Tag: Trust

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Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1752 and Too Much Protestant Work Ethic

I am pouring far too much autistic enthusiasm into my pet beauty shopping column that has a roughly half and half ration “theory of appearance culture in Protestantism” and half “specific routines at different price points” but I am enjoying it.

The heavier lift is going to be the work I am putting into the individual routines for the founding subscribers who have paid good money for help and I intend to give them my absolute all. I admit I’ve put way more thought than is probably necessary into each one but it’s a joy to track down specific products and geographic needs. It’s a shame that market editor was never a well paid enough job at a fashion magazine as I am pretty good at it.

Like, of course, I have opinions on the German drugstore market and its cost effective actives lines versus the old school naturals brands and where to acquire them. I don’t have quite as extensive a sample library of the market staples on hand but you know I spent hours browsing the grocery and retail shops when I was living in Frankfurt.

And on that note I’m going to bed early as I’m healing from my various biohacking experiments and I’m exhausted even with all the effort I’m putting into wound healing it still takes a certain about of rest to actually knit things together no matter how much time I spend with HBOT or what peptide stack I’m taking (it’s a spicy boy on the way in I’ll say that much).

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1748 and Putting Testosterone Pellets In My Butt Cheek

Intrepid biohacker that I am, when I learned that my testosterone levels were concerningly low, I began on a program to raise them.

I started with nutrition and supplementation but I already had a diet and supplement routine that was evidence based for raising testosterone levels in women.

I added in DHEA (Dehydroepiandrosterone) at 25mg. Six months of that brought me up to just about half of the lowest baseline acceptable. I was NOT getting adequate results.

My physician prescribed me a cream from a compound pharmacy which unfortunately didn’t agree with my skin. So we were going to get creative.

I had read a blog post from Cate Hall (whose husband Sasha Chapin had helped me on another entirely different vector of my life) on how testosterone pellets changed her life.

She had had teeny tiny testosterone pellets placed into her subcutaneous fat and had remarkable results in terms of energy and focus. This and that happened, and the summer was a mess, but today was the day I finally followed in her footsteps.

Vials of compounded testosterone

We’re started me with 10mg of estradiol (range 6-25mg with 8-10mg being most common), and 75mg of testosterone (range 50-150mg with the most common being 75-100).

We’ll aim for labs at 4-6 weeks after insertion which would represent peak levels. We will repeat dosing at 3-6 month intervals. We will check levels at 4 months or so, or earlier if I feel the effects waning.

Do be warned that within a paragraph or so, there will be images of needles, scalpels, and some blood. So feel free to not scroll down further.

Part of the difficulty with dosing this stuff is that the pellet doses are wonky and frequently out of stock – estradiol comes in 6mg and 10mg increments so 8mg is impossible.

Naturally, we’ve made surprisingly little progress when it comes to women’s health, particularly as it relates to hormones.

Prepared and ready to go

But as I am happy to be a guinea pig and my luteal phase is a mess of migraines and misery I figured I had little to lose and much to gain. I was the first patient my doctor has done the procedure on so if anyone in Bozeman is interested, you can confidently give it a go with him as I’ve survived it.

These cool tubes don’t actually go inside too far but sort of shoot the pellet into the incisions

I was given a local numbing agent with epinephrine. I needed a surprising amount of it but I was a bit nervous. Once I was just able to feel pressure and no pain it was time to make a small incision with a scalpel and in popped the tiny bit of hormone on the left butt cheek.

No big deal at all.

But if you don’t want to see it going in don’t scroll.

Just giving you space to turn back.

A tiny incision in my goose bumped bum with the little pellets easily tucked in

I am all bandaged up and still riding the cortisone of it all but I feel alright. I’ll be adding in progesterone orally to temper the estrogen as that’s another matter. I’m excited to report back on it as if I have even a fraction of Cate’s experience with it I’ll be quite happy. Also it’s about $70 a month so not cheap but not at all expensive for something that could potentially mitigate some long term issues I’ve struggled with for years.

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
Chronicle Travel

Day 1743 and Noticing Anarcho-Tyranny Through Habits

I’m coming up on the 5-year mark of writing every single day. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been at it that long, if I’m honest with myself. When you commit to doing a basic task as a daily habit, you don’t expect it to change your life.

I’m not actually sure that writing every day has changed my life, though I think I’ve gotten better at the process of writing and the habit of finding space to think, organize, and get my thoughts together. That is a positive change.

When I first started, there were a number of goals I had in my life that seemed a lot more achievable than half a decade of writing.

Once you’ve achieved such consistency, you notice how little gets done in other areas when you regularly do things for yourself. One of my goals that I’ve had almost as long as this blog was a visa for family friends so they could travel freely to America to see me just as I see them. Pandemics and problematic presidents sure slowed that down and now I despair it will ever happy.

I honestly had no idea that the United States was so broken in its state capacity that granting a travel visas would consume more time than blogging and I’d achieve much less working to obtain a visa for years as its functionally impossible to get a legal visa.

Here I am with all of this writing (fantastic training date for an artificial intelligence) and yet I’d still have failed at obtaining a travel visa for family friends. We have so much power and yet not quite enough to get around America’s failures.

Maybe this is why projects like the Network State appealed to me. I’ve worked on policy like the Right to Compute which has taken on more and more meaning as I go through my life.

I can’t believe I was able to pass a bill into law before I could get the state department to do its job. And government workers wonder why some of us wouldn’t mind if they got fired.

I know I can rely on my own skills, my capacity to use the hardware and software at my disposal, and that the currencies of the web will happily engage with me in trustless and transparent manners.

This is not something I can guarantee when working with the United States and our State Department. It’s a hard thing to look at straight on as it traps me and my family into a kind of anarcho-tyranny where because we follow the law to the letter we are discriminated against while others brazenly broke laws.

High trust people who display their commitment daily are worn down by this bitterly painful reality that what we put in doesn’t guarantee us all that much when the state is concerned. We move fast and keep at it. The American state department moves slow and failed at every step of the way.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1740 and Jungian Archetypal Stories

I woke up resolved to apply fresh energy to the new beginning that has forced me into a cycle of grief as I memorialized my father and worked through his death. It’s been a strange and very sad month.

Jungian archetypal stories such as the symbolically significant “kill your father” narrative are templates and fundamental patterns that appear in dreams, literature and myth.

These stories come from the 12 archetypes of Carl Jung and are meant to show fundamental drives and lessons that repeat across human nature. This chart Perplexity found me illustrates them nicely.

My generation’s parents have been alive, in charge, and looming large well beyond what many expected in traditional generational studies.

The fourth turning has nevertheless begun and scramble to secure position, authority and resources pits the remaining elders against their children.

Clearly this is not optimal and we should find our own Jungian stories to free us to reach our own future without the literal end of our fathers. But if one has to suffer this loss then I’ll make the best of it.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1736 and Putting Good Things Back Into The System

I had a few appointments in town today including two doctor appointments. I like to have my husband with me when the medical system is involved just in case I need a backup or level headed second opinion.

Afterwards we were able to catch a late lunch (nearly happy hour) at one of Bozeman’s trendy no seed oil spots. It being an odd hour for dining we could hear the conversations at the bar as the place was mostly empty.

A virgin Huckleberry margarita

There were two couples, one Boomer pair and the other geriatric millennials, who as it turned out both celebrating their anniversaries this weekend. The out of town Boomers had come for a Yellowstone and Tetons visit while the younger couple turned out to be local farmers in the valley and were excited to learn the tourists had something in common with them.

The Boomers had also run a farm in Florida but retired and sold it as it is apparently nigh impossible to grow oranges for juice in Florida anymore. The conversation had turned to everyone’s frustrations with the tariffs and the pressures it put on their work.

No one could remain competitive as cost inputs kept going up. Finding labor for smaller farms was getting more expensive and harder to secure. And land developers increasingly competed to acquire land piece by piece from older larger family farms who struggled to compete. We were full on eavesdropping at this point.

The husband in the young farmer pair was dressed just like Alex. He could have been Alex for how closely their styles matched. When he left for the bathroom, his wife said to the older couple how hard it has been recently.

Land he’d worked for years on a lease had just recently been sold to developers at an enormous markup. They understood the demand for housing but how could anyone continue to farm and make a living?

Between tariffs, labor costs and ravenous unmet demand for housing that could only be financed by large scale real estate developers the era of the family farm felt over. Only the big dogs could afford the costs and regulatory overhead.

We were finishing up our meal as we nodded along. Alex said to me “ok I know we don’t do this very often but I think we should pick up the meal for the younger couple.” Being on the verge of tearing up myself I couldn’t have agreed more.

I waved over the waitress and asked if this was possible. She seemed a little surprised “the whole meal?!” But it wasn’t a crazy amount. It was about $100. We sneakily paid our tab and theirs as quickly as we could. We didn’t want to make a thing of it. We just wanted to make their day a little better.

We got up and said to both couples that we couldn’t help overhearing it was both their anniversary weekends coming up and we wanted to wish them many more happy years together.

We thanked them both for keeping America fed and tried to casually saunter out before anyone noticed what we’d done. Hopefully this added a little cheer to their day. In a system as big and opaque and impersonal as America it can feel like there is nothing any of us can do.

So when you can do something even if it’s a small thing like picking up a meal we should do so. America is an idea but we are also a people and we stick together even if our elites make stupid decisions.

Categories
Biohacking Reading

Day 1720 and I Am OK To Go

I love Carl Sagan’s Contact. I first read the book in my middle school years and was allowed to watch the movie starring Jodie Foster despite having a very limited “screen time” diet.

As I got older I was allowed to watch edifying science fiction and book adaption only if I had read the source material. Contact passed both tests

It’s a beautiful story of faith and science about on a radio astronomer who finds a signal from alien intelligence which kicks off a planet wide space race to make contact.

There is a scene in the film where our protagonist Dr Arroway is set to launch a machine which we humans do not fully understand but is presumed to be some sort of transportation device.

Just as the countdown nears zero, she loses contact with the ground team. Roaring machinery and turbulence drowns her voice as she repeats over and over “I am OK to go” until a blind colleague finally picks her voice out of the static. The capsule is let go. I won’t spoiler it.

I’m OK To Go

I had a little moment of being out of contact myself today. I am now the proud owner of a hyperbaric chamber but still getting used to the machine. Alex, watching me as I adjusted, communicated with me through the glass with gestures.

Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy has roots in diving as managing pressure changes is an important aspect of safety for underwater and high altitude work.

When diving you don’t give a thumbs up to show you are alright. Thumbs up actually means ascend. You give the OK sign to communicate that you are doing fine.

The “OK” hand signal in diving is formed by touching the tip of the thumb and index finger together to make a circle, with the other three fingers extended upward.

Even as I was a little dizzy and struggling to acclimate I was ultimately “ok to go.”

Categories
Travel

Day 1715 and My No Good Horrible Very Bad Transit Day

As I often do on transcontinental travel days, I wrote my post for the day first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how the journey would go so I thought “let’s post this early” in case things get hairy. And boy did it.

I was leaving Europe just as Poland closed its airspace after a Russian drone attack. Tensions were already high as Israel had attacked Hamas inside Qatar’s capital of Doha. Greyzone war that blur attacks on national sovereignty through target or weapon choices make everyone twitchy.

It’s a weird thing to complain about air travel on 9/11, but I don’t think much of the security theater we’ve accepted over the years did much to keep my transit safe yesterday. Twenty four years later we go through the motions of keeping air travel safe from terror because what else are we going to do?

In fact, it didn’t seem as if security was particularly tight yesterday so much as particularly incompetent. It was chaotic confusion everywhere from passport checks to boarding flights.

I had a Frankfurt to Chicago polar day flight, along with a positioning flight on each side. I went through a lot of security screenings and passport checks yesterday and stood in more lines than I can count.

In Frankfurt the lines were so long that even with planned two hour airport transit time, I was among the last to board my flight.

The “special purposes” line I begged my way into as my inbound was delayed by fog was glacial in its pace. It seems the new transit grift is wheelchairs. So perfectly abled people are now pretending at disability to board early and use special security screening lines.

It left wishing I’d registered my real disability as I attempted to run the two miles of the international terminal with suitcase and backpack torquing my spine so I wouldn’t miss my flight to Chicago.

Deplaning at Chicago I couldn’t even count the full set of wheelchairs waiting.

Add in enormous confused families using the special purpose line, who spoke neither German nor English, with 3-4 bags a piece and every sort of banned item from pocket knives to 1.5l bottles of liquids and I am shocked anyone made it through security to their flights on time.

I watched a foursome of black Arabic speaking grandmothers in hijabs and wheelchairs shouting at German security guards and their extended families as I waited for my turn. Their fierce attitudes did not speed anything up that I could tell.

I saw them 9 hours later gathering somehow even more checked luggage upon arrival in O’Hare. I’m glad my Global Entry let me pass them by at passport control as I did not want to be behind them again.

Not that I got through Chicago’s security lines unscathed. The TSA pre-check lines were four times as long as the regular line. Figuring I was well packed I could handle the normal line. Naturally I got randomly selected and unpacked basically everything

As I stood in my socks waiting for the agents to stop gossiping and listen to the only working agent explain to them that “yes that the ice pack was for medications so they can move this along” I got an alert on my phone that the conservative political organizer Charlie Kirk had been shot.

I wandered in a daze to the United club where I was denied entry. This despite booking a business class ticket for the entire transit through their own hub via their Star Alliance partnership with Lufthansa, I couldn’t use the club as “the last leg of my flight didn’t qualify.”

I knew this was possible as this last leg issue happened to me on my last transit through O’Hare so I’d bought a day pass ahead of time. But they weren’t honoring those as it was too busy. I schlepped to another club in the terminal where they were still letting in day passes. There I listened to scared speculation from two blonde women about Mr Kirk’s status.

Another hour later I made my way onto my flight to Montana. I decided to just jump to the front of the line as I was in first with seat 2B. If everyone is ignoring lines then it was irrational to keep trying to politely queue.

As the plane boarded it was all talk of Mr Kirk. A news alert crossed my phone saying he had been killed.

A gentleman was playing a video of stitched together angles of footage on his phone with full audio on. You could hear the bullet hit again and again.

The cabin attendant told him to turn it off, saying sir please have some respect for the dead. A few hours later, still living, I made it home to Montana.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1713 and Breaks and Ends

It’s hard not see every day as more of a beak with the past even as so much remains the same. No wonder the French have that handy slogan about “plus ça change” as systems remain even with violence. They really know how to balance being disgruntled with the past.

I was suggesting La Haine to someone earlier this week as the French movie that made an impression on Gen X and elder millennials who paid attention to Francophone culture. It’s hard not to think current problems are similar tensions recycled for a whole new era. Atmospheric, vulgar and dangerous are the keywords.

The Hate or La Haine by Matthieu Kassovitz

The addiction economy repackaged the same old things that kept our attention economy running. And they will keep running it till it is so refined and so well packaged you won’t even remember that Starship Troopers was meant as a satire of fascism.

We repeat so much. The Churn as the Expanse called it.

Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. The Expanse

Survival breaks out into the only game all the time and we are always running a Red Queens race. So try not to get too distracted. Ween yourself off of anything that you’ve not got any reason to hold dear. Change to meet what you can so long as you can still see yourself.

Categories
Politics

Day 1712 and Rome Didn’t Collapse In A Day

This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.

Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.

But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.

I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.

The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.

It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn