Eating a Donut After Fasting

Mr. Donut

I started fasting every other week a few weeks ago.  It’s no fun.  To make it more fun, I added a donut.  Let me first be clear: this has nothing to do with losing weight.  I decided to try this after reading that fasting may have an effect on autophagy*, or the destruction of damaged cells.  I decided to attempt this after reading that 2016 Nobel prize winning research has confirmed the benefits of this**.   Since attempting this, I have lost zero pounds.  I look generally the same.  There are no success stories about weight loss to be had here.

I love my donut.  I generally feel that a donut is a dish best reserved for special occasions, which don’t come often enough.  So, in keeping with the universal rule of moderate, I try to reserve them for times when I’ve had a fast.

 

 

*For autophagy, read This.

** For 2016 Nobel Prize research on autophagy and fasting, read Here and Here.

Things I Don’t Give a Tart About: Hair Edition

Somewhere in the right side of my head, a white hair is sticking out with the subtly of a middle finger.  I have gone to job interviews believing that if I wouldn’t want a job where I was judged by the state of my hair.  I regularly wait my turn in line beside the girlfriend of a guy who is getting his hair trimmed at Supercuts for $20.

This has done me zero favors.  While out browsing at Forever 21 (in my 30’s), after getting a really bad cut, a man directly approached me asking if I wouldn’t mind being his hair model so he could train.  I have no pride.  I knew I looked horrible.  I said hell yes.

Despite many attempts, I do not like hair salons.  I hate how small I feel in them, how universally unflattering the overhead lighting usually is, and I hate making small talk to someone while they are throwing my hair across my face.  While I was sitting get my hair modeled and listening to my hairdresser talk about calyxes, for half an hour I watched the woman next to me wear a backless 1960’s dress and three inch heels walk around continuously while cutting and styling the person next to me.  My feet ached.  My back felt parched and vulnerable.  My hair looked fine.  I never went back.

It’s so much more relaxing to go to supercuts without planning anything and not care about my hair, letting my cares go like farts in the wind.

Little Pockets of Sanity Between Liberals and Conservatives

A little while ago, I read this post from Emily Henderson’s Design Blog.  It’s the not post itself that is so intriguing, but the comments it evoked.  I don’t read comments sections because it’s usually akin to eating at table serving hate biscuits, if you understand my meaning.  But what I love about her blog, aside from showing me houses that I will never live in, is that Emily creates these spaces where liberals and conservatives can speak respectfully to one another.  And I am curious, not curious enough to venture onto Fox News, but I am curious.

Here’s a quote from a self-acknowledged conservative, that is rational, accepting, and wonderful.  In this, she points out that some pictures of Obama are perceived as aggressive, which had never occurred to me before.  This also indirectly leads to another point: that both sides feel aggression from the other, and how meeting aggression with aggression helps neither cause.  But I like to know that there are places, where people can come together and respectfully disagree.  It gives me hope.

While I am a bleeding conservative, I LIKE YOU!! I love my liberal friends! Your sentiments were thoughtful and I can tell they come from a place of understanding and open-mindedness, which our country needs a whole lot more of right now. I didn’t love the insta post, if I’m being honest, mostly for all the reasons you spelled out above–the aggressive tone, propensity for more polarization, etc. Politically, I feel like Obama sent our country to hell in a handbasket, but I have always respected the man and the office he held. I can say the exact same thing about Trump. While I don’t agree with a lot of what he has done or said, I still retain respect for the office he holds and pray we come out of his presidency in one piece.

By definition, I AM A FEMINIST. I stand for women’s rights and equality and empowerment. I do not, however, feel like it helps our cause to stand for these rights with anger and an aggressive undertone, and with the underarching message of “society needs to see us the same way they see men!” Men and women are divinely different, and we need to celebrate those differences. Both genders have strengths they bring to the table, and rather than striving for SAMENESS, we need to strive for EQUALITY in our differences. The world needs more gentlemen who value women, and more ladies who value men, not more women acting like men. We need more kindness and love, more acceptance and understanding, more respect for each other, and we need to calm the heck down and be more unified as a country!

 

Recognizing Kindness, Always a Good Time

In my twenties, and why I sometimes find my past self to be something of an embarrassment, I walked around in an oblivious haze.  One which, if I hated myself, I would call stupidity.  But choosing to be kind, I will say that I was simply unaware.  Around that time, my first job out of college, was minimum wage, and involved commuting to the nascent abscesses of South San Francisco, in a building which has since been razed, paved over, and replaced with a Lowes.  In that building, I worked for a tiny family run biotech firm under the dual leadership of the married co-founders, who both received their Ph.D.’s from UCSF.  So there was no shortage of intelligence or drive between the two of them.  I worked directly “S” who was a tiny, brilliant, and the mother of three, yet still tiny.  She was unnecessarily kind to me every day I worked there.  And this was not not the norm.  In my last job, the one where I labored free of charge, I had been threatened with being fired.  Not for incompetence, but on a whim.  In the same way I let almost being fired for no reason slide right on off, like shit off a boot, I also did not recognize that there was someone, without any basis, who worked alongside me  every day who was encouraging and saw the best in me.  Me, right out of college, fog in the brain and all.  I didn’t recognize it at the time, but looking back now, I see it and take it out, and appreciate it.

A second instance, again in retrospect, stands out.  Again, at the time, it was not something I recognized as extraordinary at the time.  I just let it pass me by, in one ear and out the other, deep in my fog.  It was during one of a series of one-on-one graduate school interviews.  I was led by a student to one professor’s office after another, in a series. It was uncomfortable and tiring on both sides.  On one interview with Professor M, I said, and to this day I still believe this to be true, that I was destined to have a difficult life, because I would always choose the more difficult path.  It was simply my personality, and that part of me has not changed.  A lot of my difficulties are self-inflicted, which means that the way to resolve them lies within me as well.  But I digress.  I think this little piece of information triggered something.  She took out a piece of paper, and gave me her contact information.  She said she understood, and that if I wanted, I could always give her a call.  Of course that didn’t resonate with me.  I wadded up that paper and put it in my pocket and forgot about it.  I see it now, years later, as an exceptional act of kindness.

Here is what I take from this: these were both women who were fulfilled, strong, and in their prime.  While in that glorious state, they had the capacity, the energy, to genuinely invest themselves in the welfare of those around them.