The long hours over decades, the multiple Covid infections my husband suffered, my own autoimmune issues and the realities of aging are not horrors but they are real. And I acutely am aware that Halloween is pretend.
And nobody should have to pretend that they aren’t hollowed out when they are. That is a fairy tale for children and for the people who still are. Neither category include me. It’s perfectly fine to be tired on a Friday.
If I’m going to put on a mask tonight it damn well better have health benefits. Here is to red light therapy and collagen masks. May they heal what ails you on all hollows eve. You can face the dead and your demons tomorrow.
