Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 1647 and More Sleep

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.

Rocky Mountain High
Freedom Thongs
Sweat it out
Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 1645 and A Sleep of Prisoners

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.

A screenshot of my Whoop’s recovery page

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

The 4th of July is now my independence from a month of poor biometrics

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.

Mixing more strain than recovery into my Whoop cocktail for maximum life

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!

Christopher Fry

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.

Categories
Travel

Day 1644 and Problems Behind Me Sleep Ahead?

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.


Airplane sleep doesn’t lend itself to dreams

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.

Leaving Montana
Categories
Travel

Day 1643 and Like A Shark

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.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1642 and Really In It

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.

Categories
Community Culture

Day 1641 and Honor

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’m in my Worf era

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.

I’m the alien in this scenario
Categories
Community Travel

Day 1640 and Ebullient

Having spent a whirlwind 72 hours at a campout with weirdos I am in a very good mood. Minus getting called demonic by a coward who wouldn’t face me, the entire trip including the long drives was amazing.

It’s always a pleasure to spend offline time with real people. Especially when they disagree with you. Which happened a lot as it was a fractious group of eccentrics from all walks of life.

Technologists, theologians, farmers, military men, musicians, mothers, writers and even a journalist or two. We were missing a trucker friend and a former hobo (his wife is due to deliver a baby any minute now) but it was full in spirit.

We drove home through golden time with a sunset so brilliant it made me wish I could capture even a fraction of its beauty with paintbrush or camera. Alas it will remain a memory that is impossible to share.

Stopping for gas and getting Maxfield Parrish
Categories
Travel

Day 1637 and Day Tripping

It’s positively verdant in the Rocky Mountain west. This far into June it doesn’t seem as if it should be Irish countryside green heading into Wyoming.

Both because I was driving, and an iPhone picture can’t ever do a landscape of such texture and vastness any amount of justice, I have few pictures.

Some portion of I-90 in Montana

We’ve got a little camp out with some of our oddest friends. As befits the oddity of the open road we made a pit stop on our day trip at one of the centers of interstate commerce Loves.

The various locations of Loves in America

If you’ve not encountered a Loves, I don’t quite know what America you live in but it’s quite the experience. It ain’t no Bucc-ees but it’s a vibe. The smooth loyalty driven core business of truckers bumps up against the families headed to parts elsewhere. And its merchandise reflects this intersection of oddities.

Keep on rolling with two or we upcharge a whole buck for these meat sticks
Cover those meats with a push of a button.

All I acquired was a half tank of gas, a king size Starbursts for Alex, and a Pina Colda Bai. I made it about a third of the way through the drink before calling uncle.

There was other similarly faux foods we encountered on the road. An equally loyalty driven chain whose signature simulacrum only exists because of a Ray Dalio arbitrage. I wonder what Baudrillard would make of American food in 2025.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1604 and First Weekend of the Season

It is so beautiful today in Bozeman it almost doesn’t feel real. It’s warm but not hot. It’s sunny but we have fluffy clouds breaking up intensity. Cool breezes waft in and out without ever really turning to wind. I hope our entire summer has this weather.

Because of the holiday weekend the town has fully switched into “seasonal” mode from daily New York flights to way more availability at restaurants and service. One of Alex’s friends from college is headed into Yellowstone with his whole family from grandparents to kids.

Mountain towns make as much money in the summer as they do in the winter so you always wish for fluffy snow and cool clear summers.

The snowpack is smelting, the grass is green and the sky is oh so blue

While Yellowstone is worth the travel, I appreciate being able to work and hike all flavors of public trails from city to state in Bozeman.

On days like today I want to fully throw myself into a Bryan Johnson super adherence biohacker as I want to be able to enjoy as much of our summer as I can outside.

Categories
Culture

Day 1596 and Dangersous Professional Voice

I am a pretty informal person. I don’t hold any institutional authority. The interests I represent are my own. I speak for myself.

Obviously I care a great deal about my family and my friends and want to reflect well on them but I can only speak for myself. This is a given in an age where big institutions often find themselves frustrating the interests of normal people. And people take a stand.

So when I find myself haggling with medical insurance or trying to wrap my head around a set of requests from someone claiming to be a representative of a large power, I think back to a viral tweet by Patrick McKenzie (@patio11), about the efficacy of the dangerous professional voice.

The “Dangerous Professional Voice” is less about aggression and more about clarity, formality, and signaling that you understand the system and expect to be taken serious.

What are my options?’”

McKenzie suggests this phrase, calmly and professionally delivered, often prompts the other party to reveal escalation paths or alternatives that might not otherwise be offered.

The voice suggests it solving it is a given. Getting down to business and showing you mean business. Even if you are an informal person sometimes you may want to use this dangerous professional voice as you go about your day. Share if it works. Patrick says he enjoys hearing about use in the wild.