My 49th Birthday
Today I turn 49 years old. I love my birthday. Each year I throw myself a party, and tonight many of my friends are coming over. I'm particularly excited about this party because it falls on my actual birthday. That doesn't always happen. Happy birthday to me! I'm...
Dog Sitting (oh no)
Her tail stayed down like that a LOT. Someone who has a successful little side job with a dogsitting service suggested I try it as a way to make some extra money. You go to the website, sign up as a pet sitter, set your nightly rate and wait for someone to ask you to...
Old Is Good
My hair stylist recently made a comment about her children's definition of "old." She seemed to dislike their idea that she was just a couple of years away from being old, but I disliked her dislike. I said, "I don't think there's anything wrong with being old." She...
A Story about Norco, II
Part I is here. The worst of the sleep disruption went away by the third night after she stopped taking Norco, but her mood plummeted the next day. She woke up feeling anxious, tense and worried. In the mirror she saw an ugly person with a ruined middle aged body. She...
A Story about Norco
It was just five days. Her prescription was for 20 pills to be taken every six hours. After the doctors in the emergency room couldn't figure out what was causing the intense pain in her abdomen, they gave her the prescription and told her to go home. It wasn't...
Sweet Dreams
Previous post on weight & health: Kicking a sugar addiction Last night I dreamt I was eating layer cake. I scooped off the sculpted yet gooey white frosting with my finger and wrapped my mouth around it. In other dreams I've abstained from desserts or only...
Prosopagnosia and Alerts
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,...
Kicking a Sugar Addiction
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...
Give Blood. Meditate.
I've felt frustrated because I've been using Joe Dispenza's powerful guided meditation recording for a year and a half and there's one part that just hasn't fallen into place. While I've gotten great results in general, there's one thing that has bothered me. At the...
When I Stood Up, I Was Different
Celebrate Your Life conferences bring together gurus and teachers of various disciplines all focused on the same thing: helping you achieve the best life for yourself and others. I've never been to one, but I attended their pre-conference workshop with Dr. Joe...
The Pain Has Receded!
Previous post on weight & health: Hooray for fat yoga! I finally had a mostly decent menstrual experience two weeks ago. I'd been suffering since November from horrible cramping that made me cry. On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain's grip spent hours at 10,...
DWYL (Do What You Love). Or Not.
(This could be considered the second part of a discussion I started in yesterday's post.) Miya Tokumitsu's Slate article In the Name of Love has this as its subtitle: "Elites embrace the 'do what you love' mantra. But it devalues work and hurts workers." It's a...