Tag: Life

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Aesthetics Internet Culture Reading

Day 1831 and A Stenographer For Everyone

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.

Steno-pools turned into secretaries for executives and eventually secretaries were more ornamental than practical. And then suddenly the private secretaries who worked for the aristocracy were working for any number of corporations, governments and utilities. Imagine if you could become one yourself. Or have access to one for your own personal letters.

The original pitch for Uber wasn’t a taxi for every user but a black car for every person. So I imagine dictation software is a little bit like saying, “We’ve got a stenographer for everyone.”

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.

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Chronicle Travel

Day 1827 and Year 6 of Daily Writing Begins

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.

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Aesthetics Culture Medical Startups Travel

Day 1826 and Some Best of 2025 Selections

Yesterday I wrote about the experience of my daily writing experiment rounding out its fifth year. It’s been a fun and often emotional journey that I find hard to fully capture. But I’ll attempt to list a few of my favorite posts of 2025 on the last day of year.

Healthcare and Biohacking

Day 1490 and Healthcare’s Sin Eaters

Day 1468 Deciding to Go HBOT and Starting HBOT

1567 and Turkish Medical Tourism

1565 and Elephant’s Eye

1560 and Getting an HBOT

Day 1517 and Blink Blink (First Incision of 4 Scalpel Incidents in 2025

Day 1503 and Managing Healthcare Projects from Mold to Hyperbarics

Startups

Day 1486 and Is There A Tech Right

Day 1510 and Turning Valar On

Day 1542 and Future Blind

Day 1572 and Reskilling

Media

Day 1485 and A New Pogue at The New York Times

Day 1581 and Lecturing at UC Boulder on Renegade Futurism

Day 1569 and the sky above the port tuned to a dead channel

Day 1496 and Maneuver Warfare

Politics

Day 1484 and Montana’s Right to Compute Bill

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

Day 1578 and Dark Start or Energy Realism

Day 1576 and a NatCon Boomer Kicks a Townie Millennial Out of Their Hometown

Trends, Cultural and the Academy

Day 1484 and Zoomer Identity Violence Trend

Day 1479 and Liminal Industrial Transport in an Empty Frankfurt International Terminal Pod Hotel

Day 1580 and Learning By Doing or Embodied Learning for Humans

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

Day 1555 and Modern Machiavelli

And I got to about May and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to put more into the organization. I had 4 medical procedures involving surgery. My father died. My best startups all raised rounds to scale. You can find your own way from there. It’s been a hard year despite the wins.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

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.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

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?

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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1822 and Frozen Mountain Time

I feel as if I somewhere between time and place as my present requires so much focus. My body and my mind are some distance from my soul though and I cannot seem sync up the sum of myself.

I spent much of yesterday at maximum attention as driving along mountain roads of variable quality requires focus. My body needed my mind on the job. My soul may have hidden itself away inside as I silently prayed the road would deliver me safely.

I’d enjoyed a few days of safety and quiet for Christmas and am now off on adventures that might be a bit more than I can handle. Crossing borders atop mountain passes is a bit of an adventure by any standard but add in ice and it kicks it up a notch.

Ice storms

I’m a little lost and potentially overwhelmed in my adventure as the logistics of making it from one city to the next becomes bogged down in challenging weather and road conditions.

Hotels aren’t quite as readily available as I’d hoped, nor are they priced for adventure. Between Christmas and New Year, it would seem everyone books ahead of time.

It’s one thing to toss a few Euro or dollars on a Best Western, but quite another to find yourself scouring Airbnbs on the mobile app as sundown nears and all you can see are $600 a night rundown flats. Inflation they say. Opportunistic nonsense perhaps.

Because really who wants to pay that much for a middling apartment in a small city just because you happen to be driving through on New Year’s Eve?

From the Alps the Rockies, variable pricing pops up at the worst times. And in principle I’d rather not book it. Maybe frozen mountain time should be enjoyed with a nap in the car instead.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1821 and All Stages of Water

I finished a seven hour drive through weather so moody and inconsistent I felt it’s changing by the hour. 

The day began sunny and bright but as I climbed into higher elevations, I quickly encountered what felt like every state and format of water in quick succession. 

Fog turned to drizzle which began to pour as rain which froze to the trees in sparkling ice till finally snow began falling. 

My intention had been to reach a remote nature preserve in the mountains known for its views but also the switch backs and hairpin turns required to make it up (and down) the elevation climb. 

I left as early as I could muster given the 4pm sunset that comes this close to solstice. I didn’t want my last climb up the hill to be in the dark. I barely made it by sunset.

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Aesthetics

Day 1817 and Magnesium

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 remote 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.

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Aesthetics Chronic Disease Travel

Day 1816 and Bedding Down

Having put no small amount of effort into preparing to be quietly away from the world for Christmas, I have made myself a very cozy in the chosen retreat.

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.

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Preparedness Travel

Day 1815 and Preparing for a Closed World

It’s unusual for stores and restaurants in America to close for a holiday. We’ve got rare cases like Chick-fil-A which observes the Sunday sabbath.

America don’t have national day of rest every Sunday like say Germany does. We have shift work and many faiths and nationalities so the days and hours off depend entirely on who you are and how you work.

Maybe it’s a woman thing but knowing a a day of rest in which the whole world comes to a stop always seems to mean an extra day of work. We must prepare for a closed world.

I’ll do loads of laundry, clean the house, do all remaining errands & shopping, and attend to the fuel knowing that if everyone is off then I must be particularly on. I’ll tap into my inner prepper and double down on my to-do list just as I do before storms.

Especially given my variable (occasionally fragile) health if I am to survive things being shut comfortably I need to put on my best Boy Scout act. Be prepared. I don’t care to pile on additional risk if I can mitigate it with a bit of work.

I used always shower before a storm just in case the water and power go out. Sadly I’ve lived through major disasters like Hurricane Sandy and Boulder’s devastating prairie fire. Nothing helps you maintain optimism in a bad situation like being in clean.

I’m thinking ahead to being somewhere a little remote for Christmas, where it’s unlikely that restaurants, gas stations or grocery stores will be open for the season let alone Christmas.

About the only thing within driving distance that will surely remain open is a monastery. Maybe if my preparations go well I can make a trip to visit with an offering to whoever else might come to worship in the far wilds.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1806 and Trying Not To Upset My Proverbial Applecart

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.