no boys allowed in the room!!!!

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.

(just a quick aside, even after eating pretty much perfectly I am still iron and vitamin D deficient in a sad way.. those of us with autoimmune conditions are often deficient in things like these, and if you are tested and are low, I don't think taking supplements hurts. Even after taking 10,000 IU of Vitamin D daily, I am still only at 30).

Okay! Nutrition talk over.

i wonder how one balances the work of being in a relationship where you're both trying nullify patriarchy, against the work of being in a relationship where only one of you is conscious of the strain it's putting on you.

I think the second state of affairs is just "normal"???

I mean hopefully not for any of us but for a lot of people? Or maybe "normal" is when neither party consciously realizes it and one of them is compensating all the time without acknowledgement?

well i guess with our old friend "false consciousness" neither of you could be conscious of where the strain is arising from.

xp yes, like that

also, y'know, "benevolent sexism"

Also I want to like this new superhero tv show Arrow but the main female character's name is the same as mine and her tv show dad keep being controlling and patronizing to her and using her name to give her lectures about how he's going to make decisions for her and it's really bothering me.

Ahhhhh you love it!! A superhero with your name! Condescending parents! :)

She's not the superhero, UNFORTUNATELY, but she is a do-gooder public interest lawyer.

I was thinking recently about how much i hate that old canard "if it was men who got pregnant, there'd be [fantastical image of kindness to pregnant people]" - if it was men who got pregnant* then the social effects of pregnancy and childcare historically removing your gender from other social/economic activity would apply to them! even the men who did not get pregnant would be thought of in the terms of being from the fecund gender! this is not helpful!

* i'm not talking about, e.g. trans men, who are a different case, because of how intersecting social and economic pressures affect them specifically.

xposts some of my comics-favouring friends on twitter are v irate about how marvel's not planning to do a female superhero film for at least three years. where are the female superheroes ;_;

Oh :-/

I'm not really into superheroes of either gender but I was happy for you for a sec there!!

(Sorry on phone, that was re tv show)

Haha it's okay! Public interest lawyers are like irl superheroes basically so although she doesn't get the good parts of the story, there are more positive interpretations. Also tbh the hero character's approach to being a superhero is demonstrably flawed from the first ep = ain't nothing to be jealous of there.

So, in comparison to my (no BC) short, painful, rather aggressive periods of 3-5 days each month, this month it has so far gone on 8 days, no pain, no sign of easing up, less ... er, flow, but steady. 8 days is WAY outside my usual bodyclock. Should I worry? Sometimes I think I might be perimenopausal but the GP always poohpoohs me when I bring it up even tho my mum's started in her mid 40s.

...sorry for the random interjection heh.

I was thinking recently about how much i hate that old canard "if it was men who got pregnant, there'd be [fantastical image of kindness to pregnant people]" - if it was men who got pregnant* then the social effects of pregnancy and childcare historically removing your gender from other social/economic activity would apply to them! even the men who did not get pregnant would be thought of in the terms of being from the fecund gender! this is not helpful!

"If men got pregnant, you'd be able to get abortions out of vending machines" <-- this kind of thing, yeah. I can understanding getting fed up with it!

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

What would happen if we had thread about tipping at a health food restaurant in NYC? Let's never do that.

in orbit, my current television namesake has a cursed vagina... that kills!!

At least they spell the name correctly.

trayce, I might bring that up to a doc, yeah.

xp Wait, I don't know what show that is!!

It's the current season of American Horror Story.

Oohhhh I've never seen it before.

Wait wasnt that the plot of "Liquid Sky"?