If you mention your job to a stranger, how likely are they to get interested and ask questions? 1 would be like a grocery store cashier and 10 would be like a stunt double
hi, my name is delilah, im an autistic trans girl trying to figure out life but ive barely got enough money to pay rent and i cant afford my estrogen & other necessities
ive just barely turned 18 and ive already lost my home twice, im dealing with an insane amount of stress and any amount of help would be such a load off my shoulders.
ive lost so much stuff that was dearly important to me, i dont currently have my own bed, and im trying to figure out moving to a new place where rent isnt as encumbering. please, please help if you can
Stickers seen around NYC in the days after cops opened fire in the NYC subway, shooting a fellow officer, two bystanders, and an alleged “fair evader” they were attempting to apprehend.
I feel like I woke up from a bad dream. everything is okay now. the world is good!
this is like the end of a House episode.
I’ve been sharing all the info in scraps, but here it is summarized for anyone who wants to know:
most cats are exposed to feline coronavirus early in their life. in a tiny percentage of them, it mutates into something called FIP (Feline infectious peritonitis).
Belphie developed FIP, and has been slowly declining in health. because his immune system was busy dealing with the FIP, he became a sponge for other pathogens.
for a healthy cat, going on leashed walks, or going out on an enclosed catio is a relatively safe way of enjoying the outdoors. for an immunocompromised cat, it becomes dangerous.
Belphie became a little disease factory spreading his pathogens throughout the house, and Pangur and Grim (being senior cats) eventually got quite sick. keep in mind that he can’t spread FIP, because P & G have already had exposure to feline coronavirus early in life, and now have an immunity.
Belphie tested positive for calcivirus and mycoplasma, and was put on medication.
despite the meds, he kept getting worse, which made my vet suspect a third mystery illness.
on Sep 17th, I woke up to find that Belphie’s abdomen had swollen like a balloon. I took him in for testing, and my vet cautiously suggested FIP. the medication for FIP is still under development, and not easily accessed in Canada yet, so she wasn’t able to give me anything.
the wet form of FIP (where the cat swells up with straw-coloured fluid) kills the fastest, so that evening I joined a FIP Facebook group, sent some frantic messages, and ended up heading to someone’s house at midnight to receive illicit drugs.
you can legally order the drugs from China, but you cannot legally administer them. so it’s all wink and nudge.
the next day (Sept 18th) I took Belphie in again for more testing, and it was determined to be FIP. I learned of a medical study in Ferguson Ontario (two hours from where I live) that was willing to take Belphie as a participant, and could get him the medication that day, so we hopped in the car and drove there.
the medication has to be given for 84 days, and the injectable drugs from China are unfortunately quite painful. they burn going in, which makes the cat scream. this Ferguson study uses the oral medication, so it’s just a small pill that they swallow daily. OBVIOUSLY me and Belphie would both prefer 84 days of the pill!
it’s now the 19th, and Belphie is playing for the first time in weeks. his swelling has gone down, and he no longer whimpers in his sleep.
all three cats are on the mend. everything has been discovered. and everyone will be okay!
A lot of younger people have no idea what aging actually looks and feels like, and the reasons behind it. That ignorance is so dangerous. If you don’t want to “be old,” you aren’t talking about a number of years. I have patients in their late 80s who could still handily beat me in a race—one couple still runs marathons together, in their late 80s—and I lost someone who was in her early 60s to COPD last year. What you want is not youth, it is health.
If you want to still be able to enjoy doing things in your 60s and 70s and 80s and even 90s, what you want to do, right now, is quit smoking, get some activity on a regular basis (a couple of walks a week is WAY better for you than nothing; increasing from 1 hour a day of cardio to 1.5 will buy you very little), and eat some plants. That’s it. No magic to it. No secret weird tricks. Don’t poison yourself, move around so your body doesn’t forget how, and eat plants.
If you have trouble moving around now because of mobility limitations, bad news: you still need to move around, not because it’s immoral not to, but because that’s still the best advice we have. I highly recommend looking up the Sit and Be Fit series; it is freely available and has exercises that can be done in a chair, which are suitable for people with limited mobility or poor balance. POTS sufferers, I’m looking at you.
If you have trouble eating plants because of dietary issues (they cause gas, etc.) or just because they’re bitter (super taster with texture issues here!), bad news. You still want to find a way to get some plants into your body on a regular basis. I know. It sucks. The only way I can do it is restaurants—they can make salads taste like food. I can also tolerate some bagged salads. On bad weeks, the OCD with contamination focus gets so bad I just can’t. However, canned beans always seem “safe,” and they taste a bit like candy, so they’re a good fallback.
If you smoke and you have tried quitting a million times and you’re just not ready to, bad news. You still need to quit. Your body needs you to try and keep trying. Your brain needs it, too. Damaging small blood vessels racks up cumulative damage over time that your body can start trying to reverse as soon as you quit. I know it’s insanely, absurdly addictive. You still need to.
You cannot rules lawyer your way past your body’s basic needs. It needs food, sleep, activity, and the absence of poison. Those are both small things and big asks. You cannot sustain a routine based on punishment, so don’t punish your body. Find ways to include these things that are enjoyable and rewarding instead. Experiment. There is no reason not to experiment—you don’t have to know instantly what’s going to work for you and what won’t, you just need to be willing to try things and make changes when things aren’t working for you.
You will still age. Your body will stop making collagen and elastin. Tissues you can see and tissues you can’t see will both sag. Cushioning tissues under your skin will get thinner. You’ll bruise more easily. Skin will tear more easily. Accumulated sun damage will start to show more and more. Joints will begin to show arthritis. Tendons and ligaments will get weaker and get injured more easily, as will muscles. Bones will lose mass and get easier to break. You’ll get tired more easily.
But you know what makes the difference between being dead, or as good as, in your 60s vs your 90s? Activity, plants, and quitting smoking. And don’t do meth. Saw a 58-year-old guy this week who is going to have a heart attack if he doesn’t quit whatever stimulant he’s on. I pretended to believe it was just the cigarettes, and maybe it is, but meth and cocaine will kill you quicker. Stop poisoning yourself.
Baby steps; take it one step at a time; you don’t need to have everything figured out right now. But you do need to be working on figuring things out.
You will be unsurprised to learn that someone already accused me of ableism for suggesting that people not smoke, move regularly in ways their body can tolerate, and eat plants.
I’ll have you know I’m still nursing a 22 year old grudge against Wallace and Gromit for denying the original Courage the Cowardly Dog short the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1995, thank you very much.
It’s literally my love for stop-motion that keeps me from outright hating W&G.
I also jacked off twice today. You wanna FaceTime for round three?
not before I go do my deadlifts. I’ve got 406 lbs, 4 reps, 9 sets today.
Have a great time! :)
“That should be long enough for me to jack off at least two more times. He’ll stand no chance against my empty balls and desensitized dick. I’ll be sure to win this session.”
Thanks bestie, I will!
“If he were Kira, he’d likely to use this time to jack off again… No… Maybe several times. It would be wise to bring my stroker with me to the gym so I can get at least another load out between sets. Such a dangerous foe, one can never be too cautious.”
Segment from a documentary about Medialab, the French animation studio that created the first two seasons of the Donkey Kong Country cartoon, showing the motion capture technology used to animate Donkey Kong. In this segment, Donkey Kong announces that he loves military service before marching away.
wild mice have the ability to levitate but seldom use it due to it being considered impolite by mouse standards, and also it making you visible to predators.
domesticated mice had the ability deliberately bred out because it was hard manufacturing tether harnesses that small, and they kept getting stuck in the ceiling
I’m a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it’s so much better when you lean into programming tropes.
A spell the wizard uses to light the group’s campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.
The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver’s foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.
The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party’s rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard’s “drying spell” seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.
A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The “shelter for the night” spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.
A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he’s written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.
Wizards enjoy each other’s company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.
Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they’ve taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.
Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be “nevermind, fixed it”.
“This spell causes the hair to fall off cats.” “It works with my tome”
“This spell causes the hair to fall off cats.” “That’s fixed in Xaranthius’ latest publication, you just have to rewrite your entire spellbook for compatibility.”
“This spell causes the hair to fall of cats.” “Magister Olaus of Writhington uses it to help with his allergies. WORKING AS INTENDED.”
I want to see wizards snarking at each other over different magical languages/scripts, the same way programmers do it over different languages.
Sure, “High Tower is a powerful language, but it’s such a pain to write. I just use Unity* as it’s simple to write and can do nearly everything I need” “cranky because you can’t memorize all the conjugations and declensions, aren’t you?” “LOOK MAN, I CAN MEMORIZE ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACE OF YOUR MOTHER IN ECSTASY. IN FACT, BEHOLD!” *a little time window appears between them, demonstrating exactly that. The first wizard (seen through the window) turns around and winks at the “camera”.
“you kids today with your lizardman. How can you get anything done in a language without gendered pronouns? It’s like fingerpainting. Sure you can learn on it but once you’ve got the basics you should switch over to a REAL language”
“the Kalic have been here already. We better get out before the rest of their army marches in.” “how can you be sure?” “you see that teleport?” “no” “well, if you COULD see it, you’d see it’s written in Adevic Yevi. That’s the Kalic magic language.” “couldn’t it be someone else? We saw those Monon traders, maybe one of them…” “no. No one writes Adevic Yevi unless they’re being paid to. It’s a language written by committee.”
Wizards going on a quest to get the spellbooks for a lost spell, only to find out that it was written in skydove cant. No one can read that shit! The creator must have been one of those weird “functional wizards”. (They’re obsessed with making sure their spells have no side effects)
There’s a small library on the outskirts of Freeport which tries to collect versions of basic spells in every language. The Adevic Yevi version of “fireball” takes up 7 pages, mostly boilerplate setting up the interfaces with fire and explosions and ExplodingMagicalBallFactorySingletons. The Lizardman version is basically “AHAHAHA, YOU GO BOOM!”
There’s a bunch of wizard apprentices working on porting an old “Summon Bread and Fishes” spell from the absolutely archaic language it was written in. Once it’s in Unity, it’ll be easy to modify and teach to more wizards, which’ll obviously be good for disaster areas. It’s just too expensive to keep paying the ancient guys who can still do magic in TRAN-FOR.
Eccentric wizards keep inventing new languages for spells. You look at them and they’re neat, but it’ll never catch on. And either you’re right, or the next time you’re applying to be a court wizard, the advisors want to know if you have at least 5 years experience in Tilted Runic and you’re like “it only came out 2 years ago!” “aren’t you a chronomancer?” “oh good point. Yeah I’ve been using it for 20-30 years.”
There’s wizards who will spend incredible amounts of time doing silly things with spells in strange ways. There’s this guy (Vorth) who made his own language where there’s only one basic spell: fireball. Everything else is basic magic glue tying multiple fireballs together. So like, he’s got a breakfast spell. Stand back (good advice for all his spells), and you’ll see a fish get knocked out of the local pond, flung through the air by successive explosions, and eventually it lands on his plate, nicely cooked and deboned, if slightly charred (the glass of milk is harder to explain). His magical door locks involve a quicksilver sphere and molten lead changing shape when heated… It’s tricky but it seems to work. He’s working on a teleport spell, but so far it’s mainly just killed test subjects (primarily sheep from a nearby farm).
* so the funny thing here is that this isn’t a reference to the unity game engine. The main country in my One Hundred and One Magical Pistols setting is called “the union” and their language is called “unity”.
ALT
It’s wands vs staves vs bare hands.
Wanders are like “they’re available everywhere and once you learn how to do it it’s so powerful!”
Staffguys always talk about how you can do ANYTHING with a staff. Wanders claim it’s a pain to carry around an overpowered device that can do ANYTHING when you just need to cast fireball or a simple one man teleport.
Meanwhile the bare wizards are showing off how they don’t need any magical tools and can just do hand motions.
Wanders and staffguys retort that when a spell goes wrong, THEY need to go to store for a new magical tool. YOU need new hands.
For the record, the reason we don’t have a Lyme Disease Vaccine is because of antivaxxers(1, 2, 3), not because of ticks, so maybe try redirecting some of that hatred.
Though there is a new Lyme vaccine in human trials right now so maybe keep an eye out so they don’t do it again
I was at a ren faire with my mom and I saw a belt with cool leather pouches on it for $3759 and I whispered to her, “You know, if it weren’t for the price tag I’d totally get that,” and she was like “Go for it! It’s only $3000! That’s nothing!” And I was like *surprised pikachu face*.
When you’re at a ren fair but you forget it’s Argentina
I could never be a protagonist because I’d just never move the plot along. “You have free reign of this castle, but don’t go into this one area” Okie dokie. I mind my own business and hang out in the library. Queen of staying in my own lane. I’ll never discover your magic curse.
I genuinely want more stories that operate like this, the protagonist has to end up discovering the super secret thing in a way other than ‘went exploring in one place told not to’
Maybe they found a secret passage so they didn’t know they had ended up there
Is he “female socialized” or is he just a standard flamboyant sensitive artsy gay dude who would honestly be indiscernible from any other fem gay guy if you didn’t see him as a walking vagina first and foremost.
Is she “male socialized” or is she just a tomboy with a fucking spine who doesn’t let anyone talk to her any old kind of way who would honestly be indiscernible from any feminist cis woman y'all gas up on here if you didn’t see her as a walking penis first and foremost.
This is insane to me. Please there has to he someway that we can put these posts into a translator and make them comprehensible.
The post is saying that people often label things that trans people do as being a result of growing up as a certain gender even when they wouldn’t make that type of claim about a cis person acting the exact same way. In fact some people might celebrate that type of person or see them as normal or unremarkable if they didn’t know they were trans.
Look. I’m going to be honest with you. Adopting that hard anti-plastic surgery stance while trans people’s lives and right to transition is at stake is absolutely horrendous timing. Knock it off.
Plastic surgery saves and rebuilds lives. While anti-aging culture and lookism are both detrimental to society, it’s important to remember that plastic surgery is healthcare.
People in the tags are nottttt getting it. I’m saying you should address the societal influences that lead young women to seek plastic surgery before you seek to villianize the plastics field and/or limit access to healthcare to anyone. Plastic surgery is healthcare.
I am not making this a ‘trans people versus feminists against lookism’ issue. You may require plastic surgery in your lifetime as well. Anyone could. The line of where plastic surgery is frivolous and driven by vanity or necessary for maintaining or creating a greater quality of life is far thinner than you think. That nose job may have been motivated by Eurocentric beauty standards or it may have been motivated by the desire to correct a deviated septum. I am saying that at a time when we are all losing our bodily autonomy and access to medical care at an alarming rate, now is not the time to be writing treatises on why access to certain forms of healthcare is bad.
im a trans man having top surgery this year and if a woman wanting a boob job had to go through all the exhausting loops I have with therapists and psychiatric evaluations for nearly 2 years then I wouldn’t feel better, I’d feel sorry for her. we BOTH should have been able to go to the doctor and said “I want my chest to be different” and to have it be done without a hassle, because we’re adults and we get to chose how our bodies look. a lot of times your self image just can’t be cured with body positivity and good self talk. no one else gets to judge someone for what they do with their body regardless of the reason.
Some people have no idea exactly what plastic surgery entails and it shows
The person who stitches your face back together after a motorcycle wreck? Plastic surgeons
The person who puts skin back on your body after a house fire? Plastic surgeons
The person who evens your tits out after breast cancer so you can have a workable bra Ever Again? Plastic surgeons
Plastic surgery can be purely cosmetic but they worked out a lot of the cosmetic stuff based on what they learned from emergency care
Plastic surgeons work in the ER on everything from reattaching severed body parts to fixing your broken nose - and yes, putting your face back on after an accident is also cosmetic surgery
“Oh obviously I didn’t mean actual medical emergencies” - didn’t you? Dysmorphia isn’t a trans-exclusive condition. Anyone can get it on any part of their body… which, yeah, includes that nose job you want to call frivolous
If the way you try to fight a social issue is by attacking medical care, you’re already in the wrong place; people who do get plastic surgery just for their looks are a symptom of the issue, not the cause
Making it even harder for the people who need plastic surgery to get it isn’t going to do a single damn thing to the propaganda machine that spews out all that lookism you hate
It’s just going to make more people miserable while the machine keeps telling them they’re worthless and ugly
Bodily autonomy is important and yeah, it’s a ridiculous argument to be trying to make when people are already not able to control their own healthcare, but it’s also fundamentally not going to do what you want it to do
The change you want won’t happen by making it so hard for people to change their own personal body that they give up. It happens when the mechanisms that tell people they must change their bodies in certain ways to be human are broken down to nothing and forgotten
This is a hard, complicated systemic change that needs to happen, and saying “plastic surgery bad” is very easy
The question is, what are you trying to do? Something easy, or something that actually makes a difference?
A lot of younger people have no idea what aging actually looks and feels like, and the reasons behind it. That ignorance is so dangerous. If you don’t want to “be old,” you aren’t talking about a number of years. I have patients in their late 80s who could still handily beat me in a race—one couple still runs marathons together, in their late 80s—and I lost someone who was in her early 60s to COPD last year. What you want is not youth, it is health.
If you want to still be able to enjoy doing things in your 60s and 70s and 80s and even 90s, what you want to do, right now, is quit smoking, get some activity on a regular basis (a couple of walks a week is WAY better for you than nothing; increasing from 1 hour a day of cardio to 1.5 will buy you very little), and eat some plants. That’s it. No magic to it. No secret weird tricks. Don’t poison yourself, move around so your body doesn’t forget how, and eat plants.
If you have trouble moving around now because of mobility limitations, bad news: you still need to move around, not because it’s immoral not to, but because that’s still the best advice we have. I highly recommend looking up the Sit and Be Fit series; it is freely available and has exercises that can be done in a chair, which are suitable for people with limited mobility or poor balance. POTS sufferers, I’m looking at you.
If you have trouble eating plants because of dietary issues (they cause gas, etc.) or just because they’re bitter (super taster with texture issues here!), bad news. You still want to find a way to get some plants into your body on a regular basis. I know. It sucks. The only way I can do it is restaurants—they can make salads taste like food. I can also tolerate some bagged salads. On bad weeks, the OCD with contamination focus gets so bad I just can’t. However, canned beans always seem “safe,” and they taste a bit like candy, so they’re a good fallback.
If you smoke and you have tried quitting a million times and you’re just not ready to, bad news. You still need to quit. Your body needs you to try and keep trying. Your brain needs it, too. Damaging small blood vessels racks up cumulative damage over time that your body can start trying to reverse as soon as you quit. I know it’s insanely, absurdly addictive. You still need to.
You cannot rules lawyer your way past your body’s basic needs. It needs food, sleep, activity, and the absence of poison. Those are both small things and big asks. You cannot sustain a routine based on punishment, so don’t punish your body. Find ways to include these things that are enjoyable and rewarding instead. Experiment. There is no reason not to experiment—you don’t have to know instantly what’s going to work for you and what won’t, you just need to be willing to try things and make changes when things aren’t working for you.
You will still age. Your body will stop making collagen and elastin. Tissues you can see and tissues you can’t see will both sag. Cushioning tissues under your skin will get thinner. You’ll bruise more easily. Skin will tear more easily. Accumulated sun damage will start to show more and more. Joints will begin to show arthritis. Tendons and ligaments will get weaker and get injured more easily, as will muscles. Bones will lose mass and get easier to break. You’ll get tired more easily.
But you know what makes the difference between being dead, or as good as, in your 60s vs your 90s? Activity, plants, and quitting smoking. And don’t do meth. Saw a 58-year-old guy this week who is going to have a heart attack if he doesn’t quit whatever stimulant he’s on. I pretended to believe it was just the cigarettes, and maybe it is, but meth and cocaine will kill you quicker. Stop poisoning yourself.
Baby steps; take it one step at a time; you don’t need to have everything figured out right now. But you do need to be working on figuring things out.
You will be unsurprised to learn that someone already accused me of ableism for suggesting that people not smoke, move regularly in ways their body can tolerate, and eat plants.
A lot of younger people have no idea what aging actually looks and feels like, and the reasons behind it. That ignorance is so dangerous. If you don’t want to “be old,” you aren’t talking about a number of years. I have patients in their late 80s who could still handily beat me in a race—one couple still runs marathons together, in their late 80s—and I lost someone who was in her early 60s to COPD last year. What you want is not youth, it is health.
If you want to still be able to enjoy doing things in your 60s and 70s and 80s and even 90s, what you want to do, right now, is quit smoking, get some activity on a regular basis (a couple of walks a week is WAY better for you than nothing; increasing from 1 hour a day of cardio to 1.5 will buy you very little), and eat some plants. That’s it. No magic to it. No secret weird tricks. Don’t poison yourself, move around so your body doesn’t forget how, and eat plants.
If you have trouble moving around now because of mobility limitations, bad news: you still need to move around, not because it’s immoral not to, but because that’s still the best advice we have. I highly recommend looking up the Sit and Be Fit series; it is freely available and has exercises that can be done in a chair, which are suitable for people with limited mobility or poor balance. POTS sufferers, I’m looking at you.
If you have trouble eating plants because of dietary issues (they cause gas, etc.) or just because they’re bitter (super taster with texture issues here!), bad news. You still want to find a way to get some plants into your body on a regular basis. I know. It sucks. The only way I can do it is restaurants—they can make salads taste like food. I can also tolerate some bagged salads. On bad weeks, the OCD with contamination focus gets so bad I just can’t. However, canned beans always seem “safe,” and they taste a bit like candy, so they’re a good fallback.
If you smoke and you have tried quitting a million times and you’re just not ready to, bad news. You still need to quit. Your body needs you to try and keep trying. Your brain needs it, too. Damaging small blood vessels racks up cumulative damage over time that your body can start trying to reverse as soon as you quit. I know it’s insanely, absurdly addictive. You still need to.
You cannot rules lawyer your way past your body’s basic needs. It needs food, sleep, activity, and the absence of poison. Those are both small things and big asks. You cannot sustain a routine based on punishment, so don’t punish your body. Find ways to include these things that are enjoyable and rewarding instead. Experiment. There is no reason not to experiment—you don’t have to know instantly what’s going to work for you and what won’t, you just need to be willing to try things and make changes when things aren’t working for you.
You will still age. Your body will stop making collagen and elastin. Tissues you can see and tissues you can’t see will both sag. Cushioning tissues under your skin will get thinner. You’ll bruise more easily. Skin will tear more easily. Accumulated sun damage will start to show more and more. Joints will begin to show arthritis. Tendons and ligaments will get weaker and get injured more easily, as will muscles. Bones will lose mass and get easier to break. You’ll get tired more easily.
But you know what makes the difference between being dead, or as good as, in your 60s vs your 90s? Activity, plants, and quitting smoking. And don’t do meth. Saw a 58-year-old guy this week who is going to have a heart attack if he doesn’t quit whatever stimulant he’s on. I pretended to believe it was just the cigarettes, and maybe it is, but meth and cocaine will kill you quicker. Stop poisoning yourself.
Baby steps; take it one step at a time; you don’t need to have everything figured out right now. But you do need to be working on figuring things out.
You will be unsurprised to learn that someone already accused me of ableism for suggesting that people not smoke, move regularly in ways their body can tolerate, and eat plants.
A lot of younger people have no idea what aging actually looks and feels like, and the reasons behind it. That ignorance is so dangerous. If you don’t want to “be old,” you aren’t talking about a number of years. I have patients in their late 80s who could still handily beat me in a race—one couple still runs marathons together, in their late 80s—and I lost someone who was in her early 60s to COPD last year. What you want is not youth, it is health.
If you want to still be able to enjoy doing things in your 60s and 70s and 80s and even 90s, what you want to do, right now, is quit smoking, get some activity on a regular basis (a couple of walks a week is WAY better for you than nothing; increasing from 1 hour a day of cardio to 1.5 will buy you very little), and eat some plants. That’s it. No magic to it. No secret weird tricks. Don’t poison yourself, move around so your body doesn’t forget how, and eat plants.
If you have trouble moving around now because of mobility limitations, bad news: you still need to move around, not because it’s immoral not to, but because that’s still the best advice we have. I highly recommend looking up the Sit and Be Fit series; it is freely available and has exercises that can be done in a chair, which are suitable for people with limited mobility or poor balance. POTS sufferers, I’m looking at you.
If you have trouble eating plants because of dietary issues (they cause gas, etc.) or just because they’re bitter (super taster with texture issues here!), bad news. You still want to find a way to get some plants into your body on a regular basis. I know. It sucks. The only way I can do it is restaurants—they can make salads taste like food. I can also tolerate some bagged salads. On bad weeks, the OCD with contamination focus gets so bad I just can’t. However, canned beans always seem “safe,” and they taste a bit like candy, so they’re a good fallback.
If you smoke and you have tried quitting a million times and you’re just not ready to, bad news. You still need to quit. Your body needs you to try and keep trying. Your brain needs it, too. Damaging small blood vessels racks up cumulative damage over time that your body can start trying to reverse as soon as you quit. I know it’s insanely, absurdly addictive. You still need to.
You cannot rules lawyer your way past your body’s basic needs. It needs food, sleep, activity, and the absence of poison. Those are both small things and big asks. You cannot sustain a routine based on punishment, so don’t punish your body. Find ways to include these things that are enjoyable and rewarding instead. Experiment. There is no reason not to experiment—you don’t have to know instantly what’s going to work for you and what won’t, you just need to be willing to try things and make changes when things aren’t working for you.
You will still age. Your body will stop making collagen and elastin. Tissues you can see and tissues you can’t see will both sag. Cushioning tissues under your skin will get thinner. You’ll bruise more easily. Skin will tear more easily. Accumulated sun damage will start to show more and more. Joints will begin to show arthritis. Tendons and ligaments will get weaker and get injured more easily, as will muscles. Bones will lose mass and get easier to break. You’ll get tired more easily.
But you know what makes the difference between being dead, or as good as, in your 60s vs your 90s? Activity, plants, and quitting smoking. And don’t do meth. Saw a 58-year-old guy this week who is going to have a heart attack if he doesn’t quit whatever stimulant he’s on. I pretended to believe it was just the cigarettes, and maybe it is, but meth and cocaine will kill you quicker. Stop poisoning yourself.
Baby steps; take it one step at a time; you don’t need to have everything figured out right now. But you do need to be working on figuring things out.
You will be unsurprised to learn that someone already accused me of ableism for suggesting that people not smoke, move regularly in ways their body can tolerate, and eat plants.
A lot of younger people have no idea what aging actually looks and feels like, and the reasons behind it. That ignorance is so dangerous. If you don’t want to “be old,” you aren’t talking about a number of years. I have patients in their late 80s who could still handily beat me in a race—one couple still runs marathons together, in their late 80s—and I lost someone who was in her early 60s to COPD last year. What you want is not youth, it is health.
If you want to still be able to enjoy doing things in your 60s and 70s and 80s and even 90s, what you want to do, right now, is quit smoking, get some activity on a regular basis (a couple of walks a week is WAY better for you than nothing; increasing from 1 hour a day of cardio to 1.5 will buy you very little), and eat some plants. That’s it. No magic to it. No secret weird tricks. Don’t poison yourself, move around so your body doesn’t forget how, and eat plants.
If you have trouble moving around now because of mobility limitations, bad news: you still need to move around, not because it’s immoral not to, but because that’s still the best advice we have. I highly recommend looking up the Sit and Be Fit series; it is freely available and has exercises that can be done in a chair, which are suitable for people with limited mobility or poor balance. POTS sufferers, I’m looking at you.
If you have trouble eating plants because of dietary issues (they cause gas, etc.) or just because they’re bitter (super taster with texture issues here!), bad news. You still want to find a way to get some plants into your body on a regular basis. I know. It sucks. The only way I can do it is restaurants—they can make salads taste like food. I can also tolerate some bagged salads. On bad weeks, the OCD with contamination focus gets so bad I just can’t. However, canned beans always seem “safe,” and they taste a bit like candy, so they’re a good fallback.
If you smoke and you have tried quitting a million times and you’re just not ready to, bad news. You still need to quit. Your body needs you to try and keep trying. Your brain needs it, too. Damaging small blood vessels racks up cumulative damage over time that your body can start trying to reverse as soon as you quit. I know it’s insanely, absurdly addictive. You still need to.
You cannot rules lawyer your way past your body’s basic needs. It needs food, sleep, activity, and the absence of poison. Those are both small things and big asks. You cannot sustain a routine based on punishment, so don’t punish your body. Find ways to include these things that are enjoyable and rewarding instead. Experiment. There is no reason not to experiment—you don’t have to know instantly what’s going to work for you and what won’t, you just need to be willing to try things and make changes when things aren’t working for you.
You will still age. Your body will stop making collagen and elastin. Tissues you can see and tissues you can’t see will both sag. Cushioning tissues under your skin will get thinner. You’ll bruise more easily. Skin will tear more easily. Accumulated sun damage will start to show more and more. Joints will begin to show arthritis. Tendons and ligaments will get weaker and get injured more easily, as will muscles. Bones will lose mass and get easier to break. You’ll get tired more easily.
But you know what makes the difference between being dead, or as good as, in your 60s vs your 90s? Activity, plants, and quitting smoking. And don’t do meth. Saw a 58-year-old guy this week who is going to have a heart attack if he doesn’t quit whatever stimulant he’s on. I pretended to believe it was just the cigarettes, and maybe it is, but meth and cocaine will kill you quicker. Stop poisoning yourself.
Baby steps; take it one step at a time; you don’t need to have everything figured out right now. But you do need to be working on figuring things out.
You will be unsurprised to learn that someone already accused me of ableism for suggesting that people not smoke, move regularly in ways their body can tolerate, and eat plants.
A lot of younger people have no idea what aging actually looks and feels like, and the reasons behind it. That ignorance is so dangerous. If you don’t want to “be old,” you aren’t talking about a number of years. I have patients in their late 80s who could still handily beat me in a race—one couple still runs marathons together, in their late 80s—and I lost someone who was in her early 60s to COPD last year. What you want is not youth, it is health.
If you want to still be able to enjoy doing things in your 60s and 70s and 80s and even 90s, what you want to do, right now, is quit smoking, get some activity on a regular basis (a couple of walks a week is WAY better for you than nothing; increasing from 1 hour a day of cardio to 1.5 will buy you very little), and eat some plants. That’s it. No magic to it. No secret weird tricks. Don’t poison yourself, move around so your body doesn’t forget how, and eat plants.
If you have trouble moving around now because of mobility limitations, bad news: you still need to move around, not because it’s immoral not to, but because that’s still the best advice we have. I highly recommend looking up the Sit and Be Fit series; it is freely available and has exercises that can be done in a chair, which are suitable for people with limited mobility or poor balance. POTS sufferers, I’m looking at you.
If you have trouble eating plants because of dietary issues (they cause gas, etc.) or just because they’re bitter (super taster with texture issues here!), bad news. You still want to find a way to get some plants into your body on a regular basis. I know. It sucks. The only way I can do it is restaurants—they can make salads taste like food. I can also tolerate some bagged salads. On bad weeks, the OCD with contamination focus gets so bad I just can’t. However, canned beans always seem “safe,” and they taste a bit like candy, so they’re a good fallback.
If you smoke and you have tried quitting a million times and you’re just not ready to, bad news. You still need to quit. Your body needs you to try and keep trying. Your brain needs it, too. Damaging small blood vessels racks up cumulative damage over time that your body can start trying to reverse as soon as you quit. I know it’s insanely, absurdly addictive. You still need to.
You cannot rules lawyer your way past your body’s basic needs. It needs food, sleep, activity, and the absence of poison. Those are both small things and big asks. You cannot sustain a routine based on punishment, so don’t punish your body. Find ways to include these things that are enjoyable and rewarding instead. Experiment. There is no reason not to experiment—you don’t have to know instantly what’s going to work for you and what won’t, you just need to be willing to try things and make changes when things aren’t working for you.
You will still age. Your body will stop making collagen and elastin. Tissues you can see and tissues you can’t see will both sag. Cushioning tissues under your skin will get thinner. You’ll bruise more easily. Skin will tear more easily. Accumulated sun damage will start to show more and more. Joints will begin to show arthritis. Tendons and ligaments will get weaker and get injured more easily, as will muscles. Bones will lose mass and get easier to break. You’ll get tired more easily.
But you know what makes the difference between being dead, or as good as, in your 60s vs your 90s? Activity, plants, and quitting smoking. And don’t do meth. Saw a 58-year-old guy this week who is going to have a heart attack if he doesn’t quit whatever stimulant he’s on. I pretended to believe it was just the cigarettes, and maybe it is, but meth and cocaine will kill you quicker. Stop poisoning yourself.
Baby steps; take it one step at a time; you don’t need to have everything figured out right now. But you do need to be working on figuring things out.
You will be unsurprised to learn that someone already accused me of ableism for suggesting that people not smoke, move regularly in ways their body can tolerate, and eat plants.
we’ve seen political assassination attempts that are great for the perpetrator’s agenda, we’ve seen political assassination attempts that are great for the target’s agenda, but America, ever the innovator, has invented something new: the political assassination attempt with no effect whatsoever
ALT
ALT
ALT
