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.
I am doing everything I can to biohack my way around a chronic autoimmune condition that interferes with my quality of life. My love for my life and work is strong.
I’ve not had good sleep this week between the excitement of huge wins and the terror of facing down another global crisis brought on my conflict.
You’d think I’d be used to it. Russian invaded Ukraine the week before I left to live in Frankfurt. I was living in Tallinn when 10/7 happened. I was also there when Estonian cables to Finland were cut. One of my best performing companies has had to work around three kinetic wars.
No wonder sleep can be elusive. Yesterday all dream roads carried me to horrors. I woke myself multiple times. You can literally see in my sleep tracking the spiking heart rate and my forced waking.
The positive side to this fitful pained sleep was being up early enough this morning to prepare for a Costco preparedness run and still arrived before their executive member hour was finished.
We rotated our basics like rice and beans. Tinned fish, chicken and other canned and stable shelf proteins are just part of preparing for a nightmare that we hope never comes. Preparedness is a civic obligation. Help yourself to take the strain off the system so we all make it.
It’s possible we are facing an industrial process cascade thanks to the war in Iran and I like us have supplies just in case. We can’t know what comes next but it’s good practice to check expiration dates and make sure you have everything from first aid kit supplies to soap. You’d be surprised at just how much processing fuel fuels the rest of the world’s production.
After all this, I was happy to get stumble into bed and take a long nap. I didn’t even wash the sunscreen off my face. I was running a deficit and wanted to have REM sleep where I wasn’t trapped in horror. Thankfully I got almost two hours of restorative sleep this afternoon and I am ready to go back to bed as soon as I can.
I was talking with my mother today as I was organizing some logistics for her birthday. Don’t tell her that though as it’s a surprise. Just kidding she knows I’m up to something.
As we talked shared pictures from a recent work trip where she was able to visit our extended family. Her brother lives in Texas after a long military career. It got me thinking about the very different lives it’s possible to live even within one family.
My mother has siblings that she is not related to by blood that are nevertheless our family. Her mother was unable to stay with her father. She married a man I consider my grandfather and gained a large family in the process.
One of my cousins (not by blood but through love) had her children when she was still a teenager. We are roughly same age. She has nearly fully grown children while I will likely never have children. We had very different life trajectories.
She didn’t have an easy time when she was a young mother, but seems to be in a good place now. She is married to a kind man (not to her children’s father though they were married for a time), enjoys watching her son play varsity baseball and football, and lives near her parents. She earned a beautiful life the hard way.
My aunt and uncle are hard working, deeply kind and patriotic people. They supported their daughter every step of the way. Which in the late nineties and early aughts was harder than it looked for a conservative military family in Texas.
I feel lucky my mother got to have such a wonderful brother (and other amazing siblings). My grandmother was an incredible woman. She got remarried at time when single mothers had it even tougher than my cousin did.
I think of the lineage of my mother’s family and wonder which of us made the right choices, which one of us thinks we made the right choices, and how we feel about those choices in the grand scheme of things. Lots of my family believe I made all the right choices. And maybe they are right.
Both my mother and grandmother heavily encouraged my interest in academics and the sciences in particular as they both wanted to pursue scientific careers and were unable to do so. I know I am their pride and joy.
But as I think of my mother’s upcoming birthday I know she won’t get to see her grandchildren playing varsity sports under Friday night lights in Texas with her mother sitting beside her. Her mother, my grandmother, has passed.
There won’t be three grown generations to coincide together because that’s just not how it works any more. And I don’t believe she is disappointed. And I know my grandmother wasn’t either. They wanted this life for me.
And it’s a good life. But I am also glad that my cousin was able to have a good life too. If only it were easier to balance some of the choices. If they were choices at all.
My brain feels pretty scrambled at the moment. I wish I could say it was over easy but I’m clearly closer to fried than coddled at the moment. Yesterday had some big news. Valar is prepared for a long slog and that means on paper I’ve got a unicorn and a fund returner.
There’s nothing quite so satisfying as becoming big enough that instead of listing the founder and the team, they mention the celebrity investors.
It’s good that people know we have dry powder for an important mission, just as energy insecurity becomes a real concern, along with all of the cascading effects of side products and elements that are part of the hydrocarbon processing chain. Don’t worry. They’ve got a plan for nitrogen if it comes to it.
And obviously I want to brag, as do all of the other people who took a risk on this exceptional team, especially those who wrote multiple checks (we followed on three times) when it was unclear how far we could go and how fast it could be given regulatory hurdles and funding constraints. Those are now gone.
I do feel like I paid a number of social consequences for being a loud mouth and also generally being anti-consensus during the first few years. And I am glad to have paid that price. Real reward comes from real risk.
I felt we had not adequately addressed American energy independence, clean energy, renewable energy, or any of the many effects of our rampant demand for energy.
I do believe that carbon heats the planet and we have to address it in a way that meets our demands and gives us abundant supplies. I thought well how we could possibly serve it in a way that is sustainable and clean without nuclear?
And I’m as surprised as anyone that the Republicans are the ones championing this but we’re in a place where it’s very clear that we have industrial needs and a geopolitical context that require us to go much faster and invest much more deeply in the solutions that we’ve put off for so many years.
I didn’t get into technology to do some set of financial arbitrages or eke out an extra few dollars so I could have status in the world. I know it’s naive but I’m not very transactional and I do it because I think it’s the right thing to do.
We need to slowly push the markets towards funding the things that are necessary and not just the things that give extra capital to people fighting for status and power. I hope that I can look back on the work I’ve done and feel proud that I tried.
Thanks to this blog God knows I’ve got the receipts for it. We’re barely out of the first quarter. Not even confident we’re at halftime. There’s so much work to be done but I feel like I’m playing the right game.
