It’s always baffling to me when something that is supposed that is supposed to make you feel good makes me awful. And yet it’s a very consistent experience for me.
Every time I get bodywork done (massages, acupuncture, osteopathic spinal work, physical therapy) I feel like absolute shit for 24-48 hours afterwards.
I have an autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis which is a fancy form of arthritis. It’s well controlled with medication and a healthy lifestyle but I am always looking for ways to increase my functionality as well as my capacity to tolerate stress.
This naturally leads me to want incorporate positive stress techniques like cold showers, saunas, and the thousands of other hacks to improve your capacity to tolerate stress.
I’ve tried supplements magnesium supplements to adaptogenic mushrooms and most major modalities of body work to even the whackiest of woo.
Yesterday I had an amazing osteopath work on my spine and yet today I feel about 10x worse than I did before I went in. The dip is just a misery of exhaustion, pain which leads to some anxiety from being tired and in uncomfortable.
I trust I’ll feel better after this dip and some progress as I recover from the good stress but at the moment I’m just miserable.
My assumption is that many things in life that make you feel better in the long term are uncomfortable. Delayed onset muscle soreness is a common issue for new weight lifters and pushes many out of their routines before they even get started.
It’s such an art finding the correct amount of stress to put your body under and I wish I had a more perfect intuition about how to do it. Until I do I’ll probably have to work through many types of dips.
You may recall the old aphorism about marriage. Men and women have very different goals for the institution and how it will or won’t change them.
“Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed”
I don’t recall having any ambitions for changing my husband when we got married ten years ago. I thought quite highly of him when we got married. I still do.
The irony is that we have both changed significantly not because of any goal the other has for each other but because of the work we do together. Fast growing startups simply demand so much emotional change from their people.
A recent piece in the New York Times discussed how coaching has become the hack that drove emotional chances
Venture-backed startups simply must scale faster than all but the rarest of human beings can acquire emotional intelligence. As a result, startup founders and chief executives, many of whom are trained not in management but in software engineering, face extraordinary risk of coming unglued in ways that vaporize immense amounts of capital.
Acquiring emotional intelligence quickly becomes a “do or die” skill in startups. And most of us do die. Ego death in mediation like jhanna are within reach because failure and rebirth are such common experiences for the technologists that build quickly moving companies.
Both my husband Alex and I have done family systems therapy as well as multiple forms of professional and personal coaching. If Alex didn’t want change from me as his wife then he is surely disappointed. As his wife if I wanted change from him I very much did get it.
Neither one of us is disappointed, aphorisms aside. If anything, as we’ve done more work to acquire the emotional intelligence required of us to growth and thrive in our work, we’ve become more ourselves.
There is a real joy in becoming “you-er” as essential personality, skills and ambitions become clearer. It’s well worth investing in therapy and coaching to become yourself. Being “you-er” is quite freeing. It’s hard to be disappointed by that outcome.
I am hunkering down for a Friday evening at home. Batten down the hatches, secure the chickens in their coop, turn on the security system and lock the doors kiddos because the circus is here.
We don’t live in the town of Bozeman thankfully but comfortably far enough into rural county land that we shouldn’t be bothered.
Nevertheless when something big comes to town, and it’s harder to imagine something bigger than a political rally, it can get in the way of basic routines like grocery shopping or picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy.
I was doing a few errands over the lunch hour and traffic was crawling as trucks decked out in flags paraded through town. It was actually quite festive even if it slowed everything down.
Trump is speaking at 8pm and already by noon the rumor on local chats and news websites was that the indoor arena was nearly full with early arrivals.
There is a portion of 19th street where local farmers sell fruit and vegetables on the side of the road. Today it was packed with booths selling Trump paraphernalia instead of cherries or sweet corn. I
think the most astonishing flag I saw was “Cum-Allah Harris” but it was otherwise your usual MAGA fair with lots of signs for local Republican candidates as well.
Slow traffic and roadside flag sales
I didn’t get any close up pictures as I was trying to avoid the scene but I did a little bit of looking as I drove by. I’m hoping it brings good business to restaurants, bars and motels though in truth August is already so popular a time to be in Bozeman we don’t really have much capacity.
I’m safely back home long before anything has kicked off and I indeed to keep it that way. Don’t invite trouble and trouble won’t find you. But I look forward to hearing stories from friends and neighbors. Maybe I’ll watch the livestream.
I wasn’t expecting August to be much fun but I’m on an enjoyable roll through the first week. Maybe the politicians will listen to us and maybe they won’t. But stuff still gets built no matter what the news says so I’m just working what’s in front of me with my people.
We’ve had relatively good luck with weather this week and the fires have blessedly not been blowing into the valley. Which does a lot to improve moods. It’s cool, bright and you can breathe.
Add in a few prime season tomatoes, some fresh basil, a Japanese watermelon at its peak, and you’ve got the making of a great evening. With sunset coming earlier every day I can almost feel like fall might come after all.
I didn’t get enough sleep last night. Between one thing and another I got about five hours of sleep. Adult circadian rhythms being what they are I still woke at the usual time.
I had a busy morning and afternoon so I pushed through it. Unexpectedly a number of pieces of my investing work were happening all at once. So much for a slow August right?
I was able to get through everything on my calendar but I’m I was starring down a bunch of work even at midafternoon. And I found myself unable to keep my eyes open.
I was zonked. Slept from 2 till I was woken up for a bird dinner. I’ll admit I’m planing to sleep as soon as I can wrap up my evening routine.
I’ve got so much to get through over the weekend. I have two rounds I’m working on (if you like hardtech slide into my DMs), juggling a bunch of inbound, and I’m gearing up for the fall. So maybe I need a little extra sleep.
And to think just a few days ago I was completely despondent over fire season, the sadness of American politics and my own seasonal affective disorder with high summer. If things keep up at this pace it won’t be summer much longer.
Things have taken a turn for the worse on the timelines. I’m not all that bothered by the feral internet, but I do occasionally find myself staring down the dark corridors of anonymous “holders of risqué opinions” and I wonder about my life choices.
I can feel all the shifting crazies that come from an unstable media environment. Our endocrine systems are simply not built to metabolize this much information and noise. Signal is lost in the static.
I suspect a lot of rational voices will make the choice to bounce out of the moment simply to avoid the informational shrapnel. Alas these days it’s less of a metaphor. How quickly we forget that just weeks ago someone tried to kill a presidential candidate.
If rational people don’t want to engage. And given where we are with ridiculous hysterics over couch coitus I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t. Well you will be left to the hyenas. Millions have already retreated to the cozy web. As they reemerge it’s only a reminder of how bad things are online.
The last few weeks or so of history happening has felt agonizingly long. Almost inescapably so. I first wrote about the concept of the long nowon Day 326 in 2021 after being inspired by Epsilon Theory.
The more we put off investing in a future the more the long now stretches on. We borrow against all the things that could build us a better tomorrow. And we fall back.
Being trapped in the long now never serves your own interests. Your priorities shouldn’t be tangled into the frozen fear of a worse tomorrow. Every day we have the chance to close the loop on something in our lives and bring the future we actually want a little closer to reality.
Having now written for thirteen hundred days in a row I have a sense of both my own progress but also a reminder of how long it takes to build something when the world is dragging at your attention at every turn.
Closing the loop in your life means not letting yourself be dragged from your priorities. Setting those priorities should be in your control no matter how much is happening. It doesn’t have to be bigger than your own life but you have more agency than you think.
The benefit of keeping trace of one’s biometrics that I at least have some visibility into the misery. Of course, the downside is that I have visibility into how much misery. An extremely both sides of the bus meme situation.
I have a lot of reconditioning in front of me. Or at least my health data suggests that. It’s very discouraging to have health apps say you’ve had a 90% decrease in activity.
This week I slowly began the work of going back to life. I attended a policy gathering. I’ve been working on deals. I suppose I was doing that while I had symptoms too. It’s been hard as I want this to be better but I lost a lot of ground and relatively quickly.
I’m now doing all the little things one does help get your body back on track. Simply changed and reminders are most effective if you have injuries or are chronically ill.
I have little routines where I get up and do body weight squats on the hour. I’ll make sure to walk 500 steps each time I get up. I’ll touch my toes and stretch.
All these things feel very hard at the moment and I get blaring warning signals from the trackers suggesting physiological strain when I do. The slog of not giving up is a permanent part of the human condition and I refuse to let entropy win. But I am discouraged by how much work it is to do the basics. You can’t ever escape that life is just chop wood and carry water
There was a Baz Luhrmann song “Everybody’s Free” that became popular at graduations for millennials. It was delivered as advice for the class of 99 and became a cheesy but heartfelt touchstone for many millennials celebrations.
It is a tearjerker and contains some useful insights on nostalgia and advice.
Be careful whose advice you buy but be patient with those who supply it Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past From the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts And recycling it for more than it’s worth
I had sunscreen on my mind when consider its wisdom, I was trying on a new SPF tinted moisturizer as I dragged through my morning routine tired from 3 weeks of Covid. I tweeted a one off idle thought about the nostalgic advice I’d been given about how to live my life.
It’s amusing to me that two of the biggest cultural trends for women in the 2010s, Marie Kondo’s “spark joy cleaning” and Sheryl Sanders’s “Lean In” got immediately tossed the moment their life circumstances changed.
If there is one thing the internet agrees on it’s that life is always more complicated than 140 characters. Coming to terms with we feel about the advice and cultural stories we were told is a touchy subject online. Even more so when it comes to what women should be doing.
We all have ideas about how we should be living that come up hard against the realities. It’s a comfort to think anyone has living figured out. So much has changed and at such a rapid pace that we are looking for new scripts. It can be kind when someone offers you a solution. Let us take what lessons we can from the past as we seek the future.
As I run out the clock on the last vestiges of my Covid infection (two fucking weeks give me a break), I’ve had the pleasure of being extremely online.
There has been a bit of a kerfuffle on the costs of being “a well kept cosmopolitan woman” with varying levels of push back that are functionally regurgitating the plot of The Devil Wears Prada.
Breakdown of the costs of a “well-maintained” attractive woman in a large U.S. city: hair: $400/every 2-3 months at least facials: $200-300/mnth fitness: $200-400/mnth cosmetics: $100-300/mnth nails: $100+/mnth brows: $15-40/mnth waxing/laser: $100-$150/mnth med spas: $1k/every 3 mnths at least And doesn’t even include clothes or shoes!
Expressions of feminine presentation through grooming is what the academics like to call “contested space” but you can probably get the gist of how it through it by skimming Veblen, Baudrillard and old issues of Cosmopolitan.
Needless to say, most women are not $10,000 Instagram models, professional girlfriends, trophy wives or professionals in glamour industries. This spend is extreme and for people who life off their image.
I’ve been a peon in the image business and I’ve been a girlboss and it’s a bit exhausting if you are not young, naturally beautifully or able to afford the upkeep. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. I’ve watched many rounds of influencer burnout. I am blessed with good skin, good hair, the knowledge of my professional background and cosmetology school, and I have money to spend on myself.
Hair: $80 2x a year Facials: $0 Fitness: $0 on gym or classes but we do have a barn squat rack & a mortgage Cosmetics: $100-200 a month it’s my hobby & former profession Nails: $50 for pedicures 6x Brows: $0 Waxing: $90 4x year Med Spa: Botox $220 every 120 days
I am myself in the middle ground of expensive personal presentation. I like everything about cosmetics from makeup to haircare. I posted my own breakdown above and it’s about $250 a month.
I don’t dye or heat style my hair, I am not heathy enough to be a gym rat (I wish I was), I get pedicures because it’s hard to do my own with my spinal problems but don’t get my nails done, I wax downstairs for personal preferences, I love skincare and at 40 it seemed time to get a light dose of Botox seasonally.
Which is in my book quite a bit of money to spend on appearances. It’s the opulence I allow myself on the other side of some financial success and I justify it by saying it’s worthwhile to keep up on my old industry.
My husband says it’s mostly an excuse to buy makeup I’ll never wear and he is naturally quite right. It’s a hobby like any other. I’m glad I can justify it for work though.
Social media comparisons for lifestyles that are simply beyond most people’s reach shouldn’t be considered aspirational. My spending should level not considered aspirational on this either if I’m candid. I could easily get away with less and look good.
The good news is that for bargain hunters who want to combat hoe-flation costs in their life is that we’ve never had better access to quality grooming. We have cheap actives brands like the Inky List and the Ordinary, access to the best Korean biochemists, and excellent buyers clubs.
