It’s a topic on which I have written extensively, as I am one of the women who was hurt by the American approach of high hormone intensity to extract eggs efficiently. To make a long story short, it kicked off an autoimmune process in me that we’ve never fully gotten under control.
I think a lot about what the fertility industry did unknowingly to me and how it forever changed the course of my life. I went from thinking I had an insurance policy to being too ill to work within the space of a year. There is no recovery for me as of yet, even though I spend quite a bit of time and effort on my health.
If you were a millennial or Zoomer thinking about these procedures, I’d like you to consider reading her research and my personal experiences and educating yourself so you can make the most informed decision in your family planning.
Becoming a mother may have been an easy or unexpected decision for other generations of women, but we live in a very different time with very different technologies and different social constructs.
The more you know about your options, the more likely it is that you will find the right path for yourself without doing harm to your body in the process.
One of my mother’s great passions is children’s literature. I am an avid reader and credit my love for books to my mother’s knowledge of the space.
She built a beautiful library to cover my needs from kindergarten to the upper grades that covers hundreds of foundational texts. It is the foundation of my moral, civic and business life.
Or if you prefer something a little less pretentious, I read all kinds of things from science fiction to periodicals to grand biographies as an adult because I was taught to read in the classical cannon of literature and history that has benefit many generations before me raised in the Western Cannon.
Children’s books tend to be sneered at self serious adults and it is more the pity. The beauty of childhood is that we need not approach all issues with grim learned gravity, rather in appreciating the childlike perspective see the truth that only a child’s eye reveals.
There are many books in the Western Cannon appropriate for children that can introduce them into the joys of critical thinking. And it can be quite intimidating to set out to build a library of you were not raised with this knowledge. This is a market opportunity.
Over the last 25 years I’ve seen the classics that I read as a child disappear from high quality prints. You could find items circulated in cheap paperback or you could search for used books. My girlfriends would text me about where to find classic high quality booksas their own children reached reading age. A child deserves a library that is not only quality in content but in form as well. Beautiful illustration sparks the imagine and quality binding grounds the experience.
My mother slowly built our library as my mother practiced her discipline as a teacher. It was not just raising me that drove her, but the combination of homeschooling and teaching in Waldorf schools that honed her favorite choices.
Many homeschooling families will attest to the challenge here. They know what they would like to find for their children, but it’s hard to find classics you can rely upon and curriculums vary in quality and tone.
So when my friends, Hannah and Josh Centers, told me last year that they were working on an imprint called Chapter House focused on great children’s literature in the Western Cannon I was excited. I knew the demand was there.
They are also homeschooling parents interested in improving themselves in their effort to raise educated independent children. They have first hand experience in the challenges. They are, what we would call in startup world, operating in real world conditions.
We publish restored editions of classic children’s books in four Chapter House box sets, made with premium materials and meticulous craftsmanship.
We also curate a grade-by-grade bookstore from select publishers, giving families a complete reading curriculum for children at every stage
I have often wished I could gift my mother’s library to new parents. In reality, it was almost an impossible task. It easily costs many thousands of dollars and cannot easily be assembled. I feel like what Josh and Hannah have put together is the start of being able to gift my mother’s favorites.
Josh and Hannah very graciously listened to many stories about this library and my mother’s teaching inspirations which means that wish has been granted. Their choices reflect treasures from my childhood and those of many other children educated in the classical tradition.
I seem to have accidentally fallen into polyphasic sleep. Those experimental not for human consumption, long amino acid chains that everyone is doing n of 1 research with?
Well, my n of 1 experiment seems to be yielding the occasionally odd sleep pattern. I’ll be up early after having a night of sleep that feels more nap than fully weighed sleep hours.
Think out by 9pm and awake before dawn. I feel fine, so I pack in the full day till around 3pm when lunch digestion & the general slumps have me saying “maybe a short nap.”
I’ll find myself popping back up at 6pm with an eye on dinner. Another accidental siesta has stolen the afternoon hours back from the long evening hours to which I’d applied them.
I won’t have any trouble going to sleep on time early. This pattern seems to be applied to days where I have a lot of physical strain.
If I get in a workout, a long shower, extra walking time, and other physically demanding tasks in alongside my mental work I end up needing the nap and still fall asleep on time.
I am trying to get healthier, but that suggests it is even an achievable goal. It would be wonderful to get back to endless working hours or even just eight hours on my feet.
Every time I make a tweak to my routines and I see a change in my biometrics, it’s becomes eventually cause for concern. There’s no stable equilibrium to be found, and I know that’s part of life, but I’d like a stable equilibrium that’s a little bit better than one day at a time or ideally a couple weeks at a time.
Take my experiment with Bimzelx. Even when I achieve an outcome like getting my CRP rates into the normal bounds, it came at a cost that is simply too high to maintain. I had four separate incisions and surgeries last year from soft tissue infections.
What good is a drug that tamps down my immune system so much that I need to always go under the knife? It was like Goodhart’s Law came to haunt me personally.
I am going off the biologic (I am 12 weeks from my last injection) and already seeing change in the wrong direction. Not enormously bad but my immune system will pop if it’s not locked down.
Yet there’s very little I can do except keep going and hope that the balance will be more manageable, as I don’t know that I could have another year like 2025 again.
I set out trying to reboot my immune system last year, and it certainly seems like it worked. But can I keep the numbers in a place that are low enough to let me live, and ideally live with fewer medications?
I am constantly working against some new tweak or some new problem, and even little gentle experiments like a Pilates reformer workout or 10 minutes on the trampoline can turn into a full-day migraine if I am not immediately able to tamp it down. Thoracic pain will pop up crushing my breathing if I take a nice slow hike in the pastures beyond our house
Everyone is maxing now. You can barely read a proper broadsheet without the Zoomer coinage crossing your transom. Maxxing is everywhere.
Maxxing means maximizing a certain aspect of one’s life. Comes from “minmaxxing”, a term for extracting the maximum output from the minimum input.
Urban Dictionary gives its history though the minmaxxing, though lately I’m not sure minimum input is actually part of the Maxxing game.
Maxxing is now maximizing every aspect of wherever you are focusing on improving. And boy do people want to improve across all possible vectors and all at once.
Is a geopolitical conflict all about Chinamaxxing? Is an influencer Looksmaxxing? Is a certain venture capitalist Retardmaxxing? It’s a little uncomfortable all around but time is short so why not go all gas no breaks.
I myself have noticed a kind of JulieMaxxing creep into my life I refuse to settle for a set of interconnected yet impossible to tease apart health issues.
From hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy to everyone’s favorite semaglutide I intend to do it all. The same goes for face. I do an ABC+SPF routine just for starters for my skin. I am going to JulieMaxx if only so I can get back to Minimum Viable Julie.
We did not have much of a winter to speak of Montana. Sure, Farmer’s Almanac predicted a lot of snowfall but even such an august institution can’t always get it right.
We got almost no pre-season snow fall. Which one can shrug off. We dutifully schedule our snow tire switchover at the end of September anyway. Alex bought his lift tickets with high hopes for a good ski season. Then the openings of our local mountain and Big Sky looked dicey. And yet still we hung onto hope.
We had no white Christmas. The deep freezes of January usually come with snowfall. It was grey this year. February would surely come through right? Alas wrong again. March did not go out like a lion. There was little water to whip up in our non-existent bay. And so, in April we cried and our hopes stepped aside as we waited for pretty little May.
People began to take off their snowtires. This just wasn’t our year. Spring would arrive early right? Any hopes of good days of powder were thoroughly dashed. It was over till next year right? Wrong!
The weight of wet snow
It snowed a big wet mess of deep sloppy powder on Good Friday. Hooray! Indeed it was a good Friday. Except, oh no, our snow tires are off.
Then, last night, when no one honestly believed the forecast for 6-10 inches one bit, we went to bed expecting a normal day. The days had already begun to lengthen substantially. Birds were hatching and the green was growing.
A heavy wet mess dumped onto our patio overnight
Clearly we were wrong. I tossed and turned all night as my joints bubbled and ached. I thought I was using a flare. But when I woke up it was clear my body knew more than my brain and the weather forecast was correct. It has snowed almost a full foot.
The hot tub needed to be dug out
Now the particulars funny aspect of all this is that Alex took the snowblower off the tractor yesterday. He needed to cut the side pasture down before new growth hit so the snowblower attachment was replaced for the trimmer. We’d let long grass grow and then flatten which required more than a riding mower. It needed the Deere to cut through.
So the front walkway was hand dug out but the drive to our road is going to remain snowed in for a bit. The sun will come out tomorrow. I did however have to reschedule a haircut. But that’s the price you pay for trying to get ahead of the weather. We never should have taken off our snow tires early.
Some days end up being so much more interesting than you expect. I awoke to a family member, who has been preparing for a set of major surgeries, saying they had in fact gone in that morning for the first round of procedures.
I had been concerned they were putting it off so I was quite relieved that their lack of communication on the topic was simply their preparation to face what will be a grueling health challenge. Preparing for a procedure well gives you the best chance at success.
Then I went about a normal work day having lobbed a question, or maybe a prayer, onto the network as the reality of human lives is that imperfect options are always what remains. Being clear eyed about the choices in our lives and how the weight of our past actions have set us on a path can be hard. But it is necessary.
And as I wrapped up my day I was the recipient of some good news. I can’t share anything but the shape of it. But a project that was an experimental approach to a space I care deeply about has bravely faced the whipping winds and looks like they will successfully come to a safe berth intact with all souls.
Which is not such an easy thing to do when you set out for uncharted territory. I am so very proud of what has been accomplished thus far.
All things in life are the fruits of imperfect options that remain. That we make the best use of them is our obligation not only to ourselves but to those to whom we have committed. I am grateful that today was a day where those hard choices were made.
I am no spring chicken. That’s why we bought some spring chickens this weekend. I kid I kid. I do however have a forever 35 face. I come from a line of women who age well sure but I have very consistent habits.
I’m lucky to have an ageless look. My husband would say I have a forever 28 face as I somehow look better having crossed into my forties than I did when we met at 28. Meanwhile my husband has gone from boyish wonder with full head of hair to distinguished grey beard with a bald pate.
Now sure husbands are supposed to say nice things like “no honey you haven’t aged a day!” Except I really do seem to have benefited greatly from genetics and routine.
He may be right, not out of any urge to flatter me, but simply because some women do look better with a little age on them. I looked young with a rounded features right until I looked ageless somewhere in my late thirties.
Alex and I at 29 where you absolutely can spot my pre-retinol skin Alex and I two weeks ago before touring the West Wing during our trip to D.C
I don’t look all that different when I compare and contrast between photos from then and now. I gained and lost as much weight as a Kardashian (more than once damn you prednisone and bless you semaglutide) but my face has somehow retained its plump without a maximalist approach without gaining wrinkles. I’ve lost the fine lines.
I didn’t start Botox till forty and I’m grateful as I need much less now. I didn’t pull anything out either even when cut looks were all the rage. I’m glad for my rounded features now.
But I have added in more to my beauty routine as I age because I enjoy it. I found it humorous when a 31 year old pursing a doctorate in clinical psychology said out loud what I’ve darkly joked about with girlfriends for years. It’s really hard to be completely controlled.
For a year in my early 20s, I was also spending literally all of my money on a psycho 100-step skin-care process. Looking back, I didn’t have the executive functioning to be successfully anorexic, which is what I also wanted. But I did have the discipline to enjoy this complicated multistep ritual of the skin care. I found it satisfying.” New York Magazine
Now we can all joke and say she shouldn’t be in practice but I never felt I could pull off an eating disorder either even though I often wished I could. That eating disorders are dangerous enough to kill you isn’t the point. It’s being able to control your body enough that you can kill yourself that we desire.
I hated that no matter how much effort I put into diet and exercise I could never achieve the standards of waif like beauty put out in the heyday of Anna Wintour’s heroin chic era. Millennial beauty expectations were a bitch and I could never quite work up the control to hate myself. Sure I got really fit with a heck of a squat but I always had to watch every single macronutrient and instead of skinny I got lean.
And while I appreciate a good Molière joke about The Imaginary Invalid, weight was never the issue that got me in trouble.It was hormones that got me.
So I knew poor health with a healthy weight and I knew poor health with a lot of weight gained trying to fix the poor health.
I will never allow myself to get over the BMI band again to avoid the medical discrimination I faced when I gained weight while on prednisone.
Alas no my autoimmune condition was not mitigated even an iota by weight loss. I had it before I was fat. I got fat treating it. I still have it now that I’m at a healthy weight.
But the desire to maximize your looks and your health always intertwine with women. Increasingly it does for men too. Body dysmorphia respect neither sex nor gender. I doubt it will ever again.
Beauty is a skill set. And some of that skill set is now pharmaceutical in nature. And if we are honest, it’s been that way for a few decades. It’s just that everyone know about it now. The network age comes for us all.
We keep chickens on our little homestead in Montana. Having playing hens is a relatively low maintenance though we do have predators we’ve generally been lucky. But it is all relative A lost hen to a fright is better than losing a hen to someone’s lost dog. Losing a hen from the flock is always sad.
We recently lost two laying hens to someone’s dog getting loose. We have video of the dog working the wiring on the coop for an hour till he loosens something just enough to wiggle in.
The lab mutt proceeded to play with the chickens for half an hour to an hour. A mother with two kids comes down the drive and gets the dog. Alas two chickens died while he was in the coop. No note was left and we don’t know if they knew we’d most hens to their dog but it was upsetting.
A bowl of eggs from our hens
Having eggs is a nice perk of living out in “zoned rural” county land as no one can yell at you for having animals. Farm fresh eggs are fantastic I’m sure though I don’t tolerate eggs well so we mostly use them for bartering or ingratiating ourselves with friends.
No one said no to a dozen eggs during the price hike. But it’s also pretty normal to keep chickens and have a garden so you barter for what you don’t have which is fun.
But after a few good years with our first flock it was time to add new hens. So we drove to the new Tractor Supply which I’ve been meaning to visit for ages but haven’t had the chance. Yes I like the Odd Lots episode about them.
It is exciting both because it’s a well merchandised retail experience whose excellent financial performance matches its in store experience but also because it is chick season. You can go to the store and in a box not all that different from a fast food bucket acquire your own flock.
It’s not a KFC family meal but it does contain chickens.
I’d seen some concerns about the price of chicks ranging from $5-$8 a chick on Twitter but we weren’t sure if we were going to buy this season. But we are also generally a bit later in the season for getting chicks here so we put it off.
Obviously we are on alert for long term consequences from our geopolitical situation but our hens are more for fun than calories. Did we want to get more when it’s like keeping pets?
Finally after a Good Friday snowstorm it felt like we might need to consider the consequences of spring even if others were well on their way with sprouting seeds and hatching chicks.
Tractor Supply had all kinds of breeds of chicken and some of the older ones who had been quite expensive a few weeks ago were now half off. Spring is late here but Tractor Supply gets them all at the same time at each store.
Once we were the cheep cheep cheep of the chicks it was all over. It was like picking donuts. I’ll take the Cinnamon thanks. We decided to go with five. Everything from chocolate to frosted right?
They all snuggled up together except for the runt who is a beautiful fluffy wonder.
They are now all safely in our barn with heating lamps, food and water as well as a camera live streaming them on our local network because who doesn’t want a baby chick camera? Hopefully we can raise them up without any incidents and introduce them into our existing chicken coop. We’ve got six weeks or so to find out so wish us luck.
Yesterday both my husband and I were quite sick. We had very different symptoms but my worst one was a fever which added additional pain to the usual autoimmune nonsense. Naturally I subjected myself to more pain by spending the day on the internet. There is a lot going on and my brain was foggy in the wilds of the open internet.
Thankfully my fixation on consumer packaged goods’ price risk coincide with the arrival of a fresh round of skincare as well as a number of grim stories on the K shaped economy. Southeast Asian is rationing fuel while in Harper’s Bazaar wanted me to know that K-Beauty was coming for my neck. .
I don’t write headlines but I thought it was a bit on the nose to suggest fashion magazines are vampires. I clicked though.
It turns out there is a lot you can do for your neck but be warned the skin is thinner so promote collagen growth and be aware fewer sebaceous glands means it is dryer and more prone to irritation when exposed to actives like retinol. Useful information reinforcing my recent experiment with using Medicube’s PDRN Pink Niacinamide Milky Toner on my neck.
The beloved director of romantic comedies Nora Ephron m released a book in 2006 about the trials of womanhood. One essay was dedicated to how her neck was giving away her age. At the time I don’t even know one could be anxious about one’s neck but I filed it away as a to do in the endless list of feminine expectations.
“Short of surgery, there’s not a damn thing you can do about a neck. The neck is a dead giveaway. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck.” – Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being A Woman
Now maybe back in 2006 there wasn’t as much you could do about your neck when you’d smoked, tanned, and I will presume maybe occasionally enjoyed m drinking or other substances. But her Boomer fears encoding their neurosis into my generation was not in vein. I did none of those things.
Now that my fever has broken, I’ve been able to enjoy simple pleasures like the arrival of a box of skincare for myself (and also Alex because obviously I help him out) and ponder that I can feel anxiety about risk in the petroleum derivative markets like consumer packaged goods and also I can worry if my neck isn’t aging well.
I imagine I won’t get to enjoy that luxury forever. We have it very good in America with access to the best French pharmacies and South Korea plastic surgery clinics have have produced. I slathered on a milk toner and then topped it with hyaluronic acid water cream and a few drops of a Matrixyl peptide to boost collagen and elastin production.
The Internet as we know it is under new pressures from artificial intelligence as automation washes across digital spaces once populated by humans. The pressures in the market for technology private debt as it reconciles old Internet companies with cash flow against changing terrain.
It’s not just creative destruction in software businesses. Storied luxury families like the owners of Puig and Estee Lauder are discussing a merger. Price inputs are a killer when share prices are under pressure. Thats more of a geopolitical risk worsened by consumer struggles. The top 20% of the market does 80% of the spending is the new horror metrics.
So much for the lipstick indicator eh? Maybe I’ll look back and be glad I stocked up on serums, creams, drops, peptides and other petrochemical packed Swiss and Seoul laboratory style miracles. There is always shea butter and beeswax.
