Double Dutch

 Growing up in the 1970s I was *sure* the next Olympic Sport would be Double Dutch, a jumprope style that has two rope turners wielding 2 long ropes while someone(s) jump elaborately in, over, among, and through those 2 ropes.  It’s a thing of beauty, not to be missed. 

Every Olympics I expected the world to acknowledge the divine art of Double Dutch by adding it as the new sport. The grandmasters were mostly Black women. Thanks to overwhelming racism with some bonus misogyny, Double Dutch has not been honored as an olympic sport despite lending itself to creative spectacle and clear ways to judge it. 

Instead we got 

• rhythmic gymnastics, which is … adjacent to jumping rope, kinda, and should have taken the “artistic” gymnastics title. It’s niche and seems made up for the sake of adding something for girls to be good at that won’t upset boys. Absolutely no shade to the tremendously gifted and coordinated athletes who compete, but it’s a very hothouse, solitary kind of sport. It’s also quite proscribed & regimented, and not really stuff one sees people doing just for fun outside a Cirque show.

Double Dutch can be done on pavement by anyone who can scrounge 2 friends and 2 ropes. It’s fun for beginners and experts.

• X-games sports like snowboarding and BMX. I think snowboarding is a great addition to a spectacle featuring skiing and I think BMX is questionable but both require access to purpose built environments (or at least open space) and expensive training and gear. A snowboard, like a skateboard, can be affordable, but lift tickets are not. A trip to the mountains is not necessarily accessible or cheap. Regular trips to ski or snowboard cost big money. Competition Bikes (and medical expenses after wipeouts) aren’t cheap (in the US). Neither sport is a thing someone can pick up just anywhere. It’s gatekept by virtue of expensive gear and access.  Despite some strong female contenders at top levels, both sports’ ecosystems cater more to male athletes.

Double Dutch can be done in cramped or expansive environments with varying qualities of rope. You can see it, think “that looks fun” and start trying it yourself in as little a time as it takes to find some rope and one or 2 someones with rhythm willing to thwack you with it when you mess up. It’s gender agnostic, near as I can tell.

• Breaking, aka breakdancing. Dance is a bit of an odd thing to add but not without precedent.  I don’t necessarily love sports that are almost entirely judged on vibes but, well, gymnastics & figure skating exist & are beloved. And it evolved in a dueling format so judging it has a long history and the historians know which vibes earn out.  To break dance you need a beat, some inspiration, and a slick surface - often cardboard, from a used box. Anyone who sees it could try it themselves, but it takes dedication to get even the basic tricks down. (I happen to love watching breakdancing. We kids in the 80s practiced the worm for weeks/months. I never quite got it.)  But it’s extremely male coded. 

Double Dutch was dominated by women, near as I could tell, but men got their steps in too.

And here we get to the purpose of this entry.  Breakdancing is not just heavily male, it comes primarily from America’s Black communities, as does Double Dutch. (It’s here I ponder whether breakdancing would have evolved without the existence of Double Dutch. I suspect not but have no data on that, just vibes.) It’s one of the first events added that doesn’t favor white trust fund kids. 

And in its first year of competition/inclusion into the Olympic pantheon (?) , the commentary was overwhelmingly about RayGun.  (That may not be the correct spelling of the competitor’s name but I refuse to do her the honor of looking it up.) She was a “competitor” from Australia. She’s a white woman who is *Spectacularly* inept at breakdancing.

We were breathlessly assured by all the Very White sports reporters that she had a long history of involvement in breakdancing and we shouldn’t hurt her feelings by pointing out she had no business being in this competition. “But she studied it so hard!” That’s all well and good but that means you hire her to do technical or color commentary for the event, not to participate. 

Breakdancing isn’t new. Anyone who watched a few American music videos or movies from the 1980s knows enough to identify it and try it until they hurt themselves.  Anyone since the advent of the internet could get enough information to advance in breakdance while minimizing breaking themselves. We all know what quality breakdancing looks like and RayGun was not up to the task  She apparently “won” her slot by beating other candidates but that’s obviously some form of lie. It is not credible that Australia couldn’t field a better candidate.

The fact that someone so laughably incompetent from a wealthy, white dominated country was allowed to compete was more than an insult to the sport/dance. It tells everyone who values breakdancing that the system may be forced to add a sport developed and dominated by Black athletes, but they can’t be forced to take it seriously. 

That white ignorance is as good as Black excellence for getting in the door. Her laughably bad performance sucked all the energy away from the medalists.  It’s my personal shame that I don’t remember the medalists.  It’s the media’s shame that I know RayGun exists at all, let alone being the name I can remember, just from incidental exposure. The commentary was absolutely dominated by this one figure, out there doing it wrong. And that was the purpose of allowing her to compete. A new Olympic sport should get good press even just for the novelty. But allowing this travesty made sure all the press was about what a joke this event was. As if it was unserious sport not worthy of serious effort.  It was done to diminish the event.

But Cranky, you can’t say that was on purpose! You just had that realization in the shower a couple hours ago. Yes I can.  It’s a little ironic that I’m here in what could be my ignorance putting up a claim as truth while deriding people who can’t be bothered to be good enough.  But after decades of watching Double Dutch get overlooked by Serious Moneymaking Athletes, of it not becoming a sport spectacle on par with gymnastics and figure skating, because Black people, even the poor ones, were really skilled at it so white folks wouldn’t take it on at scale or acknowledge its greatness.  And knowing the white supremacist underpinnings of my society in general and the Olympics more specifically, for however well Usain can bolt, I think I’m right in claiming she was a deliberate spoiler, intended to devalue the sport from the jump, the year it was launched.  Pernicious bias gets to skate through on plausible deniability all the time.  I can only hope breakdancing stays included and grows in popularity, and that more people grow to love it.

But RayGun was allowed to compete, however pure her personal intentions, as a message that for all the oddball sports we collectively take seriously every 4 years, Black sports won’t be taken seriously. At least not yet. 

The amount of waste resulting from upholding racism is staggering. Also, put Double Dutch in the Olympics already. Even if kids don’t really do it anymore - it fell by the wayside as stranger danger protocols moved kids indoors where their moms would have to watch them like a hawk, instead of them all having a go jumping rope, now and again. It’s not like kids are out there dancing down the streets tossing ribbons, but that gets to be there. Surely there are still a few old heads that could school us in How It’s Done so we could all revive the blurs of their feet, making magic.

Musings on Menstrual bleeding

In a video showing the first ever movie of an embryo​​⁠ (blastocyst?)  forcibly digging its way into a (lab grown) endometrial lining in an attempt to implant, a commenter asked how it was energy efficient to bleed every month rather than reabsorb the uterine lining.  

Well

____

Here’s what I felt compelled to come up with.  It’s not maximizing for energy/nutrient protection, it’s minimizing the danger from infection  

The menstrual tissue being discarded is subject to outside contamination. Shedding it keeps the spread of contamination to a minimum. The fallopian tubes open to the abdominal cavity, they aren’t in a closed loop with the ovaries (this is why ectopic pregnancy can occur in strange places). And in the case of a failed implantation, shedding expels it from the body - remember half its DNA is foreign! 

Without the placenta (and other pregnancy specific elements) running interference, the mom’s immune system will damage or kill the blastocyst/embryo. Then there’s dead, potentially necrotic tissue with foreign DNA in a place open to the outside world but also into the gut. Best not to risk it getting into the gut. It’s best not to reabsorb that if you don’t have to. I imagine those that reabsorbed the tissue in our evolutionary antiquity fared less well over millions of years so now humans are stuck with bleeding. 

Although historically, a great number of women only had a few years worth of periods in total after their first kid. The majority spent the majority of their post pubescent life pregnant or recovering from pregnancy. Unless subject to the Rh factor, other fertility issues or they managed to avoid sex, they had a baby, recovered somewhat, maybe had a period, maybe not, then got pregnant again. 

Regarding contamination - anything going in the vag can catch a ride on a sperm or be pushed by a dick or dildo  being slammed into it , on a feminine hygiene product or randomly move around into the cervix. This could be sperm, ejaculate, crusty unwashed urine, dirt, sand, oil, lube, bits of unsafe toys, lake water, you name it. All this foreign tissue is an infection risk.

(iirc, the hymen is there to keep literal and figurative crap out of the cervix and uterus when we’re babies who wear diapers and can’t stand up for a gravity assist.)

Mucosal membranes are where we have our greatest risk of infection because it’s purpose is to interact with external bodies and only let the ones we need in, but it’s not as good as intact epidermis/skin because it does need to let some stuff in, like water or sperm or placentas. the cervix is kinda like the end of a balloon with a tight neck. It blocks a lot, but it has a hatch that can be breached. And wily enough germs or forcefully introduced grit, can get into the uterus, which is lined with yet another semi-permeable surface. Because we don’t want stuff going up the fallopian tubes easily, the forces acting on the area favor flushing detritus out. When the uterine lining detaches, it too gets flushed out. 

QED, it makes sense for people with a uterus to bleed regularly rather than risk absorbing dangerous contaminants and infectious pathogens

On masking in an ongoing airborne pandemic

I have a friend with some debilitating disabilities who I have been giving as pass on mask wearing to because they already have a lot to manage & masking is actually difficult for them.  But even after their last round with Covid had them throwing up and shitting themselves for 2 solid weeks, they recently made some crack about masking and I went a little mask off in my reply.

Here it is so I can reference it later:

I don’t insist you mask around me because you have a slew of disabilities that make for harder for you than most, & I think people with fewer barriers should be doing more of the work to protect you and not place all the burden on you — not because it’s safe for me to be around you when you don’t wear a mask. 

You may not even know if you give me a life ruining virus but I care that I don’t give one to you and prefer to not get sick. The only reason I’m resigned about your attitude and not incandescently angry all the time is that public health and the medical establishment told you you could vax & relax. And you should be able to trust the public health authorities on stuff like this. 

But right now we can’t. I know better so I do better. You ask when we can eat inside. I haven’t eaten inside with you, not once, for five long years, because it’s not safe enough. I don’t do this because it’s fun for me. I do it so you don’t hurt me & I don’t hurt you. I will continue to have to be on guard even around people who claim to like me until viral transmission is *orders of magnitude* lower or we get sterilizing vaccines. If that never happens, then I will be eating alone or outside forever. 

Because the alternative is a faster, more painful disability that leads to my early death. And as much as my disability and not being able to eat comfortably are a giant pain in my ass that I would give up tomorrow if I could, I prefer them to being in a nursing home or dead. 

It’s particularly not safe for me now that you routinely _lie_ to me about whether or not you are ill, whether or not someone in your household is ill, whether or not other people are in your house at the time I plan to be there, and whether or not they are ill. Add in asymptomatic spread and it doesn’t matter if people think they’re ill or not because they can still be infectious. So I mask around everyone. Then when I show up to help you shower, and you casually drop that you’ve been sick with covid all week, I have some protection already in place. 

It’s not safe but it’s a bit safer now that many people are vaccinated so I can briefly remove my mask in public if outdoors, (preferably in direct sun to reduce viral exposure). I do understand that it’s limiting but my choice isn’t “eat with friends indoors” or “eat outdoors”. It’s “eat with friends outdoors” or “eat alone”. My goal is limiting viral exposure because fewer virions means less for my immune system to fight off and less virus means less damage to my vasculature. Which is what covid damages. Wearing a mask means I can limit my risk of heart attack, aneurysm, and stroke. I can limit my risk of losing even more energy. I do not understand why my wanting to prevent illness and debility is controversial. It’s not popular but it’s not wrong.

On the “Polite No” & Comfort

A friend asked if it would be ok to not eat when at my house.  My soul wants to feed people. But more than that, I want people to be comfortable, and if them not eating my food makes them more comfortable than eating my food, then to be a good host, I must let them starve on my watch. I’m told it’s even safe for people to go 3 hours without eating. It fine. I’m sure it’s fine. This blog is a reminder I need to be better at letting people refuse food. 

This friend wasn’t worried I would judge them. They were worried that their choice would distress me. I needed to assure them that any distress about them not eating my food isn’t harmful to me. I’m only ensuring they aren’t refusing for politeness purposes, as I want to include them and if there’s something they would eat if offered, I would provide it. But if they would rather not eat *for any reason* — other than being worried I can’t provide without straining my resources — as a host my priority is their comfort, not *my* idea of what comfort is.

Here comes the monologue!

A lot of people spend a lot of time worrying what others think of them. Evolutionarily this makes sense because community is the best survival advantage humans have By Far. But while people can & do judge, the judgment, even if other people are thinking about you specifically, which they often are not, is rather passive. This means, by and large most reasonable adults let things slide unless & until it hits a threshold of taboo/ick/safety/weirdness. 

Unfortunately autism can put people into uncanny valley territory, a weirdness people pick up on and have difficulty leaving it be until they address it head on. Uncanny Valley triggers, like some autistic traits, make people fearful & aggressive unless or until they acclimate that version of autism into their “acceptable”, if not normal, paradigm. I would say that most people who care enough to aggressively judge someone on performing normalized behavior, where a deviant behavior is harmless, aren’t worth bothering with. But that only applies is they can’t or won’t hurt you.  For many autistics, we learn that people will hurt or exclude us for being weird so reducing the quantity of weird is useful, if tiring. Masking is one way to do this.  Learning societal scripts by rote, instead of osmosis, can also help to know how to manage expectations on both sides.

After navigating weirdness, food can be fraught. Food is also central to survival so a lot of hosts want to make sure everyone is fed. A better host makes sure everyone’s needs are met, which may or may not include eating. There are  STRONG cultural scripts around offering people food/drink. The dominant script in many places, including here, in one where the host offers dood/drink/service, the guest refuses to “be polite”, and the host overriding ones’ “no” insists on providing said food/beverage/service. This gets tricky because there are fewer scripts allowing you to say no because you mean no. 

One piece of writing that has stayed with me more intensely than anything else was a travel guide. 

Really? Yes! They explained that when you come to their house/store/restaurant, you will be offered coffee. The polite thing is to refuse, no matter how thirsty.  This offer-refusal pattern happens thrice, and after the third “no” coffee will be provided, and they watch you drink it. Everyone there understands this.  My problem is that I don’t like coffee  I can’t drink it to be polite. I don’t know how to operate in that system. I have spent literally years trying to figure out “polite” ways to navigate such a situation. The easiest is to offer an alternative  “I don’t enjoy coffee, do you offer tea?” would be my go to but as I age I’m now comfortable saying “no means no”, ignoring the coffee, or leaving to make my point. (You can see where similar situations that aren’t about coffee, but use the same script, and rely on the host correctly intuiting a no nmeans yes, could be problematic?) I never yet travelled to that particular region in part because of this coffee situation. Meanwhile I have noticed that script is actually common nearly everywhere.

Saying no when not meaning no (a thru line to many social problems) and hearing no & not respecting it is the culturally dominant script and it can take a lot to shake us off script. Some people literally can’t, and others won’t, parse that you really mean no. Some of us, like me, take an iteration. Because as a host with food it would be rude to not feed you, tho better hosts know it would be rude to give you something you don’t want. But probably 70% of people are on the main script and don’t question it. Or even know to question it. So a guest has to offer up a reason to break script to get the “no” to register, which is a problem if the reason is personal. 

Maybe you’re on a special diet. Maybe you’re pregnant. Maybe you have a feeding tube. Maybe you’re on a schedule. Maybe you don’t trust the host’s hygiene. Maybe you’re having a bad day and food isn’t appealing. Maybe you’re a zombie, but a polite zombie. It should not be incumbent on a guest to divulge personal or medical information to get a host to listen but it’s often required as anything less than “I have a notarized doctor’s note for a recognized & respected disability” won’t flip the script,  which makes it tiring & emotionally draining on the guest. A tired and emotionally drained guest who is that way because of you is not comfortable. If your hosting instincts say “feed them” override that with “make guests comfortable with or without food”.

At most gatherings where one don’t want to draw attention or don’t feel the need to share personal details, taking a small amount of food and casually disposing of it draws less comment/concern than refusing food outright. So for most encounters it is the sensible, least effort choice. Or lying and saying you ate already or are on a special diet & you “forgot” to bring some, etc… 

But at my house please say “I would prefer not to eat” and I will let you not eat.  I do have the “must feed people” script locked and loaded and will doublecheck. I try to let things go after 2 no attempts (I do 2 instead of 1 because some people do have that “refuse, to be polite” practiced to a reflex.) My concern is you not feeling included you or you being hungry when I can solve that, especially knowing how long I can extend a goodbye.

There’s also a confounding factor.  Part of raising kids to adulthood is introducing them to foods they may not initially take to, and not everyone navigates that ideally. But it does mean that people offering food who have outwitted cranky toddlers have a lot of persuasive scripts and techniques at their disposal to help convince you to eat. Including putting the food within reach so if you change your mind you don’t have to humble yourself to get the food. Which is fine if the timing was off but irritating if you don’t want the food there.

I really don’t want to give someone coffee who doesn’t genuinely want coffee. I don’t want to sit there with stinky coffee I will never drink. In a society where false “no” is considered more polite than truth, this host-guest dynamic remains tricky. But respecting a no is a good start. And those people who judge one for making off script choices really aren’t worth bothering with if/when we can escape them. 

On Fake problems from the Spin Machine

I wrote most of this as a comment on a friend’s FB post forwarding a statement from the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson. The quote I start with is from him, abbreviated slightly by me. It’s something I want to write about more but don’t usually have the bandwidth. This post is a reasonable start on it.

——-

 “The willing fists of a regime that cannot solve real problems so must invent new spectacles” is on the nose. (Tufts seems to be backing their students & this one in particular, legally.) I’m incredibly concerned how eager some folks are to be anonymous jackbooted thugs disappearing people off the street. But beyond that, the GOP can’t solve problems. Because they try to only ever “solve” problems they made up, so when an actual problem arrives they have no tools to solve it, except (1) spin through their propaganda machine helmed by Fox and (2) distraction. The distractions/spectacles they choose are life & death stakes as well as a clear & present danger to individuals, marginalized folks specifically, & democracy generally. They disappear people to convince us not to point out that they’re useless and unable to meet the demands of their jobs. 

The main purpose of Fox “news” entertainment is to gin up outrage over fake problems. The fake problems have a grain of truth for verisimilitude but, crucially, aren’t actually problems that need immediate attention or complex solutions. They’re a PR “problem”. They’re spin. 

When democrats get hounded about these ginned up problems out of the blue they look unprepared. Because they _aren’t_ prepared to discuss made up nonsense. By the time they assemble the facts to address this concern — the media won’t let them dismiss it out of hand as would be proper for made up nonsense — they get hit with some new ginned up nonsense or are accused of doing nothing about the 1st ginned up nonsense because of course they haven’t been working on a problem that the GOP spin machine invented on Tuesday. Meanwhile all this scrambling distracts and prevents them from pursuing their own agendas  

They of the GOP spin machine keep this topic going (But Her Emails!, migrant hordes overrunning borders) for as long as it serves to harass & distract people from pursuing modern, relevant agendas (climate change, ahem). If the GOP gets elected they either drop the topic all together, pass draconian laws to “solve” the non-problem they invented, or just claim that they’ve solved it, secure in the knowledge that investigation will show it’s no longer a problem - because it never was a problem at all or not a problem on the scale of their claims. It was always spin meant to derail progress by diverting attention from real problems that need real solutions. And this is how the GOP have “solved” problems for my entire adulthood. 

So when they’re asked to address real problems like, say, a pandemic, they have no tools but PR. They have no problem solving skills beyond spin through propaganda. They exist to avoid letting people who mean well solve problems. It was ironic that in Rick’s statement saying as much, he listed off several of the fake problems as real ones, because sometimes even they forget not to buy what they’re selling.

(insert paragraph about feckless dems who claim to want to solve real problems then let just enough of their caucus defect so that they “can’t” pass that bill, so sowwy. But “slow walking real solutions to actual problems” is a different scale and nature of problem to “obstruct real solutions and divert attention from real problems until the government ceases to be addressing reality” then using fake crises (Iraq war, her emails) to roll back rules on oligarchs and curtail freedom for everyone else.)

And then they pull evil stunts like disappearing people off the streets! While we’re all rightfully focused on that, we can’t bring up anything else relevant (progressive agendas) that needs solving because these insults to humanity need top billing to avoid imminent catastrophe. 

I’m so frustrated by the media that plays into these narratives on purpose or by being credulous tools! 

I’m so frustrated that no one in power seems to have a plan to obstruct this evil nonsense. 

I’m so frustrated that enough people prefer being mean to being kind that this propaganda works.

(Next pgh added Aug2025 when fixing typos above)

I’m just flat out appalled that white voters have *never* voted over 50% Democratic since the Civil Rights Act was passed. Grow the fuck up. Just like Brexit didn’t re-seat Britain as the Crown of Empire, almighty and untouchable, bringing back chattel slavery is a dream of resentful entitled failures who would create a waking nightmare for everyone rather than go to therapy, ask their government to function, or be happy with a C+ life. You’d still have a C+ life, you’d just get to make sure other people suffer, which apparently makes you think your C+ is a B- that you round up to B. Slavery is antithetical to survival. The boot on the neck doesn’t advance any more than the trodden upon; both are stuck fighting old fights, solved fights. And for what? To live in a wasteland full of hate? Get a goal and a hobby that isn’t dependent on making others miserable. Figure out how to be a better person and get out of the way of people who can make the world a nice place to be.

——-

That was my comment, with a couple upgrades. I want, in particular, to point out the “migrant caravan” or “border invasion” nonsense. At the time the GOP started really leaning into the “illegal immigrant” narrative, the “punishment” for it was an $18 misdemeanor ticket.

… and a need to get the paperwork sorted for a vast majority of cases. We didn’t hold migrants in detention centers.  We gave them vouchers to stay at a motel until their initial paperwork got sorted out, then they would go live in the community where they had sponsors. The entirely unnecessary detention centers were built to become concentration camps and I hope that everyone knows this at some level.  When we elected Democrats in 2020, my expectation was that they’d demolish the detention centers.  Building new facilities takes more time & effort than upgrading existing facilities with established personnel and supply chains, and making concentration camps harder to build and use should be a priority. 

Of course the US has incarcerated more of our citizens by % than any other country and more by sheer numbers than most in an effort to (primarily) derail the lives of Black men for most of their productive & reproductive adult years. And we keep failing to address that at scale although we occasionally inch closer to it. California got so far as a ballot measure repealing the use of slave labor from prisons in 2024 and failed to get it over the finish line.  This is all of a piece with the spectacle and terror. The GOP establishes it then the Dems treat it like the norm, to appear “tough on crime”, another PR spin, instead of dismantling unnecessary prison populations and going after the real criminals, like private equity and corporations who commit wage theft at scale. But that would involve holding rich men accountable and US leadership and legal systems don’t want to set the precedent that rich men, particularly rich white men, can be held accountable for crimes.

I apologize if the intermingling of “and” and “&” is distracting. But we have Genocide & Concentration Camps and No One in power, those with the fuck you money, seem to think that’s an urgent problem, let alone the emergency it is. We’re speed running the Comic Book Villain Evil Agenda & I’m so frustrated that a sternly worded letter wasn’t enough to set these OBVIOUS wrongs right.

Long Covid is a $16T problem already

We can’t keep ignoring Long Covid & ME/CFS. Well, maybe we can, but the results will be catastrophic. 

Want to know when my disability ramped up? Look at the frequency of my blog posts over time. I still have a file full of ideas for posts from back then. I ran out of energy for blogs/thought experiments. Then I ran out of energy for work. Writing & editing the last two entries knocked me out for a week, with residual effects even now.

I don’t wish this reduced life on anyone.  It’s better than the alternative, because I still have survival money & good days. (If I run low on/out of that I have options for help, but I lose independence. Yes, it’s that bad.) For a problem that feels fixable. I feel like I should be able to recover from whatever is wrong.

So if your health seems on a slippery slope down, barring incidents or accidents, chances are high you’re dealing with the the post acute effects of a virus, or the damage it caused or is causing, or your body’s immune response to the nasty 🦠. We’re slow off the mark in dealing with this despite lessons from the AIDS epidemic, because medical systems aren’t funded or designed around chronically ill patients that aren’t imminently fatal, and like to tell people to fix health issues with exercise. But if you get post exertional malaise, exercise can worsen baseline function temporarily or forever. If you don’t get help from doctors, you stop asking them for help. (Hint for the docs - low exercise levels correlate to bad outcomes *because* unwell people can’t exercise, not the reverse. Performing the activities of wellness doesn’t make one well.) Once “eat right & exercise” has done what it can, that’s when we see a doctor & we need medical interventions, not cliches.

Here are some first round Long Covid interventions. Some are repurposed antivirals from AIDS treatments, some are otc supplements. I started taking atorvastatin today. (I hear statins seem helpful for LC). 

I have been trying grape seed extract (super grapes ‘gummy’ heart chews). They cause, uh, loose stools. Not “explosively 💩 for 6 hours” like I get with metformin*, but a little concerning. Bodies dump a ton of water into our bowels to flush out nasty things, but I don’t know if the nasty thing getting flushed is the met/GSE (from a bad rxn) or the stuff those meds are fighting off (a good indication of effectiveness.) 

 "The urgent need for long covid meds", linked so I can find it again.

—

a place to mention more of my metabolic med side effects 

Metformin helps clear my brain fog from ultra high insulin levels, but shreds my guts. I can’t physically take it more than 2 weeks at the lowest dose. I gain weight every time I take it because my brain interprets all pain signals from my stomach from level 1-8 as “hungry”. I put up signs saying “you’re not hungry, it’s metformin” but they don’t help enough. When it hits level 9, I get “pain/maybe hungry”. Level 10 is Pain, Not Hungry, 🤮 now.  Than I can’t eat for several days and am in pain. That isn’t great. Let’s try something else, right? But there are surprisingly few options to treat high insulin if your glucose is still in control, which mine is. With my intermittent metformin plan, my A1C went from 5.8 to [5.3-5.6], “ok” is <5.5.

I tried Victoza, but that took my sleep from 9-12 hours/day to 14-18 hours per day (just a mild insulin coma). So I put off trying the not totally dissimilar Ozempic, but I’m falling apart metabolically - all that insulin is shoving fat into my organs like it’s packing a carry on & can’t afford checked luggage. The ozempic does cause me to fall asleep after eating. After getting the 4-hour postprandial coma-naps down to 2-3/month, I was getting at least 2-3/week, to every day but for shorter durations. Having already started trying “intermittent fasting” (stuffing all food consumption for the day into fewer hours,) since years of small frequent snacks/meals hasn’t helped me, I could reduce these unplanned naps by eating less often. My hope was that if Ozempic started fixing my metabolism, the insulin spikes would become lower as they became less necessary. This improvement seems to be happening. (0.25mg every week, or every other week if I forget or need to make sure I stay awake for a crucial appointment.)

So far with Ozempic: I don’t get constant hunger signals, like I did with metformin, & actually feel satisfied after eating a snack or meal. My eye color had started fading. It’s back to being dark & vibrant after a couple weeks. (Maybe also related to getting iron infusions, but iirc it tracked more to Ozempic.) Also, my buffalo hump has gone from being a solid lump of semi-rigid fat to a thinner layer of flexible fat similar to most other areas on my body. It no longer moves as a unit. And I seem to have less post prandial sleeping unless I overdo things like I did with the last entry & the update to the previous one. That KOed me pretty hard.

I mention the buffalo hump, particularly, because that’s one of my “affects appearance/comfort/quality of life but probably doesn’t immediately need attention like brain fog, PEM, non-24, systemic tendinitis & fasciitis, excessive fatigue, coma-naps, pain, & restless leg (& more!)” symptoms. The hump is one of the key side effects that caused people to stop taking one of the earlier AIDS treatments. So it’s not a catastrophic symptom in and of itself, but people have ***risked dying of AIDS complications*** rather that put up with their body having that shape. Which makes me feel great that no one offered any solutions… “It’s genetic” was the best I got. And a YouTube video of upper back strengthening exercises akin to pulsing, appropriately, YMCA arm positions. I don’t know if my spine will straighten up any with it gone, & kind of don’t care as I’m still tall & the bulk is gone. But it’s definitely connected to glucose &/or other metabolic processes, and it went away in less than a month on the lowest dose, not after any amount of physical activity or lack thereof.  

I spend most of my time being horizontal these days. I can still stand and move around on demand if I’m not hard asleep, but I’m always, always looking for somewhere to sit or lay down. It limits my doing anything out of the house. It makes doing things in/to the house tricky. But it’s what I have.  If I could recover more functionality, back to being able to do road trips, or walk around an outdoor festival without feeling doomed, life would improve. But for now, I’ve lost maybe half the metformin weight, my eyes aren’t fading and the hump is, so I’ll take it. 

And hope that something better [is made to] come along.

Course Correcting, my Monster Wishlist for MVP Harris

 For MVP Kamala Harris. 

I love seeing you and Walz out being joyful. It’s absolutely the right way to go. 

I’d feel better if you could move in public more safely. Please renew efforts to stop the spread of COVID, including tracking, mandatory testing for hospital inpatients at start/end of stay, routine staff testing, and more importantly promote masks, mask alternatives, and filtration of indoor air, with priority to public schools. 

Please also fund and fast track Long Covid research and treatments, excluding testing exercise as a treatment. (Testing to see if treatments help exercise tolerance is fine. Testing to see if exercise helps recovery is not. It has failed every single time for the last 40 years of “research” done on patients with ME/CFS characterized by Post Exertional Malaise. It has confirmed that adding exercise actually damages bodies and minds to the point where recovery is less possible.) People don’t become sick because they’re sedentary. People become sedentary because they’re sick. Medical dogma has this backwards. Making sick people perform wellness doesn’t create well people. Preventing preventable diseases, curing curable ills & mitigating disabilities with gladly provided assistance creates maximally well people. 

Wars are bad for people, the environment, and economies. I wish we’d stop saying that WWII kickstarted US power/wealth when the New Deal (even if applied unequally), social safety nets, putting limits on banks & Robber Barons’ wealth (Billionaires in today’s parlance), investment in infrastructure, and being half a world away from most bombing did it. This shouldn’t need to be said, but help Ukraine fight off Putin & help Palestinians survive. Everyone knows that we, the US,  can stop Israel’s genocide of Gaza. We need to stop it. The best time would have been Oct 9th. The next best time is now. Ceasefire immediately. 

I’m tired of seeing titans of American influence and industry being strip mined for short term shareholder profits. I’m tired of people being bankrupted for education and illness or disability. I’m tired of watching the world burn, and not just kicking the can down the road on how to stop it, but denying the world is on fire at all or denying that we should stop deliberately burning it. I’m tired of re-fighting for the human rights advances of 1865 (all people are people, with rights to bodily autonomy), 1919 (yes, even women), 1968 (yes, even the Black babies), 1973 (yes, even people pregnant with babies), 2010, (yes, even the LGBTQ soldiers, 2015, (yes, even the non-soldier LGBTQ people). 

Every moment we spend re-fighting (needless) fights for bodily autonomy (as they should long since be settled law) is a moment we aren’t planning for our futures. Every dollar spent fighting because we’re allowing Fox News et al to spew their poison for free, is a dollar we’re not spending on the health and education of the nation. Every moment we make catastrophic climate decisions so we can keep oil money propping up the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is a moment we’re stealing from our kids’ futures. 

Progress towards more rights for more people is always acceptable. Yet 1 in 6 kids is food insecure here. We imprison more people by % than any other country. We still haven’t closed out GitMo prisons and the Bush/Cheney/Loo torture doctrine. In addition to being gross, unprofessional, and unproductive, it’s all *embarrassing*. As annoying as it is to keep fighting to insist that marginalized folks deserve equal rights, up until recently, we were gaining. I keep hoping the recent backsliding is an ‘extinction burst’, a last gasp of a failed regime before we step into the future and give equality the old college try. When you win, let’s stop the pathetic rumblings of white supremacy by codifying rights, for real this time (without the prison loophole for slavery) try a Green New Deal, with a little nuclear power, as a treat, and push for a future with clean air, a cleaner climate, and space to have hobbies that don’t have to be monetized for survival. 

The Dem pattern is to get enough people elected to enact an agenda, then let [Harry Reid, Manchin & Sinema] turn coat and stop most Dem progressive agendas, even the too-far-right ones. We can’t keep doing that. We must solidify gains. You & Walz and the next generation of Democratic leaders need to figure out how, after you figure out how to hold the White House when (🤞🏽) you win.

My student loans have been paid back for years, but aside from increasing salaries ($25 min wage, including waitstaff & farmhands), cutting private equity out of landlording, curbing the price of groceries, a modest UBI for all resident adults ($3000/month on top of existing social services, for a start), taxing passive income & finance more heavily, and don’t forget stopping both Covid & fixing Long Covid, the single biggest boost for the economy would be cancelling all student loans & making public college & trade schools (including nursing & cosmetology) free for students, well funded by us. 

Millennials control barely 5% of the wealth of the nation. At their age, Boomers controlled over 25% of US wealth. What worked for Boomers not only won’t, but can’t work now, until we divest from preying on schools & students. Most economic models don’t seem to factor in the absolute disaster of sending our best and brightest into young adulthood already saddled with the equivalent of a mortgage. (Certification creep can be discussed later.) It’s both scary and baffling to see pundits & economists talk about the younger generations delaying or missing major adult milestones without ever connecting the dots to predatory student loans. Every $1  spent on education returns about $8 to the economy. It’s worth investing public money in education at all levels.

Our economy would TAKE OFF if all student loans were just canceled tomorrow. Add in a UBI kicker (Every $1 sent to someone in poverty returns more than $1 to the economy. Every $1 given to the investor class decreases that dollar’s value in the economy more than 10%. It’s part of why & how our industries chasing shareholder profits are helping Long Covid in collapsing the economy. We should still send the UBI to everyone, no means testing, no purity testing, yes even addicts, layabouts, and felons, because it’s cheaper and more effective that way.) and with a lot more of your contagious joy and we’d be back to being unstoppable without having to disappear protester leaders into cop cities (which absolutely will happen if we don’t stop those abominations) or without needing to let Israeli soldiers keep sniping Doctors, Aid Workers, Professors, Press, and, I cannot stress this enough, Toddlers. They’re sniping toddlers on our watch. Please make them stop. 

We’ll be able to stand behind you when we can all afford a safe place to stay and food for the foreseeable future. Joy is easier when community, including government, works for the people, all the people, yes, even those people.

I haven’t even hit needing to stop the “War on Drugs”, a mindset that needs rethinking. Prohibition is more dangerous than regulated supply. Criminalizing addiction prevents rehab. We can be smarter and kinder about how we regulate and educate about currently illicit drugs. We can let people in prison for drug charges out. We can live with pot (& probably coke) much more safely and productively than we can live with Covid. 

I know this is too long. The world is in chaos with not enough people putting forth vision for a better future. You have a slog and a half in front of you. Give me, give us, the promise of a better, more joyful tomorrow by course correcting. Please.