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pinehutch · 4 years

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9, 18, 23 (any, all or none ❤️) for the end of year asks

Answering some end-of-year asks, and then crashing. Tomorrow is drive followed by three or four or five more days of holiday socializing and busy-ing and I’m pretty much toast already.

9. Best month for you this year?

August. Not for any one stand-out reason, but I love late summer, I love borders. August 2019 was a border for me, between someone-I-have-been and someone-I-am-and-will-be, I think, and there were many small things to love about it. It was exhausting, but good. I watched an old favourite movie with my main squeeze, but I also did some professional things I hadn’t done before. I worked hard, and got to reconnect with some people in my home-away-from-home while also stepping up, career-wise, again. There was a family event, and beautiful weather.

A long-standing annual tradition with local bff resumed, after a year off in 2018. My ankle had healed enough (from its second consecutive sprained af summer) that I was more mobile than not again. I swam. I took extra days off. I chopped off a good eight inches of hair in what has remained the best haircut of my life.

I’m also pretty sure that August is when I started talking with Internet Cool Guy and co-founder of the Sad Bastards Society @mia-ugly, and that has been, like, pretty good I guess (imagine that I am lounging, extremely cool-y).

The later months of 2019 have been a wonderful ordeal of letting myself know and be known a bit more, and I can’t disentangle that from a full and satisfying August.

Monumentally, it was also in August when I started writing again on a semi-regular basis, and if there is anything I can say for 2019 - or for the 2010’s in general - it’s that I started making poetry a regular practice for myself again, in the second half of the year.

18. A memorable meal this year?

Here are three. Uncharacteristically, it’s not about the food (I like food, I’m a solid home cook, I live in a food-obsessed small town, and Toronto is near enough. And yet.)

My dad turned 70, and we ate hamburgers and coleslaw and drank beer in the backyard. I have a gentle but distant relationship with my father. My brother and his family came. There were many dogs, including from the neighbours’ house.

July, I think, and fajitas and the best flour tortillas ever in a provincial park, with family. Earlier that day I sat on the beach beside someone I hadn’t spoken to in probably 10 years, who just happened to be at the same place at the same time. I drove my dad up to the park that day, because his health has been poor and he’s not allowed to drive anymore, and we blasted How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful on the drive home, which went past the turn off to the old house, the old lake, and that had been the drive back and forth for so many years, so many years ago.

A little over a month ago I got to take my soul friend to one of my favourite brunch places, and the coffee was quite good and the fireplace was warm and I felt so rich to have such people in my life.

(Honourable mention to the glou-glou and multiple rounds of cheese at the holiday party with the work team a few weeks ago. That gets the most points for food and for atmosphere, crammed into the wine bar and watching fat, glittering snowflakes hit the sidewalks outside.)

23. If you could send a message to yourself back on the first day of the year, what would it be?

Honestly? “Those back stairs are Slippery When Wet.” Not even joking a little; two years in a row I’ve done probably-permanent damage to my right ankle falling down the stairs at the beginning of summer. My physiotherapist is moving his practice and I’m honestly catching myself thinking, oh, I wonder if I should follow to his new practice, we should keep in touch for book chats and updates on his kids - we’ve spent that much time together. There is enough chronic pain in my life that I don’t really need to self-inflict any more of it (tell that to my fingernails, augh).

***

So, so much to think about. A new decade feels monumental in a way it hasn’t since 1990 was looming.

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shark-myths · 7 years

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the mania singles

traveling through time

breaking news in Pete Wentz’s incredibly recursive, self-referential relationship with himself:

THE MANIA SINGLES ARE EXPLICITLY LINKED TO SPECIFIC BAND ERAS

CRYSTAL BALLS ALWAYS CLOUDY EXCEPT WHEN THEY LOOK INTO THE PAST AND CALLING YOU FROM THE FUTURE: the themes are laid out for us to infer that this album is a jumble, a retrospective, an out-of-order examination of the same thing from different times, angles, and selves

Is Mania is peterick retrospective album????? uh, probably

……let me explain……

The order of release is, I think, significant, so let’s proceed accordingly. Pete’s metaphors have always layered up and referenced back on themselves, with scraps from his 2005 lj appearing as recently as in AB/AP lyrics. so let’s do some tinhat digging…

Young and Menace – as made obvious by the title/chorus of the track, this is about being young and out of control. Sure, Pete might feel that way now to some extent, but this is one of the most settled and clearly happy periods of his life that we’ve ever witnessed. it’s safe to assume from readings of their discography that he felt significantly more monstrous (ah, to be a young bisexual! is there a keener #monster feel that exists) in the past.

lyrical markers to prompt us to backdate this track:

I only wrote this down to make you press rewind

Britney Spears 2000 lyrics reference

I woke up in my shoes again links us to the line in grand theft autumn from 2003 my new fashion for waking up with pants on

probable era of reference for this track: 2001-2003

Champion – once again, this track makes more sense if we place it at a time in his life when Pete and his bandmates were struggling with personal demons as well as the fickle abuse of public perception. its theme fits much better with prehiatus content from the boys’ lives, and the song opens with a prompt of exactly that:

I’m calling you from the future (to let you know we made a mistake --> and if you don’t think this ties in p e r f e c t l y to Tryst Theory we are living very different lives my friend)

there’s a fog in the past

I’m just young enough to still believe specifically, like y&m did, brings up youth as a theme; and they do seem to know what to believe in, now, personally. To me, this line is evocative of Believers Never Die and seems to place the song in that era; the lyrical content certainly addresses hiatus themes and the extremely rough time most of the boys had surviving it. (even andy told an interviewer he thought about suicide during the hiatus, and we all know how pete immolated)

specific references to pete’s rage and trying to blow out the light, like he’s trying to extinguish something in himself because of the pain it causes, and the way Patrick has always been linked up with light metaphors in pete’s writing

I got nothing but dreams inside conflicts directly with the TLOTRO lyric I’m here with having dreams. I mean we do have the omnipresent dialectic dilemma of bisexuality, and I am dicks-and-hearts-out for bi!Pete readings, but I think this specific contradiction is here to remind us, again, that these songs are dated for different eras. being full of dreams maps on really well to you are the dreamers, we are the dream; I dreamed about the afterlife but I never really lived; I used to waste my time dreaming of being alive, now I only waste it dreaming of you.

(I think there are lots of good indicators that we can read these dreams as being pete’s dreams of being with Patrick, and I should probably write a whole post about that at some point)

probable era of reference for this track: 2005-2009ish

The Last of the Real Ones – this song, I think, is the only one anchored in the present day. (also can we talk about interviews where pete teases this song before its release and calls it their first real/only real love song????? augh)

I really specifically want to look at this bit: I’m here at the beginning of the end, oh the end of infinity with you—anyone who read my last meta post knows how I feel about the infinity = gay love content of fob’s discography—I’m done with having dreams, the thing that I believe, oh you drain all the fear from me.

listen I think we have ample ground to read that line, I’m done with having dreams, and especially the fearlessness, to mean that pete’s not just dreaming of Patrick anymore—either as a message that he’s ready to start now, or perhaps evidence that active trysting ™ has resumed (and check out the y&m elvis duran interview if you want to imagine a version of pete who had to get so drunk on sake at a sushi place that he created an excuse for him and Patrick, sharing a hotel room in nyc, to MAKE SOME EXPENSIVE MISTAKES)

the thing that anchors this most firmly in present day for me is the idea of finding true gold, finally being fearless, and understanding the worth that can be uncovered under golden plating. it took pete a lot of years and suffering to get to the point where he could appreciate that truth about himself and the people around him. this is such a love song. this is such an insane peterick love song. oh my god, you guys.

openly talking about his therapist and mental health is also more reminiscent of the modern canon, although it did appear occasionally in folie era

probable era of reference: present day

I’m seeing them play tonight in St Louis—hit me up if you are too!—and after I hear the new song I will update this with my thoughts on it. no spoilers yet—I want the first time I hear it to be live and in person with the people I love most in the world, because that is an experience that will probably never be replicated for me and wouldn’t have been possible without the album delay. thanks guys 💜 💜 💜 💜 💜

**to be continued**

#mania #lyrics meta #peterick #fob #fall out boy #tryst theory #the last of the real ones #young and menace #champion #expensive mistake #tinhat

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veloxaraptor · 7 years

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So fucking done right now.

I’m waiting on results for some blood and urine lab work my doctor put in for me this past Friday. I specifically mentioned this to my husband. I asked him to either wait to check out of medical until the end of the week, or to ask and make sure that his checking out meant that I’d still be able to get results, since my enrollment is tied to him as the “sponsor” for my military based health care.

He checked out of medical today.

Forgot to ask the front desk, because of course he did.

“Well it shouldn’t effect you until we get to the next place. You can still make appointments if you’re not feeling well.”

That’s-- that’s not. AUGH.

I swear to god I married a moron sometimes.

So I went online to the Tricare website to see if they had updated my file with my lab results yet. (I did notify them that they should call my home phone, but I like to be on top of things since I’ve been having some long term, obnoxious uterine pain and wonky cycles. Plus my birth control seems to be exacerbating the problem. Hence the lab work.)

My Tricare account says it’s having problems showing my records and has no information about me WHATSOEVER.

I’m hoping it’s just because the site is being weird and not because my husband decided to check out before we had a chance to get my results back. I’m fucking pissed.

#ranting #angry #fucking god damn it

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nancygduarteus · 6 years

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Keto in a Bottle

“If there’s a downside, it is kind of crazy tasting,” said Geoff Woo, the founder of HVMN, a Silicon Valley company that makes nootropics, or performance-enhancing supplements. We were in a conference room in The Atlantic’s office building, and he was bracing me for my trial run of his latest product.

It was a small, clear vial labeled “Ketone,” a new type of energy drink his company is releasing this week. Its nutrition label says it contains 120 calories, but no carbs, no fat, and no protein. Instead, it’s all ketones, the chemical that Woo and his company are calling a “fourth food group.” He hopes the drink will allow people to reap the benefits of occasional fasting—high ketone levels inside the body—without actually having to not eat.

I unscrewed the top and, college-days muscle memory kicking in, chugged it like a shot of Captain Morgan. It tasted like cough syrup that had been poured into a garbage bag and left in the sun.

“Augh!” I cried.

“I compare it to a combination of a liquor shot with nail polish remover,” Woo said.

Woo’s co-worker, Brianna Stubbs, went to fetch me a glass of water. “We’ve done a lot of work to make it better,” she said.

Within an hour, the drink was supposed to help improve my athletic performance by changing how my body burned energy during exercise. Some people also say it helps them feel more energetic and focused on their work.

About 25 minutes after I drank Ketone, Woo and Stubbs pricked my finger to see if it was working. My blood sugar, which had verged on diabetic levels from some pineapple I had eaten that morning, was down to near-normal levels. Meanwhile, my ketones, which had been practically nonexistent before imbibing—measuring just 0.2 millimolar—had soared to 4.9.

“It would have taken me six days of fasting to get to that level normally,” Woo said. “To hit five is pretty crazy.”

* * *

Ketones are chemicals made from fat that the body burns for fuel when it runs out of carbohydrates. The process of burning these ketones is called “ketosis,” and it can be achieved through either fasting or through a “ketogenic” diet that’s high in fat and very low in carbohydrates. The ketogenic diet was initially developed more than a century ago to control seizures in epileptic children. Today, some healthy people fast intermittently or follow ketogenic diets in order to remain in a near-constant state of ketosis, saying it helps them control their weight, feel more energetic, and stay focused.

My trial bottle of Ketone (Olga Khazan/The Atlantic)

Woo says he fasts for at least 18 hours a day and runs a 8,000-person strong intermittent fasting group. He subscribes to fledgling evidence showing that fasting might help boost neurogenesis, or the growth of new brain cells, as well as lead to longevity. When he met me at 11 a.m. in Washington last week, he only had coffee and seltzer that morning.

“I would say almost standard eating is an eating disorder, in the sense that when you get invited out for happy hour or a lunch meeting, we don’t do that because we’re hungry,” Woo said. “We do that because it’s a cultural norm. … Romans centered their meals around one large meal a day, typically around lunch. A lot of East Asian cultures had two large meals a day. ”

Though ketones are considered an especially efficient energy source, the liquid version isn’t found in food; it had to be manufactured in a lab. Because the keto diet can be unappealing—low on fruit and vegetables and high on bunless burgers—it can be hard for all but the most committed to stick with it. And though intermittent fasting can help the body attain the same reported benefits, fasting is, well … fasting.

Kieran Clarke, a professor of physiological biochemistry at the University of Oxford, began researching dietary ketones in 2003 as part of a U.S. Department of Defense grant that was intended to find ways to help troops perform better on the battlefield. She and her collaborators created the ketone ester, as these liquid ketones are called. Clarke founded a company, T∆S, to market her findings, and she licensed the intellectual property to HVMN (which is pronounced “Human”).

Each bottle of HVMN’s Ketone provides 25 grams of the ketone ester. The drink can now be preordered, but it doesn’t come cheap: A three-bottle package—three doses meant to be taken, at most, within a day—sells for $99. The FDA has blessed HVMN as “generally recognized as safe,” but it’s considered a food, not a supplement.

You’re supposed to take the ketones an hour before you work out to boost performance, or 30 minutes after you exercise for recovery. The company claims that some people feel a sense of enhanced focus and “flow” after drinking the substance, though the evidence behind this claim is less established.

It’s not necessary to fast or follow a ketogenic diet while drinking Ketone, but Woo said it could be a type of “bridge” to get people through the first few rough days of fasting. (Clarke, in fact, recommended drinking Ketone with a banana or another carb, so the body has its choice of fuel.)

In a study of 39 elite cyclists published last year, Clarke and others found the athletes were able to go 400 meters further in half an hour after drinking a ketone drink, compared with a carbohydrate or fat-based energy drink. One reason for the increased performance could be that their muscles contained lower levels of lactate, which causes an achy feeling while working out. Rats on a ketone diet have also run further on a treadmill and completed a maze faster than rats on a regular diet.

Ketone esters have been shown to have some promise in Alzheimer’s patients and in people with traumatic brain injuries as well, but research on ketones’ cognitive benefits is still very early.

Most recently, Stubbs, a scientist with HVMN and a British rowing champion, found that ketone esters can suppress appetite by controlling ghrelin, a hunger hormone. The reason my glucose dropped after drinking Ketones, Woo speculated, is that the drink signaled to my liver to stop releasing sugar. He is hopeful that, eventually, dietary ketones could become a treatment for people with Type II diabetes.

“If you can replace some of the calories in your diet that would have come from carbohydrate and refined sugar with ketones, now that it’s in a bottle ...” Stubbs said.

“This is so much grosser than a donut, though, I have to tell you guys,” I said.

“We’ll work on putting it in a donut,” she replied.

Several dietitians have tossed cold water on the idea of ketosis-in-a-bottle. “I have not yet found one ketone ester supplement that has been able to successfully put someone into the state of ketosis, no matter what dosage they take,” Ben Sit, the president of Evolved Sport and Nutrition, told BuzzFeed News.

Over email, John Newman, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said, “I’m a little skeptical about the idea of enhancing performance in young, healthy people—I’m a geriatrician after all. However, the older patients I care for in the hospital would certainly be better off if they could recapture some of the resilience that their brains and bodies had when they were younger.”

He said there’s still a “lot of hard work” remaining to determine if ketones can translate to better health.

* * *

I drank Ketone on two different days, and on one of them, I went for a run to test out the sports benefits. The thing is, I’m an abysmal runner. I recently ran a 5k and would have finished last in my age group, had there not been some people on actual crutches participating. On Ketone, I did manage to run about two and a half miles in 30 minutes, which is actually good for me. But any dreams I had of finally lapping moms with jogging strollers were pretty much dashed.

For me, the clearer Ketone benefit was cognitive: I had the most incredible surge of positive energy I’ve had in months. I’ve never been one of those people who is happy for no reason, but I found myself smiling at strangers and cheerily making small-talk in the office kitchen. Even more surprising is that the previous night, I had taken a red-eye flight and gotten almost no sleep.

On Ketone Day, I was able to stay working on a story late into the evening, and I barely noticed the extra hours roll by. And when I reread it, the story even made sense! This is the best drug ever! I thought. I am Ethan Hawke in Gattaca, not saving anything for the swim back. I am Jessie Spano, so excited and so scared. I can’t wait to get my hands on a case of these suckers!

Then I remembered something from the last big story I wrote about nootropics. In the absence of clear metrics on cognitive enhancers—how much more productive was I, really?—a placebo effect can sometimes take hold. “You can give people lemonade and tell them it’s a cognitive enhancer, and they’ll get perky,” is how Derek Lowe, a science blogger and expert on drug discovery, put it to me then.

Indeed, Clarke burst my bubble: “The ketones are all gone within three hours. There’s absolutely nothing left after three hours,” she said. In other words, it’s unlikely the ketones I drank at 11 a.m. could have been amping me up at 9 p.m.

When I visited San Francisco for my last story on nootropics, everyone I met seemed really … on. Many of them ate special diets, or had “stacks” of pills and supplements they took to keep their focus heightened. Or at least, they believed it was heightened. But for hyper-intelligent people looking for just a micron of an edge over the competition, there’s not much of a difference between the two.

I might glug some ketones if I ran marathons, or if I faced some grueling concentration task, like a paper to write in a hurry. But I wouldn’t expect this company’s beverage to magically transform you from a couch potato into an Olympian or hyper-focused work robot. They’re only HVMN, after all.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/keto-in-a-bottle/545129/?utm_source=feed

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