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Archive for the ‘health’ Category

Taken after my shower today, here are some of the red welts and engravings and rashy areas that appear on me for seemingly no reason:

In the past couple of years my skin has become very . . . expressive.  To the point of being really inexplicably and sometimes unbearably itchy and rashy and/or just freaking out when hot water touches it (not itchy or painful, just looks like I’ve been scratched and/or rubbed in places I can’t even REACH to have accidentally sandpapered myself or scraped nails across my skin).

I’ve eliminated some of the possible triggers, but have wasted a neurotic amount of time googling stuff like dermatographic urticaria. I think it’s like a mild version of that, so unfortunately I don’t have that exciting ability to make myself look scarified with lettering just by gently writing words across my body, but the way I look sometimes reminds me of Michelle Remembers, and how the trauma of satanic ritual abuse made her body recall these events years later with physical manifestations, such as clearly(!) visible welts in the shape of forked devil tails on her skin or whatever.

I read that book on a field trip to the Seattle Public Library that our English teacher took us on in high school, hoping to expand our small-town horizons. Obviously he did not succeed in my case, since I was magically drawn STRAIGHT to this sensational and informative book (and a homeless dude with a porn magazine “hidden” in the center of a more respectable book). I have no idea what we were really there for, but maybe I should make up some stories about some repressed memories that my body is trying to tell me about.

Like maybe I was kidnapped as a child and held for a year by a bizarre, EXTREMELY WEALTHY couple who gave me a whole closet full of tutus in every color imaginable and let me SLEEP in them.

Baby blue, lilac, bubblegum pink, fuschia, soft pastel princess pink. White satin with rhinestones, matte white, white satin WITHOUT rhinestones. Emerald green with sparkly green beads and glossy black bows.

After so many days, weeks and months of wearing and lying upon flipped-up tulle skirts and shiny, scratchy little sequins, it did in fact irritate my skin. That’s why I hate musicals so much but somehow know all their words. You should have seen me in Safeway last night when Whatever Lola Wants came on . . . I immediately started sashaying and singing along. And don’t think I didn’t also know the words to that Phantom of the Opera number that came on right afterwards. It hurts me, but I can’t stop myself.

Someday my abductors’ names will appear in a wedding invitation font on my back and I’ll be able to find and blackmail them into paying me large sums of money for not sending those tutus along when they returned me to my parents. All because I cried that one time at the pageant and ripped off one of my false eyelashes. Of course I’ve repressed these memories, but my body will never forget the sensation of 24/7 tulle.

*****

Here’s an example (also from today) of the more irritating itchy belly-rash I get:

Last week I got it on my left forearm. Just as a way of saying, “I couldn’t possibly be more localized and seemingly random!”

It’s fucking bullshit, or maybe not always because a lot of times it happens when my body gets really hot from excitement. Not sexual excitement, but emotional: frustration, agitation, anxiety, stress, over-enthusiasm, manic thinking, etc. And maybe from eating too much carbs and simple sugars. I don’t really fucking know. But I should stop fantasizing about a closet full of tutus and passing out with cake batter all over my face because it’s really getting me wound up.

A nude demonstration this morning under a grey sky of the fun I had yesterday under a blue sky:

I did some clean-up in the yard, like cutting down and pulling out blackberry and blackcap vines. I was surprised how sore my muscles got from this activity; my arms and shoulder and chest feel like I got in a real workout, partly because of the stretching up high and far away and deep down, but probably mostly because our loppers are rusty as are most of our garden tools. Neither this house nor the last one we lived in has a garage or much storage space and we haven’t wasted money on one of those plastic yard closets or storage lockers, so after years of being wrapped in tarps outside or just left out, they’re pretty fucked up. We can still use them, but it’s harder. Hence the extra-sore muscles. I’m not complaining though because it’s fun free exercise.

I actually feel kind of bad about cutting down so much of the blackcaps – they’re yummy, they attract birds, they’re not as invasive as the blackberries – but they distract from the other plants and we’re trying to prepare to use the yard as much as possible for shooting. And they reach out and grab your ankles and pants when you’re just trying to walk by them.

They don’t seem to make protective leather work gloves in a size small enough for my hands, so I often use the loppers to hold onto the vines and try to pull them out and move them to the discard pile. I still managed to scratch my face with thorns, though.

I also did some other stuff around the yard, like picking up limbs and debris that blew off trees during our stormy weather. I piled some of the branches up in places where I want the grass to die down.

I also stepped in one of the neighbor’s dog’s shit piles IN OUR YARD. RIGHT ON MY FUCKING PATH!!

I thought I’d located (and photographed) all of them after I made a tiny misstep, but then I wound up with a total stinky shoe-ruiner, like a wet cheap-dog-food messy pile my foot found that squished up on the side of my shoe and almost got into my velcro!

Yes, I have shoes that utilize velcro!

I decided to not be TOO mad about it, as it provided me relief that this neighbor and I are now fully fucking EVEN if she was bothered by me not-on-purpose flashing her or by all of the noisy sex H. Rugaru and I had when he was here. Okay, I was still “too” mad about it, as I scowled for at least forty-five minutes and even crossed the street to make a bizarre display of myself trying to wipe my shoe off, publicly swearing and muttering. Made even more bizarre by the fact that nobody else was actually outside to witness me sliding and stomping and dragging my contaminated limb around.

As long as we live in a society where polluting groundwater and other people’s private property with feces is viewed as friendly and the best way to show our love of animals, I’m going to feel free to grunt and moan and holler in the middle of the night and run around naked like a bozo during the day. SO THERE!

Also! If the reward for adulthood is having to tie and untie and tie and untie shoelaces, then we simply don’t deserve technology!!

Here’s a webcam snap of me at work at my desk in WebWhore Headquarters in front of my computer(s) from this morning, afternoon and evening:

Me at work at my desk / computer: morning, noon and night.

Kind of a good illustration supporting why, after having desk jobs almost constantly since I was sixteen years old, I’ve finally accepted that getting an hour of massage every week is not a luxury, it’s a health necessity. And even then I don’t think sitting like this for 8-12 hours a day is a recipe for good health.

Exercise. Massage. Fewer computer hours. Stretch. Must have. Think about it. Also if you travel in a seated position a lot for work. Especially behind the wheel.

In the past four or five months I’ve endeavored to do many a good (or at least interesting) thing.

*Remember how I was doing that ninety day program? Which involved leaving the house and being around people every day? Well! We spontaneously decided to move in the middle of that, but since I’d made this goal I kept going even though it started to be overwhelming and piss me off. Because I’d made a commitment to doing it and thought it was pretty fucking simple and I should be able to do it. And it was supposed to be GOOD for me!

• WHAT HAPPENED: I failed to complete the ninety days. And then felt like a loser who couldn’t perform even the simplest of assignments. But really there was a lot of stuff going on and I should have QUIT when it ceased to be effective and started making me crazier. Instead I lost sight of the purpose and doggedly tried to stick to something just to try to feel like I could successfully finish something.

*We moved.

• THAT WAS HARD. But I’m so glad we did it. Kind of sucked up a month or more, though.

*Immediately after we finished moving I decided to apply for a residency thingy that every year I say I’m going to apply for and never do. I started the application before we decided to move so again put pressure on myself to FINISH something for once.

• WHAT HAPPENED: I told everybody I was busy and to leave me the fuck alone, spent hours working on it (in my head, at least) but I still didn’t finish it. The process was useful and interesting, though, and it forced me to ask two people I admire if I could put them down as references. Just having them say yes was pretty awesome and made me feel good. Another failure to finish something, but got a lot out of the process anyway.

*I socialized! In addition to the 90 day thing and the screwing around with a person I shouldn’t be screwing around with, over the past few months I’ve spent more time talking on the phone with people and hanging around with them than I have in YEARS. Still not as much socializing as “normal” people do, but I broke my carefully-written rules to limit interacting with people (particularly in times of stress, like a big MOVE) and took advantage of rare visits to WA from friends Fayette of the Cockettes, and Tara / ecowhore (formerly hobostripper). We also visited with fellow Washingtonian pals Heather Corinna and Blue, and Lightning Allie.

• ASSESSMENT: I wouldn’t trade the time I spent with these friends (or transient playmates) for a bigger sense of accomplishing more work or making more money. But I’m still not sure what quantity and frequency of socializing I can sustain over the long haul in my life and actually get things done AND have the amount of quiet time in solitude I like/need to have. Delia’s been picking up a lot of slack at home and with work to enable me putting my energy towards these social experiences. I also failed to spend enough quality time with my mom or my sister and her family during this time so I have a long way to go in achieving satisfactory balance between work, play, solitude, friendships and family. Ultimately I think a big part of the solution needs to come from being less emotionally involved or obligated-feeling when it comes to interacting with customers or FEELING like I owe special one-on-one attention to everybody who appreciates me. Because
  • I’m a failure at that anyway
  • it’s not a sustainable business model / there aren’t enough hours in the day
  • I want my work to be creating more, better and more creative, unique-to-me content and ways many people can experience it NOT overextending myself to individual people
  • My social life needs to be with people *I* choose (or am blood-bound to) and do not need to maintain a certain level of service towards in order to retain a customer
  • Basically? I need to respect my personal limitations more and establish better boundaries between my work life and my personal life. I thought I was happy with my work life BEING my personal life, but that’s actually pretty fucked up and needs to change. I still have a really difficult time in separating the two, as with the guy I screwed around with (I couldn’t tell if I was doing it just for fun or because I thought he’d be a good convenient stunt cock to make porn with; the answer is both, but I need to stop forcing everything in my life to do double duty; too often I’ve passed up good experiences because I couldn’t exploit them for work).
  • Needing to work fewer hours needs to be a higher priority / goal to work towards.
  • I want time and space to be physically intimate with more people. Both privately and for work.
  • I need to treat work more like a regular job than my entire reason for being and source of self-worth. Because sometimes I don’t do a good job or work breaks or people don’t like me and I need to still be worth something to myself even when that happens. And it’s happened a lot over the past year.
  • I need to be a better partner to Delia. Next to myself, she and my relationship with her is my highest priority in life.

• ALSO: I identified a few people I don’t want to feel so attached and obligated to and do NOT want to have boundary-hazy relationships with. People I need to distance myself from. I’m figuring out that I can continue to love people easily and with a certain level of emotional or spiritual generosity without being their friends or feeling I owe them something or even interacting with them at all. Does that kind of love have any real value? It does to me, and beyond that I need not give a shit. Nobody is entitled to my love, time or friendship. Essentially I need to be more selective about who gets inside me and how deeply I let them penetrate.

*I took non-adult pictures of a couple of beautiful local ladies for their website and ads (for their totally non-adult work). I was flattered that they asked me, but also really nervous about it and wished I hadn’t agreed to do it because it was yet another opportunity to waste time failing at something.

• THIS WAS HARD. We don’t have the equipment and I don’t have the expertise to do a great professional job at this. One of them cried when she saw the pictures because she looked (felt like she looked) fatter than she wanted to look (she’s crazy-gorgeous) and I suspect they both had really high expectations of me and my supposed ability to take flattering photos (they know we make porn). I learned a ton from this thought-provoking experience, with maybe the biggest thing being that I am really fucking brave to put so many raw naked imperfect images of my very average imperfect self on the internet. Most women in this country would be mortified and sink into a deep depression to be as exposed as I am online, even ones that are a billion five times hotter than I am. This reminds me that 1) I am awesome in some ways and 2) my work is valuable. There are tens of thousands of women who are more beautiful than I am and have bigger and/or perkier knockers than I do (or longer legs or flatter tummies or tastier feet) but very very few of them are equipped to do what I do for as many years as I have without wanting to cut their own throats and castrate all men. I’m not saying my work is intrinsically horrible and damaging, I’m saying that IT’S NOT SOMETHING THAT JUST ANYBODY WITH A VAG CAN DO.
• ALSO: I am more skilled and useful at listening, understanding and helping somebody with tearful gendery emotional body-image perceptual stuff and finding ways to put that stuff into healthy contexts than I am at being a photographer. I would rather spend time having (and becoming better at) those discussions with people than taking pictures of them. Right now neither is a priority for me, though; my priority is continuing to exploit my own high tolerance for raw exposure to get our credit cards paid off. And to steadfastly love myself while I do it. And to understand the very distinct difference between me and projected images of me.

*I did our 2010 taxes. Late again. But whatever.

• This takes me awhile, but it’s when I kind of assess our financial health and progress so for now it’s worth it for me to continue doing it myself. We’re making some progress in some ways even though our paysite income in 2011 is half of what it was when it needed to be twice as much to get ahead. So our sites need to make 400% what they’re making now to get anywhere financially. For a few years, anyway. OR we have to cam our asses off. Which is what Delia’s been doing to make up for the shortfall.

*We’re establishing better systems with the help of Lightning Allie. This includes being better organized with better plans for content production and processing, housework, debt reduction, and having some balance in our lives and figuring out what we want our lives to be like. We are no longer trying to do everything ourselves, just the two of us, or making decisions from within a weird bubble of isolation.

• RESULT: I feel a lot less anxious, a lot less overwhelmed, and like a lot more is possible by doing less myself / focusing on fewer things. And I’m enjoying contemplating and grappling with what I want those primary areas of focus to be. SEE ABOVE. And we’re getting ahead on shooting content. I feel more secure. I feel like I’m carrying much much less of a burden of memory and responsibility and obligation-to-follow-through because Allie is there to keep us on track and do a lot of the stuff that we really don’t need to be doing. I can drop balls without being scared I’ll lose them forever. It’s easier to get things done when you don’t have armfuls of bushels of balls.

Now you’re kind of caught up on tons of (the boring-to-others parts of?) my life lately. I don’t complete a lot of what I start, but when I’m okay with that I still wind up *doing* a lot. That’s pretty cool.

I started to write something else I’ve been spending time on but it felt too private to be conveyed in here in this format, so I deleted it for now.

I know this is probably a bizarre thing to post on my site, but I just found this short NPR interview with my psychiatrist:

* Psychiatrist explains why he speaks on behalf of drug makers

As you can tell by the review I posted here on RateMDs on 8/21/11, I think my doc is truly top notch so it’s weird to hear him portrayed in this sort of nefarious way. I admire that he stepped up and spoke openly about working for drug companies. He knows a fuck of a lot about drugs AND BRAINS – it’s truly amazing. I wish I could see him regularly.

Anyway, thought it would be bizarre and interesting for you to get to hear the voice of my psychiatrist.

I’ve also often wanted to share the website of my awesome in-town doc/general practitioner because he’s also super interesting and awesome, but I don’t want people in town to google his name and wind up here or for him and everyone at the office to see our porn sites (not a huge issue, but not the greatest idea, either). He has very specific, passionate, well-thought-out (and sometimes unusual) ideas about and approaches to health care, the pharmaceutical industry, being a doctor, etc. that are fascinating and informative, and make me feel really lucky to be his patient.

Professional ethics and ways people approach their work are interesting to me, and I like measuring customer appreciation, suspicion and criticism of other professionals against customer appreciation, suspicion, and criticism of sex workers.

I’m inspired by how much love and continued study my doctors put into their work and how much they are compelled to share insights and information with their patients and other people.

I can’t believe I’ve been sitting on (haha) this entry in draft form since December! Please leave comments if you have answers to any of my butthole questions:

I ran out of toilet paper at the cabin (or I almost did, and it occurred to me this detail could prove interesting and worthy of reporting to you).

If I run out of toilet paper, if I forget to bring more next time, I will not immediately run out to get more. The first priority is The Cabin, and the LAST priority of the cabin is personal cleanliness. Of course I still want to be comfortable, and I recognize that I feel more comfortable when I’m not COMPLETELY foul between my legs, so here are some of my options if I run out of toilet paper at the cabin:

For pee I can use kleenex OR just let it moisten my panties OR wipe with the front hem of my shirt (I do this on walks and really, having a few smears of urine on my t-shirt feels kind of fresh and natural to me).

You probably think the main problem will be what  to do if I shit at the cabin when I run out of toilet paper, but shit is not such a big problem. I have soothing moist generic hemorrhoid pads to cleanse my butthole & asscrack which I can follow-up with  an absorbent pat-down provided by a used washcloth I left hanging to dry after my last shower.

Some people keep baby wipes on the toilet tank for that purpose but I think they are overkill: too large, too horribly scented – really quite irritating to sensitive skin. Hem pads are better. Thriftier and more therapeutic. Plus I was always fascinated by those Tucks commercials where they snuff out a burning match by wrapping it in the damp circular pad. To get rid of the BURNING and ITCHING of swollen hemorrhoidal tissue.

I think once I even asked my mom or my dad, possibly my grandparents, if people really did TUCK the pads up in there. Nobody ever answered me with the specificity I desired, but my grandpa told me to NEVER EAT BLACK PEPPER! BECAUSE YOUR BODY DOESN’T DIGEST IT AND HE HAD TO HAVE AN OPERATION BECAUSE OF IT! They weren’t prudes so I don’t think that was why they avoided answering me. I honestly believe it’s because NO ONE REALLY KNOWS.

It seemed like a very interesting adult mystery, the proper application of Tucks. Did people simply tuck them between their ass CHEEKS or did they tuck them INSIDE their assHOLES, leaving petals of white hanging out to pull them out later (I imagine this looking very much like a container, rather than a box, of baby wipes, where you pull the wipe out of a plastic butthole-like opening).

Was I taking the name “Tucks” too literally? If grown-ups really were TUCKING them INSIDE, how long did they leave them in? Did they hang out in the bathroom for a couple of minutes to derive the benefits of the tucking, extracting the pad before exiting, or did they tuck one in there and KEEP it tucked while driving to work, doing laundry, greeting clients, playing bridge, etc.? How many Tucks could you tuck at one time? Or did you use them as a barrier between your finger and your ass to push severely hanging hemorrhoids back inside? Could you apply Tucks in a public restroom or was the process too intimate with telltale sounds, shifting body weight and sighs? Was there an applicator involved like with certain petal-soft tampons? AND WHAT ARE HEMORRHOIDS, ANYWAY?

You might shrug off these questions as obvious overthinking, but I don’t think I was/am. For a course on child abuse in college, I read a story of neglect involving an obese junior high age girl who was a pariah, in part because she smelled horrible. It turned out her parents weren’t mean people, they just were NOT competent and the girl had always had to fend for herself for the most part. Someone had to intervene and teach the girl stuff her parents had not, like how to shower (and how often), how to use shampoo, etc. They sent her to a doctor and it turned out she had many applications of TOILET PAPER AND PAPER TOWELS IMPACTED IN HER BOTTOM. The text didn’t use the word “bottom”, but it did use the word “impacted”. That story has stuck with me all these years and I often wish I could find it again to see EXACTLY what it said, because it’s still so unbelievable and yet rings so true, like I wonder how often this happens to people (there are SO MANY people who aren’t able — for all KINDS of reasons — to teach their kids how to take care of themselves first world stylee, and unless you get to watch someone do it who knows how, how would you learn?). Anyway, if it did say where/to what extent the toilet paper was impacted, it was strange enough that at the time I looked up the word “impacted” in the dictionary to make sure I was really understanding the condition being described, but I still feel uncertain about it: how much paper product can one girl carry around on/in her person? I think there was even a painful extraction process. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that there are modern conveniences at our disposal to tend to our asses and separate us from feces that some of us actually need to be taught how to use. Some people simply intuit what to do, but for some of us the standard operating procedures are less clear. It is also not always obvious how far you should stick things up your butt or how long you should leave them there.

I’m on the 16th day of a 90 day thing. Not a diet or a cleanse or a new pharmaceutical regimen. No, not rehab either. But I think by the 90th day it might appear that way.

The reason I’m (vaguely) sharing this is to ask people to be as patient with me as I’m trying to be with myself instead of telling myself I don’t have time or that something good is taking too long or I’ve been healthy for four days so it’s time to go back to “normal” already! It’s definitely cutting into my routine because I’m going to a support group of sorts every single day, or twice in a day if I skip a day.

I told my sister about it and she could barely believe it: “Wow, that’s A LOT of leaving the house for you, Trixie. How’s that going for you?”

So yeah, as people who are close to me know, I don’t have a lot of stamina for interacting with people or even just being around them much (even though I *love* people!). Or even just leave the house much, as my sister pointed out. I’m able to do these meetings, though, because I know how long they last and there is a structure to each one and guidelines for behavior. And because I get so much out of going, even when some of the meetings start out and I’m like, “oh my god how the fuck am I going to sit through this?!?” and then every single time IT IS WORTH IT.

*****

The really big thing that’s happened in the past couple of weeks is that I’ve asked people for help. One is for help with the above stuff and the other person is for help with stuff YOU are interested in, stuff that has to do with our porn sites! This person is super DUPER awesome. We’re gradually going to tell you more about this person, and this person may tell you more and more, too. If you’re lucky! Most of the work she’s doing is behind the scenes, back-end stuff but it will free Delia and I up from having to do it (or in my case just sitting around being afraid of doing it. SO MUCH of it).

While two weeks in is too soon to get people (me included) looking around for grand results, I do already feel immensely relieved and things look (and feel) a lot simpler than they were in my agonizing, trying-to-do-it-myself, totally-confused-and-overwhelmed brain state. We’ve exhausted ourselves over the past ten years thinking that first we had to “get rich” to hire someone to help us, insanely getting the cart WAY before the horse. Delia’s been working her ass off on cam for the past few months so tell her “thank you” for making the money to help attract the work-time of this super duper new friend of ours! And thank you to all of you who buy shows with her and memberships from us!

My top priority starting yesterday for at least five days is to get lots of exercise and do a lot of stretching in preparation to do a lot of shooting.

Here was the view from my yoga mat on the floor this morning:

"Skyyyyyyy hi-uh-eye" (everything's a Blue Rodeo song today)

I loved watching the clouds whispering past the sliver of moon:

Clouds coming to get the moon.

Sliver of moon.

Today’s Olympic Mountains from the backyard:

Today's Olympic Mountains: snowy & skirted with low clouds

Lots of trees were blooming on my brisk noon-time walk:

Spring blossoms shot with my new smartphone!

I know — how many colors of sky-blue can there be?!? I think the first picture is the most accurate to my eye. With the moon-and-cloud pictures I just wanted you to see the contrast I was enjoying.

So! Of course I have other goals and mega-amounts of stuff on my to-do list, but my waist is measuring more than 35 inches; I need to work on my health before I have a heart attack or cortisol-poison my brain to death or something.

Members: I’ve got a lovely gallery to post for you as soon as I finish two blog entries that I want to post WITH it.

So. The good news is it stopped snowing here and has all melted away. The bad news is I’ve been sick for months now. The other good news is I’m finally tired of it and resigned to the fact that I need to do more to get better.

Snow & Icicles and SNOW!

Note: this post is not going to get sexy / will bore you unless you’re curious about the state of my phlegm and such.

I’ve kind of been ignoring being sick because GOSH I’ve been so much sicker before and able to get better on my own, but I’m really, really tired. I came down with a cold at the end of December, got better for a week or two, but then the sore throat part of it came back along with the gross symptoms I described here. My throat hasn’t actually felt painful or scratchy the past month, it just feels very constricted, tiny, and hard to swallow. And it does look red. People have been bugging me that it might be strep but I’ve been dismissive of that for a number of reasons. Do you really want to know the reasons why? Okay, here are a few of them: 1) because no one else I’ve been close to has had strep or gotten it from me this whole entire time and isn’t strep supposed to be really contagious? 2) Because I’ve had these kinds of symptoms before in my long life and gone to the doctors for strep tests only to have it be a total waste of money because it wasn’t strep, 3) because I TOTALLY BELIEVE I CAN SOMEHOW CURE MYSELF!!, 4) because I hadn’t done everything I possibly could to get better, etc.

But now it’s literally been months and I have other weird sick-but-not-dying feelings. And I’m just so so so fucking tired. But I’ve been so much more tired in my life and I don’t actually feel like I’m dying so maybe I should give it another week or two! Anyhoo, I *will* go to the doctor soon, I promise. With this set of problems on top of how I’ve been randomly breaking out in itchy rashes since April (yeah, almost a whole year) with no apparent cause plus a host of other chronic issues I think I might have a  systemic yeast infection. I’ve been suspecting something like that with my weird nose and throat problems, but didn’t actually know something like that could exist in your sinuses (or bowels or system-wide) until I read it this week in a book I checked out from my doctor’s office. It would all make sense since when I got better two years ago, a big part of the solution was following a low glycemic index diet to improve and stabilize my blood sugar/decrease insulin resistance/increase my insulin sensitivity.

I feel depressed, have very little energy, and am having a super duper hard time eating right even though I know that’s most likely the key to feeling better. When I feel shitty, all I want to do is eat and sleep. I wish I could check myself into some kind of diabetic insane asylum therapeutic fat camp or something.

Getting my B vitamin injections is much better than NOT getting them, but definitely not solving the problem. I started taking 5-HTP more aggressively for the depression problem AND because I read (in that same book where I read about systemic yeast infections) that it helps suppress cravings for carbs / boosts weight loss. I’ve been doing nasal rinses, but not as regularly as I could/should. I’m taking acidophilus, vitamin D supplements (do NOT listen to the government’s recommendations on how little D you should get because they are WRONG), etc. (also not as regularly as I should). I drink emergen-c like it’s going out of style.

*****

I’m torn between embracing and catering to my identity as a sickly creature and denying it absolutely.

Basically my biggest accomplishment most days is just winning the struggle to stay awake. It sucks. And I’m aware that it’s not at all sexy unless you have a fetish for invalids with disproportionately large bellies.