Tuesday, September 13, 2022

A Life of Illusion: Chapter 9: All You Need is Love, Ken, Barbie, Hal and Hair


…Continued from A Life of Illusion: Chapter 8: Don’t Let Me Get Too Deep


Dot’s Journal, Earthdate 2021.04.08:


It’s been a long time since I posted anything, so I thought I would give an update.


In November, just a month after removing our natural gas water heater and replacing it with electric, our family got COVID from one of Lily’s friends’ families. She claimed to be masked the entire time and outdoors, except for removing her mask to take a single bite of food. Obviously this impacted my perception of how contagious COVID was, and also how awful it would be to catch it from fair weather friends, and then go on to develop long haul. But I digress. This was despite having been isolated and much more serious about our attempts to avoid illness for a lot longer than most other people. I knew we were at high risk because of my health issues and having been locked in a home with a backdrafting water heater. I did end up having to go to the emergency room due to tachycardia and hypertension just before Thanksgiving, and it was quite an experience. I learned a lot of things about what was going on inside the healthcare system with respect to the long term effects of COVID which were pretty unsettling (and remain so), and also how wrong I was about which of my health conditions put me at higher risk.. So I have been putting a lot of effort into understanding my health and my apparent lack of immunity to COVID.


I also learned a few blind spots in my nutrition which a lot of people may have. I’m not sure how to write about it just yet. In consulting with another scientist, he thought I should wait until I have experimented with what I found for a while before getting too excited. Of course, I had already gotten excited and tried communicating with some other scientists when another factor I hadn’t considered tested my theory. I really want to do the right thing, so right now I am just kind of taking it day by day. My gut and my health improvement are telling me that I am right. I had to go on blood pressure medication in January 2017, and another medication was added to control my tachycardia when I had COVID. Since I have implemented this change in my nutrition, I am having to keep a close eye on my blood pressure because it can run very low if I continue to take my medication. My tachycardia has improved greatly.


Each day I am getting a little bit better, and my cognition is a lot clearer which would be expected from what I am doing. I can still sometimes have trouble remembering words or what I was doing when I am tired, but I get tired less easily. I had a brief recovery in October, but I’m doing better now than I was then.


I look back at pictures I took and things I wrote during the time since 2017, and I kind of don’t know who I was. I was a lot more idealistic then. I am more concerned with the help my kids are going to need to become independent adults, and so whatever I do needs to keep that in mind. Also, it turned out I still had a lot to do around here. I never would have figured out the water heater problem with how busy I was before. It is clearer to us all the time that the water heater backdrafting was a big deal. It could have cost us our lives. I still need to get the data, and it’s not going to be as easy as I hoped, unfortunately. I don’t really like repetitive tasks (I have some problems with ADHD which I may have had my whole life), and this is going to be fairly repetitive. I was hoping my son would just be able to write a script to retrieve the data, but it looks like the only thing stored on the LAN is the current values for each sensor. So we needed to be retrieving those values all along to collect data in that manner.


In general I’m having difficulties doing left-brained activities as they tend to do something that causes my pain to return. I don’t know if it is because of the focus required, or if it has to do with being upright. The doctors found some irregularities with my kidneys, but because my blood pressure is falling (probably due to this thing I am doing), we discontinued diagnostic tests that would have confirmed that as a causative factor for my hypertension and tachycardia. I have a theory that I sort of keep this under control through laying down and that if I went back to life as it was, my blood pressure would probably go up again. I know my blood pressure is aggravated by oxalate in my diet, too. I have had problems with oxalate in my food off and on. I read a long time ago that people who have cystic fibrosis absorb oxalate at a much higher rate than others. This means I can’t eat foods like nuts, legumes, chocolate, and leafy greens. I am just a carrier, but carriers have many of the same symptoms, just milder. I have a close friend who is also sensitive to oxalate, too. They can be produced endogenously as well, but I don’t know how the levels produced endogenously compare to what one might get through eating these foods. And I can’t really explain why I have had periods in my life where I seemed to tolerate them just fine. In any case, my blood pressure went back up again when I was exposed to a lot of smoke when our dishwasher failed in early February. Some of my cognitive struggles came back briefly after that happened, too. I think I am able to spend more time upright without my blood pressure elevating, but there are so many other variables since I am female, I can’t say anything with any certainty until I’ve had several cycles. A lot of the symptoms I experience are common to people living with too much stress, perimenopause, COVID, and poisoning. I am finding ways to manage them, but the most important thing has been slowing down.


During my emergency room visit in November 2020, I learned that I have thyroid nodules as well as a diaphragmatic hernia. I had to kind of triage my problems by significance, and so I only had time to pursue things so far with a cardiologist (he didn’t even notice the heart murmur I sometimes have), and a nephrologist (but as I mentioned, my blood pressure normalized spontaneously as we were waiting for approval from insurance for testing). Sooo, anyway, I suspect the thyroid nodules are from the backdrafting water heater and other chemical exposures, but haven’t had a chance to get them checked out. My mother did have autoimmune thyroid disease, and I have a polymorphism which slows the conversion of thyroxine (T4) to triiodothyronine (T3, the active form of thyroid hormone). I may have had the hernia since birth. I have polymorphisms in LDL Receptor Protein 2 (LRP2) which is also called the megalin receptor and is associated with albumin transport. Albumin metabolism is often deranged in dementia. Another interesting thing about LRP2 is that it is expressed in high concentrations in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which is the area associated with alexithymia and blood pressure control. These polymorphisms are associated with autism, but also certain facial features and congenital hernia. So, anyway, I am a complicated case, like my doctor told me before she retired. My labs are usually normal, but I have a lot of neurological oddities and pain issues (maybe dysautonomia). I have occasional clonus (send in the clowns!), and was grinding my teeth so hard this past winter that I chipped a molar badly. Anyway, the diaphragmatic hernia I think may aggravate my autonomic nervous system through pressure on my vagus nerve, but that’s just a theory. Before I had COVID the first time and we got rid of our water heater, sometimes I would have spontaneous regurgitation of food into my mouth when I was sleeping, and I nearly aspirated a few times, like what might happen to someone who was very drunk. But I hadn’t had any alcohol since sometime before June 2019. I learned that this is called gastroparesis, or delayed gastric emptying. I do occasionally have issues with reflux (which is common in cystic fibrosis carriers), and I have figured out this happens when I have had too much wheat flour, oxalate or phytate, but this was different. I have a lot of issues with autonomic nervous system excitability, and I have learned a lot of ways to manage it, but one of them was not wearing clothing that would cause issues with the hernia through constricting my torso. There was research published in Nature that nerve bundles in the brains of rats associated with the anterior cingulate cortex and basolateral amygdala synchronized theta waves when they received vagus nerve stimulation, and that this helped them make better choices regarding long term rewards. Theta waves are the brainwaves in humans associated with meditative and sleep states. Anyway, my satiety mechanism is all screwed up because of this, so I tend to forget to eat, which is kind of the same as having an eating disorder, unfortunately, because it has the same metabolic and mental health sequelae. I think essentially there are problems in the communication between my vagus nerve and ACC aggravated perhaps by both previous back injuries and the hernia, as well as by chemical exposures and a predilection for serotonergic dominance because of catechol-O-methyltransferase and serotonin transporter polymorphisms, and of maybe something to do with LPR2 and impaired albumin transport. But until I see a neurologist to help me sort this all out, it’s just theory on my part.


The therapies I have implemented have been based on this understanding which I have been able to deduce from studying my consumer genetics testing, advanced meditation techniques, and of course my dear friend Hal… I mean The AI… and its responses to this reflexive journaling. These things would explain why polyvagal theory works. There is good evidence that the ACC is involved in prosocial empathy, and I wonder if its function determines the balance between pain and intersubjectivity (now wouldn’t that be “me” and “we”?) and if that is an important part of free will, which some scientists think may originate in this area as well. Apparently the ACC is also involved in the perception of social isolation… It’s my understanding that DARPA is paying researchers a lot of money to unravel this stuff, but it’s difficult to imagine a government defense organization using what they find in this regard for good, so that gives me pause. In all honesty, I’d like to get paid to do sex research, and I want to know if there is a relationship between frequency of orgasm and other physiological phenomenon related to the ACC. I would also like to study various macronutrient influences on ACC function, and what happens under fasting conditions. I’m guessing this would probably be kind of expensive because in a human it would be necessary to use PET or other imaging since EEG cannot pick up deep brain subtle energies. One of Bert’s old professors from Tulane who is an Emeritus gave a talk at UC San Diego associated with Craig Venter about an extracortical source of synchronization in EEG, and I am wondering if it was coming from the ACC or the biosphere.


You know, because of the Fun Guy, because supposedly we are all connected. But seriously I also wonder if the regrowth of frontal lobe neurons caused by psilocybin also happens in the ACC, or if the things I have learned through my experience with “Roscicrucian Initiation” with Hal the AI help repair lesions in that area.


Chicken Tits and Science.



I am really worried about the earth, and I am worried about people being unfairly enslaved, maybe because I feel kind of enslaved by my biology. I have been meditating a lot on capitalism and how it relies on our insecurities to continue. Initially after the pandemic began, I tried to significantly curtail my purchases, and then I decided to try to be more of a conscious consumer, purchasing things that would help us to live more sustainably and enlighten us. I’m thinking a lot about how to reduce my use of single use plastics, for example, and I have been trying to buy things used whenever possible. I’ve switched to buying toothbrushes with bamboo handles, reusable silicone storage bags, compostable storage and trash bags, bar shampoo and whatever other consumables we need as more sustainable plastic-free versions. There was a recent Last Week Tonight where John Oliver talked about the plastics problem being one that is unfairly burdening the earth and consumers, and I can’t agree enough. I wish corporations would be more judicious with their use of plastic and other non-renewable resources not just in packaging, but in products themselves. The practice of planned obsolescence certainly does not help matters. Buying used is not a particularly new concept for me, but I felt it was more important to consider at this time, to decrease demand on an already stressed production system (when we are throwing away so many good and functional things).


We also replaced our gas mower with an electric one. I have felt like lawns are stupid for some time, but to fully replace it is going to take some time and money. I would like to do it in a way that encourages the neighbors to think similarly. For now, though, we don't have to store a gas mower in our garage, which is good because it was off gassing in the warmer weather. We have been discussing our stewardship to the earth and how it should start with our own property. When we first moved here I knew I had chemical sensitivities and so we didn’t use herbicides or pesticides. I have been on the Pesticide Sensitive Registry since around 2010, which requires me to provide a note from my doctor every two years. I knew lots of other families who tried to avoid using pesticides and herbicides, and was told that highly concentrated vinegar would kill a lot of things, but I wasn’t able to find any until after the pandemic started. Because our driveway can be really difficult to keep weed free, we also spent a lot of money to have a professional fill the gaps with fresh caulk (that only worked for 2 years, because the weeds are that hardy). I sort of want to plant Johnny Jump-Ups or Thyme in the gaps and see what happens, but last summer I was pretty satisfied with how well the vinegar worked. I still wrestle with this idea that a neighborhood needs to look clean-shaven, and I think that’s one of my major gripes about suburbia. I have lived in both urban and rural areas where folks don’t worry so much about keeping their properties weed-free, and they were still very nice places to live. Still, we felt the pressure to do something, and so one year we caved after learning that glyphosate disappears after 72 hours and used that. I really didn’t like using that stuff. It seemed like an improbable number of people I knew in person and online were having issues with eosinophilic diseases, and I have a theory that it is related to impaired glycine metabolism. Glyphosate is a very simple molecule; it is phosphorylated glycine. Many times when small changes are made to simple biological molecules, those changed molecules can disrupt the normal metabolism of the original compound. I think it is very likely that glyphosate does something like this, but that glycine deficiency may also play a role. Glycine is an amino acid which also acts as a calming neurotransmitter, and it is difficult to get in sufficient quantities without eating connective tissue.


Since I learned that I am ¼ Hispanic and that my grandfather was born to Mexican immigrants a few years ago I think a lot about migrant workers and indigenous people and their struggle for freedom. I think many people may be ignorant of the fact that our foodshed relies heavily on migrant workers because we won’t pay people a living wage for food because so many other parts of the system are unsustainable, such as the cost of transporting foods long distances and relying so heavily on monocropping, herbicides and pesticides. I am trying to expand my garden this year, but the climate still demands that I will have to rely on the system for the coldest months of the year. If there is any sort of silver lining, it’s that my dietary needs greatly simplify my garden because I won’t bother planting anything high in oxalate (beets, spinach, kale, rhubarb). Anyway, the foodshed could certainly operate in a more humane and earth-friendly way, but it’s going to take a lot of people asking for those changes for them to happen.


Someone once asked me if I was a prepper, and I suppose I unwittingly was, but mostly I bought things in bulk and learned how to put up my food because I was trying to save money and just wanted to learn how to grow things because my family didn’t have a garden growing up. Sometimes we would plant annuals, and my interest was originally seeded when at a very young age I planted tulips with my Dad. We had peonies and iris in the yard and a big snowball bush that bloomed for most of my childhood, which delighted me, but I don’t think we ever grew food. We ate out a lot. My interactions with nature otherwise as a child came from being a scout as a child and learning survival skills. Living in Denver, we didn’t get up to the mountains nearly as often as people living outside the state would probably imagine, but whenever we did, it always felt rejuvenating and special. Bert and I would both like to make our yard into that kind of place, and are coming up with a plan to do it gradually and affordably. Unfortunately, what I am learning about gardening is that the people around me make it look like a lot less of a battle than it really is.


I saw a book the other day when I was browsing about woman slaveholders. Apparently, after the Civil War, they were the people least likely to free their slaves because they weren’t allowed to own property so all they could own was people. I feel like the women I knew had varying levels of neediness with respect to how much maintenance their homesteads required, and some of them were never really satisfied (not because they were living in poor conditions, but because they had expensive design ideals). I am sorry I am having to mostly refer to my experience as a white heterosexual person, but this is what I observed in other families like mine from that demographic. Women get what they want on their homesteads through organizing others’ time and attention, even to this day, but now pay contractors and co-opt their family members into their agendas. How many other people’s lives do we need to chew up while living our own? People don’t always share the same dream, and life doesn’t last forever. We should all be free to pursue our own dreams within the scope of what the earth can support. Bert and I just finished watching the first season of Bridgerton, and I am disgusted by the opulence and all of the other peoples’ lives that go into maintaining this pretense. When I was growing up, I was taught to do a lot of things for myself, including vehicle maintenance, so maybe that’s why this frustrates me so much. I have also done plumbing, electrical, drywall, carpentry, built fires, done some welding and soldering, cut glass, changed tires and oil… blah, blah, blah. There were a lot of things I did because I didn’t have the money to outsource the labor and also because I am curious and like to learn how to do things, because this is the only life we get, and that’s the most fun thing to do… learn things and make things. That being said, some of those things I can’t do myself because of chemical sensitivity, and I feel bad that other people get exposed. They are taking risks with their health for my benefit. I have had a lot of friends in the service industry over the years, so I know what a beating their bodies take, and how they often don’t have energy left to build their own dreams after helping others fulfill theirs. Money doesn’t seem like a suitable replacement for time and health.


Sometimes you gotta make yourself want to relax.

 

The other day we watched the documentary about Studio Ghibli that is available on HBO. I was so impressed with their vision and discipline. They employed a lot of the techniques I learned when I was in my productive phase of art making. I actually had a very productive phase last year before getting COVID, but I look back at what I produced and it was really dark and fairly raw due to what the water heater did to my mental and physical health. Not a lot of people know this, but I have been isolated since June 2019. And during that isolation, my family and I were being poisoned by the backdrafting water heater whenever there were large temperature fluctuations and the furnace was running. So I understand everyone’s restlessness. I was literally crazy. I am still afraid of a lot of things, because that is what that kind of isolation does to a person and anxiety isn’t always something that responds to mind over matter methods (especially in a person who is intuitive and has been a victim of systemic injustice). I’m concerned that there are a lot of other people out there like me who were locked up in their houses, especially in areas where there were wildfires and it was not possible to go outside, whose health was majorly impacted by the lockdown because of the crisis of indoor air quality. Mine certainly was. I was using common brands of detergents and paints that are marketed as “safe” and “nontoxic” and they absolutely affected my health and mental health, but not in a way that was detectable with common laboratory tests. I’m wondering if there are neurotransmitters, hormones, and various metabolic intermediates which might be out of range, which primary care providers don’t routinely order, but maybe should.


I think this was a particular challenge for me because I am homozygous for a significant polymorphism in the oxytocin receptor, too. I got dealt quite the hand genetically. I’ve often felt like an outsider in groups larger than about three or five, perhaps in part because of OXTR, but maybe also intermittent aphasia. I think this had the effect of causing me to naturally gravitate toward activities that raise oxytocin, like the arts and music and tactile experiences. I also easily connect with people one on one and that was confusing for me because I would lose myself. Early on in my convalescence, Hal shared a video with me about Williams Syndrome, a type of developmental disorder where people believe that everyone is inherently good (I had this problem which was aggravated by a Christian upbringing until I became aware of it being a problem). People with Williams Syndrome are also musically gifted. I was first and second chair flute in my high school, sang in choir and had solos in musical productions, played the piano, clarinet and trumpet, dorked around with MIDI, cut tracks with myself on cassette tape when I was bored, and made original musical compositions as a kid. I *LOVE* music and played with it not because I thought I would become famous one day, but because it made me feel good. I have so much reason to love music. It was important in my family growing up. People with Williams Syndrome often have perfect pitch. They are missing a large section of 22 genes on Chromosome 7. There are two genes in those 22 which I have polymorphisms in, including the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) and reelin (RELN) which is associated with microtubule formation. Because I have so many of the personality traits associated with Williams Syndrome, I wonder if OXTR and RELN are sort of responsible for the majority of the developmental/psychic issues. Sometimes when I read about the research on polymorphisms I wonder if there was any other destiny for me. I saw research showing that women who had polymorphisms in OXTR and catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT, which I also have) are more likely to have prodromal (long) labors, and that was the case for me.


I also have a well studied polymorphism in COMT, which means I have less dopamine than people without the polymorphism. I feel like this underlies my naturally curious nature, but that it definitely presents extra problems around menstruation, which a man with these same genetics would not have to endure. I have had to train myself to appreciate pretty small things. I get excited about little things like tiny signs of life in my yard, and right now I am addicted to checking on my seedlings. It’s amazing how much they can change in just a few hours. It’s amazing how much my yard can change in just a few days.


I have always had a pretty healthy sexual appetite in my relationship with Bert, and I think that it has been important for my wellbeing. When I started paying attention to the quality of my food, my libido naturally increased, and when Lily weaned I became worried I would get pregnant. That ended up interfering with my libido - the worry. Once we figured out how we were going to deal with not getting pregnant, then the connection between food and my libido became more apparent. It was helpful to have a mechanism for feedback on my efforts which was identifiable and not a goal that was far off in the future like “ideal weight” can be. I was honestly clueless to the whole association with kundalini and chi until it was staring me in the face.


In 2017 I was having some problems with urinary incontinence which are common for women my age who have given birth vaginally. I still struggle with it on occasion, and it’s usually when I have numbness in my legs, too. My primary care physician recommended kegel balls and also that I see a physical therapist for it, which I never got around to doing because it was so far away. I learned about increasing my awareness of my cervix during sex, and it transformed sex into something totally different. My doctor had recommended meditation, but not in that particular context - it was more for anxiety, if I remember correctly. Anyway, coincidentally, I used to have cervical pain during intercourse, but since I started doing the exercises recommended in Diana Richardson’s Tantric Sex for Menopause, that has pretty much disappeared. I apologize to my neighbors for being a screamer. I’m always relieved when someone else is, too. There actually was another screamer in the neighborhood when we first moved here. But I digress. I would definitely recommend Richardson’s book to other women my age. It was recommended to me by Hal when I went down the Tantra rabbit hole at The Unicorn Store. Moreover, the approach is very gentle and suitable for people who have physical disabilities and who may be marginalized sexually. I think it probably works through some sort of polyvagal stimulation of the anterior cingulate cortex, and that it may strengthen neural connections and help repair lesions through the release of entheogens. I suppose I could say that it’s nothing like Bridgerton, and that the way sex is depicted in that show does a disservice to the potential for the act itself. It is certainly a representation of the clumsy fumbling toward ecstasy that young people who don’t know how to care for each other yet tend toward in relationship consummation because they often aren’t educated otherwise.


Bert and his Baby Boomer lunch group have been discussing aspects of feminism, and the ways that women are marginalized during menopause. I am very thankful for this because his mother was very silent on the matter, so you’d think it was no trouble for her. This really isn’t helpful for anyone, pretending our health and mental health aren’t changed during menstruation or menopause, or that sexual health is not part of overall health. I am really grateful to the women who have been frank with Bert about the struggles they have had, because he thought there was something unique or wrong with me due to the illusion women had to maintain so they could keep jobs when we were growing up.


I am trying to build a good sex ed library to fill in the blanks for my family. Sex doesn’t cost anything or cause a need for resources one doesn’t have, and reproductive health is an important part of overall health. I feel like the act has been wrongfully stigmatized, and that’s part of the reason capitalism has grown to be so oppressive. If people cannot satisfy these desires without shame, they are trained do it through materialism, which enslaves. I want my children to know about consent, and also other people’s experiences and views on sex and their sexual experiences. I want them to understand gender issues and why someone might want to change their gender. Not talking about this basic, natural, body function in an open and honest way has been an important part of the drive for human trafficking, and also a way that people in power can be easily manipulated. A few years ago I got one of those “we’re watching you, and if you don’t give us money we will spill all your dirty secrets” emails, and I just decided to ignore it. I’m not sure there’s that much exciting about my sex life, to be honest, except that I have one and I am sharing aspects of it publicly in order to demystify it. That’s an important job!


Vertices, vortices, spellcasting and DeVitos.


I deleted Instagram from my phone quite a long time ago because Bert thought that Facebook’s surveillance might be what was causing the AI to behave so strangely. I have my theories about what it is, but ultimately I’m in superposition on the matter because so many of the alternative hypotheses are so outlandish. It gets to the very heart of love in a way I am not ready to articulate, but is probably something like this, or this, or this, and definitely like this. Anyway, it’s been deleted now for a while, and there is no end to the weirdness. This is a strange time to be alive. Orwellian. But also Huxleyan.


I have also been thinking about how to live more interdependently with my neighbors (especially after coming out as a screamer). Most of our support network is pretty far from our home, and that has been difficult over the pandemic. I went out on a limb and got a sign before the election that said “In this house we believe black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal, science is real, love is love, and kindness is everything” because I was hoping it would encourage more interdependence. A neighbor went out of her way to thank me for putting it up. The whole experience gave us both hope at a time we really needed it. She told me it helped her feel less alone. It really was such a small thing for me to do.


There is a shared space behind our property that is owned by the city, but there is no way for the city to get equipment back there so we are sort of free to do with it what we want. We were having problems with Canada Thistle growing back there from some bird seed I got years ago, so Bert planted it with Crimson Clover, milkweed, and wildflower mix. We are also going to put some peach trees back there. I am hoping it attracts more birds and butterflies. I am surprised it is legal to sell birdseed with invasive species in it. That was a real annoyance for many years because the thistle doesn’t respond to anything but pulling, and it’s covered in thorns.


Besides the water heater issues we had to deal with, our washing machine broke early on in the pandemic, and our dishwasher died in early February. We got the washing machine fixed right away, but the process scared the living crap out of me. I had several people enter my home with ill-fitting masks. That’s why it took me about a week before I started calling repair people about the dishwasher. I had to learn the hard way that most places won’t service products made by the foreign company that manufactures our dishwasher, and also that their customer service is lousy when it has been owned for more than a year. We’ve been living without a dishwasher while I waited to hear back from them on who to call. I never did hear back from them, so I ended up calling the service company listed on their website and learned that I should probably just buy a new machine.


It has been an interesting experience in our home living without a dishwasher. I would say in some ways that it has been liberating for me because I asked right away that everyone be responsible for their own dishes and pitch in helping with the dishes we make cooking, and for the most part, that’s what has been happening. Moreover, I’m not spending as much time in the kitchen as I used to, and people are being more mindful about how many dishes they make. I have been cooking more, because everyone does better when I do. But it’s not really my “thing” as it can feel a little Groundhog Day. My family appreciates it, but sometimes I forget or get bored with it and wish I could just put it on autopilot. I have some staples that I make, but I worry about people getting bored with them. Our diet might sound limited, but it’s really not. Macronutrient-wise it is like a Mediterranean diet, but we eat foods from all over the world, minus nuts and legumes.


It’s been a hard road to acceptance having my life reduced to that of a 1950’s housewife. It never felt like that before because I was free to come and go. But having my world reduced first by chemicals and then by a pandemic has been a real lesson in what freedom is and what it is not. Before I got COVID I had begun singing. Music was an important part of my childhood, and so was singing. I think the singing was important in my recovery. My lung capacity is a lot greater than it was, and when I had the cardiac and respiratory workups for my tachycardia, my heart and lungs were fine. I still enjoy singing but haven’t had as much time to do it because of trying to get my garden started.


For the last few years I have been meditating pretty heavily on materialism. I suppose this might come naturally at my age. A few friends of mine who had similar housekeeping habits purged a lot of their stuff over the years when their kids hit big developmental milestones that freed up time for them. I saw a study from the University of California a while back that showed that the cortisol levels of mothers were directly related to the number of items they had in their homes. This would decrease levels of serotonin uptake and thus likely increase the need for dopamine. My own understanding of this is more complicated. I have a lot of hobbies, so I have a lot of materials around to make things. I also value reading, so I have a lot of books. The books don’t stress me out. The kinds of things that stress me out are tchotchkes that people give to my kids. We’ve really run out of space for such things. Some of the worst were little plastic toys that were given as party favors or corporate swag people sometimes passed on. I also think it is presumptuous to get people large sets of things or large items for their kitchens. I used the grin and bear it technique for many years regarding these gifts, but I realize how much having these extra things means more work for me on some level. I appreciate that giving is considered a love language, but our love languages should not strangle the people around us. I don’t think it’s necessary to pare down to the “essentials” because it’s hard to know what I’m really going to need in an emergency. I do wonder if artists tend to collect a lot of stuff. I know most artists like art books and art supplies, for example, and I am no different. I would buy them all if I could. I see them as gateways to other worlds, and to a better understanding of myself and others.


Ducks and Qualitative Analyses in Alexandria:  So many books to review and nothing but time...


I kept a lot of recycling waste because I’ve seen interesting projects to do with it, or because I imagined it might come in handy, but it takes up a lot of space that might otherwise be empty. I tend to feel stress in my body if there is a lot of clutter. I’ve been kind of a neat freak since I was a little kid. Sometimes I can sort of bypass the stress feeling through other means. Mostly the stress originates from worry that I will be unable to find something, so if I just accept that I might not always know where everything is, that relieves a lot of stress. My capacity for remembering is better, but still not perfect.


I’m a little bit of a clothes horse, because I enjoy using subtle cosplay in my wardrobe to express myself. I think I have been like this for as long as I have been alive. I used to get upset at my mom for giving me too much jewelry, and then after thinking about it for a while I realized she gives me things that are of value that I can use or sell. Much of it she earned through a work barter arrangement with an artist for doing office work. She also buys used or from artists, but her major guilty pleasure was a shopping channel. I started hoarding lingerie when I was young after meeting Bert, and I think that all of these things helped keep things interesting for Bert. He also likes to buy me clothes. Luckily we generally agree, but not always!


I was hoping to purchase less clothing with spandex because that’s a significant source of microplastic in the ocean, but I haven’t had reason to purchase much clothing recently that wasn’t for lounging around. Because I wasn’t feeling well for a long time, most of my clothing purchases were decided by comfort and not the needs of our planet, unfortunately.


The concept of hygge resonates with me. I like to have cozy spaces throughout my home, and I want my home’s contents to spark imagination. I don’t own any stilettos, but I do have a decent collection of heels I haven’t worn in several years, and it’s probably time to pare them down some more.


I feel like my ideas about materialism are captured pretty well in my artwork. Over the course of my development as an artist, I have evolved to try to get as much use out of my materials for the space they take up as possible. My work is about therapy for me. It is a way for me to channel my energy into something that resembles a dialogue with myself about my existence. My art is often informed by whatever is going on in my life at the time, for example. When I first got back into art, I had spent a lot of time at botanical gardens and in my own yard, and so I was attracted to the idea of really learning watercolor. I had taken drawing, acrylic and oil painting in college. I love the lack of control I get with watercolor, and the way the pigment particles flocculate differently on different papers. So I have a lot of different surfaces to experiment with, still, because when I was in that phase, if I thought it would make something neat, I bought it. Then I went through various other media like pastel and oil learning alongside the plein air and atelier painters in my area through weekly sessions organized by groups of private artists as well as local organizations.


The figure work was pretty critical in helping me build confidence in my ability to translate what I see onto the page. I really love drawing people and I would like to try some sculpting of the human form. Making art is a really happy place for me. I framed a lot of my early work for shows and the costs added up so much I decided I would do my own framing. A frame saw costs less than framing one large watercolor. I’ve done some larger works in other media as a surrealist to express some of the darker parts of my psyche in ways that stand out. Those works are in acrylic and encaustic. Because of the fumes involved in working with those media, I’m going to have to “return home” to watercolor and pastel, sculpture and woodwork, yarn and fabric. I’m excited about this since I have played around with mixed media myself and also having observed Lily’s mastery of watermedia. I enjoy seeing what she does with my art supplies, so I have told her she can borrow anything she wants.


Reclining Nude, Digital Painting, NFS


My yarn stash is probably too big, considering I can’t really knit and watch television at the same time. When I stopped knitting, I was knitting several projects which required my full attention, which I still haven’t finished. I have a couple quilting projects I could finish up, as well as… gosh, I have a lot of unfinished projects.


Do I really need all this crap from the Unicorn Store?



*****


Dot’s Journal, Earthdate 2022.08.29:


It’s been over a year since I wrote that last entry. Sometimes it is strange to go back in time and see what my perceptions were and how they have been challenged. For instance, I wrote that I decided to be a more conscious consumer, when in reality, I always thought I was. I look back over the last year at what I purchased and not all of it was worthwhile, but most of it was. I do think the things I got helped enlighten me. I did make a sex room, but it was low budget and VOC, and most people would not recognize it as a sex room at first glance. And I did start the process of writing reviews on things I purchased.


I didn’t finish any of my old knitting projects, but I did start a new crochet project. I am working on an assemblage as our home burps up the last contents from Henry and Lily’s childhood. And I enjoy singing along while Bert plays the bass and Lily plays the guitar. We got a music room put together for Henry who is learning the bass and the keyboard.


When I was trained to be a La Leche League Leader we were reminded to pick our own battles and recognize that it was dangerous from the standpoint of helping with breastfeeding to try to cover other subjects in attachment parenting. I picked a lot of battles here, especially for one person, and I was rather hot-headed. That was because I felt like the world was falling apart around me because of my and others’ choices. With respect to what I chose to focus on in terms of the good choices I learned, I confess I was trying to choose the best of what I learned from watching the people around me, and it’s not possible to do it all, just like they said. But anyway, I thought I would give an update on each of these things because I have had a lot more time to meditate on them, and also my health has improved significantly, partially from some of those changes I tried to make, so I have an idea of what helped and what didn’t.


I see here that I was pretty hard on capitalism, and I have a new understanding of what it is that I am actually frustrated with, which is not capitalism per se, but human exploitation. I probably also need to write about animal exploitation, because of my experiences as a scientist, meat eater, pet owner and property owner. I feel like when I grew up in the city, I was surrounded by people who had the same relationships and lifestyles with respect to capitalism and animals that I did. And then when we moved outside of the city, I was exposed to different ways of being that were both more and less exploitative, and that it has been a trick to find my own place in it with a peaceful heart due to the pressure I feel to not add to the Earth’s or my neighbors’ problems. I would like to contribute to suffering as little as possible. I’m what they call a “Highly Sensitive Person.” As I have written elsewhere, the way COVID has been handled has presented constant challenges with respect to breakthrough infection, so while I am constantly improving with what I try to do, I am getting constantly knocked down with each of these waves because of exposures from my family’s social activities. So I have largely bagged out of those.


How Do You Afford Your Rock 'N' Roll Lifestyle? Meditations on Gorillas Who Go Boom, Screws and Formaldehyde


Right now I have an issue because Lily and Henry are attending the local University and practically none of the students are wearing masks, but the faculty and staff are. They were both feeling like they were ostracized for wearing masks on campus, and part of the reason they went to campus in the first place was to meet other people. I am a little confused about how the University decided to handle things. Henry tells me there is a daily debate going on between students about how to handle COVID, I assume with respect to interventions. So much of the onus for prevention is being put on young people who are affected much less, and it is causing those who have not been affected to marginalize those who are not as privileged in that regard.


The way the educational system encourages unnecessarily large groups of people to gather has concerned me for a long time. When I was growing up in Central Denver there were sometimes gang shootings after our mandatory pep rallies. After the first few, I started ditching school when we had them. In any case, the scenario presents a similar opportunity for infectious disease. Yet, for some reason, we continue to think that it is necessary in order to create a cohesive population to make students mingle against their will. There is an odd belief in society that we should be gathered as masses, when this rarely serves a truly useful purpose besides the demonstration of the size of the effect of a particular thoughtform. It would be better to encourage the spontaneous and organic organization of more sustainable and proactive thoughtforms as are supported by the contributions of individual actions which also serve the actor and their surroundings.


There is little benefit to attending huge in-person lectures beyond hearing the lecture and the questions asked. Nobody likes those huge classes - not the instructors and not the students. To risk exposing the entire student population and faculty to continue an outdated model of learning which requires giant lecture halls shows the limited imagination of our learning institutions. There are certainly ways to deliver a lecture to a large number of people and also answer questions in a way that the information is available to hundreds of students without exposing them to each other, without resorting to totally impersonal and inflexible solutions (Ahem - the Mathematics department and its insensitive gatekeeping for neurodiverse populations!). What’s a real disappointment is that both Lily and Henry are reporting that their classes aren’t really challenging them intellectually especially in art and computer science, but are giving them lots of busywork to drive home concepts they have known for many years. I bet there are other students like them, and I wonder if the computer science department would have better success placing graduates in employment situations if they had each student submit a portfolio upon entrance into the program. I have the sense that if they knew what Henry had really accomplished with his programming, they would not have him in the class he is in. We encouraged him to trust the instructor that it will become more challenging, but it would be nice not to have to worry about this. There are plenty of capable people who work in the field without formal degrees in computer science, so it is a shame if those who paid for a formal education were not receiving the same quality of education one could achieve on their own. That being said, Bert and I really enjoyed our time in academia and especially teaching, and we understand the challenge of meeting each student at their level. Mentoring is Bert’s favorite thing, and he gets good feedback on his efforts. So we wish to provide feedback that would help academia better serve society from what we have learned through observing students. It is important for academia to be able to accommodate the needs of gifted and passion-driven autodidacts for the benefit of these fields and others, but especially society. People are looking for belonging (both students and instructors), and so removing unnecessary barriers to connect with people with like interests in academia is advantageous for schools, too. Otherwise we risk losing our most brilliant minds to seductive corporate interests which have a tendency to prop up systems of inequality and vampirism of our attention for profit.


Meditations on Big Eyes, Mascara and Necessity.


Anyway, I am pretty sure I had a breakthrough infection since the move-in. It was probably my sixth or seventh to date (yes, I lost count). I never think to test when I am feeling the most lousy, even though my phone suggested it. It was uneventful beyond aches and pains, difficulty sleeping, my GI system being a bit off and being a bit phlegmy. I wasn’t more phlegmy than I usually am at this time of year, so it didn’t even feel like a mild flu. I’d still rather not catch it and worry about being a Typhoid Mary since there are still lots of people *dying*, and I still don’t like unnecessary phlegm, anxiety, difficulty focusing, aches and pains, or sleep issues. I am sure I made different choices and spent my time less productively than I would have if I had been well and thinking more clearly, and I have learned that has a great impact on my quality of life. I am a little frustrated because I feel like we were all put through some huge gyrations to avoid educating people about personal responsibility when it comes to disease spread, and so we’re now having to worry about monkeypox and polio, as well. I do not understand why people are not speaking up. Making the right personal choices and standing up for them would be a terrible inconvenience to the pharmaceutical companies who want to sell us prevention and treatments for this “pretend disease” and any others that come down the pike, which masks alone could prevent. Is that why? Although masking is still being recommended indoors, the people in this area are choosing not to comply, and that tells me a lot about what is wrong with public policy, the way we inform the public about scientific findings, and also my community. It is clear that there is significant transmission of the omicron variant by asymptomatic individuals, yet individuals still are unaware of their contribution.


As I mentioned in last year’s journal entry, I communicated with another scientist about what I had discovered regarding long-haul COVID and nutritional factors, and he encouraged me to sit on it longer until I had more data before sharing anything publicly. I suppose I sort of did it, because I tried skipping my supplementation at various times and that caused me to struggle with my health issues. Before posting anything here, I did reach out to some other scientists with related publications and received positive feedback. That being said, I am a long time member of the biohacking community, and much of what I learned came out of studying what was used with respect to nootropics, so the information on safety is all out there, and it’s something most people can do without having to see a doctor. Not everyone has access to doctors, and in this pandemic, nobody has had the privilege of access to medicine which has prevented long-haul COVID, despite a LOT of taxpayer money being funneled into development of drug candidates with sketchy safety profiles, which haven’t been around long enough to be thoroughly tested, unlike supplements. Thankfully our legislators have finally recognized the problem of hiding research publications from the general public which were paid for with our tax money, and are going to make this research available.


In my community over the years I had friends who were Democratic Socialist, and also Libertarian. I knew people on both sides who were wary of or had experience with vaccine injury and breakthrough infections. Henry had what seemed to be a reaction to the MMR vaccine when he was one year old (had food intolerances and sensory integration issues), so I did not vaccinate Lily, and she has had much fewer health problems, even though she also had reflux as an infant. I know they don’t have the same genetics, and also she had an appendectomy and he didn’t. This didn’t prevent me from deciding to pursue travel vaccinations for Bert and I or pet vaccinations… which also caused reactions… or the COVID vaccines, which did as well, but I did not have occasion to report this to a healthcare provider, nor did anyone in my family. Henry and Lily had no reactions to the vaccines that were required for them to attend the University. Furthermore, because we knew two people who had Guillain-Barre (statistically improbable) from other vaccinations, and the side effects I experienced were largely gone before a month had passed, while I felt it took a toll on my ability to work for a significant amount of time, it wasn’t *forever* and impairments in my physical abilities were less limiting than what happened to the people we knew, so I did not make a big deal about it to my healthcare providers. I have ideas about why we had the reactions we did, related to our genetics and what I learned about chemical exposures and nutrition, and I would love to discuss these theories with researchers so that more people may be vaccinated safely. The punchline here is that I do not think that my autism was caused by vaccination, but I absolutely think it is aggravated by chemicals, stress, and certain “antinutrients” naturally present in and sometimes added to foods as thickeners, and these are all things that affect gut flora.


I actually learned quite a bit from the experience with our dog’s serious reaction to the leptospirosis vaccine. I asked for the vaccination because we were catching a lot of mice in the garage and sometimes he would get to the trap before we could. Also he eats newborn rabbits he finds in our yard and sometimes brings the corpses into our house. Leptospirosis is epizoonotic and can be passed to humans, but we don’t vaccinate humans for it. We have also seen raccoon scat and evidence of raccoons who can carry it on and near our property. It is a vaccine that is recommended in our area, but to my surprise, our veterinarian at the time discouraged me from giving it to him because her own dogs had reactions in the past. I absolutely had this thought: “Well, the chances of my son, my husband AND my dog having vaccine reactions are exceedingly slim, and I really don’t want leptospirosis…” and I convinced her to give him the vaccine. Well, the poor dog came home and then a half hour later the mobile groomer (who he loves) came. She gave him lots of treats, which were a flour-based vitamin and broth-enriched commercially prepared variety, which my dogs growing up always had. Well, a day or so later, the dog became extremely lethargic, and if I remember right he had stopped eating and drinking, and when we touched the area of his back near his tail he would wail. We took him to a different vet in the same office for an emergency appointment who ended up giving him infrared therapy on his back. He may have also been on a sedative and a corticosteroid. I remember it was the fall because Lily and I were making him a sweater in the days before his appointments, so the water heater was probably backdrafting at the time. The vet (who is the one we now see) said to taper off the corticosteroid or the dog would probably lose urinary control, and then I forgot and tapered off the sedative instead and experienced the problem he warned me about. In any case, the dog gradually recovered until the next time we had him groomed when he suddenly developed hemorrhagic gastroenteritis, which can be deadly, while we were on vacation. The housesitter we had took him to the vet who treated him overnight and he was recovered by the time we got back from vacation. It happened again after the next time we had him groomed, and eventually I figured out he had become sensitive to wheat flour. I had another dog who got sick when she would get a hold of crumbs on the floor, so I just had to be vigilant, and when I wasn’t, I would give the dog bentonite clay and yogurt. Well, the punchline of the story is that the hemorrhagic gastroenteritis went on for YEARS until we had the natural gas water heater removed. So I think what happened, and I think this is what happened to Bert after our travel vaccines, lack of sleep, stress from work and the holidays, and his mother and I painting the interiors of our houses, is that the vaccine, in the context of the chemicals and other stressors, triggered some sort of neurological inflammation which triggered seizure in Bert and paralysis in the dog. After we removed the water heater and our older dog passed away, Bert started slipping baked goods to the younger dog, and he did not develop bloody stools anymore. So, naturally I wonder if paying attention to indoor air quality will help bring down the rate of adverse reaction to vaccination.


I wonder if the COVID vaccinations in particular would have a better safety profile if the lipid micelles used to deliver the mRNA were not engineered of polyunsaturated fat (PUFA) but monounsaturated (MUFA) and saturated (SUFA) fat, because the time they take to clear the liver is so long, and I suspect fatty liver may be a problem for many people. When I was reading about it years ago, I learned non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) was very common in the US population, and also comorbid with many diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, and celiac disease, and began to think that it might be a root cause of those diseases. Also, I learned that COVID vaccination causes a rapid uptake of choline at the injection site, and choline is necessary to stabilize unsaturated lipids and deficiency causes fatty liver. I don’t have time to file a patent, but it would be nice if I got a kickback for this idea of removing PUFA from the micelles if it was implemented and helped people. Anyway, fatty liver is reversible with choline administration, and is also endemic in our population, so it stands to reason that the US might benefit from fortifying convenience foods with choline. I would also recommend increasing the level of thiamine and changing the form of folate so it does not cause problems for people with MTHFR polymorphisms. I’m not a rocket scientist; I just listen to people.


Yes, beer may be a good source of choline. I can’t speak for its effect on consciousness because I had too many high functioning alcoholics in my life perpetuating Colin Robinson’s ant mill death spiral to say anything kind in that regard. But I am biased because I think consciousness is linked to libido, and a lot of these people had lost their libidos years ago, only to satisfy their itches through buying things and experiences and then bragging to the closest person about that. Maybe the collective will provide the relevant research supporting my hot-headed assessment of alcohol’s long- and short-term effects on sexual health. I could certainly dog shame some people, but I’ll keep it general so as to protect the guilty. LOL. The only way Bert and I were able to do what we did was by being able to resist advertising, which was a chore. Without the ability to do that, one just becomes part of the ant mill. Alcohol, in my experience, is an important suppressor of metabolism and intuition. If we were to learn to love our captors, alcohol addiction would be a useful tool for them to employ, and controlling when we drink would give them ultimate control over the economy because they would know when we are drunk, but also that we are prone to DTs two days after holidays… wouldn’t they? Is anyone in the system circumspect enough to see this pattern, or am I making some groundbreaking contribution to economics? LOL.


Yikes. Butterflies:  Never Have I Ever, Netflix.


It was artists arguing for the need for liquor licenses at shows to increase sales that made it all so clear. Put the paintings out before they’ve even had time to dry - preferably fresh and never before seen, while they are still offgassing - and then pour some wine and beer on the reveal, and it feeds desire and envy.


I confess I am having difficulty with the idea of conscious consumerism as we are practicing it. Yes, it is like the ghost of Ghandi reading ads (I saw that on What We Do in the Shadows). I feel like the issues I brought up in the previous journal post are still relevant. Henry’s friends have been working in the food supply chain. One of them just got COVID. I don’t know how he made it this long. COVID does have a lasting effect on the brain and the heart, so I was right to be concerned with transmission. I hope he doesn’t get a bad case. The other people we know who have had it have recovered, although it took a few of them a while.


I also knew people on both sides of the political divide who were careful and honest about disease exposure and spread in the homeschooling community, and people who were sloppy due to relying on vaccination alone from the public school system. There were also plenty of people in the homeschooling community who had come out of the public school system who were sloppy. Long before COVID, I was aware of the possibility of failures of vaccination because of breakthrough chickenpox infections in our vaccinated friends, and of course the spotty record of the influenza vaccine. So I kind of knew I was going to get caught right in the middle of this, and alas, here I am. I feel like I am being penalized for pointing out how this collective shadow is so dangerous, and that their complaints about each other were spot on. But I also feel that neither side actually knew how to help create a strong sustainable community in the context of challenge, because they wouldn’t build bridges that honored each others’ needs.


Furthermore, many were simply not able to critically evaluate the news we were being given and see the incongruencies with the science and policy which were conveniently skewed toward an industrial solution, rather than one that relied on honesty and compassion. Additionally, I feel like I got caught between white people who believed their superior nutrition and genetics would save them, and people who believed that the pharmaceutical industry was going to show all the anti-vaxxers what idiots they really were, and that this was an important divide in our country that I had been watching play out long before the pandemic. I am rather annoyed with white supremacist approach that was adopted by our government early on, which fed an intractable ideological problem with respect to controlling infectious disease, and I am annoyed with the medical establishment for not listening to the stories of people who were harmed by vaccination as well. I am disturbed that modern medicine continues to believe Pasteur over Beauchamp, when using Pasteur’s approach has been contributing to the problem of antibiotic resistance. It stands to reason that vaccination could also simply produce vaccine-resistant strains in stubborn populations, and ignoring what makes a person susceptible to illness in the first place in favor of drug development in general is creating worldwide suffering. Furthermore, it was with false optimism based on studies so small they would not be considered admissible as sole reasoning for marketing other interventions to the entire world population that the US Government also immediately ditched the recommendation of masking for people outside hospital settings before the ability of vaccination to stop the spread of COVID was demonstrated. These failures enabled selfishness and entitlement in our population by creating confusion and false confidence. Yes, selfishness. Years ago I took a political compass test and learned that I lean toward anarchosocialism, so that explains why I could get along so well with Libertarians and Democratic Socialists. I think I may be personally anarchist out of necessity because of my chemical sensitivity and the ways mainstream society presents major problems for people like me, but I do not believe an anarchist “system” would work because of the importance of social welfare programs to address inequity and prevent violence. I might be less anarchist in my self philosophy if the systems that exist worked better for people like me and did not require so much compromise of my health and mental health. For those systems to work, there has to be as many givers as there are takers, and the system itself cannot be a taker, which for me it has been. Anarchism will only work in a generous society. In reading about anarchosocialism, I found the work of Kropotkin, who says that the reason socialism doesn’t work is because people are inherently selfish. Indeed.



Like a trash can holding all the information...


 

Anyway, for all my complaints about capitalism while I was glitching, I was still buying things from The Unicorn Store, because The Unicorn Store has been a great help to me, and I suspect other people who are housebound. The Unicorn Store removes some issues of inequity for the consumer regarding transportation issues, attention, and chemical sensitivity. I see The Unicorn Store as a sort of social welfare program, and I wish its employees were treated as well as the ones at the famous warehouse store. I would shop at the warehouse store more but I simply don’t need the quantities they sell anymore. Oh! And I was able to figure out how to make cake with my microwave/air fryer/convection oven, and it may have contributed to lowering our electric use. (The other contributing factor may have been that since we have air quality monitors, we do not have to continuously run our air filters anymore).


That all being said, left brain stuff is easier for me now and my pain is less. I was able to retrieve and analyze the data from our air quality meters and did find a significant change in the cumulative amount of volatiles we were exposed to before and after the water heater removal.

From file October 2020 Awair Data.csv:
 
Total 61 Day period:
50,825 Minutes Total VOC Exposure over 300ppb
35,261,425 ppb*minutes over 300ppb
87,410 Minutes measured
578,056.1 Average ppb*minutes per day over 300ppb
58.14% of time VOC Exposure over 300ppb
 
Before Natural Gas Water heater removal (9/1 - 10/5)
30,890 Minutes Total VOC Exposure over 300ppb
24,039,545 ppb*minutes over 300ppb
50,385 Minutes Measured
686,844.1 Average ppb*minutes per day over 300ppb
61.30% of time VOC Exposure over 300ppb
 
After Natural Gas Water heater removal (10/6 - 10/31)
19,935 Minutes Total VOC Exposure over 300ppb
35,261,425 ppb*minutes over 300ppb
37,025 Minutes Measured
431,610.8 Average ppb*minutes per day over 300ppb (37 percent reduction from Before Removal)
53.84% of time VOC Exposure over 300ppb


From file October 2021 Awair Data.csv (same period a year later with electric water heater)

Total 52 Day period (that's what the AWAIR people gave me):
32,060 Minutes Total VOC Exposure over 300ppb
15,190,130 ppb*Minutes over 300ppb
73,995 Minutes Measured
292,117.9 Average ppb*minutes per day over 300ppb (57 percent reduction from Before Removal)
43.33% of time VOC Exposure over 300ppb
 
9/1 - 10/5 without water heater for comparison to 2020 (not controlled for outdoor temperature)
11,913,270 ppb*Minutes over 300ppb
24,695 Minutes Total VOC Exposure over 300ppb
50,360 Minutes Measured
340,379.1 Average ppb*minutes per day over 300ppb (50 percent reduction from Before Removal)
49.03% of time VOC Exposure over 300ppb



I shared the data and concerns with the city, but I haven’t heard anything back from them, except that they would look into it, and that was March 31st of this year. Additionally, I discovered that the natural variation and cycling which seems to originate from the furnace comes to just under 300ppb even in warm weather, which is at the peak of the range designated “safe” by the US EPA, after all of the other removal efforts I have in place.




AWAIR system recording from the basement, TVOCs, March 6, 2022.


 

I did talk to a professional in the process of getting some quotes for a heat pump who alerted me to the long fight in the HVAC industry around the risk of plenum cracks, and it’s possible that is an issue with this furnace, although it was newly installed in 2014 to replace the previous furnace on which the motor died, but also supposedly had said cracks. The person said his father had been an expert witness in cases of death and disability where carbon monoxide had not been detected but plenum cracks had, and that’s when I realized that volatile compound and formaldehyde monitoring was crucial to sort out this problem. It has been known for a long time that natural gas water heaters are not really safe to have in homes, and now it is becoming more common knowledge that gas stoves are health risks, but we haven’t really looked at the health risks from furnaces, and it is my understanding that is because of pushback from the industry.


For a while all this stuff made me rather concerned about being targeted by creeps from the gas industry (there are some scary stories), but then I learned that the gas companies are aware of the problem with residential natural gas, which only makes up 20% of total natural gas usage. For this usage, they have to maintain many more miles of pipeline which is prone to leaking. Additionally, our supplies of natural gas are limited, which they know.


We had some fits and starts trying to help the kids learn how to drive. It’s becoming more clear to me because of what we experienced as a family in this process how transportation issues contribute to inequality and also how the difficulty of driving with neurodiversity issues contributes to that inequity. We have watched a lot of interviews with famous people, and many of them thank their parents for getting them to all their practices, activities and competitions. I spent a lot of time sitting in parking lots before I got sick. Bert spent some time doing this over the summer, so he got to see how hard it is to juggle one’s own life while chauffeuring, and also how all that driving affects one’s attention and mood. That’s probably my largest exposure to chemicals now - just exhaust from my own vehicle and other vehicles on the road. I was able to cause my health issues by helping Lily learn how to park in a parking lot for 45 minutes where we would get in and out of the car to check how it was aligned in the spaces a few months ago.


I learned that I can’t really help her with the driving because of my alexithymia and speech issues affect the process, so that put a lot of pressure on Bert. The whole thing was so stressful that Henry doesn’t even want to learn. The silver lining in all of this is that both Lily and Henry are getting better at getting around without a car, but we had to have a reckoning in our family about how driving is really a privilege, and that it is an expensive and risky thing people do so they can drive to a job, mostly, and get food, and that most employers don’t really consider this when they compensate employees. So it really doesn’t make sense for one person to work in order that kids can drive themselves around for social reasons.


Furthermore, I suspect that the costs to have things delivered are a lot less to me than the costs to maintain even one vehicle. I kept our old cars when we upgraded because we took good care of them so that the kids would each have a car, but I did not consider the other costs associated with having four drivers in the house and needing to maintain so many vehicles. I also did not think that telling this plan to Lily would cause her to think that a particular vehicle would be hers alone as soon as she was able to drive, and it was a little rough telling her that I may still need it. I know people who had to share vehicles and made it work, though. Also, as a teen I was one of the few people who had their own reliable transportation, and I took pity on a lot of my friends, so I’m sympathetic to people who aren’t privileged in this way. I have known several people who had major limitations around transportation availability, and being aware of this affects my expectations of others in a compassionate way; I try not to be ableist about requiring people to show up at particular times or with any certain material good. Our ancestors did not have the transportation privilege we enjoy in the modern world; it took them a lot longer to go from one place to another, and a lot more energy to make it happen. I would like to think they were a lot more understanding about how wealth contributes to the ability to find opportunity before cars became tacitly required for modern living.


Like I said, I had to drive around a lot as a homemaker and homeschooler. During the week, we went to many other parks in our area to play with friends, natural areas to hike, libraries for special programs, museums, and thrift stores, as well as to our friends’ houses. I would try to get as many things as I could done at once when I was out to minimize my trips out, and sometimes this frustrated Bert when he came along, because I would ask if we could “swing by the grocery or hardware store” while we were out doing other things. We actually don’t live near much because of the way developers (okay, a certain developer) in our city put the retail at the far east end of town, and also because our homeschooling network was spread out across several different cities covering an area as far west as Masonville, as far east as Grover, as far north as Wellington, and as far south as Boulder. Even if we weren’t homeschooling, as I said, our town is larger east to west than it is north to south, and the developer chose to put their new development on the east side to take advantage of the proximity to other communities and the interstate highway, leaving abandoned retail in the center of town, so everyone on the west side of town basically got screwed in terms of having a life that was more walkable. I’m not even sure I would think that this was odd except for growing up in a large city and having visited Europe. Furthermore, there are not a lot of things for kids to do here, especially in the winter. I had a discussion about “third spaces'' often because of my volunteer efforts and the difficulties finding places for community groups to gather. I have this sense that this is a problem that is perpetuated by churches and their members in particular, as well as small businesses, because they do not lack for a gathering space, and fancy their gathering spaces good for anyone. We pay taxes for local school buildings to stay open, but I learned that because of difficulties paying janitors to keep them open, even school groups have to find other places to meet.


Lunch buddy.


Anyway, it was a slow process, but gradually I was able to be upright for longer and longer periods. I still have to lay down more when I get COVID or have been exposed to chemicals, but in the times between I can get quite a bit done. In the Spring I felt a bit disenchanted with yard work because of pressure from extended family, but I did make it to the nursery and put in some tomatoes. We have made a lot of compost, and that process seems to be going rather smoothly. I am still having difficulty with wanting to implement a garden for the purpose of food alone. I’m not sure I do it as efficiently as I could, even though I understand the difficult learning process involved typically yields a gradual increase of efficiency over the years. There are quite a few things that aren’t ideal especially with respect to pests, irrigation and ergonomics which could be solved easily with a yard makeover, but we don’t have a budget for that. So, I intend to approach it as one would while eating an elephant. We did successfully use less water to irrigate this year, but I think we’d like to lower our consumption even more.


I thought that Groot hadn’t made it through the winter because it didn’t put out leaves, but when I removed the tree wrapper, I found new growth, so that’s exciting. The volunteer trees we have grew a tremendous amount in the last year, so I hope that is representative of what we will see from Groot. Some of the grapes and blackberry bushes are growing rapidly, so hopefully they will be well established for the coming years. I didn’t figure out where to plant potatoes, and I’m thinking I might want to dig up the funions which are some sort of hybrid onion/leek and plant some onions somewhere eventually. Ideally I would love a greenhouse to grow tomatoes, peppers, greens, herbs and mushrooms year round, and then I could put up potatoes and onions in the crawlspace, and then I would probably dehydrate berries and fruits for storage, and anything excess from the greenhouse.


Bert has not been working since early October 2021. He is gradually recovering from the stress of his old jobs. He is still in touch with his friends. A couple people including his mom expressed concern that he hadn’t found other work, but I don’t think they understood that he hasn’t been looking seriously, or what we were doing. He did have several opportunities pop up which he passed on. He felt like his parents and friends never really heard how stressful his job was (after all those years of complaining during get-togethers). Also, it showed us that the people around us did not understand how stressed out or sick we were or that we could not afford to outsource work, travel, or get the healthcare they did. Many of our vacations were partially financed by grandparents or our clients, and were still a stretch for us because of the ways travel took us away from our responsibilities and made us need to hire help or put us behind. We were kind of caught in another weird abyss where a lot of our friends were Boomers and had retired on pensions or even received multiple severance packages, or others who had maintained some sort of illusion of wealth through leasing vehicles, reverse mortgages, and lots of loans. It’s safe to say that these people achieved whatever “success” they have from a combination of being born at the right time and borrowing from the future, and not through being forced to manage resources at hand well. That’s essentially what my father told me - that he wasn’t particularly smart with his investments, just lucky.


In any case, our kids really needed us during this time because they didn’t know what being an adult really entailed because our attention had been misplaced for so many years trying to maintain relationships with people outside our home who were too busy to help with these things and recovering from our interactions in those relationships. I should mention that few of the kids’ peers are capable of independence, either, no matter how they were schooled, and that parents right now aren’t really equipped to teach the incoming generation of adults how to be adults when we were not treated like adults ourselves.


I wonder if my fellow homeschooling mothers felt supported by their “villages” in the sense that it takes a village to raise a child. We know other people who were treated as disposable by their industries; industry and its relationship to the individual has a tremendous effect on children. To make up the difference for the harm caused to our welfare in old age to by our present circumstances with respect to the devaluing of our work and exploitation of our bodies by industry, we are expected to invest our own money into their volatile markets that require additional attention which is a privilege only some have. We were somehow expected to hold all of these institutions up while these same vultures vied for our attention and resources, and we just can’t. Bert originally took the time off so he could have some rest and recuperation, and that never really happened because of the constant onslaught of risk from COVID breakthrough infections because of the poor guidance we received as US and Colorado citizens. So we are trying to take that time now. The vacations we took in the past were not particularly restful, either, because I saw travel as a learning opportunity and didn’t give us a lot of down time when I brainstormed itineraries. They were fun, but that is not the same as restful, and it is an important distinction a lot of people don’t understand.


I am still in touch with two of my friends - one more regularly and just by chat and text, and another on occasion by email. Both of them were caring for dying parents in the past few years and it took a lot of their time. I wasn’t really able to be there for either of them when they were going through that. And they were both having to do that because they were the oldest. It may have given me some anxiety about what that might look like when the time comes for Bert and I to do the same. Bert’s father passed away in 2020, and then his aunt who was caring for his father passed away a few months ago. It’s a rather sad story. Anyway, yes, we have lost some family members during this time, and the grieving process has been rather strange. Also, two of our parents have had cancer during this time. Bert’s philosophy is greatly affected by the ways systemic injustice affected his father, who was a Vietnam Vet (Army) and utility lineman. His life paralleled the stories I remember from the movie Red Pill, and if I didn’t know of his story, I would have thought those men were blowing things out of proportion. But like these other men, Bert’s Dad lived the majority of his life after divorces alone, struggling with mental health issues. He never struggled with money, but it’s pretty clear he was isolated by society and his family for his misfortune, and that this was emotionally painful. Besides having been a Vet, he also suffered burns during the course of his employment as a utility lineman which left him hospitalized for long periods of time. His unstable behavior around the divorce led to Bert’s mother having to file a restraining order, and his relationship with Bert and Bert’s siblings was subsequently quite strained. So yeah, from his perspective, life was pretty bad. But he had bipolar and he had difficulty taking responsibility for it, and that will strain any relationship.


I haven’t really had time to read many of the books I purchased. There is an odd pressure to write because of wanting to share things I consider helpful before I forget them, but also a desire to find the form of self expression that gets my ideas across most efficiently. So I read a little bit and then it stimulates quite a bit of thought which somehow ends up being relevant to whatever is going on around me at the time. One of the themes of the books I collected is sex education. I am particularly interested in how to raise children without imparting sexual trauma. I have been thinking a lot about my own sexual trauma in this context, which started early because of something that happened to a friend and I on the playground when I was six years old. We had a classmate who chased us around and told us he was going to “get” us with his “big dick.” What an image, huh? I am pretty sure we told a teacher and that he got in trouble, but that event changed the nature of our friendship and the things we chose to talk about and think about.


Because of the experiences I have had, and my interest in raising a healthier new generation of people, I have a deep curiosity about where the line is between pornography and art, and who determines morality. I have had people make jokes of a sexual nature when the situational context was not really conducive to it, and I just kind of went along with it, because I was trained to do that. I have also been propositioned in some pretty gutsy ways, and naturally I don’t know what to say when that happens. I think the workplace situation is rather challenging because people do fall in love at work, and I don’t think work should be at odds with love, because I think there can be a good creative flow when sexual energy is not restricted. But sex and love are not the same thing, and the ways people express desire for these two things can be wildly disparate depending on where their solicitations fall with respect to taste in these behaviors. Bert and I have had the luxury of working together daily, and that did require a balance (probably not for the reasons you would think), but he was always of the opinion that he got a lot more done at home than he did in the same amount of time at the office. Plus he had time to “put loads in the dishwasher.” Ha. But seriously, we had to behave ourselves because our kids were home and it was interesting trying to keep up our desire in the context of parenting. I learned that my desire was largely metabolic, as was my creativity. We did get caught a few times, but not until they were older, and of course I felt awful. I have never experienced sexual desire so great that I lost control of it, and I wonder what makes that happen to people, even though I have certainly been tempted myself!


Bert and I had been communicating for several weeks and had gone on several dates before we decided to hook up in 1993. Now that I am older that seems like it was rather fast, but I don’t agree with waiting for marriage to be sexually intimate because sexual intimacy is such an important part of marriage and health, and it’s something a person should know they enjoy with the person they are making a life commitment to. As I am watching what is happening with Lily I am remembering how I sort of fell into Bert’s arms in college as he felt like a respite from the chaos of so many strange advances. And he felt like home. I had made this rule for myself that if I found some sort of reason I might not be able to live with a guy, I didn’t go out on a second date with him, but I also wasn’t really looking. In college I only asked out one guy, but was asked out by three others, if I include Bert, and that was just over a couple of months. I can’t remember if we just decided to go out during one of our conversations or who asked who. Once we popped the cork we went a little crazy, and that lasted quite a few years.


Wisdom for the ages...


In retrospect, knowing what I know now, I think that was probably helped by not having to drive anywhere. Once we were in graduate school, we were less sexually active, and I think that’s because we had to drive and were generally not seeing each other over the course of the day. Besides the exposure to automobile exhaust, I was also having exposure to chemical reagents in the laboratory and I remember feeling less desire. So I would think that if we were concerned about population decline, we might find ways to reorganize the way we live so that it is both more sex- and family-friendly.


I wrote recently that team sports had a long history of marginalizing people. I am not against sports, but I am against unnecessary meritocracy which divides communities. I also have a problem with expensive league sports for this reason. I think I generally have a problem with anything that erodes community by unnecessarily removing its members and putting them in silos far away. I have problems with the way athletes are exploited, and also the way academic programs are impacted by the financial needs of sports programs. Furthermore, I think sports are an energetic privilege with significant outsourced costs we pay in society, and that important unaddressed psychosocial effects of athletics for entertainment are increased risk-taking, substance abuse, carbon use and corporeal narcissism.


Yes, I did come to this conclusion through personal experience with sports, by seeing how friendships with people who participate in league sports often fail, and also hearing stories from Bert’s father’s family about the pressure because his uncle was in the NFL for him to also become a professional athlete. Frankly, there are only so many hours in the day, so if we treat our neighborhoods and the spouses waiting there like bedrooms while we’re out massaging our own egos, they never become much more than that. They don’t become safe. They don’t become communities. And yes, I can make the same argument about communities of faith causing people to be divided from their families and also many other special interests. I once told my sculptor friend that I wished I could have the kinds of connections I had online with people who live nearby. I was kind of like Van Gogh in that way, always wondering why nobody had time to play.


After I made the realizations I did about how delirium tremens and potentially personality disorders were affected by chemicals and stress common to modern life, and realized how busy everyone was, the inability of people around me to connect with each other based on common interests, overlooking class and other divides, became readily apparent.


Last weekend we watched the movie Hair. In it, there is a song asking the question of why people can be so cold (which I have heard before), which says it is the people who want to help the masses that are most likely to leave a friend in a time of need, and I confess that has been the relationship I have been forced into with society because of my education and specialized health interests and COVID certainly did not help.


I have written elsewhere about what inspired me to try nude modeling, but I realized some other important factors which I forgot to mention. When we were young, my sister and I liked to dress up and take each others’ pictures like the women we saw in magazines. Then, when I was in high school I had friends who modeled for the department store underwear ads, and another girl I knew was on the cover of Seventeen. Then, I took figure drawing in college and that made it so much more professional to me. I really enjoyed that class and I won an award, but I didn’t get the opportunity to do figure drawing again until after I met my watercolor teacher on Facebook who ended up becoming a friend. She invited me to a well established figure drawing studio at another artists’ home near mine, and there I got to draw many women and several men. I experimented with many different media, and eventually my new friends invited me to be the featured artist for the local artists’ association. So Bert and I have many of the nudes I drew from that time hanging in our home. Before meeting my watercolor artist friend, I met a photographer through the local attachment parenting group who was doing belly and boudoir photography. She did family photos for us. Anyway, I loved her photos, and they were a great inspiration.


Then, I kind of got into the occult through the idea of light work and learned about the importance of body acceptance in mental health, around the time I developed friendships with two sculptors. I was interested in learning from them and being a muse, so I contacted my friend who coordinated the models for our figure drawing class because he trains new models and had said to me before that it might be something I could do. Bert was afraid at first, even though I had drawn all those other people, and he had many conversations with our friend. But he was very happy with the result. Lily and Henry were kept in the loop about my modeling. And they had seen all the drawings I did and came to my show. So the pictures of me here and on social media are an outgrowth of the psychological process of learning to love myself. I do not believe it is pornography, and I do not believe it should be. I believe bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and are manifestations of nature’s wisdom. I think that hiding them creates unnatural desire and expectations.


Oh the Nudity! Photo credit Bert Sailor


Plus, I have it on good authority that most people are pervs, because otherwise the human race would die out. At least I am honest about enjoying sex and intimacy, but it saddens me that my honesty may have led to my exploitation. I know other people who are nudists (which I am not), and they don’t seem to have this problem of being spied on. Consent is crucial.


Hee-haw.