no boys allowed in the room!!!!

lol

I would offer you some of mine, but they are currently serving as a flotation device so y'know I need them so as to not drown and stuff.

calling carl a: I forget in which thread you mentioned the 8 minute meditation book, but I dled the kindle version and am going to give it a go. I am notorious for giving up a meditation practice within 7 to 10 days; can we be meditation support buddies?

Which week are you on?

Namaste and all that shit,

Q.

anyhow this is related to the no boys thread b/c I have got to do something (or many things) about this hormonal roller coaster situation. It is affecting my daily life in a not so good way.

I did not mention that book! I don't even know what you're talking about, but meditation has been suggested to me to deal with high risk pregnancy-related anxiety so I am interested.

q, how so?

also if you have trouble concentrating on meditation, i recommend incorporating a smell element (essential oil under yr nose, incense, something). it helps me get in the mood.

oh huh, I thought it was you, carl! Lemme search to see.

LL, I tend to be kind of perfectionistic when starting new things, so the minute something because "not perfect" (schedule change, on missed day, etc.) I tend to abandon efforts entirely. See also: yoga, learning Spanish.

I need accept that in these cases, "some" is better than "none" and "good enough" is just fine.

I like the smells idea, thank u for suggesting.

Your meditation phrase: the perfect is the enemy of the good.

perfectionism is self-defeating behavior -- once you start to look at it that way, it doesn't look so perfect.
(this not-news brought to you from the person who cried during her second drum lesson because she was frustrated)

Oh it was Jaq who was doing the 8 minute meditation thing! Jaq, are you here? CALLING ALL JAQ!

xpost that would be perfect for me, except that I would worry that I had not chosen the perfect meditation phrase.

It's funny, because I'm not like this in all areas of my life--as an editor, I would frequently coach writers who were charged with rewriting something horrible provided by a healthcare professional with "just make it better, it doesn't have to be the perfection you would have created had you started from scratch!"

it takes effort to retrain yr brain
give it time! and effort. and practice.

this is the big lesson i have learned this year btw, so it's not like i'm comin atcha from some high place
i have to remind myself of this every single day.

it is good to know I am not the only one! Thanks, LL :)

A tall woman just sat across from me in this coffee shop to study her "Explaining Psychological Statistics" book. Quincie, is that you?

I wish! Alas, I am still south of the border!

Sure do wish I had a coffee shop to study in.

i wish i had a coffee

my co-worker has this sign up that says "PERFECT is the enemy of DONE" or sthing which is corny but I like it

So after being on thyroid meds two months and a crazy diet, my hormone panel is actually WORSE than it was before! My estrogen is really low, as is my progesterone.

I had my blood drawn on Day 21, and my estrogen was only 47 (two months ago it was 61), and my progesterone is 11 (two months ago it was 15).

The good news is my thyroid antibodies did go down quite a bit.

man, weird! do you have any hypotheses about why it would be worse?

good that there was some good news too, tho.

i STILL haven't gotten my results back, and now i definitely won't get them back til at least monday. aaargh!

my doctor today explained that low is actually better than too high - which causes water retention, migraines, horrible PMS, etc. So she said its not a bad thing.

FINALLY got my results back, but the results are confusing and equivocal. I tested positive for one factor that is positive in 30% of people with lupus, 20-30% of people with scleroderma/mixed connective tissue disease and in only 10% of people with rheumatoid. However, I tested negative for the other lupus indications. My doc suspects this means I am in the early stages of lupus, but I have to come back in SIX MONTHS to get another test - if the amount of the factor in my blood has increased, then we'll be pretty certain that I have lupus. If not...? I don't know. In the meantime I get to just continue not knowing why I have horrible pain in all my joints, what's happening to them or what I can do to help alleviate it.

Sorry my last sentence was so melodramatic, lol. I'm kinda POed! I was really looking forward to some conclusive answers, but I know these things are sometimes really hard to nail down, especially auto-immune disorders.

CRAP. Sorry. And there's no other monitoring you can do in those six months?

I guess I'm wondering why they couldn't offer you a trial of steroids to see if it helps? Wouldn't that help confirm an auto-immunity dx? IINAD, tho. We need a gbx, too bad he isn't allowed in the room ;)

But for real, I'm super bummed for you and HII having to deal with health crap. I mean right now my biggest complaint is that my boobs hurt, and that tiny complaint is enough to piss me off!

ugh roxy that suuucks. my mum has rheumatoid, I know how exhausting and stressful all-over joint pain can be. I wish there was some way you could get some intermediary relief.

i don't suppose you could go back and be all 'yo doc help a girl out'

I'm sorry, roxy. That is the pits. Not knowing would drive me bananas.

Can you ask your doc for some pain meds in the meantime? It is not cool to have to live with horrible pain!!!

Rox, I definitely recommend seeing a dietician for your autoimmune condition. A lot of it can be alleviated if you can heal your gut (easier said than done, it sounds like it's like a 2-3 process of getting it in a good spot again).

2-3 YEAR process, that is.

meanwhile! I am going to pretend I know what I am talking about, and say VITAMIN A, D, & C are super important and critical as well as essential fatty acids. I'd take 5,000 IU's of Vitamin D daily, and incorporate fermented cod liver oil into your life. Try making your own bone broth (very important for gut healing--especially the gelatin). I really need to do better about these things, too. And organ meats wouldn't be a bad call either.

I'm in danger of going completely over the brink into quackery here but in addition to making sure I get a lot of broccoli and greens, I'm considering taking the spoonful of raw honey a day method. Not yet convinced it has to be manuka honey, but at $15 or so, it's try-able.

i am going to have to disagree a bit with homo ii here: while it's important that you get sufficient vitamins in your daily diet, taking extra supplements may not particularly help. The body is much more efficient at taking in vitamins from food than it is from pills. There's some argument for taking vitamin D as that can be hard to get in within one's regular diet. The US office of dietary supplements recommends, for example, that an adult of over 71 (ie whose bones are increasingly brittle) gets 800 IU per day. (http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-QuickFacts/ )

It's been found in recent studies that vitamin supplements (esp in the form of multivitamins), rather than extending one's life, may in fact shorten it: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitamin-myth-why-we-think-we-need-supplements/277947/
I still find this kind of hard to believe and weird - even thinking that multivitamins did nothing, i would have thought that there's be a correlation to people making attempts to live healthily. But apparently not! Perhaps it's related to what's been found in another study, where taking vitamin supplements can make you feel like you've done something 'healthy' so it's ok to take other health risks like smoking: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/26/bad-science-vitamin-pills-lead-you-to-take-risks

can i make a sincere plea that this not turn into "your nutritional choices can save/kill you" thread? tbh it makes me totally neurotic!

There's some argument for taking vitamin D as that can be hard to get in within one's regular diet.

That's what the doctors told me -- apparently I have a serious vitamin D deficiency, which apparently is something that can cause symptoms of depression -- they said even if you gorge yourself on salmon, almonds, orange juice and dairy, and sit out in the sun for all your waking hours, it won't provide all the vitamin D you need.

sure, LL!

you = me, the deficient person

(you can all feel free to ignore me as well -- i am not trying to control the convo)

sorry - my post was in process before i saw yrs!

i wasn't even referring to that! i just meant in general, i avoid the "nutrition nazi" threads for the same reason. i don't need more reasons to not eat things.

i also generally object to the use of "nazi" in a jokey way but that's a separate issue ;)

honestly i'm sorry i brought it up -- i think my tone was misread. i'm not angry, i'm just feeling low.

Much like "tipping" and "restaurants in NYC," nutrition talk can take over ANY THREAD. ANY THREAD I TELLS YOU.

I'm having ehh...complicated thoughts this week about dating feminists.

what does that mean? elaborate pls.

an aside before IO's elaboration --

the other day i was out for a drink with a dear male friend (feminist in politics but probably wouldn't call self "feminist" because it's awkward when dudes do it) and his girlfriend, and when she said "i'm not a feminist" i swear i could feel his apologising eye turned on me. and then she talked about the discrimination and pigeonholing she feels she gets in the workplace and how she feels companies have to work harder to make things fair for women given childcare etc. and then we had a conversation about "lean in" where i carefully refrained from making any disparaging comments.

and then i went home and read that long faludi piece on everything that's wrong with lean in, but i thought - well, it's doing something for this woman, anyway.

I went on a little binge about it on the anorgasmic thread on ILTMI and some other thoughts that I didn't put there might develop into an actual piece? Like a blog posty thing. So I might not want to dissect them here yet, but I'll c&p this.

...as soon as someone becomes a project, as soon as I have to hold back and say only supportive things, as soon as I perceive that they need something from me, I absolutely cannot feel desire. I can imagine that I do in an alternate reality, but right there with the person I cannot. I just realized this lately on a 2nd or 3rd date w someone I was trying to be attracted to (which might not have happened anyway) but definitely was not going to happen when I started feeling like I had the power to hurt him. I wondered if this was inordinately selfish of me, but I feel a little more aligned with myself from that talk.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Sunday, October 20, 2013 7:34 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I started saying a long time ago that if I was going to have sex I at least wanted to be there for it, and not somewhere else or floating around the ceiling watching it or whatever. Actually achieving that has not really...happened. Partly because I go a year at a time without meeting anyone I want to date (who wants to date me) at all, so it's an extremely slow process.

I feel like a bunch of difft things lately have led up to me making a big jump in understanding some truths today. But in relation to the article about young people in Japan, I think...when you start realizing that nothing except equality is acceptable, it may be the case that everything suddenly becomes like 100x more difficult because everything you do is swimming upstream against the status quo. That amount of work is not always/often? going to be worth whatever the perceived benefits are.

Also just to say it again, human needs w/r/t sex and intimacy are amazingly varied, I grok that more and more. The "new normal" can be...ANYTHING.

People have introduced me lately to this guy Jay Smooth who has inspections of racism on youtube, and my favorite part is the "personal hygiene" approach to not being racist in which he compares it to brushing your teeth--upkeep, something you have to do every day or you lose the benefits of the act. So when you slip up and do or say something kinda racist, you're not doomed, you're not necessarily a bad person or irredeemable from some terrible hell, you just forgot to brush your teeth and you should do that before you talk to anyone else.

carl agatha commented once on what a huge amount of work it is to be in a ltr/marriage in which both ppl are committed to nullifying patriarchy and its effects on them, and I've been trying to fully grasp that idea ever since she said it, and I think I just understood some part of that.

But now we're really into a different thread entirely.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Sunday, October 20, 2013 10:10 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

All originally spurred by this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa0RUmGTCYY

Haha, c#M! Do you know, "lean in" has become the punchline to so many jokes among my feminist friends?? The other day they were throwing out phrases that people have been using in motivational talks, all taken from sayings like "decisions get made by those who show up." There was this long string of things they were mocking that went, like, "Show up, something something, pull your pants up, lean in, PROFIT!" To general hilarity.

But I already read those posts :-/
Where you gonna post yr blog post?

Post post post post
I need a muzzle.

Haha okay! Um if I do it, it would be on my wordpress thing that I've only used like once, probably? I dunno.