On this April Fool's Day, I feel like stating the obvious: depression is not productive. At the age of 49 and three quarters, I'm still learning how to manage my chronic depression, which sometimes gets triggered by a specific circumstance, but often shows up with no...
Previous post on weight & health: Wheat is the culprit I've spent most of my life as a thin person. I was a skinny kid and then a gym rat who constantly struggled to stay down at a size 10 or under. My raging sweet tooth that never stopped somehow never tipped the...
Bernie Sanders has my vote, which I plan to cast later this week during Illinois' early voting period. But I was disappointed by his remark in last night's debate: We are -- if elected president -- going to invest a lot of money into mental health. And when you watch...
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Some call it cussing. Some call it swearing. Some call it using bad words. It's the use of "four-letter words" and it's very controversial. I understand that such words aren't appropriate most of the time, but I'm puzzled by people who think such words are...
By the way: last week I celebrated National Suicide Prevention Day on September 10th by not wishing I were dead.
This is National Suicide Prevention Week and Sept. 10th is National Suicide Prevention Day. I'm actually ambivalent about suicide prevention (I feel equally strongly both ways). I believe people have the natural right to decide when they die, but I'm also sensitive to...
Four ibuprofen every three and a half hours. I even set my alarm to wake me up in the middle of the night so I wouldn't wake up to PAIN. Keeping the air conditioner on high so I can use the heating pad while it's in the 90s outside (30s Celsius). Staying home a lot so...
(My original post about my fibroid tumor is here.) So I decided to go with the Lupron treatment for my uterine fibroid tumor symptoms, but in the two weeks since my doctor appointment, their office has been having a hard time getting the paperwork through. The cogs of...
So, I've been battling horrible menstrual cramps for months now and I've gone as far as I can with acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal supplements, diet, meditation and exercise. After eight months of drastically changing the way I eat and getting good results, the...
There's a part of the human brain that processes face recognition. Being able to distinguish and recognize faces is a very specific skill that gets a region all its own because being able to tell family from friend from stranger is critical to survival. Unfortunately,...
Previous post on food & fatness: The pain has receded I am in the process of trying to kick my addiction to sugar. For almost seven months, since November 2014, I've done a pretty good job of reducing my ingestion of sugar of all forms, which means I've...
The one I use is in the middle. (With this post I contribute towards the effort to normalize the topic of menstruation and the word "vagina.") The Atlantic recently published a history of the tampon, which mentioned the controversy over how safe they...
Previous post on weight & health: I love my glucose level When I put on 50 pounds (23 kilos) between the fall of 2012 and the summer of 2013, I didn't know if that weight was here to stay or not, but now it's starting to come off. It's probably similar to a woman...
I'm very grateful to my friends. I had a bout of depression in the past week and they responded in just the right ways. They asked how they could help and offered to talk, but they didn't give me a pep talk or keep asking why I was depressed. They just let me know...