childlike empress

Author: childlike empress (page 8 of 67)

‘Good Boy’ Appreciation Post

You know how some people put on music to influence their mood? Like, they want to feel happy, so they play songs that evoke happiness.

I am not one of those people.

Usually I’m the type of person who has to find the exact music that matches my mood, especially if it’s a bad one. If I try to listen to peppy music whilst in a bad mood, I descend rapidly into an ultra-bad mood.

There are, however, a few exceptions to this rule. One of those is G-Dragon and Taeyang’s “Good Boy.”

It makes no sense. This is the opposite of a song I’d usually like. It’s an absolutely stupid song (as in, “get stupid”). Repetitive beat. ‘Dudes in a club’ lyrics. Autotune.

And yet, it never fails to put me in a good mood.

Maybe it’s because the choreography perfectly matches the beat and the cadence of the lyrics.

Maybe it’s the swagger.

Maybe it’s all the weird little sound effects.

Maybe it’s because G-Dragon used one of the live performances to diss the M-net Asian Music Awards on their own broadcast.

Regardless of why, “Good Boy” can turn the day around for me. I appreciate that.

A Cure for Crohn’s Disease

2019-02-05 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

I’m going to do it, guys. I’m going to find the cure for Crohn’s disease.

First, a few premises:

I have Crohn’s disease. I was diagnosed over 20 years ago. At this point, “having Crohn’s disease” is a pretty entrenched part of my identity.
Second, I’ve done the drug merry-go-round to manage my disease. Guess what? It didn’t work. In fact, it made my life much worse. SIBO.
Removing all the fiber from my diet and finally getting an infected dead tooth out of my mouth have allowed my body to eradicate most of the excess bacteria.
I’m in better health than I’ve possibly EVER been in my life, without drugs.
And yet, I’m not perfectly healthy. My guts are still messed up.
And even more yet, when I score myself on the Crohn’s Disease Activity Index, I score a 70—IN REMISSION.

Now we can plough on to the meat of the matter. From Guru Anaerobic:

Crohn’s disease and Ulcerative Colitis are particularly vicious types of inflammatory bowel disorder (IBD). According to medical experts (and support organizations like ‘Crohn’s and colitis UK’) both conditions are life-long and irreversible. Current opinion is that they are caused by a mix of genetics, autoimmune derangement, environmental triggers, maybe microbiome – whatever.

Very often the sufferer doesn’t realize they have a problem (there may have been signes which went unnoticed) until a major flare-up occurs. For serious flare-ups a short course of steroids may be prescribed, but not for too long due to side effects. Once the flare-up has subsided the general advice is that a life-time of immunosuppressants or ASA’s (a certain class of drugs) are required – the rationale being these drugs will help prevent future flare-ups recurring (they don’t). Without drugs another flare-up may not occur for years, no one knows.

In between flare-ups the sufferer is said to be ‘in remission’.

The sufferer will always be in remission even if they never have another flare-up. ‘In remission’ makes the individual a life-long victim, a life-long sufferer. In the case of IBD they are a victim even if they are completely asymptomatic. If drugs had no downsides there would be no problem, take them like smarties.

After an injury (or disease) the last thing to heal is the mind; I realized this when I had a running injury (one of many) which had healed. Whilst I was warming-up for an 800m race a friend shouted to me, “Mark, why are you limping?!” – even though my injury had resolved I still held it in my mind and was unknowingly (sort of) taking my weight off the leg where the injury had been.

Ok, one could argue that “in remission” means ‘to take care what you do so the condition doesn’t return’, but we all act in a certain way so we don’t suffer from something don’t we? You don’t eat cake, chocolate and jelly beans everyday because you might get fat [If you were once obese and lost weight, are you in remission?]. I don’t smoke as smoking is related to a host of diseases and conditions – is my life diminished because I don’t smoke?

The alcoholic is not an alcoholic, the IBD sufferer is not an IBD sufferer. If they are not suffering from any effects they are no longer a sufferer. They are not in remission – they do not have the condition; they are cured, they don’t need any drugs. Could they one day suffer from the condition again? Possibly, if they don’t acknowledge there are certain things they shouldn’t do, But this doesn’t make them a life-long sufferer, in the way that I can’t constantly eat sh*t or smoke.

We need to get rid of the term ‘in remission’ and replace with ‘free from’. Being in remission makes you a victim, it’s like a slavery mindset.

Much like I refused to be a slave of the modern medical system, I refuse to be a slave to Crohn’s disease. For my whole life, I’ve refused to let Crohn’s define who I was, or what I could do. After a while, it started to feel like a shackle that prevented me from living the life I wanted. I was in danger of succumbing.

Now, the sheer wonder of my body’s ability to heal has me looking to the stars again.

What does this tell me?

It’s time to preemptively work on getting Crohn’s out of my head. Time to summon everything I know about mantras, and do the mental work while my body does the physical work of healing and rebuilding.

“I am free from Crohn’s Disease.”

That way, my mind doesn’t have to catch up to my body. God willing, they can heal together.

You steer where you look, so it’s time to look at a cure, at healing—at freedom.

Let’s talk about Denise Bennett’s email

2019-02-04 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

Who is Denise Bennett, you might ask?

Denise Bennett is a faculty member who lost her shit about grant administration at the University of Idaho. The university then placed her on leave. She retaliated by livestreaming as she opened and read through the terms of her leave. And, in top-tier episode of “that escalated quickly,” the UI administration responded by excluding her from campus and sending out an alert insinuating that she was going to shoot up the campus on a meth bender.

The whole situation is a mess. Both sides are behaving badly.

You can read more at the UI Argonaut if you want.

Backstory aside, I wanted to take a closer look at the email that Denise wrote that has since been published to the internet for all to see. From my vantagepoint, I’ve heard similar rants before but it’s rare that they make it into print. Most of the time, faculty know better than to commit this sort of thing to paper even though everybody knows.

People who are outside of the university system probably don’t know, tho.

This email demonstrates one of the fundamental problems that drives the strife in universities today: on the one hand, universities usually are a cobbled together series of outdated systems that don’t talk to each other or provide any sort of meaningful output or feedback, which are then exacerbated by employees who have no idea what things are like from the faculty side AND don’t have any conception of how a system works; on the other hand, faculty resent having to do any type of administrative work or having to interact with others who are trying to do administrative work on their behalf.

Yes, that is an extremely convoluted paragraph. A pickle, if you will.

Let’s try it again: Faculty resent administrative work, so they don’t do it, so the university has to hire administrators to do the work that faculty aren’t doing, which causes bloat and policy creep, which makes it more frustrating for faculty to try to do administrative work, so faculty end up resenting administrative work.

While I know absolutely nothing about administrative systems at the University of Idaho, I think it’s safe to say that they are outdated, convoluted, and incomprehensible.

So you get statement like this one:

I
AM
BEGGING
ANYONE
TO
PLEASE
come up with a god damned system where I can see how much actual money there is FOR ME TO SPEND ON THE PROJECTS I WROTE THE FUCKING GRANTS FOR! All year I get “the system is changing” and now, after the first of the year, “there’s money, but you can’t spend it.” WHY THE HELL DO I WRITE THESE GRANTS? WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT ANY OF THIS? SOMEBODY GIVE ME AN EXPLANATION AS TO WHY LAST YEAR MY REPORT TO NEH WAS DUE BEFORE OSP EVER GAVE ME THE FUNDS?

Makes sense. It’s hard to do your job as a teacher/creative when you can’t use the money that you won to do so—especially when you are judged by your ability to bring in grant money.

But Denise doesn’t stop there. Things snowball from “I can’t get my grant” to a complete refusal to participate in the systems that make a university run.

I WILL NEVER GO TO ANOTHER MEETING INVOLVING THE WORDS ASSESSMENT OR STRATEGIC PLAN, I WILL KEEP UP MY END OF THE BARGAIN AS DESCRIBED IN MY PD, THAT’S IT.

I get it. Really I do. Most faculty get into the professorial business because they want to do research, or teach, or do their creative work with no interruptions. Unfortunately for faculty, they want to do that without thinking about how their courses interact with everybody else’s courses. That’s where things like assessment and strategic plans come in—to try to bring some sense of coherency to a bunch of individual faculty interests.

Is that ideal? Of course not. Administrators don’t know what faculty in each discipline should be teaching, which is why they delegate that job back to the faculty.

On the other hand, administrators never let faculty delegate anything to them.

I NEVER ASK ANYONE TO COME TEACH MY CLASSES! HEY OSP, COME TEACH MY INTRO TO PRODUCTION COURSE ABOUT THE 180 WILL YA? FUCKING JOKE. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE!

And yet, at the end of the day, Denise is happy to have a permanent spot at the very institution that is doing her wrong.

THANK GOD I HAVE TENURE,

See what I mean about a pickle? (There’s no clear solution.)

Is anything really going to change? (Doubtful.)

I’ll be interested to see how this situation is resolved.

I Found Batfort’s Mascot

2019-02-03 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

source unknown

This is the story that you didn’t know you were waiting for: the Batfort origin story.

My first job out of grad school was working in a fast-paced customer service environment. It was the kind of job that necessitated close relationships with coworkers, so we became a tight team—the kind of team that squabbled like family and had a million inside jokes.

One of those teammates and I became legitimate friends. We spent time trading memes off Imgur, many of which ended up pinned in our cubicles. (Or in my case, saved as desktop wallpaper.)

There was one meme in particular that my friend loved.

She was a dog person, the kind who would stop and pet every dog she met on the street. Obsessed, basically.

I’m not a huge dog person but I do have a fondness for bats. If you asked me about dogs, I would tell you that my dream was to get a black French Bulldog and dress it up like a bat.

So when she dug up the dogfort meme, it became an instant favorite. Her cubicle became Dog Fort.

My cubicle became Bat Fort.

I turned the image above into meme format, and hung it in my cubicle. I’ve taken it to every new job and it’s hanging in my current office as we speak.

A few years later, I was struck with the urge to buy the batfort.com domain. Later still, I decided to start blogging daily.

Now we here!

The Reader: Fake News, Fake Universities, and Why We Need Beauty

2019-02-02 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

Some weeks, are easy. Other weeks are hard. This week, everything is fake fake fake. The world feels like a hall of mirrors, a raft of lies, a neverending stack of turtles. One of the best ways that I’ve seen this feeling described is in John C Wright’s City Beyond Time: Tales from the Fall of Metachronopolis, where arrogant time travellers fold so many alternate timelines over each other—like the folding and stretching of saltwater taffy—that eventually you can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t. Mr Wright has a delightful way with words, distilling grand concepts into striking, fairylike scenes that stick in your mind like cobwebs. I highly recommend his work.

» Apparently University of Farmington has been a fake university all along. (Spoiler: it’s an ICE sting.)

» Appreciate beauty:

Keep strengthening your beauty appreciation apparatus and it will drastically change your relationship with your sensory field, with your mind, and with your consciousness. Rather than having your interest and attention immersed in the churning babble of the labeling, dividing mind, your interest and attention begins moving to the sheer gorgeousness of everything that appears in your field of awareness; sensory input, thoughts, feelings, and the experience of being alive itself.

» I’m personally more interested in health than in weight loss, but I was just introduced to Seth Roberts and the Shangri-La diet. It’s fascinating to see how our bodies and our brains are connected.

» How Hollywood Invented Ben Shapiro. Honestly, this just makes me dislike him more.

» I’m losing track of all the Literal Hitlers in the world.

» Yes, please. (Warning; beautiful, expensive shoes.)

» Howard Schultz, former Starbucks CEO, announces that he’s interested in running for president as an Independent instead of Democrat. CNN responds by publishing 5 hitpieces on him. Fascinating.

» Something mysterious is blocking vehicle key fobs from working in a small Alberta town

» When Taemin performs “Move” with other backup dancers, you can’t help but watch him. When Taemin performs “Move” with his choreographer/teacher, you can’t help but watch her.

Image of the week: #tbt edition

2019-02-01 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

I haven’t thought about this photo in months. Maybe years. It’s hard to keep track at this point. I don’t remember what crisis brought this photo into being. There have been too many since then, and they keep coming faster and faster.

What I do remember is how this photo—like some of the other gems from the 2016-2018 period, so concisely sums up our situation.

It’s gotta be the smirk.

The attitudes, the antagonist and protagonist (which is which?), the bystanders, all wrapped up into an incredibly dense visual package. One that’s blessedly free of corporate logos with a cohesive color palette.

I’m in a fit of nostalgia tonight, nostalgia for the meme wars of 2016. When the fight seemed winnable. When the memes were actually funny. When the conflict was somehow still in meme-land and not something that I feel the need to prepare for.

For the longest time I’ve known that if I were ever to write songs, they would be lamentations. I could never write angry songs—that’s not my mode of being. But lamentations, when there is so much beauty in the world?

The older I get the more I know why. The conflict—the war—is already around us. We just can’t see it. We’re in a fog of our own making, waiting for the spark that will explode the gas so that we can see again.

I know that we should not give in to despair, but dang sometimes it’s hard to keep my chin up.

It’s the end of World Carnivore Month 2019

2019-01-31 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

What a more perfect time is there to reflect on what an ideal carnivore future might look like.

The typical carnivore line is “eat steaks!” and, let’s be real, steaks don’t have much complexity to them. Steak is delicious, but it’s simple. Cooking steak is a craft that can be honed, but it’s not the same as taking 3 days to prep for a feast. And so, with eating mostly meat, my kitchen skills have been put on the back burner.

Enter Tara at @slowdownfarmstead. She’s mostly carnivore, lives on a farm, and raises, hunts, or grows all her own food. Her freezers are full of grassfed, organic beef and lamb, venison and pork, ghee and all sorts of good things.

Tara has shown me that it is possible to be both a strict carnivore AND a good cook. Her diet is varied in a way that I’d like mine to be: fowl and swine and cow, juicy steak and pate and raw-milk cheese, homemade charcuterie and cultured buttermilk and stock.

I present lunch, hubby’s plate, mostly from our farm: grass fed and finished lamb chops cooked in homemade ghee and topped with a foraged and dehydrated wild mushroom salt, braunschweiger made with rabbit livers and heart, bacon and duck liver paté topped with ghee, dried mushrooms used as crackers, prosciutto, raw sheep cheese, a couple of cured egg yolks, and a cuppa’ lamb bone broth from yesterday’s lamb shank supper. @slowdownfarmstead

I mean…look at that plate. Look at it. Such a range of flavors and textures, of mildly processed foods (braunschweiger!) and straight-up meat.

I’m in love.

Tara also advocates fasting, based on the writings of Thomas Seyfried. She was not the only influence into my recent forays into fasting, but she certainly showed me that one can fast, still eat well in between, and heal from deep-seated chronic ailments.

It’s easy to romanticize the homestead life, Tara reminds us that life is still life, and that life on a farm is not as glamourous as we like to think.

It’s not all Martha Stewart sipping chai while she braids bacon over a terrine. It’s Tara, with goose poop in her hair, reminding herself to be a little more grateful than frantic. A little injection of reality lest my pretty IG pictures suggest I’ve got it all together.

Most of all, I’m inspired to dig out my copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I and Nourishing Traditions. Before I started weeding plants out of my diet, I loved cooking. For a long time, baking made me happy—but even after cutting grains and sugars out of my diet, I found joy in trying new dishes and inventing new, interesting ways to eat food.

Now, I mostly cook burgers and the occasional tuna steak (#currentfave). I had kind of given up on being a “cook” again, with the idea that once I fine-tuned how to cook a perfect steak, I’d have reached the end of what one can cook as a carnivore.

Oh, how wrong I was. And I’m happy to be wrong.

Now, I’m re-inspired to cure egg yolks, make my own sausage, and try frying up some pig’s ears. Experimenting with organ meats and offal. Cultivating relationships with local ranchers.

It’s gonna be a delicious year.

Checking in on the Creative Achievement Quiz

2019-01-30 / childlike empress / 2 Comments

I was curious, so I peeked.

People have been taking the Creative Achievement Questionnaire Quiz. 97, so far. That’s good enough for some results, right?

I didn’t include the original category names, courtesy of Jordan Peterson, because they are cringey.

Are you surprised? I’m not.

The Creative Achievement Questionnaire is set up to get results like this. Lots of people in the “new” category. Very few people in the “genius” categories.

Let’s not talk about the fact that this questionnaire is based solely on other people’s approval of your creativity—which by definition excludes the most innovative and original thinkers.

What strikes me—and I’m no statistician—is that this graph looks like half of a squished-down bell curve.

What would be on the other side—anti-creativity? Whining? Plans with no action?

Maybe that’s where they stick the people who are so innovative that they look insane.

Anyway, I’m still not happy with JP’s questionnaire but I haven’t come up with anything better yet.

How would you measure creativity?

Stop lying to yourself: you know what you want

2019-01-28 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

This is a pep talk for myself, but you’re welcome to listen in.

Look.

I know you play the “I’m still trying to decide” game when you talk to other people. Like somehow it’s more socially acceptable to be undecided. Maybe you think it’s a conversation starter. People can help you think through options. Whatever.

Bullshit.

You know what you want.

You made some of these decisions years ago, but your life hasn’t caught up to them yet. You haven’t put in the work. You’re still adding 2 and 2, hoping that somehow this time they’ll equal 5.

That’s not how this works.

Maybe it’s not ~God’s perfect timing~ either, but there’s not a dang thing you can do about that.

If the key to having clear eyes and a strong backbone is the truth, you have to stop lying to yourself.

Even if you haven’t 100% committed,

Even if there are other options out there,

You know what you want.

And the longer you lie to yourself about it, the less time you have.

The Reader: Conspiracy Theories, Slow-Mo Music Videos, and HOAXED

2019-01-27 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

source

I’ve been searching for a church. As someone who is really good at seeking and researching, the search is easy for me. It’s the finding and committing that’s a problem. I’m trying to balance the need for theological soundness with the knowledge that churches are made of people, who are flawed and sinful. Too entrenched. Too young. Unbiblical sermons. So many reasons.

One of the biggest dealbreakers that I didn’t anticipate is my utter antipathy to the Baby Boomer influence. If there’s one thing that will provoke an immediate heel-turn, it’s a Boomer in the pulpit booming his boomer platitudes. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two I feel most drawn to are the Orthodox church and a church planting operation run by Millennials for Millennials.

Neither church is perfect, but I’m hoping to embed myself in one that helps me work on my own faults in the context of a Truth-centered community.

Short link list this week.

» If you read one article this week, read this one: Bryan Singer’s Accusers Speak Out

» In other “conspiracies are actually real” news, Brandon Truaxe got thrown off a building in Toronto this week. I’m not surprised, since he got “let go” from his own company last year and was ranting about very familiar topics on social media last year. I’m curious about who he got caught up with, and how much his “cheap good skincare for all” philosophy threatened people who make a lot of money. Context: Truaxe founded Deciem, the parent company of The Ordinary.

» Hoaxed is finally out! Go watch it. Expect a review soon.

» How the newspaper industry got into this mess (without talking about fake news)

» An interesting booklist

» The minimum wage debate: point and counterpoint (definitely read the counterpoint)

One music video, two ways.

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Batfort

Style reveals substance

Author: childlike empress (page 8 of 67)

‘Good Boy’ Appreciation Post

A Cure for Crohn’s Disease

Let’s talk about Denise Bennett’s email

I Found Batfort’s Mascot

The Reader: Fake News, Fake Universities, and Why We Need Beauty

Image of the week: #tbt edition

It’s the end of World Carnivore Month 2019

Checking in on the Creative Achievement Quiz

Stop lying to yourself: you know what you want

The Reader: Conspiracy Theories, Slow-Mo Music Videos, and HOAXED

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