Tag: Routine

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Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1786 and 40 HBOT Sessions Later

The days becoming shorter has hurt my attempts at getting out in the sun for a walk every day. This matters to me as I’d like to get regular readings of my V02 maximum and my heart rate. I rushed out without sunscreen to get in a mile.

I hit an important milestone in my current biohacking regimen this week. I made it to my 40th session of hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy or HBOT. I began on September 13th and did session 40 on November 20. I only traveled once during this period (a five day trip) so I could have fit it all in within a two month period but I was consistently doing two hours a day.

I intend to get bloodwork for comparisons next week, but in some ways this was a terribly experiment period. I had a small procedure to insert testosterone and estradiol into my left buttock which turned into a saga when I got a skin infection. Not the procedure’s fault and I’m glad I did it as my numbers are already better.

Fortunately HBOT is renowned for healing soft tissue infections so if I was going to suffer for having compromised immune health across my skin biome, then at least I had the state of the art treatment available.

We didn’t purchase the HBOT for its skin benefits. In fact, I didn’t even know I’d be have skin immunity issues. They began with my new IL-17 inhibitor which I started in January We’d acquired the HBOT around the same time but I had no idea how challenging Bimzelx would be. It could have gone worse.

We had originally acquired the HBOT as several of our friends and acquaintances had succeeded in managing impressive inflammation rate reductions as well as progress with a slew of autoimmune issues from long COVID to mold toxicity. The kind of troubles we only test in fancy labs with extreme athletes or the enterprising technology brother.

My wound has mostly healed save a small lump, my V02 max has improved despite virtually no exercise (hard to do much cardiovascular exercise with an infection in your posterior chain) and I have overall found the balance of improvement in my energy and pain to be significant.

Thanks for noticing Whoop

If I could just get a month without a health crisis where I have enough energy to workout consistently I just might make some progress. So if I disappear for a bit that will be what I’m doing. Once I’ve got bloodwork I will share obviously.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1762 and New Nodal Points

I suspect that if I am any good at seeing the future it’s because I enjoy touching the present so much.

I think it’s a fools errand to professionalize “the spark” of active players meeting and exchanging information. Not to say that working at your game is wrong. You should work at it. But know what game you are playing.

I’m experiencing a kind of multi-modal view of my own focus and how it can be turned into more time touching reality. I know it sounds silly but the verbiage of the moment is enabling in strange ways.

I don’t always like consensus. I need to experience the consensus myself before I’ll join up. But I love to be first. I love being your first fan. I love being first to a new trend, narrative or aesthetic. I want to see a thing first.

To engage with others in this market place of ideas and trade in our knowledge for our own priorities, is for me, the stuff of life. I love a market. What is the mood of now so I can find others who might understand the possibilities of tomorrow. Every angle counts

I do think it’s all up for grabs future at the moment. I am leaning into some personal weirdness partially for my own happiness but partially because I think maybe this strange node of “people who want to communicate that they value beauty” to the world will be a vector for finding interesting people working on what is going to explode next.

Put out a little value for people with your own skills and maybe that is the node through which you have the opportunity to see what they see and in return you both learn more together.

I am trusting when everything goes up in “the churn” I enjoy picking up new skills. I am enjoying turning myself in a new direction. I think it might actually get me to my original goals. To invest in founders building their weird chaotic nodes of next should be.

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Aesthetics

Day 1750 and The Protestant Work Ethic and Masculine Beauty

I am booting up the more practical aspects of writing to provide value, as opposed to the writing I do here, which is to provide a thinking space for myself, and if I’m lucky occasionally my notes will help someone else.

Setting out to provide utility to others is a much higher bar as I’d want the content to meet my own expectations for value. I don’t have necessarily have expectations for utility here even if it provides it more than I’d expect.

I am enjoying preparing posts with research, and the next post teaches a little about the Protestant Reformation and The Enlightenment’s role in the great “Male Renunciation” of appearance.

Afew short centuries upended thousands of years of cultural norms that showcased the importance of masculine beauty and taste and replaced it with a drab mind first Cartesian split.

If I’m going to put together historical context, I figure it has to help the reader feel freed enough to experiment with their own world and consider that they can regain lost or hidden knowledge that was once foundational. In this case how masculinity communicated power, status and taste through appearance.

If you are aspiring to better yourself, to pursue an aristocracy of the soul, we will start with mastering the basic ingredients you will encounter in a drugstore and how they might build into reclaiming your appearance. We will go from there to Pareto-optimal options for building a habit that helps age well and look its best.

So I am having a bit of fun thinking about appearances. Anything anyone of us can do to free up another human to choose a life that is better for them is worth the time.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1744 and A Yenta For Your Perfect Look

I am considering doing more writing, but instead of it being an exercise in creating more, I am interested in writing about how to consume well, so meet Nice Packaging, a beauty shopping column with a b side about the business of keeping up appearances.

Background on why I want to do this is below, but if you want to be a part of it getting started, I’m going to offer “founding members” for it live 1:1 time with me to craft your perfect routine. Details here

Background

I get a fair amount of joy out of being the person in my social group who everyone goes to for advice on what to buy in the areas where I am most expert. I sort of wish it just could be just category (cosmetics would probably top the list ) but I’ve developed a wide range of interests as I’ve cultivated my tastes over the years so I’m just as likely to be asked what supplements I take for my biohacking as I am to be asked for skincare and cosmetic recommendations.

Chronic disease offers very transparent revealed preferences as I do what works best for my health. A a long career in the style industry means I’ve learned a lot and how to apply it as looking good is often a side effect of feeling good.

I have been in wellness my whole career as it’s not just a matter of having clean clear skin and long hair (though I mostly do) but having been inside the corporate sanctums of everywhere from Goop to Equinox. I learned a lot sourcing for my own makeup brand and I’ve applied the depth of knowledge I have in cosmeceuticals to my own healing as naturally we humans pay more for beauty than we do for health. The cosmetics industry is often light years ahead of standard medical practice.

Other topics I will play with may be more esoteric. I oddly well informed on preparedness thanks to our Montana off grid lifestyle. I’m regularly asked about stocking pharmaceuticals and first kits as those wellness worlds overlap with chronic disease, biohacking and family preparedness. Wellness goes hand in hand with fighting for your own life.

I still travel a great deal so I’ve got travel and packing optimization stories and preferences for days. Having once owned a cosmetics brand that specialized in on-the-go makeup, I can tell you now to pack what you need to look good for any scenario from surviving O’Hare with your family to packing black tie makeup that fits through London Heathrow’s quart bag nightmare.

And finally as an avid reader in the go-to gal for science fiction and reading lists which isn’t as likely to go with the rest but I’m shockingly well read in the genre. And no I don’t mean romantasy. I read hard sci-fi from cyperpunk to space opera. Thinking about what will be popular in the future means living on the cutting edge taste of the right now.

I’ll maintain my daily blog here as this is me time or me space or whatever you might like to call it. I enjoy having the space to ramble about continental philosophy, internet cultural subgroups and their fascinating ecosystems, my own emotional work and becoming version of myself that makes me happy and healthiest.

So I’ll be considering what all this looks like, editorial cadences and how I will integrate which portions of those varied interests into what is most likely going to be a style blog.

Get Started with Me

I can also use your help in getting this off the ground, so I’m offering something special – if you join as a “Founding Member” for the first year (for $300), I’ll spend an hour with you, coming up with your perfect skincare or cosmetics routine, and even send you some products to get started with. And btw, this can be just as helpful for men as for women.

One of my greatest pleasures is putting together cosmetic routines for my friends to test and trial to get you exactly what works for them. I’ve done this for billionaires and working class dollar store shoppers so I promise you I know the market.

I typically do an intake session with you with a questionnaire and some one-one time where we yap about your look, your hopes for them and your ambitions. Then I go over all of your preferences, allergies and issues. With that in mind I create a month or so of samples total for us to experiment with.

I’ll prepare your routine from either my personal brand library of travel sizes (which is enormous) or I decant into sample containers creams, serums, lotions and lotions into one perfect routine. Don’t worry I’m a germaphobe autist.

My goal is to make a routine that matches your skin & hair, and bodily needs perfectly with hour preferences. Things like daily simplicity or complete looksmaxxing, your budget from drugstore to luxury, your comfort level with different kinds of return on investment from Pareto optimization to no routine is too much. And then you test it out and we refine it together. I’m like a yenta for your grooming.

Sign Up Here

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1727 and A Happy Fluke or Compounding Effects

Maybe it was all of the crying, rending of clothing and gnashing of teeth I’ve been doing as I stare grief in the face.

Maybe it was taking a Fluconazole after my doctor notice some tearing “downstairs” at my annual physical when he was checking out my surgical scar from July.

Maybe it’s that I am on my seventh session of hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy and the results starting to compound. Protocols say it takes about ten to feel a difference and my full protocol will be sixty so I’ve got a ways to go.

Maybe it’s just the absolutely gorgeous fall weather filtering in the perfect amount of light for that ideal temperate middle ground of low heat and humidity that makes being outside a joy.

Maybe it’s just a fluke. But today I feel almost human again.

I felt joy in being the adult responsible for running the household today. I managed loads of laundry, housekeeping, a proper grooming session of my own body, a grocery run into town, a decent workout, and of course, time in the hyperbaric chamber.

My husband is still struggling mightily with whatever combination of infections, stress, and post-viral damage is ripping up his immune response. He is usually the one caring for me. But today I was able to care for us both.

Categories
Travel

Day 1714 and Bum Rush The Airbus

I’ve got a long travel day ahead of me with multiple transit hops. Given the state of geopolitics, I expect the international hub that is a transit point for most of the better MENA carriers will have some extra security measures.

In situations where I know my planned itinerary could go awry, I have my three bag cascade system.

I always pack a toiletry bag that can manage all grooming for at least 3 days, all crucial medications are kept on my body with a full supply in my backpack and finally a change of clothes should I find myself with an overnight.

Match-y Match-y

If you are interested I use Aer, Muji and BagSmart and a labeling system so I always know where things are. I’ve found having extensive labeling really makes the crankier airport workers in big hubs like Frankfurt and Heathrow happy.

Boarding a Lufthansa Airbus 321

We got the hurry up and wait now that we’ve boarded in a clusterfork of infrequent travelers who insist on manners like rushing the doors when they are not in the proper class and bringing 3-4 pieces of luggage.

Watching an older lady throw a fit in broken English to a German flight manager that she should have the open space in business class because no one is using it was funny. She didn’t understand that because it was a bum rush that many of the travelers in business and first were behind her.

We just got the news that Poland is closing its airspace after a Russian drone attack. Over 100 people on the plane on my first jump have connecting flights across Europe and internationally so I’ll be interested to see what things look like at the hub. Add in bad weather in Germany and I’m sure this will have some exciting moments.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1706 and Leaving It In The Past

I’ve got my over the ear noise canceling headphones on playing a Solfeggio frequencies of 396 Hz which is labled as “liberating guilt and fear” on my Endel mobile application (which I recommend though I’m not involved with it).

I am doing breathing exercises with these tunes playing in the background. I have a routine of hyper stimulation autonomic exercises I do when I am in times of physical and emotional stress.

My father died this weekend. While I had been preparing for the possibility for sometime the reality of the moment is never what you expect.

Grief is a strange emotion. You forgive your parents but they don’t always forgive themselves. And then it’s over and everyone is free. The pain is over and the past arrived and your present is without them.

The past becomes a foreign country and you don’t speak the language and as you become middle aged you see your life reworked through success and failure and the hard costs which your ego previously obscured like too much greasepaint.

It is maudlin to stay in grief but if we do not let go of the past we will project past pains and old understandings of reality onto others that do nothing but harm.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch these huge emotions play out in your life. Death offers grand dramas when all you can offer is having built a future on the foundation they gave you.

Categories
Media

Day 1701 and USS Enterprise (NCC 1701-D)

I have mentioned I’m a fan of Star Trek a few times. I am a genuine fan of the original series, the Next Generation and Deep Space 9 as well as many of the movies.

Gene Roddenberry pitched it as space cowboys but it’s become a template for entire generations for what competence in the face of the unknown should look like.

I’ll happily take either side in the Captain Picard versus Captain Kirk debates, because just as that fashion editor in Devil Wears Prada said about two superficially similar belts, “it’s hard as they are just so different!”

We are facing quite a bit of the unknown right now. Old hierarchies and expectations have changed. Or at least been revealed for what they are. We must ask what we owe each other and how we should expect ourselves to commit to a common cause.

I find myself considering the incredible competence both personally and professionally of the crews. I named this post NCC-1701-D for Picard’s Enterprise as that crew is famously a collaborative and high trust crew. Each one well developed with expertises professionally but also everyone was always trying new things and exploring new skills.

One of my friends accused me of having nerd “stolen valor” as I couldn’t have suffered for my affection for interests like Star Trek. Maybe it’s true girls don’t experience it the same way. Maybe I didn’t notice. I don’t think I cared. I’ll always be someone who sees 1701 and thinks “that’s the Enterprise!”

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1700 and The Passage Become Who You Are

I have been writing every single day for seventeen hundred days. 1700 days is approximately 4.66 years or 4 years and 7ish months. Not bad right?

This is quite a bit longer than I anticipated when I first began writing daily with the relatively modest ambition to write once a day for a month.

I had done daily journaling in private for ten days and was interested in seeing if I could write in public every day for some period.

I wanted to create to synthesize what I consumed across the media landscape as I tried to make sense of a world deep in the throes of Covid.

This experiment was my second sustained blogging project as I had kept a WordPress blog in the glory years of 2005-2008 or so. Other social media was easier but I’d always liked the format of public long form writing.

I had a secret silent ambition to take the daily habit to one year. It seemed doable. I fantasized about making it to 1000 days, even from the start, but that seemed bigger and more likely to fail. But if Scheherazade could make it to One Thousand and One Nights maybe I could as well?

I set out with realistic expectations but big ambitions. And now here on a random August Wednesday I am deep into the depths of a daily habit that shows no sign of stopping.

I nurtured my early ambition by saying I’d take it one day at a time, while never pressuring myself into achieving it. A journey of a thousand miles (or in my case days) starts with a single step.

I don’t care for pressure. I never have. I believe those who are truly ambitious about themselves set their own standards. You make your own life.

I will do things in my own time and at my own pace. I have never been a quitter so it’s never been a problem that I go at my own pace. Life is about results not effort.

My tenacity remains a force in my life because I am comfortable tending to my will daily. We only make progress by nurturing the seed of a thing.

Not every day is a good day. We don’t always win. I have many days where I lose. But as Allen Iverson said “it’s practice” and you never miss practice. And practice adds up. I’ve done amazing things in the last almost half decade.

I hope that this aspect of my character is as clear to others as it is to me. If I sent out on a journey I will do what I can to make it. If I fail (and I might) it is because I couldn’t.

Maybe the timing isn’t always right or my mind or body isn’t right or the market isn’t right or I am not right. Full stop. But I’ll never let myself fail because I didn’t make an honest effort. And you make the effort every single day.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1692 and Your Wellness Isn’t A Demonstration of Moral Integrity

I am enjoying the adaptive training program prompt managed by an artificial intelligence which I’ve amended around my chronic health conditions as well as my considerable slate of biometrics.

I’ve been using it for a week now as I needed a recovery plan for the fitness losses that came with a month of bed rest recovery after my surgery in July.

Not to suggest I was in terrific shape before the surgery as it discovered a deep tissue infection that went so deep and so rogue I’d likely been suffering from it for sometime despite my attempts at preventative care.

It’s upsetting seeing your resting heart rate go from mid 80s to mid 60s. Realizing your high resting heart rate isn’t because you are a lazy fattybombalatty who doesn’t do enough cardio (real thing a physical therapist has said to me) but because you have a chronic deep tissue antibiotic resistant bacterial infection. Ain’t chronic disease a trip?

Anyways, I’m healing and trying not to overdo things in the process as I’m a bit stupid when it comes to wellness. More is always better has been my mental orientation for much of my life and it’s a hard habit to kick.

Workaholics Anonymous needs a subgroup for those of us who can find ways to over do literally everything. And I do mean everything. I did a stretching and mobility routine last night that had my heart rate at 150BPM doing seated spinal twists. Did I stop? Nope. I finished the 30 minute program. My adaptive training programs response?

Complete rest – no negotiations

And who am I to negotiate with an AI who has no emotions involved in the process of putting together a recovery training regimen. It’s not going to moralize at me.