f e s t i v e.

These things go together. 

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Ottolenghi
Caramelized Garlic Tart (thyme)
Cognac Pears with Fennel and Hazelnut

Anna Jones
Mushroom/Rice/Chestnut Roast (sage, rosemary)
Celery Root + Sweet Garlic Pie (mustard, sage, rosemary)
Roast Potatoes (rosemary)

Misc
Carrot Osso Buco (mushroom, red wine, vadouvan)
Rodekool (clove & bay leaf)
Aardappel puree (butter & nutmeg)
Spruitjes
Endive/Blue Cheese/Hazelnut/Pear/Honey/Mustard

dupuytren dosing.

 Merry new year. Starting experimental protocol today, hand hurting. 

1) 400mg magnesium citrate internally
2) 50 micrograms Vitamine D (2000 IU/IE) internally
3) 3mg Boron internally. 

4) 5 drops Mg oil topically
5) 5 drops primrose oil topically

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dupuytren's contracture, treatment plan 1.

Putting this here in the absence of anywhere else good to put it. 

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I'll write an intro to this in a bit, for now I just need to write down amounts and manufacturers so I can place an order for all this shit. But fuck: like most homeopathic remedies, there is just zero consensus on anything. 

1) Vitamin D3 supplement, 4000IU, or is this way too much. 
2) Boron, topical? One of the more obscure possible cures. Some data here. Suggested mediums, media?  Calcium fructoborate containing 3 mg of Boron twice per day. 10mg internal was also suggested somewhere. Need to figure out dose. 
3) Primrose oil, topical. Seems simple, might also help with my menopause problem. 
4) Magnesium biglycinate (biglycinate b/c it's absorbed better. Magnesium oxide is supposedly "barely bioavailable") at least 100mg internal because external can cause irritation, which is the last thing my hands need. There are many online articles/posts about this but they all seem to somehow refer back to Denise Nagel's experience. 

5) DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide). Unclear effects. 
6) Xiaflex, a solution of collagenase enzymes that's injected right into the cords, seems like the least potentially destructive of the "real medical procedures", but people have also described it as "incredibly painful". 

:|

america 2021.

My deep cynicism about this blog and about blogging in general will be placed on pause for the next 30 days as I attempt to document what must certainly be an especially unique moment in time, as if all moments in time aren't unique: in the middle of a global pandemic, the general dissolution of capitalist illusions, and the beginning of the climate change endgame, I'm irresponsibly taking a pollution-spewing commercial flight from one of the "hottest" Delta variant hotspots in Europe to one of the, get ready for this, "hottest" places in America. See that, hot/hot? It's like riding a bike. 

Anyway, please see Instagram for the aforementioned documentation. Here's a bit also. 

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It's not even noon yet but this morning's input has already generated a multitude of sputtering emotional outputs and my flight is still 3 hours away. The first of these outbursts occurred at 09:52, when I arrived at Station Sloterdijk underslept and on high alert only to discover that in the time it took me to leave the house and catch a bus for a 12 minute ride, my arch-nemesis the NS had cancelled most of the trains to the airport. The point of even going to Sloterdijk in the first place is its "ease of connectivity" to the airport.

Maybe I'll write again about the NS, but my loathing is a flavor of hatred so monotonous and unproductive that there's almost no point in indulging it. For now, we'll just say that I managed to catch the last train from Sloterdijk to Schiphol before things got really shitty. Then, cue all kinds of feelings about being at the airport, a familiar place, where almost nothing works the way it used to. I did feel gratitude at being an experienced traveller who is mostly sighted, mostly mobile, and mostly accustomed to the basic idiosyncrasies of European travel so that I could truly focus on being stressed out about pandemic-specific details. 

But, it all went kind of fine, some of it felt even quicker than usual, even though true efficiency continues to be made impossible by those people who seem surprised to find themselves at the airport, caught completely off guard by a request for their boarding documents or ID. Then: I saw right in front of me a mother looking at her teenage boy's face the way only a mother can, searching for clues, ready to accept any or all of the information they hinted at, and for a moment I understood what I was doing today. AWWWWWWWWW.

Then, you know, you see a couple fellow passengers not wearing masks properly; you engage in a few of those standard "in case I don't see you again, goodbye forever" conversations with loved ones; you feel all the feels about being sober at an airport for the first time in many years, ect ect ect. Is like bad carnival ride. 

Turns out not much has changed about the actually being on a plane part of flying. Boarding seemed faster due to a revolutionary new "five rows at a time instead of ten" technique. You could still only understand/hear half the announcements. It's still impossible to figure out how to get your futuristic Entertainment Screen out of your armrest. Cabin crew come by less frequently, and talk less because nobody can hear or understand anybody else. 

There is still no room to do anything at all except pray for a wormhole or some other non-lethal deus ex machina escape mechanism. I guess I'm going to have to turn to movies pretty soon. Only 6 out of 9 hours left on this flight. 

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the tree was inside it all along, part 2.

Just to be clear, because I used to hate it when I would find a blog that would talk about addiction struggles and then the blogger would disappear for two years: today is 17 months without alcohol. 

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the tree was inside it all along, part 1.

Sorry, I'm just grimly fascinated by the completely detached way Wikipedia lays this out, as if it's not one of the most crippling challenges that has ever faced we humans.

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In her final book, Neurosis and Human Growth, Karen Horney lays out a complete theory of the origin and dynamics of neurosis.^[10] In her theory, neurosis is a distorted way of looking at the world and at oneself, which is determined by compulsive needs rather than by a genuine interest in the world as it is. Horney proposes that neurosis is transmitted to a child from his or her early environment and that there are many ways in which this can occur:^[10]:18

When summarized, they all boil down to the fact that the people in the environment are too wrapped up in their own neuroses to be able to love the child, or even to conceive of him as the particular individual he is; their attitudes toward him are determined by their own neurotic needs and responses.

The child's initial reality is then distorted by his or her parents' needs and pretenses. Growing up with neurotic caretakers, the child quickly becomes insecure and develops basic anxiety. To deal with this anxiety, the child's imagination creates an idealized self-image:^[10]:22

Each person builds up his personal idealized image from the materials of his own special experiences, his earlier fantasies, his particular needs, and also his given faculties. If it were not for the personal character of the image, he would not attain a feeling of identity and unity. He idealizes, to begin with, his particular "solution" of his basic conflict: compliance becomes goodness, love, saintliness; aggressiveness becomes strength, leadership, heroism, omnipotence; aloofness becomes wisdom, self-sufficiency, independence. What—according to his particular solution—appear as shortcomings or flaws are always dimmed out or retouched.

Once he identifies himself with his idealized image, a number of effects follow. He will make claims on others and on life based on the prestige he feels entitled to because of his idealized self-image. He will impose a rigorous set of standards upon himself in order to try to measure up to that image. He will cultivate pride, and with that will come the vulnerabilities associated with pride that lacks any foundation. Finally, he will despise himself for all his limitations. Vicious circles will operate to strengthen all of these effects.

Eventually, as he grows to adulthood, a particular "solution" to all the inner conflicts and vulnerabilities will solidify. He will be either

• expansive, displaying symptoms of narcissism, perfectionism, or vindictiveness
• self-effacing and compulsively compliant, displaying symptoms of neediness or codependence
• resigned, displaying schizoid tendencies

In Horney's view, mild anxiety disorders and full-blown personality disorders all fall under her basic scheme of neurosis as variations in the degree of severity and in the individual dynamics. The opposite of neurosis is a condition Horney calls self-realization, a state of being in which the person responds to the world with the full depth of his or her spontaneous feelings, rather than with anxiety-driven compulsion. Thus the person grows to actualize his or her inborn potentialities. Horney compares this process to an acorn that grows and becomes a tree: the acorn has had the potential for a tree inside it all along.

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terror management theory.

Haha Wikipedia: 

According to terror management theory (TMT) neuroticism is primarily caused by insufficient anxiety buffers against unconscious death anxiety.^[32] These buffers consist of:

1. Cultural worldviews that impart life with a sense of enduring meaning, such as social continuity beyond one's death, future legacy and afterlife beliefs, and
2. A sense of personal value, or the self-esteem in the cultural worldview context, an enduring sense of meaning.

While TMT agrees with standard evolutionary psychology accounts that the roots of neuroticism in Homo sapiens or its ancestors are likely in adaptive sensitivities to negative outcomes, it posits that once Homo sapiens achieved a higher level of self-awareness, neuroticism increased enormously, becoming largely a spandrel, a non-adaptive byproduct of our adaptive intelligence, which resulted in a crippling awareness of death that threatened to undermine other adaptive functions. This overblown anxiety thus needed to be buffered via intelligently creative, but largely fictitious and arbitrary notions of cultural meaning and personal value. Since highly religious or supernatural conceptions of the world provide "cosmic" personal significance and literal immortality, they are deemed to offer the most efficient buffers against death anxiety and neuroticism. Thus, historically, the shift to more materialistic and secular cultures - starting in the neolithic, and culminating in the industrial revolution, is deemed to have increased neuroticism.^[32]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism 

a small victory.

This was something I wrote on Instagram that I will put here also in an attempt to remind me that I can also just write without a 2,200 character limit.

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Loath to do this here (also loath to begin any sentence with “loath”) but there is supposed to be a public component so here it is. It’s hardly controversial to declare that the last 365 days have been generally unprecedented in our lifetimes. It might be slightly more controversial to declare (possibly hyperbolically) that the value of modern hyperbolic language has kind of been exhausted, that we’re so far off the scale of normality in 2021 that there’s barely any point in exaggerating for effect anymore, because hey, whatever it is, THIS COULD BE THE YEAR, you never know. So i am not exaggerating when i say that I never ever fucking imagined that one day I’d be declaring, in “public”, with a nebulous mix of pride and embarrassment, that I haven’t had any alcohol in 370 days. And that it would be 100% true. And that it would be accompanied by such a pure, non-rationalized feeling of liberation and relief. I never believed that “sober people” were ACTUALLY happy about not drinking, I thought for sure it was something they had to desperately brainwash themselves into believing. It feels wrong to say I hope I never become the non-drinker that always turned me off of non-drinkers, but it’s true, I do hope that. And I know I’m also fucking that up with this post. But I will squirt out one more cliche and cheesy thing before mercifully stopping and never posting about this shit ever again: if you are tired of your relationship with alcohol and want to change it; if it is making you more miserable than carefree: once you stop for a while, at least months, for me it was certainly more than 3 months but who really knows, there is a switch that will eventually flip where the genuine relief of not being dominated by alcohol and the genuine dread of falling back into that increasingly relentless and horrifying cycle are more powerful than any anxiety you might have or imagine having over the grim-sounding “life without alcohol”. And when it happens, this switch will feel natural and normal and unforced, unexaggerated for effect. Do it now while there are no social events to struggle through.

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