Fifteen hours of sleep and a spa day does fix a week of disrupted sleep. I may need some more downtime of resting and recovery and maybe more water drinking before I have a cogent thought.
After seeing my sadly “in the red” recovery scores from my Whoop, I felt a bit of a cortisol mitigation effort was in effect. In other words, I took a little spa day.
When I was younger and living in Chinatown , my apartment was above an acupuncture and massage joint that specialized in pressure point work. Going once a week probably saved my life. It was affordable and close and good.
It was always packed with the working class of the area. The prison complex wasn’t too far away, we had a police precinct two blocks down, and the courts buildings system was a block away and enormous warren of humans. A lot of very intense people in tough, sometimes very physical situations needed to have it worked out of their. Kids.
By comparison, my body was easy work for a man who worked on hurt cops and stressed out prosecutors. White girl problems are easy.
So I’ve done a run of sauna and cold work. I’ve had a massage. I have stretched and done breath work and moved around to feel things reset their flow.
I should really remember that heat, cold, oxygen, movement and pressure really do solve most problems. Don’t forget to eat and drink.
I’ve had several day’s worth of poor sleep. My sleep debt had reached a good full night’s of rest at over 9 hours. And boy did I make it up and then some last night.
I wasn’t asleep all of those 15 hours according to both Whoop and Apple but it sure felt like I was in deep slumber.
With earplugs and an eye mask in, I felt dead to the world. And what’s worse is I’ve had an entire month of pooor recovery and sleep
Now on July 4th I have been liberated from a long month of poor biometrics and awful recovery scores. And it only took 15 hours of being in a dark cold hotel room and a build up stress, exhaustion, mistreatment and other sundry social frustrations.
Today really does feel like Independence Day for me. I’ve been freed from a body weighed down by physical realities and I am now free from it.
There is a poem that comes to mind anytime freedom and sleep arise to my conscience thought. A Sleep of Prisoners is a 1951 verse play by Christopher Fry
A SLEEP OF PRISONERS
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity’s sake!
His writing captures something in my imagination with turns of phrase like “the longest stride of soul we ever took” evoking a crossing to the harsh wakefulness of reality. And as he says “it takes so many years to wake, but will you wake for pity’s sake?”
I have been slumbering in both reality and in the metaphorical ties that bound me to others. And today is the day where all Americans ponder how our founding fathers contemplated the reality of waking to the dawn of a new experiment. The American experiment continues and we must remain awake to our role within it. I have many thoughts on this which may now soon flow having awoken from quite a sleep indeed.
I’ve got a comically large sleep debt to work off. My Whoop is screaming at me as it’s been 3 days of not quite getting in an adequate of sleep.
And it’s not as if I was enjoying great sleep for June. It’s possible my new Whoop hardware just has bee algorithm and set of standards as June was mostly dead.
First it was emotional “really in it feelings” that gave me a half night as I woke early as the upset remained.
Then the anxiety of preparing for a long trip while the aforementioned emotional impact hung unresolved (though I had cried it out) which made deep rest out of reach. Four hours is half of my usual needs.
The middle night between issues and my packing day didn’t get me much better sleep. It was a long day of logistics and I never quite came down.
And then I was on an airplane and trying to catch some Zzzzzs but barely managed under three hours. I feel great as I’ve just kept on swimming great white shark style, but I know I’ve got almost a full night of sleep dent built up.
Still it’s hard to feel too badly about things when you look down on the beauty of the world below.
The travel is the kind of stint that requires the logistics of being in perpetual movement across climates and time zones.
I’ve been moving for what feels like 24 hours straight as I did the dance of managing feelings, working to get across to other people, unloading and unpacking and then promptly repacking again as I’ll be on the road for a stint.
I had a shark phase as a child and the lore says the perpetual movement of this ancient predator is required lest it perish. I’d love to know how rest and sleep works in that sort of murky depth as I’d loved to know how we might incorporate it.
As it turns out of the 540 species of sharks only a handful have what’s called Obligate Ram Ventilation which means the faster they swim the more oxygen flows through their gills. If the strop meaning the oxygen drops and they literally die. Great white sharks are the canonical example.
When I am angry I consider the question of whether humans are indeed the apex predators of our environment and if it is in my nature to flow the oxygen and predate upon the wide world who crosses my hungry wrath. My own Christian faith asks for a very different answer and I obey. But the hunger is in all of us.
I really spent some time in my feelings today which isn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my day. Though I couldn’t exactly tell you why I don’t expect to feel my way through the day. All real works requires you to balance the intuition of working from one’s gut.
The world is tense and our place in it doesn’t feel assured. Every time we experience a norm change or unsettles the balance of our social order.
It sounds so dramatic but we balance trust with the boundaries necessary to make choices that work for each of our own consciences. Some things are more the basic math of a situation. We need are feeling precarious.
As I do this writing exercise tonight there is a raging Rocky Mountain thunderstorm. They come on with such fury it can take your breath away. These storms are intense and rapid and blow in and out with inn half an hour. The atmosphere after has an uneasy calm. Rage is nature’s game not man’s.
They do drive you inside which is good as I have packing to do. I am venturing off and I’ll be feeling my way through that too. I’ll blow out myself soon and let the world show me where to go.
The good vibes of my weekend have washed out on the tides as I consider a frustrating non-interaction that has grown into anger in my heart as rapidly as a wheatgrass seed grows in an Easter basket.
I am considering the question of honor in the context of closed communities and events. If you go looking, the cat is out of the bag on where I was and with whom, but I don’t yet have personal permission to use a name, so I’ll keep this brief.
I’ve been called many names in my time and plenty of them have not been laudatory. Dirty shiksa, stupid cunt, and mostly recently, demonic. Everyone being entitled to their opinion, I don’t generally ask for apologies. I do ask that you say it to my face though.
I am a shiksa, certainly “see you next Tuesday” from time to time, but I remain skeptical that I am possessed by anything from Hades or other Lovecraftian horror from the beyond.
But so long as you use my name in the process of insulting my honor, I only request you look me in the eyes while you do it. I can take it. I stand by who I am and what I say.
So I can’t shake the feeling that I was deliberately dishonored by the speaker. And I am actually angry now. I am used to the insult throwing and name calling of Internet living, indeed I thrive in it. I am not accustomed to aspersions by celebrities as I don’t matter all that much. And I certainly didn’t expect it in a small private group.
I fight in that arena under my own banner. I take those punches under my own name. I won’t lie, someone of stature being so upset as to call me evil without felt good at first (how nice to be noticed) and slowly curdled into a fury over the disrespect.
Maybe it’s because I was one of the few women speaking. It was only after much effort he agreed to speak with my male co-speaker and not me (I’d already left). Maybe it was because after multiple attempts at engagement I was refused time and again. Maybe it’s because his gaze remained staunchly averted. Whatever triggered it has now turned to fiery anger.
I think it’s a bitch move to drop bombs and then runaway like a kicked cur when the beast stirs. And I am quite wide awake now.
Yesterday we enjoyed the uncomfortable tension of a cease fire announcement in the Israeli-Iranian conflict that America had just entered that no one was sure was real.
Sure the president had said so inside the heaven ban built to purpose social network Truth Social, but we had no basis for belief in that without hearing from Iran or Israel.
Newspapers sent out alerts that resolved into “unconfirmed” once you hit the landing page. Thanks guys but maybe cool your jets on the alerts?
I read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine when it came out in 2007 with a mix of skepticism and head nodding. Her thesis was that disasters are used to push through unpopular market reforms. I remain skeptical of presenting neoliberalism as exclusively disaster capitalism.
But after resistance to the Iraq War did nothing, and having recently graduated from an alma mater whose reputation in Latin American economies was shall we say mixed, I was somewhat receptive to her thesis.
I alas myself lack the crucial qualification for being a fan of Klein’s work as I am not a socialist. I like the market reforms and doubt chaos is the only vehicle through which they can be passed. At this point in our history, chaos is leading us more towards statist solutions
Nevertheless I remain skeptical of the narratives from state power no matter what solution the state is pushing. I like a market based solution as much as the next bourgeois pig, but I’m no fan of the state overriding its people or its businesses.
The problem we have now isn’t just Shock Doctrine or disaster capitalism driving outcomes. It was mostly disaster authoritarianism in my opinion.
The reason it is so unsettling to have no source of reliable information or institutional trust in our information is because we are now living in the age of Slop Doctrine. You can take it if you like Naomi.
It’s impossible to sort out what reality is winning even when it’s coming from a head of state. A million competing narratives from untold decentralized sources of information now compete to confused and unsettle us. The psy-ops aren’t even run by humans anymore.
I’d love for us to collapse that state of uncertainty that comes from multiple entangled competing realities into consensus reality.
Alas when I searched for quantum reality collapse terminology all I found was a LiDAR imaging company for architectural documentation. Their website doesn’t suggest much of anything invoking quantum states except insofar as one hopes that by using their imaging your buildings won’t do so.
And so we are left swimming in the slop doctrine confusion in which old ways of validating information are entirely useless to us. Slop Doctrine is here and it sucks.
As anyone who binges an TV show over the weekend can attest it’s best when you wrap the storyline cleanly and quickly.
And so it would seem we’ve got a clean wrap on the whole Israeli-Iranian conflict. Or says the narrator of America the TV show. Yes, I mean President Donald J Trump.
I must be having some sort of Taoist moment personally as the prospect of war seems very improbable in the energy of the world. We’ve not got the resources to keep dicking around.
And yet we are in news limbo as other countries are involved and don’t have an incentive to wrap it up clean by Monday.
This being the fundamental viewpoint of the cynical and self centered American with the bunker busters but also a flavor of Melian power politics. If we can punch some dickbags in the nards shouldn’t we do it with those big ass bombs right? It’s funny how American runs better on semiotics than policy.
Now I’ve got no idea what happens next except to say that the “nothing ever happens” camp has to realize we are dealing with a lot of variables and everyone involved is egotistical and old.
So standard fare insofar as our historical record and fictional characters usually deliver. Your years of foreign service policy study gets put into dank memes. Hopefully we don’t have a season two as Americans don’t like those $100 barrel of oil vibes at all. Naval superiority? Air supremacy? Nah memetic supremacy.
I had the most beautiful summer solstice day. I was surrounded by beauty and good memories. I walked underneath a canopy of trees over a brook feeding blooming roses.
My whole day had the enlivening feel of the state of summer.
And then evening came with the news of American B-2 bombers dropping on Iranian nuclear targets. That sent a chill down everyone’s spine. It was late enough when the news broke that the day was nearly finished. The evening rapidly sobered. I went to bed.
It was near freezing and raining when I woke up this morning. The mood has altered. It didn’t feel like summer. Alex started a fire in the living room. An entirely welcome warmth in an unseasonably cold summer day.