I’m sure many a doctoral thesis has been written on the obsession with bodily purity and eternal search to rid oneself of toxins.
I’m not an academic but I was on the original Goop team in the far distant past when I worked for legendary adman Peter Arnell. So I’ve had a lot of exposure to particular purity culture that is modern consumer culture detoxing.
While I had hippie experiences with detoxification and also real ones like mercury chelation (which is a fun story), nothing is as intense as rich white women detoxing. From herbals to enemas to fasts you have a lot of choice.
I am all for the woo woo. The aspiration that if one just exercised enough control over oneself that all ailments could be cured is alluring. It’s also fucked up. Bodies are notoriously difficult to control and medicine is littered with mysterious ailments afflicting saints and sinners.
Alas I’m still tempted by this philosophy. I spent four days in Miami and I feel like a bunch of expensive detoxification treatments would be just the ticket. I’ll probably just sleep it off though.
I am aching from doing too much packing in one day. Somehow a flight didn’t make it into my calendar and I thought I was flying Monday and not Sunday.
I usually take multiple days to pack things not because I’m unsure of my choices or dawdle over it but because the bending and picking up of things is hard on my spine.
I try to do these kinds of activities in 15-20 minute increments with an hour or more of laying down flat to recover.
Presume that packing for women requires extra effort when there is formal wear and cosmetics involved and I need a few hours to dedicate to the effort.
Chop it up into increments and well you can see how it becomes a thing I need to split up over a few days. I don’t think of myself as disabled but requiring breaks to rest my spine probably suggests it.
Alas the work and rest cycle wasn’t possible today as I had to get it all done in one go as my flight is at dawn. I am sure I’ll pay for the strain tomorrow. Which isn’t ideal for flying which is stressful enough without additional pain.
Thankfully it’s done. Now that this is all squared away I am in bed at 6pm and planning to go to sleep as soon as I can dampen the pain. Since I’ve got to be up at 5am a nice long sleep from 7pm seems perfect. And I’ll be adjusted to my new time zone.
We are lucky to have the resources to be prepared but it’s easier than it looks. As the devastation of Helene has shown us everyone can find themselves at risk and it’s as a community that we can survive. I am praying for those in the path of Milton.
On Friday the allergic and autoimmune symptoms were so bad I took 5mg prednisone. On Saturday they were no better and I upped the dose by 2.5mg to 7.5mg. I moved forward my absurdly expensive biologic injection by a day. I haven’t been able to convince my health insurance to get them more frequently so it’s a risk.
I’m doing better today. My pain is abated to an almost unnoticeable level at a 2. That’s rare for me. And it makes me want to rush into as much work, chores and activity as possible just to enjoy it.
I’m typically working with a 5-6 level of pain on any given day but I can work (with medication) up to a 7 within reason. Past 8 I’m in bed and struggling.
The downside is of course that prednisone just sucks. It messes up your appetite. You balloon up almost instantly with side effects like moon face. And your body develops a dependency quite rapidly.
Titration off of steroids like prednisone require a steady and slow discipline so you don’t get “blow back” as it can make your symptoms even worse.
I’ll have titration for a few days ahead of me. But maybe I’ll get to enjoy the lack of pain. Already I’ve cleaned for an hour, done laundry, checked off a number of small “to do” list items and I am blessedly free of the exhaustion that comes from working with moderate to severe pain that is my normal daily experience.
One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells1. The three individuals from China are the first people with autoimmune disorders to be treated with engineered immune cells created from donor cells, rather than ones collected from their own bodies. Nature
I don’t swim very much as an adult but I grew up in an era with mandatory swimming tests (even at university).
I was lucky enough to not only learn to swim in the Pacific Ocean but in Colorado I spent a lot of time in our many creek, rivers and lakes. Freshwater has its own appeal and I’ve seen the tides work on the Great Lakes. But little is as magical as the buoyancy of seawater.
But today I was able to take a swim. I put on a bathing suit and was able to casually swim with just enough force applied to steady myself in a comfortable place against the increasingly forceful tide coming in. I felt like I’d won even if it was just for thirty minutes. I enjoyed a nice healthful thing in between the chaos of a very busy moment.
I’m not much of a Fitzgerald fan and but the joy of finding the limitations in one’s life as you mature is the relatability of feeling the weight of a one’s years as you push against the tides.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
So many decisions cannot be undone and yet we steady ourselves against forces much bigger than we are. Pushing against some of the vastness of a sea while relaxing into its much bigger whole is quietly humbling
I feel good about pushing against the vastness but also not being so sure about my own place in much larger forces. It’s no wonder man yearns for the horizon.
I took a shower and immediately went back to work. But it was nice to be a human doing a human thing while all of this is going on around me. I held my own against the tides. And I intend to keep doing.
Instead of Benadryl it was diphenhydramine. For a headache we used ibuprofen not Advil. Acetaminophen was the proper name not Tylenol.
She taught me what went into popular brand name medication like DayQuil and I learned the ratios of guaiphenesin to dextromethorphan. Always take the minimum viable dose she’d say. And if I only had a cough I didn’t a fever reducer.
America is lucky to have a thriving generic medicine market. If you are a Costco shopper you can buy thousands of tablets of every crucial over the counter medication at just a few cents per dose.
Take the time to read more on the issues as it’s been forty years of struggle for access and safety and we are experiencing shortages and supply chain risk that is unprecedented.
For a woman raised in the Rockies and settled down in Montana, you’d think I’d be more outdoorsy. And yet I can spend days at a time in just one room with little trouble and even enjoyment.
Even with that wholesome “National Parks” backdrop, I was always a bookish and imaginative child. I was once derisively described as having “a particularly pictorial interiority” by a babysitter.
I don’t have the energy I once did as a girl when I’d spend my time at the barn and loved camping & hiking with my Outward Bound going army surplus shopping Eagle Scout achieving band of hippie environmental teens.
Setting aside the humor of a toking Austrian anthroposophy student projecting onto an elementary student, I am a long winded introvert who writes a lot. They really nailed me.
When the pandemic forced us all inside I had no problem with being home. I did a full three months without setting foot outside the apartment.
As a choice I make for health & preference, it’s a far cry from cultures where women are forced indoors. I’d prefer to be outside more when circumstances allow. They haven’t for quite a few days. But it’s ok, I like being an indoor cat.
It would appear I have pneumonia. Healthcare being what it is, doctors say there little point in doing clinical testing to find out if it’s bacterial, viral or fungal (unlikely given climate) as the treatment is basically the same. I did a round of antibiotics because why not. Nuke it from orbit.
I’m stuck in bed mostly, my voice comes in and out for the few calls I absolutely must take, and I’m bored and irritated as I would prefer to work though it as it’s exciting times. I’m sleeping like a champion as my Whoop records day after day of long nights of somewhat fractured sleeping are forced by cough medicine into submission.
Having had Covid at the end of May, I now fear being doomed to some degree of respiratory illness risk for the rest of my life though I rarely had so much as a cold in decades of living in a big dirty city. Global calamities leave uneven marks and I consider myself lucky.
The benefit of bed rest is the amount of reading one can get done. My favorite cultural publication Dirt did a Tech Canon overview to get must reads from the slightly more stylish emissaries of the Silicon Diaspora. No offense to Patrick Collison who initiated the discourse with his own list (which is quite good) but it’s good to think outside the empire’s core for the trendy extracurricular bits of the syllabus.
As someone who self labels as a fashion bitch, I was pleased to contribute Neal Stephenson’s bitchy novella on abstraction and the graphical user interface called In The Beginning There Was The Command Line. It’s dated and old and free on GitHub so go read it.
There is quite a range on the list of core texts including a few books and essays that one could easily imagine being put onto banned reading lists. It’s nice that we have Heidegger Zoomers inside the pantheon now.
Schizophrenic philosophy posting is all the rage with the artificial intelligence kiddies. And to think I thought reading Deleuze and Guattari was a waste of time. Do your homework kids so you can discuss rhizomatic thought and large language models at your next conference. Perhaps you can dig into the war machine.
If I’m having a frail Victorian lady kind of week then there is nothing better than attending to the aesthetics of the moment and now you can too! Remember Alex Karp studied under Jürgen Habermas
It’s been a weird couple of days for me. It’s been a weird couple of days for just about everyone. At least all of my electronics are intact and no one has tried to kill me right?
I was hoping I’d be on the mend for this pneumonia like thing I’ve had for a few days. I took a Z pack on advice of my doctor. It’s a bit better but I’m still coughing. I’ve got my voice back at least. I keep hoping better medicine will arrive but I’m not getting my hopes up.
I’m going to lay low. I’ll keep it short. Maybe tomorrow I will have more to say and better lung capacity. I’ll keep it light. Lightening up. It’s better than lighting it up.
I am so grateful for the access I have to understanding my own body. It used to be considered quite rude to question doctors but as with any profession some are better at it than others.
Thanks to the work of the open internet and the tooling of artificial intelligence I cross check an astonishing amount of medical information. With a little work and the right questions and intelligent person can do basic differential diagnostics using Claude and Perplexity.
Networking together public papers, handy upper funnel content strategy of the Mayo Clinic, and the database of Drugs.com has been a real boon to involved patients who want to double check things.
Be skeptical of credentialism and gatekeeping in medicine. While everyone wants safe and responsible medical care there are plenty of well entrenched interests that don’t want you to do more for yourself. We deliberately keep the population of doctors limited in America. Professional organizations exist to protect themselves. But everyone deserves the tools to be healthier.
