Oh baby baby! So it seems as if, in my infinite wisdom, I did not pay enough attention to the early warning signs from my Whoop biometrics and I did indeed need to worry about the fun and games of a subcutaneous tissue infection.
I swear that this IL-17 inhibitor drives me nuts. Despite its impressive effect on my inflammatory biomarkers, it leaves me very susceptible to skin infections. And I have to be constantly vigilant to the first signs of an issue.
I’ll be fine. I did in fact catch it before it turned into anything serious. Where I am at it’s easily treatable with a short antibiotic course that may formerly be prophylactic. My wound area had not shown any signs of spreading nor was I running a fever or otherwise exhibiting other signs of serious infection.
I just had crappy HRV numbers and high resting heart rate three days in a row and it’s not worth risking it. I threw back some basic antibiotics last night and woke up with a normal heart rate again. My HRV is coming up just a little more slowly. Glad I didn’t wait as this isn’t worth any amount of risk to me.
I comforted myself by working on my beauty blog where I’ve got routines coming along for founding subscribers and a fresh post about Shrinkflation at Sephora and a minimalist men’s routine on sale at Amazon.
Or if you are feeling adventurous for an honestly embarrassingly low fee I’ll put together a custom routine for you from my sample library or go full autistic and decant you the perfect mix of potions and lotions to meet you precise lifestyle and budget. My autistic obsession is your gain. It’s so much for me for and your skin will look amazing.
I am pouring far too much autistic enthusiasm into my pet beauty shopping column that has a roughly half and half ration “theory of appearance culture in Protestantism” and half “specific routines at different price points” but I am enjoying it.
The heavier lift is going to be the work I am putting into the individual routines for the founding subscribers who have paid good money for help and I intend to give them my absolute all. I admit I’ve put way more thought than is probably necessary into each one but it’s a joy to track down specific products and geographic needs. It’s a shame that market editor was never a well paid enough job at a fashion magazine as I am pretty good at it.
Like, of course, I have opinions on the German drugstore market and its cost effective actives lines versus the old school naturals brands and where to acquire them. I don’t have quite as extensive a sample library of the market staples on hand but you know I spent hours browsing the grocery and retail shops when I was living in Frankfurt.
And on that note I’m going to bed early as I’m healing from my various biohacking experiments and I’m exhausted even with all the effort I’m putting into wound healing it still takes a certain about of rest to actually knit things together no matter how much time I spend with HBOT or what peptide stack I’m taking (it’s a spicy boy on the way in I’ll say that much).
I spent some time being really “in my special interest” today writing about why I think we should give more, and not less, time to beauty. I’ll post it to my new substack tomorrow as that will remain focused in subject matter.
Appearances clearly matter in every facet of life, but we don’t do much to help develop taste even as we face an onslaught of the hyper visual unrealistic world of short form video.
It’s all dopamine drips and quick hits that make it hard to develop taste of your own. At best you found algorithms that suited some things you could enjoy but sincerely held joy is rare. I’ve been able to experience many times and it’s now one keeps going in a cruel world.
I spent so much of my life beating the drumbeat of more access to the secret knowledge of the world only to discover again and again, that even if you offer up to the world pearls, not everyone will want them.
Or as my mother liked to say her Latin teacher said “I’m throwing pearl’s before swine!”
To appreciate the details is to recognize that layer upon layer of irritation worked to a finished pearlescent sheen which seems too delicate to truly show the process. That’s its beauty.
Each layer of culture is built by people who cares about details. And all kinds of details matter. Sometimes the details are financial. Sometimes aesthetic. Sometimes it’s noticing a very specific signal inside a very particular group and being able to admire the elegances.
I myself didn’t think I ever much went in for subtlety of any kind until I spent more of my time in mass markets. I’ve come to realize I was allowed to live without too much push on my own tastes for so much of my life.
And because I care about details, now I know I a stupid amount about the business of appearances because I worked at its heart.
I intend to do it as a fun addition to my life as I experience so much of life through professional and personal interest in technologies. I’ve got aspirations for a world where we choice to work to be better. That requires a world where beauty can be cultivated in improving ourselves. so you can be certain I appreciate the angles of how we use the existing culturally technologies at hand to create the new ones.
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.
My mother has a theory that the nicest people on earth have expensive hobbies. This doesn’t mean that they are necessarily rich, in fact quite the opposite. Nor does she mean that it’s expensive from strictly financial perspective. She means that resource intensive hobbies, ones that take significant investments of time, energy and social capital, make for kind communities.
The more “expensive” it is commit to a hobby, the more likely you will meet folks who will be welcoming if you approach them humbly. People that put a large investment into a hobby are often allocating a significant chunk of their limited disposal income into the thing they love. It signals a commitment that is easily understood by others within the group.
She originally developed this thesis via exposure to boat people. Her family has a number of blue collar folks who live on the water. But she further developed it with exposure in the mountain west to horse people and others who ranch or breed livestock. Horse people are particularly welcoming folk.
There are endless varieties of hobbies in this category but in particular anything that has a challenging and steep learning curve lends itself to the “nice folks” theory. If it took you significant resources to become adept, you will remember your early days of struggle in the hobby. That memory turns out to be crucial. You will want to help others because you will recognize their struggle from your own past.
This desire to help others isn’t universal. You will look for those that want to help themselves. But if you see someone struggling mightily, and humbly, in an “expensive hobby” that you share it’s human nature to pitch in. God helps those that help themselves. And so do other humans. And in place is it more obvious that you want and need the help than when just starting out on a challenging endeavor.
I didn’t have hobbies for a long time. People would ask me what I did in my free time and I’d give them a confused look and try to come up with a plausible activity like reading. I was embarrassed. Everyone else constantly doing shit. In reality, I didn’t have the energy for anything but work and taking care of life basics (and for a few years spare energy was dedicated to sex and dating but that’s different post).
I’ve been an on and off entrepreneur my whole working life. And if I’m totally candid I’ve had health issues that impacted my energy since I was a child. So while I have had things in my life other people would consider hobbies, they were slowly stripped from me. I stopped horseback riding somewhere between 16-17 when I dropped out of school. I told people it was allergies (which was true) but much of it was exhaustion. I was fighting just to keep up with obligations to education like taking tests for college and to prove I had learned enough to be considered a “graduate” by my school.
In college I was blessed to go to a school that wasn’t cool to have have parties. That made it easy to hide being too tired to socialize. Other students were in clubs. I didn’t join anything. I was thrilled to make it to my job (as a research assistant to a medical ethicist) and get home to my roommate and boyfriend to watch tv at night. I didn’t realize this wasn’t normal at the time.
Once I started my first company all I did was work. I had to socialize professionally so I spent a lot of time at fashion parties. While this is fun it wasn’t a hobby. I partied because it’s how I made my living. For a while I thought this meant I had a hip social life. Which was a nice lie. I had a glamorous job.
It started dawning on me around 24 or 25 after I sold my first company and had to relocate to San Francisco for the acquisition that other people didn’t live like I did. In San Francisco people hiked, did yoga, took classes, and all the other “bullshit” I looked down on. I looked down on hobbies not because I think work is better but as a defense mechanism. I was jealous.
All these people had energy at the end of the day. They wanted to do things! That was unfathomable to me. I could barely do work. How the fuck was I supposed to do stand up paddle boarding on the bay? I was not kind to people that had hobbies. I told myself (and they could tell) I thought they weren’t as good as me. Of course, now I realize this was the trauma of illness manifesting it. I couldn’t do what they did. Rather than feel sad or angry or some other productive feeling I decided I was better. All to avoid letting myself feel how angry I was that I couldn’t have that life.
I’ve come to accept that I still live more than most people even with limitations like illness. I don’t have to prove a good life with status markers like hobbies. Though I’m still fighting to get to complete functionality and control with my autoimmune disease. But even if I do get to a place where I can live normally I might still skip the hobbies. I’ll go straight for the pleasures like work. I’ve only got so much time so I may as well enjoy each moment with what I actually like.
