I feel the change all around me. I feel the change inside me. On Easter one feels the miraculous in big and small ways.
Having traveled a not insignificant portion of the Silk Road from Adriatic to Ionia to the Bosporus this week I feel the changing flows of commerce, empire and faith rather viscerally. It sounds grandiose and yet now else can one explain the gravity of time and place?
Being embodied is our human journey. To overcome it is the stuff of myth, faith and religious belief. Understanding its meaning is glimpsed here and there in the natural world but is mostly beyond our ken.
I do not know what is coming or what I will learn in the process. The glory is in being put on the path. Happy Easter.
Over the winter we did a mold test on our bedroom after I had had a batch of sub-optimal bloodwork and flares in my autoimmune condition. We wanted to be thorough in assessing potential reasons for any issues from environmental to pharmaceutical.
I was suspicious that mold would be a culprit. Or perhaps I did not want it to be a culprit. Mold has always seemed like an excuse the professionally sick lean on like a crutch. You can imagine some worried well Goop reading white woman blaming mold.
I don’t know if this is engrained ableism on my part (lol) but no one wants to be that annoying sick woman with the litany of vague issues plaguing her life. And yes I fear this about myself because I do have to manage an autoimmune condition.
So I went into mold testing with some cynicism. It’s mike making a claim you’ve got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. Sure both mold and fibromyalgia are real but I’ve learned from experience that you must avoid both lest you be seen as someone unserious.
The wall next to bed.
Alas it has turned out to be serious. It took most of the winter to work through the breaking down the walls part but once Alex began pulling back the walls it was dramatic and easy to spot.
The bedroom getting ripped apartment.
As it turns out the wall on my side of the bed has quite a bit of mold types growing happily. As best we can tell it must be some type of small leak in the pipes.
Gnarly white spores
There’s a couple hydronic heater pipes right by the baseboards so the current theory is maybe one developed a tiny pinhole leak for a bit that sealed itself back up. Don’t ask me about that one as it’s on Alex.
His plan for now is to remediate it, patch things back up, fog the room and have the carpets steam cleaned. Which is a bigger job than we might like but much better than it could have been.
April Fool’s Day is just the worst. Practical jokes were much more enjoyable when telling the truth was still a widely accepted social norm. Our moment is one of a thousand falsehoods.
Our commitment to the truth and a shared sense of what separates truth from falsehoods has never felt shakier to me. It’s one strategic lie after another from all our institutions and leaders.
If you are living in our era of lies, half truths, and various flavors of misinformation & disinformation the idea of dedicated a day to falsehoods seems perverse. I don’t want to be on the Internet or a part of discourse on a day when deliberately lying gives you social capital.
Alas this is an ancient human custom in many places. The Indian festival of Holi, medieval Feast of Fools, and the Roman Hilaria are all early spring celebrations of pranks, jokes and foolishness. The prevailing theory dates to France and the change to the Gregorian calendar.
April Fools’ Day back to 16th-century France. In 1564, King Charles IX adopted the Gregorian calendar, moving New Year’s Day from late March (around the vernal equinox) to January 1. Those who continued celebrating the old New Year date on April 1 were mocked as “April fools” and became targets of pranks, such as receiving fake gifts or being sent on “fool’s errands.”
I rather imagine that the religious traditions mentioned above all valued truth as a foundational virtue. To know the truth of the world and the truth of your soul are the twin ambitions of human life.
Perhaps I’m being too sensitive. Or too rigid. Humans are evolved primates and we play status games that involve deception in the entire primate family. But I’d still prefer that we communicate true information to each other as both a norm and as an aspiration. That’s not a joke.
Going to a spa or a hair appointment has an added layer of stress when you’ve got skin allergies.
I don’t need clean or organic beauty (though I do prefer it). It’s not about being fancy so much as I need it to be free of synthetic fragrances like Limonene.
Limonene is a naturally occurring, colorless liquid terpene hydrocarbon (C10H16) found in citrus fruits and other plants, known for its citrus scent and used as a flavoring agent, solvent, and in various products like cleaning products, cosmetics, and supplements
Somehow I became allergic over the years to a number of fragrances both natural and synthetic. A clean beauty list of “no no”ingredients has become common as everyone from Sephora’s to BeautyPie agreed on things like keeping products free of paraben, sulphate and Methylisothiazol.
It’s a little harder to justify not including citrus or lavender unless you are trying to cater to the most sensitive skin. Both are quite popular for all kinds of personal care. I have to be careful of almost all soaps.
Some of my interest in preparedness (and in travel size cosmetics) surely comes from having to carry around basics from shampoo to shea butter. It’s a pain to have to consider but also a pleasure to always be prepared for any scenario.
A friend of mine has managed a career as a tastemaker of the sort that hardly exists any longer. It’s hard to find a term that’s even appropriate without both identifying them and understating the power of their influence.
Influencing the direction of culture isn’t so much a job as a point of view with a paycheck. It used to be a bit simpler. We had a hierarchy of influence caped by physical realities.
Maybe your pastor or your employer influenced your daily culture. Even when I was younger it wasn’t much broader than your local news and what you could get at the library. Now we live in a mass market of influence.
Influencer, creator, journalist, editor, blogger, hell we even have Twitter accounts that move culture now. So it’s not surprising that it can be hard to keep track of who is truly influential and who is just popular.
Being heard out and being really listened to and considered are very different things. It’s a weird moment for taste. Especially culturally. We keep having vibe shifts. The people who are paid to make sense of it all are as clueless as the rest of us.
The only thing anyone can seem to agree on is that it’s all very chaotic. Which is a point of view with which I’m quite familiar. And naturally that unsettles me. Once everyone agrees on a cultural moment is exactly when the tastemakers look for something new and when the masses really come with the big bucks.
Much of our winter has revolved around various maladies that require the help of professional from doctors to industrial hygienists.
Alex and I (let’s be honest mostly Alex) have been scheduling a lot of consultations and procedures. While I’ll certainly caveat that selling a service does generally mean being friendly to the customer. But it really feels like like we’ve got friendlier people in Montana.
Even our government is friendly. We’ve has cause to call the county and it’s just so pleasant to engage with a kind, present and helpful fellow human.
We’ve really run the gamut. Our trash needed replacing after a hard winter and the company who does our pickup sent us a new one the next day. A recycling service for mattresses excitedly told us about community programs. The eye clinic got us in the day we called. And on the follow up let us add in an eye exam since we were already there.
We are all accustomed to the frustrations that come from indifferent corporations with private equity minders. Healthcare is by far the worst offender here.
So it’s nice to be reminded in a vulnerable world that American towns are filled with everyday people like you and me. And that genuinely makes me happier. We are all in this together and being friendly makes everything for everyone.
You can quibble a bit on the start (right there in the name alluding to its discovery in 2019) but this second of March the week where America finally started changing behaviors. Within two weeks we’d have the infamous “flatten the curve” discussion. What a shitshow those early days were.
My life changed in a lot of ways that are probably recognizable to other Americans. My already digital life became how business was done. I moved back home. I rethought my relationship with institutional trust.
We lived in New York when we were locked down. Alex and I didn’t leave our one bedroom apartment for three months except to go to the CVS.
Coincidentally we’d been in the middle of our landlord trying to evict us for filing a complaint with the department of buildings over broken elevators. That got stopped. As soon as it seemed safe to leave city we rented an Airbnb in the Hudson Valley. The next week protests broke out. We had lived above City Hall so we got very lucky.
Figuring out where to land and the shape of our lives was a process. The Airbnb phase felt stressful as the summer ended and the urge for permanency felt overwhelming. We signed a lease site unseen for a townhouse in my hometown of Boulder Colorado.
Much of the rest of these past five years have been subsequently documented here on this blog. We found our way to Montana. A lot happened in those intervening years. None of it felt like it happened very fast. And yet here we are.
Given the amount of illness that seems to be plaguing folks this winter I’m surprised we’ve not all decided to hide until Spring thaw.
Every event seems to be a super spreader. Our physical immune systems are shot and I doubt our emotional defenses are much better. Everyone is predicting informational dangers myself included.
It is hard out there and we all experience it in different ways. My medical improvement sprint is plagued with logistical issues, the mold situation in our basement is overwhelming, and yet I have hope that I’ll make it.
o many people are dedicated to building solutions to problems, big and small, that I can’t selfishly let my any of my problems stand in my way. We have to all pull forward together.
I spent a few hours with a portfolio founder working on their fundraise today and I felt my optimism. I enjoyed the flow of work even as the enormous task of raising capital is filled with risk.
I’d taken a risk on directional play earlier in the year. I believe in the founder. They are making their way through YC. I can see their path emerging with every step forward. And I see hope.
I’ve not in one thousand five hundred and thirteen days of writing in a row set forth a m standard for how I might quit. Four years (or 216 weeks) is plenty of time to come up with a criteria for making a decision.
I have in that time embraced the haziness inherent in self trust. I’ll just know when it’s time. That’s obviously a rationalization. I assumed that circumstances would decide for me which meant I’d never need firm criteria for stopping. It would just happen.
Given my health and the general state of the world surely in this long timeframe some calamity, crisis or mishap would keep me from writing one day and that would simply be that. The chain would be broken.
It has not yet happened. No forcing function has stopped me from my writing practice. And I’ve not yet set worth anything firm about how I’ll know.
So far 2025 has tested me. There are many short posts. I have been hampered by health and home issues which sorely make me want to give up some days.
I’ve tried to included more sporadic “linking and thinking” to make my writing space more blog-like and less essay oriented. Backing away from narrative forms is a fine way of introducing flexibility into one’s writing.
I can’t help wondering if I should introduce a forcing function and create a set of criteria for when I’ll stop. But the truth is I’m scared to give myself a clear way out when I’m struggling. Perhaps it’s better to keep that trust that I’ll know.
I am in a challenging spot at the moment with our household mold issue and my attempts to accelerate changes in my care protocol for my autoimmune condition.
When things are challenging physically I find myself in tension. I want to share and be open in my experiment to write every single day. I am afraid that I’m doing nothing but share weakness by doing so.
I don’t want to telegraph only strain, illness, and struggle. Sure things are hard at the moment, but I am more than my current local minima conditions. Things are quite good.
Just because I feel too weak to articulate all the areas of strength doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I just can’t put them front and center right now.
This frustrates and even angers me. Large long term projects and investments are thriving and rather than focus on those I am curling into the fetal position and wishing I could disappear until I’m able to advocate loudly and proudly for my wins.
