pktechgirl

Is this that emotion you humans call cope?

Between the HCl and the wake-up grapes, I feeling pretty amazing. I had a really stressful week at work, something that would previously have consumed my life and required a ton of processing. And now... it was stressful, I didn't like it, but it seems smaller and far away. And there is a lot of power in having the worst thing that could happen happenand still being fine.

For a more controlled experiment: my HOA president is an ass in certain very predicable ways. He criticized me in a way he's criticized me before. Last time I got super worked up about how unfair it was. This time... fuck it. He can't actually make me change, and until he cooperates with me he's just making more work for himself.

The last time I had this abundance of resilience was when I was on cortisol. There are three really definitely valid* treatments for hypoadrenia, of which cortisol is the most severe. It makes a certain amount of sense- "you don't have enough cortisol, here, have some", but it's also the kludgiest, because it limits your body's control over its chemical balance. If the problem is your body *can't* control your chemicals, possibly because it has been attempting to do so for so long with so few resources and is now completely burnt out, it's the best option, but there are side effects. Weight gain, insomnia, facial and chest hair in women*, diminished immune response, etc. I went off cortisol even though I wasn't fully better because I was well enough that the side effects weren't worth it.

The one-step-removed treatment is DHEA, which your adrenal glands make into cortisol. This is an excellent solution if the problem is DHEA deficiency (I don't know what causes that) and your adrenal glands are healthy enough to use it. Because your glands are still in control, it's far less likely to lead to cortisone excess, but it's not sufficient for real hypoadrenia. I've been on and off it a few times, and it was helpful for a while and then it wasn't.

The even-more-removed option is to consume raw animal adrenal glands (they make nice sanitary little pills of them). These contain a small amount of all the coritsol precursors plus the exact proteins that make up the adrenal glands themselves (well, the exact proteins that make up cow adrenal glands). The idea is that it provides targeted support to help your body repair the adrenal glands, and the cortisol it contains is a fringe benefit.

I've had lingering hypoadrenia symptoms ever since I went off formal treatment, but really did not want to restart it. Cortisol was right out, and even DHEA and raw adrenals just didn't feel right. Until ~5 weeks after I started the HCl tablets. I really felt like taking Iron and Raw Adrenal. 3 or 4 weeks after that, almost immediately after I started breakfast in bed. DHEA started seeming like a good idea, so I'm giving that a shot.


*As in, the have obvious mechanisms that explain why they are helpful, and may even have had studies done, as opposed to random plants that are shaped like adrenal glands.

**which has persisted even though I'm no longer on the drugs. Whoo hoo!

This is the opener from Season 3 of Community. Pay particular attention starting at 0:30.

For those of you who haven't watched Community in the past: the black woman in the purple sparkly dress is named Shirley, the bald man in the same outfit is The Dean. Wearing women's clothing, or more properly women's costume's, is The Dean's thing. This clip works on so many levels I can't even contain it all in my brain.

First, it has one of the most outwardly weird characters saying "we're gonna seem like a mainstream dream", while doing one of the thing that makes him the weirdest. Followed by the weirdest character saying "and be appealing to all mankind." It is the biggest possible fuck you to everyone who said the show was too weird* in a song where the lead character is wishing they would be less weird

But it's also a subtle racial critique of... I dunno, someone. The characters? The audience? TV execs? No one thought it was weird that, in a dance number full of people in their normal clothes singing show tunes, there was a black woman in sparkly show choir gear singing gospel. It only seemed weird when the white guy did it. And yes, some of that is because he's a man, but that is bonus social commentary: why is it more offputting for him to be weird than for Shirley to be weird?

It's especially apropo in light of Glee, where the fat black girl has complained multiple times in universe she only gets brought in to sing long, high, loud closing notes despite being a better singer than the white(ish) female lead**, been demonstrated to be in-universe correct every time, and yet is still passed over for lead singer. The in-show explanation is that she's lazy where the other girl works her ass off, which does not really make me feel better about Glee's attitude towards black people. I would love to know what Glee is thinking on this. Does Ryan Murphy not realize one of his writers is calling him racist? Is it confirmation of my theory that the narrative is being rewritten by the glee club director to make himself look good?. The show runners couldn't possibly think that pointing out racism is sufficient to make themselves not-racist, right?

I'd also like to talk about S2E1 of Girls, which brings on Community's Donald Glover to play Hannah's Black Republican Boyfriend. This character was clearly written in response to criticism of Girls as ignoring people of color, and I cannot tell if it is a commentary on that criticism or proof it is justified. The only thing we ever learn about Glover's character is that he's a Republican. Other characters intimate that he's against gay marriage, but he never confirms that, much less explains his position. Nor does he say if he thinks the GOP is less racially problematic than the Democrats, or that they are more problematic but their strengths on other priorities trump that. I can't tell if this is Girls completely failing in an attempt to prove they're not racist, or embedding Hannah's self-absorption in the medium.

Anyways, Community once again succeeds where Glee fails, in that they're multilayered self references both make sense and point in a not-racist direction

*Followed, unfortunately, by a season that I felt overdid the weirdness. Much like Family Guy, the things that made the show wonderful didn't work in large doses, and the creators didn't realize that just because the other bits weren't mentioned in the reviews didn't mean they weren't critical.

**to be fair to Glee, the actress playing the female lead is Sephardic Jewish and the character doesn't know if her biological father was black or ethnic Jewish. She would not have been allowed in most country clubs in the 70s. She is nonetheless waaaay whiter than Mercedes.

I have trouble getting out of bed. Depending on when I have to be at work, it can take anywhere from twenty minutes to three hours for me to go from conscious to actually getting up. Followed by several more hours of me dragging around the house. That + anxiety symptoms* were enough to almost get me diagnosed depression. Unless it was an adrenal problem. No one really knows. Then I found this image.


Caption: "If you wake up super early after a night of drinking, it's because your blood sugar level is low. Eat a piece of bread, or a spoon full of peanut butter. It will spike your insulin levels, and you can go back to sleep"

Let me tell you a few things about this image:

• It originally appeared on the Advice Animals subreddit


• it's advice from a duck


• The duck does not appear to understand the difference between blood sugar and insulin.

As soon as I saw it, I knew it had the answer.

I wasn't waking up because I was done sleeping, I was waking up because my blood sugar was cratering. Which, despite waking me up, also makes me tired and slow moving. So I've started keeping snacks on my nightstand, and what do you know, I now either fall back to sleep or genuinely wake up. Interestingly, the last time I took food the very second I woke up was when I was taking cortisol for adrenal fatigue, because the cortisol helped me get up and it had to be taken with food. In retrospect, I wonder if the cortisol was getting undue credit for work done by food.

And that's how I gave up caffeine.

Other interesting news: my core body temp has gone up half a degree, relative to before I started taking HCl supplements.

*Now known to be caused by me slowly starving to death

If you watch videos on youtube of soldiers greeting their kids after a deployment, you'll notice their first reaction is always crying.



This is pretty much me and food. I'll be happy to be eating eventually, but right now it's all realizing what I've been missing. For example, I always assumed it was normal to barely be able to hold back tears when food you expected to be there is not there. I am beginning to think that "counting on that yogurt" is not a thing for most people.

I've always regretted... well, not a lack of travel on my part, more the absence of desire to travel. All the cool kids want to go to these cool foreign places and my idea of a vacation is a weekend in a cabin with comfort food and no people. In retrospect, this is because vacation offered a million ways for me to potentially starve to death. Regimented meal times. Having to negotiate with other people over when and where to eat. Having nothing I can eat, or having only one thing, and everyone notices I eat the same thing every night. Far more planning required to reach optimal snacking. And that's American travelling. Going somewhere without a McDonalds on every corner might have caused an honest breakdown.

it's also had a pretty profound impact on my ability to socialize, given that so much is riding on where we choose to eat and I am pathologically incapable of participating in a restaurant discussion with >3 people when I'm hungry, which is always. I hated being That Girl Who Only Eats Kids' Food (and also Pad Thai), so I couldn't advocate for myself. Really innocuous comments about what I was eating came off as highly threatening.

it's weird, because what was scarce for me wasn't food per se, it was stomach time. My stomach had a much lower throughput than normal, so I had to optimize both timing and what food I put in. It left very little room for experimentation. And in a way, that hasn't changed, because while my throughput is much higher, there is so much nutritional debt to pay off that the old habits are still pretty plausible. So my diet has not expanded that much, it's just shifted to more of the old proteins I always ate, and more vegetables. My acceptance of new spices has gone up, but it is mostly the same vegetables.

I don't think I can convey how important *familiarity* was, and really still is. One day work didn't have any safe/familiar vegetables. I improvised with carrot ginger soup. It was pretty good. I then ate six meringues, and I didn't feel safe until the sixth. I've compromised on my junk food habit, in that I still eat it, but when I do I take some vitamin I feel I'm short on as well (accompanied with magic pills), which now that I'm typing it looks like another manifestation of stomach time as a scarce resource.

I feel safer being around food. I'd rather eat in the cafeteria than go outside no matter how nice it is. I grab extra food at breakfast and keep in on my desk. Sometimes I eat it, but I just feel safer having it on my desk.

About 4 seconds after I notice I'm hungry, I'm almost shaking with it.

On a physical level, I'm having astonishing amounts of muscle fatigue. My aerobic capacity is shit. Usually I'll walk even if I'm in a lot of pain, but I'm honestly contemplating elevators right now. It's deeply counter intuitive and I've asked my doctor about it. My crackpot hypotheses are that my temperature has gone up with my base metabolism, or the presence of vitamins has increased demand for protein beyond the amount my intake increased.

My acupuncturist brought up quitting wheat, he thinks the gluten is doing bad things for me. My reaction at the time was very defensive; that no matter what physical damage it was doing, the mental and emotional damage of giving it up would be worse. People have always been telling me to give up wheat, and until just now, that would have been devastating because I couldn't eat all those "better" food they wanted me to. I wanted me to. This makes wheat sort of like that friend who is really an asshole, but was there for you a few times when nobody else was, and their current behavior is seriously not okay but you feel like a jackass ditching them now that you have better options.

SMBC had a comic about using wishes to fix critical mistakes in your past, and I keep thinking about how my life would have been different if I could go back and time and tell my parents their daughter needed a single vitamin and everything would work out fine.

On a message board that does not allow inbound links:

Back in the day growing up in SoHo there was an artist named Rene would paint on a number of walls these murals that said "I am the Best Artist!" and it would be signed Rene. Now people would deface these murals with messages calling rene an ass and other things for having deigned to call himself the best artist.

I had a loverly conversation with him one saturday morning as he went to fix one of the murals and asked him what was his meaning and he simply said he paints the words "I am the Best Artist!" and how people react to it is the key to the art. Did he believe or was he claiming he was the best artist? no not at all but thats what people read into the murals if they just assumed

You see, when someone says a thing with negative implications, it is your job to come up with every possible reason why they didn't mean that. Believing what they say is a violation of their personhood.

This is why I am annoyed when I say someone was creeping on me and my friend asks "but did you try X?" It is not my job to try every possible way to make them stop touching me before we declare that they are bad at not touching people who don't want to be touched.

Or take this reddit threadon Phil Fish, noted asshole and creator of the video game Fez. It is possible Phil Fish is not at asshole. It is possible he is an asshole at work but super nice to the seniors he volunteers with on weekends, and it's his bad luck that his work is so public. But given his public statements, the Bayesian probability I would walk away from an in person interaction with him thinking "wow, that was mean and uncalled for" seems unacceptably high.

It is good for individuals and society to assume good intentions when plausible. That does not mean anyone has an affirmative right to have everyone ignore evidence to the contrary.

Sometimes I think Captain Awkward has played its role in my life and is ready to leave. This is to the author's credit: she came up with a few very good guidelines, described and demonstrated them well enough that I understood the general principles, and now all that's left is re-explaining these rules to people who can't apply them to their own situation. It's an excellent thing to do, but it's not as rewarding for me to read as it once was. For example, when she posted #467: How do I help my partner communicate better with his family?, I immediately knew the letter was going to be a lady trying to fix her husband's relationship with his family for him, and the answer was going to be "step away". But if I'd skipped it, I would have missed this gem:

“Terrible at maintaining relationships” isn’t an actual condition, it’s a series of choices that have turned into a habit.

I could have sworn I wrote about this last fall after my dental surgery, but I can't find it now. Last November I had a potentially very serious dental problem that was rendered nearly harmless by having money. Harmless in this case means I narrowly dodged both death and permanent nerve damage, but had to spend a week and a half on the couch when my hypoadrenia flared up. I call it harmless because I was able to pay for the surgery (~$1500) and take the time off of work unpaid (more) without having to sacrifice anything, without having to worry about sacrificing anything. I had the savings to make myself whole.

This was a huge blessing, and I found myself feeling out of balance. While I was square with my periodontist, I felt like dentistry itself had given me this huge thing (life, without pain), and I hadn't given it anything in return. So I went on Modest Needs and funded the first person I saw who needed dental care. First when the problem was diagnosed, and again after my surgery.

I recently switched jobs. My new job is, among other things, incredibly lucrative in both pay and benefits. I got the same feeling. My future employer and I are square, but my ability to enter into a square deal that benefited me so much was predicated on a lot of gifts I received: raw intelligence, specific intelligence that is both rare and commercially valuable, being born in America, being born at a time when women were allowed to have careers beyond teacher/nurse/secretary, having parents who valued education and put a lot of time and money into mine. So I went to Modest Needs again and funded a family that needed to move for a job, and paid for it.

There is clearly a lot going on here. One thing is why it means so much to me to donate to specific problems* when the logically optimum thing to do is find The Most Efficient Charity and send them a check. And the answer to that is "I'm doing something different."

The second involves limiting my choices. The purpose of Modest Needs is to fund families who are normally self sufficient through one time catastrophic expenses, to avoid starting a cycle of poverty. I stopped giving for a while because I felt like none of the stories matched that mission- I could spot multiple Poor Life Choices in just the brief descriptions. For example, I think six children is a little much to raise on an enlisted man's salary. I stopped reading because it left me feeling judgmental and yet like no one deserved help. For these three rounds of giving, I chose to fund the first person with an appropriate expense, regardless how worthy a recipient I thought they were (or how much it cost. Modest Needs is run Kickstarter style, so other people contributed before me, but I always gave enough to complete the grant. I know the variable amount is related to question #1, but I don't know how). I did this mostly because I wanted to short circuit the judgement cycle, and because the point was to pay back the dentistry/job fairy, not fix all of poverty. This had the interesting side effect of feeding the idea that a person can make a bad choice, possibly even multiple bad choices, without rendering themselves unworthy of help. That is not an idea that gets a lot of food in my brain, but I found it really comforting.

But lately it's been gnawing at me that however awesome I am for pledging to fund something no matter what the cost and then totally doing that, I am still waaaay better off financially than any of the people I've helped, and still way better off than I was before the job/dentistry for charity donations exchange took place. The amount to help that family move did not even consume my entire hiring bonus. Does it really count as balancing the scales if it doesn't even feel like a sacrifice?

I'm midway through a book called Debt: the first 5,000 years. This book is full of many fascinating ideas and also many statements that make me want to punch the author, and I don't have time to go into all of them now. But one of the things he talks about is the invention/evolution of money, and how it often starts less as a way to make three way chicken/cow/shoe trades, and more as a way to mark that there is a moral or social debt that cannot be repayed. You don't use proto-money to buy things, that would be ridiculous. You use it to mark that you've received something beyond price (like marrying someone's daughter). Proto-money can function as sort of a limiter to make sure no one person is receiving too many more unrepayable things than they are giving out, or at least make sure other people are aware of it. It's also a costly signal to assure people you recognize they've done something amazing for you, but completely devoid of an attempt to make them whole for it.

I think that is what I am doing here. It doesn't even make sense to try to make sure I give dentistry as much as it gave me, because dentistry gave me this energy because it wanted me to have it. Everyone giving a little and ending up with more than they had is a success, not a series of imbalances. I'm now thinking of those donations as both recognition that I have received many gifts, and as symbolic acts that make sure the door between me and the rest of the world is open. The goal is not to equilibriate everything right away, but to make sure energy is still flowing in both directions, and that I'm not hoarding.

Not hoarding is important. I'm beginning to think that energy flow involves less exchange than I think. That what is actually happening is energy is flowing to everyone all the time, but they don't have room for it until they give something else away, and then boom, they get this cool new thing.** We just don't realize these cool things are being offered constantly.

As I struggle to push the "pay" button, I am wondering how taxes fit in to this. Taxes are conceived of as an exchange, but they don't feel like it to me. It feels like I'm being forced to pay for a bunch of stuff I don't want, and even the stuff I do want is incredibly poorly implemented, and this poor implementation is directly related to the fact that the exchange is involuntary. But as I mentioned above, this country has actually worked out pretty well for me. Maybe the exchange isn't fair, but I should accept what gifts it gives me.


*Modest Needs promises best effort to fund the application you choose, but for tax reasons can't guarantee it

**This feels like such a trivial example, but: I kept losing when I played The Movies because my stars would age and I had no one to replace them. It turns out that you don't get replacements until you fire your existing stars, and then new actors start showing up to audition. I repeat this story quietly to myself every time I get the urge to hang on to something mediocre because I'm afraid to have nothing.

I've talked before about how I hate how modern/Western medicine focuses on treating symptoms rather than root causes, and in particular ignores nutrition beyond some vague food pyramid that is based primarily on who gave the most money to senators on the right subcommittee. So I went a doctor that actually listened to me as a whole person, and focused on nutrition as a fix for them. Initially in pill form, but hoping to transition to real food eventually. Only that never happened. It helped (I have more energy and didn't get sick at all last winter, as opposed to my usual average of "all winter"), but only temporarily. I was taking more and more supplements until I just gave up and stopped all of them. One would work for a while, and a different problem would crop up, and it just felt like symptom whack a mole. I couldn't go 90 minutes without eating without feeling awful, I'm eating mostly hyperpalatable crap and have to bribe myself to get through a meal with protein, which I nevertheless find incredibly stressful. I don't understand why I freak out if food doesn't taste good, why can't I eat for nutrition like everyone else?

Five weeks ago I went to a nutrition-focused psychiatric ANRP about a possible anxiety disorder. She listens to my symptoms, including the supplement whack a mole, and suggests I have low stomach acid (hypochlorhydria). Dr. Internet tells me there's a fancy test for this involving swallowing a pill containing a radio transmitter and some sort of pH meter, which I kind of want to do just to have a tiny science lab in my stomach, but the ANRP just told me to try taking the treatment (pills containing stomach acid, plus pepsin, an acid-activated enzyme for digesting meat) and see if it helps.

Oh. My. G-d.

Now that I know what it's like to *not* feel ill after eating food with protein or fiber, I can recognize that that's what I was experiencing before. I felt deeply ill any time I anything with real nutritional value, but was pushing my awareness of it away because I couldn't deal with it. Or I was sucking down soda because it was the only way my body could ask for more acid. It also explains:

• Why I could feel like I was starving and disgustingly full at the same time
  
• Why I have always felt so food insecure even though I've never been more than a car ride away from all the food I could ever want.
  
• Why I've always been such an insanely pick eater, and found trying new foods so stressful.
  
• Highly suspect this has something to do with my salt addiction
  
• Why I became a vegetarian at age 6 in a house full of meat eaters.
  
• The fascinating variety of subclinical hormonal disorders I have and the fact that curing one just leads another one to pop up somewhere else.
  
• Why feelings of fullness were more dependent of food temperature than volume or nutritional level.
  
• environmental allergies
  

Clearly I was able to extract some nutrients because I'm not dead, but I'm honestly not sure how. I'm still working out the exact dosages, but I easily take 200 pills in a week, where the bottle says 1 - 2/meal. I needed 180 mg just to eat a pear. I haven't even been counting how many I'm taking with this protein shake I'm drinking right now, but it's more than 1 gram of betaine HCl per gram of protein. ARNP hasn't ruled out a bone fida anxiety disorder yet, but that's only because she hasn't talked to me in three weeks. It is abundantly clearly to me that the actual problem was the psychic load of feeling that I was going to starve, and borderline malnutrition.

There's a few lessons I want to draw from this. One involves an Inception joke about going deeper: I thought I had found the ultimate problem by taking nutritional supplements, but never looked at why I had a deficiency. The second is that gastric bypass can easily induce hypochlorhydria because it cuts out the acid producing section of the stomach, so don't do that. The third is about will power. I, and others, constantly beat me up over my poor eating habits. I felt really ashamed that I had so many problems. And I suppose things might have been slightly better if I'd powered through the nausea and fatigue and blood sugar induced bitchiness and eaten perfectly anyway, but I wasn't doing those things because it would have left me miserable and friendless and quite possibly unemployed. The problem was not lack of will power or moral fortitude, it was a g-ddamn chemical.

The fourth is that I can eat 12 Wendy's Chicken Nuggets without needing a single pill, and I think this tells you a lot about the food content in fast food.

Dentist: do what you can with homecare, but don't beat yourself up over not doing it perfectly.
Me: Okay.
Dentist: I think us women need to hear that sometimes.
Me: Yes. Also, men.
Dentist: Yeah, 'cause of their big egos.

I am a software tester, but that's imprecise. "tester" can mean anything from someone with a 12 week training course certificate from a community college that plays xbox all day to someone with a computer science degree from a top university that writes software that tests other software, with a coding proficiency rivaling all but the best traditional developers. These are often called test automation engineers or "[company's internal term for software developers] + in Test".

Between the two, automated testing is far more prestigious and better paid. Although frequently not as well paid or prestigious as development, which is frustrating when companies insist TAEs should be able to code as well as developers.* People who do more things get paid more. Anyways, within reason, I agree that automated testing deserves to be the more prestigious. Automation scales and requires more planning. And because of that, the smarter people move into it, which means more of the interesting work goes to the automation side, and so on. But ego has begun to enter into it. A lot of software companies have a thing about only hiring the best and the brightest, and will either refuse to hire manual testers outright, or only hire them on contract.

There are very few products that even contemplate doing entirely automated testing, and zero consumer products. Whether or not you hire manual testers, you're going to be doing manual testing. In an attempt to grab a halo of "only hiring the best", this gets dumped on automated testers, support engineers, and maybe even developers, people who are both horribly overpaid for the task and likely not very good at it. A really good manual tester has an OCD or Aspergerish focus on things being exactly right, a trait heavily discriminated against in computer science programs, where the emphasis is on doing things in the absolute laziest way possible. If manual testing is dumped primarily on "automation" testers, you'll push the best ones into development** and start a vicious cycle of losing your best engineers. If it's spread equally, well then you're just not allocating resources very efficiently.

If you dump the testing on contractors, you lose any expertise they develop in the product every 12 months. Companies like to pretend there's no value in that expertise because it's harder to measure than code, but there are some exceptionally good manual testers out there who would provide a lot of value if people let them do what they were good at. And they're cheap relative to the people who would be doing the work otherwise, because it's low prestige and has a much lower barrier to entry.

But honestly, I think "hiring the only the best" is kind of a bad strategy even for automated testers and developers. There is not a direct correlation between "requires intelligence" and "valuable". Smart people can get themselves involved in any number of hilarious low pay off adventures, and average people can maintain google reader. This drive to hire only the best is being driven by something other than value.

*I once got a haircut from a woman who was doing a one-course-at-a-time programming degree at a community college. There was a detectable dismissive sniff when I told her I did software testing, because she was aiming for much bigger things. I didn't play the "I went to school in Boston" card, but I was thinking about it.

And it was a shitty haircut

**Because they like coding, or because of the increasing pay gap, or because of the prestige. Nobody likes being thought of as settling for second.