I was going to write an entire followup post to Disentangling The Deities, but realized I only had one more item to add that wasn’t a rehash of what I’d already said. So if you want to catch that addendum you can check it out here.
So after an unexpected hiatus consisting of health, interpersonal, and work hurdles, I think I’m back on the upswing.
My gall stone issue seems to be mostly resolved although I have not yet completed the Protocol. I still need to do the flush part of the regimen. Evidently the flush part makes you feel like shit for a few days, and so I’ve put this off until my work schedule is a bit more caught up and I can allow myself a few days of unproductiveness.
Note to my single-girl friends: dating three guys at once is a really bad idea, even when they all know about each other and claim not to care.
Aside from these various things, I’ve been pondering stuff related to extrication. Namely, how different things are now, in just one generation, from how they used to be. My generation was the first to come of age during the era of globalization and culture wars. I graduated from high school in 1986; my peers were graduating from college during the early 90s recession, and I had many good friends who went a year before finding anything other than Dairy Queen type jobs. What we dealt with back then was something of a foreshadowing of what college graduates and people that age are dealing with now. Everything economic that’s come since the 1980s has been simply a series of bubbles which, upon bursting, send more wealth higher up the caste ladder and more jobs overseas.
I suspect that no one who graduated high school before 1980 can even truly grasp what the ensuing generations have to face. Theirs was the last to see things like job-dependent health insurance, job security, retirement and other savings and the like as the normal course of adult life. Everyone I know my age who has these things either works for the government, in banking/finance, or in the medical industries. Everyone else skates from job to job, doing the best they can, and never getting ahead.
But for myself, even if I had access to such things, I’m not so sure I’d want them. Medical insurance is a fucking joke — you pay and pay and pay through the nose, then when you need it, it either won’t cover your problem or the doctors can’t find what’s wrong with you. You actually save money by not having health insurance, and just paying out-of-pocket when you need a round of antibiotics or something. Even if you get in a car accident, it is still cheaper to pay the hospital bill out-of-pocket rather than the insurance premiums and the deductible and whatever isn’t covered. At worst, it’ll be a wash.
Near as I can tell, the medical system is a frankensymbiote with big ag, flip sides of the same coin. Big ag profits by making us us sick; big med profits by covering it up; big ag profits by making us even sicker; big med further profits by covering it up. Apply the maxim “you are what you eat” to society as a whole, and the whole thing starts to make sense.
As for money, I can’t bring myself to care about it either to the degree that I work and work to accumulate more of it, or work and work to live completely free of it. Either way, the level of obsession about money is the same. There are, without a doubt, things I want and need — but money isn’t one of them. The only thing I need money for is to acquire the things I want and need which are, at this point, relatively few.
Right now, nothing works as it used to, and whatever new systems will arise in the shadow of the old systems haven’t yet congealed. It’s a scary time and things are only going to get more confusing, less secure.
None of this is news to anyone, I’m sure. I don’t have any answers. For myself, the best I can figure to do is to adopt the strategy of that fabled guy who ride the Twin Towers rubble all the way to the ground.
I was just looking at my site traffic stats for the last month and noticed an interesting factoid: 73.55% of my visitors in the last 30 days use either Mozilla or Webkit browsers. Only 17.15% are using IE. Heh ;) You guys are a web designer’s dream audience.
Now I just gotta get the Android browser view squared away.
Thanks so much for your patience while I’ve been struggling with health issues.
So here’s the scoop. I went home on Good Friday to visit for Easter, and woke up Saturday morning in such excruciating pain I could hardly stand upright. It scared me and I came back to the squat later that afternoon because I have herbs and stuff that usually help. But they didn’t help this time and the pain continued to get worse. Last Thursday I had a severe attack that lasted about 10 hours, and I very seriously considered going to the ER for fear that I had a liver infection.
It did subside however, and the next day I borrowed the money and ordered an herbal remedy which, in combination with a specific, strict diet, will break down the gall stones in about two weeks. It took about three days to really kick in but it did finally. I’m about a week into it now and the pain is pretty well gone, though I can still feel a stone in there. It feels exactly like having a stone in your shoe only it’s just inside my right shoulder blade. It will occasionally start to hurt a bit but Advil takes care of that. I’m also getting tired more easily.
I’ll do the herbs for another week and after that I need to drink olive oil mixed with lemon juice for three days — nasty! — and stick close to the bathroom. There’s a pretty reasonable explanation of the actual flushing process here — skip down to Step 3.
So my plan of doing a spring detox fast came up a lot sooner than I expected. This gallbladder flush is essentially a targeted semi-fast that will break down the stones and sludge and what-have-you throughout my entire digestive system, including my pancreas and liver. And it occurred to me yesterday that if I really want to clean out my body — after more than 12 years since my last detox — the best thing I could do is target my digestive system first and then do a more general detox. My body is smarter than I am!
Getting my health under control has been at the top of my list ever since I came to Pittsburgh. Financial stabilization was the most urgent order of business, but now that’s done and I’ve been making small excursions into healthier lifestyle things — eating better & more organic, less coffee, stuff like that. Ran’s visit was inspiring toward that end, but on the whole, getting healthy is just not something I’ve been looking forward to. For me, all that healthy stuff feels like deprivation and in the case of some types of physical exercise, just straight up painful. I love coffee. I dislike smoking but cigarettes do, in fact, function very well as a coping mechanism. Walking for very long on a daily basis gives me shin splints. And there’s no way in hell I’m doing the gym thing again, with 20-yr-old girls prancing around in lime green thongs and me there in my sweats, overweight and actually sweating.
Everyone says: do cardio first; eat whole grains; quit your meds; avoid red meat; quit coffee. All of these things suck and make me feel shitty. The very last thing I need is to feel even worse. So taking care of my health is forever procrastinated, because getting healthy feels worse than continuing to be unhealthy. Health is something I should do in order to avoid negative outcomes and ultimately death, even though it will basically suck forever until I actually do die. It’s the same coercive logic that compels people to have jobs. Getting healthy is all stick — the only carrot on offer is that more men will find me attractive. Really? I’m in violation of serial dating rules as it is.
I don’t want to do all that. What I do want is to feel better. And it occurs to me that this was a lesson I learned a very long time ago, back in my 20s when I got really sick for like a year. Maybe for other people getting healthy is a matter of sucking it up and suffering through. For me, getting healthy is the same thing as feeling better. A targeted digestive detox was nowhere on my “getting healthy” radar, even though I’ve had problems with my stomach since I was in high school. But this is not part of the prescribed “getting healthy” regimen, so I never paid attention. The things that do actually make me feel better have always been luxurious self-indulgences: massage, good shoes, great sex, acupuncture, the occasional cannabis-induced super lazy Saturday, sleeping until I’m done sleeping.
I remember now that my body really is smarter than I am. It doesn’t listen to conventional wisdom, nor is it swayed by studies and experts. It lets me know when there’s a problem — even when thyroid tests come back negative, dental x-rays show nothing, and the most common type of gall stone doesn’t show up on medical imaging equipment. It lets me know that a grain-based, low-fat diet does not provide the nutrition I need, that cardio isn’t where I should start.
In light of this lesson relearned, thanks to my debilitating gall stone issues, I’m changing my “get healthy” plans to “feel better” plans. I’ll let my body tell me the order in which I need to take care of myself — things that hurt or feel bad require attention; things that make me feel better require prioritization. And this is actually very much in line with efforts to address my personal energy distribution, because when anyone feels better they automatically have more energy.
I’ll write more about this as the process continues. In the meantime I do have a half-finished continuation of Disentangling the Deities, which I hope to complete in the next couple of days.
Quick note — Mythodrome has been on the back burner this week. I’ve been suffering from a particularly acute bout of gall stone attacks and have spent much of the week curled up in a fetal position on the bed. I’m hoping the worst of it is over, but in the meantime I’ve sent for an herbal treatment that is supposed to actually dissolve gall stones, and which has gotten some pretty outstanding reviews. If I can finally be free of this thorn in my side — or calcified biological rock, as the case may be — I’ll be overjoyed.
If you’re interested in the treatment I sent for, you can read about it here. The website is built in the worst internet marketing way imaginable and makes the product look like an utter scam. You can be forgiven if you can’t get past that, but in my line of work, I’ve seen lots of good people with good products that have gotten really bad marketing advice.
