a couple of updates and future plans

We traveled way too much in September. One trip to visit my mom (which ended with a couple of days in Dallas visiting friends from high school)(it was super fun), one trip to the wedding of a nephew (also super fun), and one weekend where my spouse went hiking with friends and I went to hang out with the grandkids. By the end of the month, which unfortunately ended with us having to spend the night in Salt Lake after missing our connection on the way back from the wedding, we were ready to be done with traveling for awhile. And thankfully, we are. We're not leaving town again-- well, except to see the grandkids-- until we fly out to see our son and his wife at their new home in Michigan for Thanksgiving. 

In other news, I have a series of posts in mind that I want to pre-write before I start publishing them, so it may be awhile before I post again. Or who knows. The last time I said that several years ago, I posted again within a month. 

I did want to do one update, though, since I made such a big deal out of being on a GLP-1 (here and here) back in July. First of all I should say that my weight loss stabilized shortly after I published those. I'm still at 152 (give or take a pound or two), which is fine for me. It feels like a good weight for my height and also I don't have to buy all new clothes. ha.

I did try increasing my dose, but the side effects were not tolerable, so I went back to 2.5 mg. Except that this week I skipped a dose. I've been having some weird symptoms, including nearly-intolerable back pain, terrible constipation, and inability to sleep (possibly related to the first two), which may or may not be related to zepbound, but I'm a little bit desperate. I had to do something. Muscle and joint pain isn't listed on the official list of side effects for zepbound, but there's plenty of talk about it on Reddit. 

So I hope that this is just temporary and after a week or two with no shots, I can go back to the 2.5mg dose. Because it really does seem to be helping with the migraines. I almost always get migraines when I travel, so that hasn't changed, but it's Friday night as I'm typing this and I haven't had a migraine since last weekend. That's pretty good for me. 

It might snow this weekend, but it won't stick around. The temps are barely even going below freezing. 

If you haven't seen Remarkably Bright Creatures yet, check it out. I rarely say this, but I thought it was better than the book, even with the unbelievable coincidence at the end. 

So, I already said to have a good weekend in yesterday's post, so I'll just sign off. Bye. :) 

what does it mean to be moral?

I’ve been trying to write this post for months, but I just don’t feel like I know enough to tackle the topic. (And if you’re thinking that’s never stopped you before, well, um, yeah). But I'm about to sign off for a month or two (more on that in the next post), and this is the one thing that keeps coming up when I think of things I want to say. I'll just warn you that I don't have a coherent argument here, I've only got -- as usual-- some things I've been thinking about. 

As someone who leans left but lives in a decidedly conservative state, one of the few things I feel I can legitimately offer here is some insight into how "normal" people in the so-called flyover states think-- not the politicians or the influencers or the opinion people or the writers of click-bait headlines, just the normal, everyday conservatives who live down the street from me or shop at the same stores or play with me in the community band. 

If you also lean left, you're unlikely to hear from those folks. Our increasingly segregated online life has shunted them off into their own world, just as it has shunted us off into our own lefty world. For people on either side, it's hard for us to imagine that a decent, thoughtful person would have the opinions that those on The Other Side have. We assume they must be evil or ignorant or something. Because of course anyone who had any decency at all would agree with us. 

One time I heard in the space of about ten minutes a person on one side saying our president is evil, and then ten minutes later on my phone, our vice president calling another politician evil. I'm not going to weigh in on the question of whether or not a human being can truly be evil, but if there are evil people, I'm pretty sure there aren't very many of them. Most of us believe what we believe, and our opinions are reinforced by hanging out with people who agree with us, and the rest of it is just trying to get through the day. 

So having said that, it seems to me that there is a very important conversation we’re not having, that we could have, if we could remember to curious and interested instead of instantly judgmental and critical, and that is around the question of morality. 

I don’t think that liberals, particularly over-educated liberals (*cough* like me) realize the extent to which they are damned (sometimes literally) in the eyes of conservatives by the perceived "immorality" of the left. Among the rank-and-file conservatives I know, this is the #1 reason that they have done the "hold your nose and vote for the current president" thing. They may not like him, but it's better than what they see as a slide into moral decay. 

I know. You are already formulating the million reasons this is ridiculous, as I did. But I'm not writing this so you can tell me how wrong I am (they are), I'm writing this to try to get you to see how we are inadvertently making things worse by the way we talk about certain topics. 

The first time I realized this was even a problem was about ten years ago when I read a comment attributed to a well-known conservative pundit saying words to the effect that “of course” liberals were immoral. I think "of course, liberals have no moral core" was the way it was worded. 

I was so surprised by this that at first it refused to compute. Liberals are immoral? There had been a recent high-profile scandal of some democratic politician having an affair, but there have been plenty of republicans who have had affairs—that’s hardly a party-line difference. 

In my mind, the conservative tendency to sell out to business interests, creating a version of capitalism that causes money always to flow upward to those who already have it, was far more immoral than anything I'd seen from liberals.

It has taken me years to tease out what this might mean, and honestly I think most liberals have no idea how strongly this figures in the current rank-and-file conservative disgust with liberals. We want to dismiss their fears as prudishness, nothing but homophobia or transphobia or a prurient reverse obsession with sex. But that's not giving them enough credit. It’s more like an abhorrence of what they see as a slide into "anything goes" morality, a type of moral anarchy, a lack of respect for social norms that they see as holding communities and families together in a positive way.

A small example-- if you’ve ever been a part of a close group of families and one couple gets a divorce, you know that divorce has a community effect. It's not just two people doing what's right for them and the world will roll merrily along as if nothing happened. We've been involved in that situation twice over the last thirty years, a group of families with kids of similar ages who do all kinds of things together, including camping and vacations-- until one couple splits up, and both times our friend group was never the same. (Although neither can you stay together only for the sake of your friends. This isn't a simple problem. There's always a balance.)

This idea that liberals are morally depraved is daily, repeatedly, constantly reinforced (and also exaggerated) by the conservative press and a zillion other online sources. But it has to be said-- we aren't helping anything by the way we talk about issues around sex. We may say that "anything goes" between consenting adults, but do any of us who are parents no matter what our political beliefs want our children (male or female or fluid/trans) in situations like that frat party at Cornell? Even if they are over 18. Are we helping the public conversation around sex when we carelessly refuse to admit that maybe there should be some guardrails, some caution, some care? 

And yes, I know, you can insert here my long-held anger at conservatives who balk at sex education in the schools, the place where conversations about safety and dealing with predators and party drugs and etc could happen, especially for kids whose parents aren't capable of providing that information at home. This isn't simple. It isn't an either/or conversation. 

It seems to me that conservatives' idea of "morality" tends to cluster around sex and sex-adjacent issues. The reason that I was so surprised by that pundit's comment when I first read it was that it completely ignores entire swaths of moral issues that are, honestly, more important to me than most sex-related issues—rapacious greed, lack of care for those less fortunate than ourselves, feigned ignorance about climate change (in the service of profit), lack of justice for the oppressed and downtrodden. 

On those issues, liberals aren't immoral at all. Morality isn't just about sex. But on the other hand, other people's beliefs are their beliefs, and we can’t tell them it's ridiculous to believe that, YOU SHOULDN’T BELIEVE THAT, and dismiss the issues that are important to them as non-problems. 

I don’t know the answer to this. I probably haven't even explained myself very well. But it’s not a topic that I hear being discussed, and it needs to be. It needs to be something that we address, because it’s a large part of the wedge that drives the two sides apart. I mean, at least we could have a little respect for their deeply held beliefs.

Yeesh. I've been working on this post for days and I'm pretty sure I still haven't said quite what I meant to say. Maybe there will be a follow-up. Have a good weekend.  

Related: Summer Fun, Had Me a Blast

7ToF: time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin'

1. Is there any better way to spend an August evening than watching a baseball game during a lunar eclipse? No. No there is not. And also our best hitter hit for the cycle. (I confess my spouse had to explain that to me.)

2. Pro tip: If you're planning to visit Glacier National Park, check the Range Riders schedule to make sure they will be playing at home while you're here. The ballpark is practically new (I think it opened in 2022), and it's a beautiful facility, great food, local brews, and a fun vibe. Definitely a great way to spend the evening. Sit on the third base side.

3. After that last post about short literary classics you can try, it occurred to me that I should have leaned in to more Montana writers. I taught a six week class on Montana writers of the short story on two different occasions in our local continuing ed department, so I have lots of ideas about this. But I will limit myself to D'Arcy McNickle and Grace Stone Coates (plus Dorothy Johnson, as previously mentioned). 

D'arcy McNickle grew up in St. Ignatius on the Flathead Reservation and he wrote a bunch of beautiful stories that were collected in The Hawk Is Hungry after his death. He adopted the Salish Kootenai conferederated tribes, but his mother was Cree-Metis. 

4. Aside: If you're still planning your trip (see #2), you can fly into Missoula, catch a concert at the Kettlehouse Ampitheater just east of town, then drive up to Glacier National Park, and you will drive right through St. Ignatius. (You'll also drive through Arlee, the setting of this book, not related to D'Arcy McNickle, I just thought you'd want to know.) McNickle's novel The Surrounded is excellent, but it is a bit over our 200 page limit. It reads easily, I don't think you'll have a problem with it. 

5. Grace Stone Coats has, among other works, a slim book of inter-connected short stories called Black Cherries. It's set in the midwest if I remember right, but Coates lived in Montana for almost her entire adult life. One of the stories is in Best American Short Stories of the Century. Both Coates and McNickle were amazing writers, and neither of them gets much attention anymore. Do your part, people. 

6. Awhile back, I told you to find a faith community as part of caring for your soul. (I know, I know. Just do it.) You definitely have to find a place where you feel at home, but on the other hand, I think it's also good to find a place where not everyone thinks in lockstep. You may not feel like you fit in at first glance. Our church is off-putting to some young people because it is an older congregation -- as are many congregations these days. You might consider giving them a chance. I was at a church barbecue last weekend and I sat with some women who are 15-20 years older than me, and they were a hoot. They got to telling stories about when they were young wives and mothers and they were cackling. It was great. I laughed until I cried. I didn't need any conversation starters since I've known these women for years, but if you do need some-- try asking about their first job, or their first car, or what's their favorite place they've ever traveled. (I wouldn't pull those out the first time you talk to them, but eventually.) You might be surprised at how relatable old people can be.

7. Our son's wedding was June 6th. I went with the bridal party a few days before to get pedicures, and I got gel polish. How the hell do you get it off? Good grief. It's two and half months later and I still have chipped polish on several toes that will not come off. It looks awful (although I admit it did look great for about six weeks). I tried filing it off a couple of nights ago, and that at least made it less shiny (i.e., noticeable). YouTube says to wrap your nails in cotton soaked in acetone and then wrap that in foil and let it sit for thirty minutes, and I am not doing that. Who does that? 

I had big plans for this post but fact-checking myself on McNickle and Coates slowed me way down so this is it for this week. Next week I will be sweltering the heat and humidity down south to visit my mom, so who knows if I will post. Hope the last days of summer treat you well. 

some short classics to see what you like

Here is something I've been thinking about. Apparently there is recent renewed interest in reading "the classics," as in the novels that everyone feels like they're supposed to have read but never got around to. And as someone who was an English major back in the 80s when you had to take a whole bunch of required survey classes (back when we still had to read Pope and Dryden and William Blake, not to mention Austen, Dickens, Trollope, and Wilkie Collins)(and I'm enough of a nerd that I loved it all), I have read quite a few of the classics. QUITE A FEW. In fact, the big hole in my reading is mid-twentieth century, which was considered passé when I was in undergrad. lol. 

So if you're just starting out (in other words, except Lord of the Rings you haven't read a novel written before 1980 ever in your life), it occurred to me that I could pass along some advice. You could start with Middlemarch (a mere 800 pages) and maybe you'd love it, but you might be better off starting off with something a bit less intimidating. In other words, shorter.  

Here are some short works that still totally qualify as classics. Bonus: almost all of these you can find online for free, just google "Joyce The Dead full text free" or something similar. The number of pages is an estimate based on the version I have sitting on my shelves, but of course it depends on the size of the font, the layout of the page, etc. 

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis 70-ish pages (freaky story about a man who turns into a giant bug, and no I am not making that up)

James Joyce, "The Dead" 40-ish pages (published as the final work in his short story collection Dubliners)

Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener (yup, Melville is the guy more famous for Moby Dick, although that was barely read during his lifetime and didn't become famous until later)

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (you've probably heard of that one, yes?)

Nella Larson, Passing 120-ish pages

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery (short story) or The Haunting of Hill House (95-ish pages) or We have Always Lived in the Castle (under 200). I’ve only read the Lottery, the others look too scary for me.

Kate Chopin "The Awakening" or "The Story of an Hour" --short stories 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper" 17 pages, which surprised me when I pulled it off the shelf, I remember it being more like a novella.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" (10 pages, but is like a steamroller) 

Dorothy Johnson The Hanging Tree (150 pages), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance(40-ish pages) (I'm sneaking in a Montana author you've probably never heard of, but both of these were made into classic westerns)(also, A Man Called Horse— she was amazing)

Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street (120 pages)(it's only 42 years old but I think it still counts as a classic) 

And a handful of classic short stories: William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily," F. Scott Fitzgerald "Bernice Bobs her Hair," Eudora Welty "Why I Live at the P.O.," D.H. Lawrence, "The Rocking Horse Winner," John Updike, "A&P," Flannery O'Connor "A Good Man is Hard to Find" or "Everything that Rises must Converge," Edith Wharton "Roman Fever" which is a 15-ish page story that seems pointless until you get to the last line. I could go on and on. If you want more, just say the word.

There are many writers who were actually probably more famous for their short stories than their novels during their lifetimes, and some still are (Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Alice Walker-- and although Dickens was famous in his lifetime for his novels, he published dozens of short stories, try "The Chimes"). So you can google any of those and find plenty of options.

Since this is really low on works by writers of color, here is a link to 12 Brilliant Stories by Black Writers to read for free online, not all of which are old.

And that search led me to discover that I'm not the only person who has thought of this (of course not), and here is a list that is actually better than mine from LitHub, which reminded me of several books I've been meaning to read but hadn't yet (Giovanni's Room, for example) or re-read, like Cane which I read and loved in college and still have my copy, but can barely remember.

And of course if you like any of these, now you know some authors whose work you enjoy and you can keep going. Happy reading. 

Random odds and ends, end of July 2026 edition

Updated: I read this this morning after it was published and realized I should have put a warning label on it, because this is a super grumpy post. Welcome to smoke season in northwest Montana-- today isn't the worst it's been, but it's bad enough-- 167, or "Unhealthy for all groups." Ugh. 

- If you hear a fan of our current administration say that the president's agenda should be green-lighted 100% because after all, he was elected by the people, and therefore his agenda is the will of the people, please remind them that the people also elected their congressmen/women and senators. And they elected those people with the expectation that they would do their jobs and uphold the balance of power set up by the constitution. Just saying. 

- OK, that was political, but this is not, this is just about dealing with the people around you. Please if you have a chance today or any day, try to keep your level of righteous certainty about your opinions at about 80%, maybe 90% in a pinch. Try to leave some room for nuance, for discussion, for curiosity about how other people think. Maybe even a little humility. Just be willing to try it. If you're guessing from this that I've run into some people recently who are not willing to try it, you would be correct. 

- I keep running into people who think because I am not 100% out there on that limb I told you about in this post, I'm anti-trans, or not an LGBTQ+ ally, or I'm really a conservative and just don't want to admit it. Whatever. I’m not going to argue with someone who won’t let anyone else be on their team unless they 100% agree with some vaunted unspecified agenda. Not that this would convince someone like that, but outside a couple of local county elections, I’ve voted blue since 1984. 

The conversation around say, ending a pregnancy or someone's orientation or gender identity, can be complex. You don't have to be 100% in one camp or another, in spite of social media algorithms and your like-minded friends who insist you must be. I firmly believe that I can be an ally to all sorts of marginalized identities without dialing my opinions all the way up to 110% of the possible "sides." 

What I'm in favor of is you figuring out how you want to live your life and making it happen, not trying to conform to some agenda made up by the opinion people. And that, unfortunately, is hard. There’s no shortcut. Some of us who are ancient of days are still working on it.  

- OK, and this is kind of obscure, but I'm responding to a particular conversation I overheard recently. Valuing diversity is not the same thing as supporting anarchy. Diversity is reality. Human beings are diverse. Wildly diverse. Saying you're opposed to diversity is like saying you're opposed to oxygen. 

If you're opposed to the DEI policies of the past few years, well, OK, that's a conversation we can have, but please see earlier statement about recognizing complexity and nuance. Just because you can cite a half dozen examples of times when DEI policies went awry doesn't mean that they serve no purpose, and just because you can cite examples of times they achieved what they were intended to achieve doesn't mean that the policies don't need to be adjusted or modified for the current climate. I mean, good grief, could we all please just grow up. The issues facing us are complicated. Getting up in a bully pulpit for your extreme opinion might make you feel all self-righteously triumphant, but it is not helping to solve problems. 

- This week's interesting read: here is a gift link to Michelle Goldberg’s column in the NYT about the Michigan senate race: The Populist Left has a Theory.

- Zepbound update: 152. There's no way to talk about this without sounding like one of those irritating thinfluencers *simpers* I just had no idea I would lose this much weight! I'm so confused! *end simper* so I'm not going to say much else except to tell you that I am confused about this and I'm not sure I'm going to stay with it long term and yes, the migraines do seem to be getting better--and I say that even though the smoke in our area has been bad to terrible on several different days recently and smoke is a migraine trigger for me. 

The run-on sentences in this post abound.  

- And last but far from least, we said good bye to our beloved black lab last week and I'm still not over it. Probably won't be for quite awhile. She was a good, good girl. We miss her every day, constantly every day. The last few months of her life were rough, as anyone who has cared for an elderly dog knows. I can't really wish that she were still here and getting more and more decrepit every day. But we still miss her. Rest in peace, Sadie girl. You were the best.

Stoically putting up with our granddaughter

In her prime

I'm Melting part 2 - Further thoughts on weight loss and GLP-1s

In the previous post (here) I told you I started on a GLP-1 medication a couple of months ago, maybe partly for weight loss, but that wasn’t the main reason-- the main reason was for relief from the frequent migraines that have plagued me since I had COVID back in 2020. 

As I told you, two months later, I’m not sure yet if my migraines are any better, but the weight loss has been way more than I expected. Before I started, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to lose ten pounds, thinking it would take 3-4 months. In two months, I lost 19 pounds, about 11% of my body weight. 

I don’t care if people know I’m doing this, but it doesn’t exactly come up in conversation and people are way too polite to ask. Last week I went for a hike with a couple of friends and I was planning on telling them about it, but then we started talking about kids and grandkids and summer plans and I totally forgot. Maybe I will send them the link to these posts. 

So here is more about what I'm experiencing, in case you're wondering. 

- I started with the standard starting dose for the medication I'm on (zepbound), 2.5 mg. Since I responded so quickly, I'm still at 2.5 mg. Many people go up to 5mg or more (I just checked, and the maximum dose is 15mg). 

- It's not cheap, and since I don't have diabetes or any of the diagnoses that insurance covers, we're paying for it out of pocket. The standard prescription is for an auto-injector, which is pre-filled with the correct amount and makes it simple to give yourself the injection, but it's also more expensive. If you or someone in your household is comfortable giving injections, you can get the vials without the auto-injector, which is cheaper. And since my spouse can give injections in his sleep, that's what I get. It's $300/month, plus the first month I had to buy a box of syringes and some alcohol prep pads. I can't remember exactly how much those cost but it wasn't a lot--maybe $30, and there's enough to last a couple of years. I'm grateful we can afford to do this. But if it works for the migraines, $300/month is cheap compared to how much I spend (in both money and energy) on migraines and migraine meds.

- Side effects. the way that GLP-1s are supposed to work is by turning off whatever switch makes you feel hungry, so you feel full more quickly and the feeling of fullness lasts longer--thus you eat less. The first two weeks, I had terrible nausea, although I never threw up. It was bad enough that I thought, well that's why people lose weight, because they can't stand the thought of food. But that mostly subsided by the third week and has now gone away. 

Also the constipation was terrible the first few weeks-- it's better now, but I don't know if that's because it has really improved or because now I take dulcolax and colace on alternating nights. I do also occasionally feel seemingly random abdominal pains, but they are pretty minor and don't last more than a second or two (by occasionally, I mean 5-6 times a week). Fatigue, headaches, and dizziness are listed on the label as side effects, and I have occasionally had those, but it's difficult to tell how much is due to the med and how much is just me being 64 and in recovery from weddings- ha. So far it has not been debilitating. 

- one of the things that interested me the most was the claim that GLP-1s reduce "food noise"-- the constant thoughts of food that sometimes run through our heads, often at a level that we don't even notice. I have mixed feelings about this one. In the past, I’ve certainly had intrusive thoughts of food-- if I know there are cookies in the cabinet, I keep thinking about them and thinking about them until I go and get them. But for me, "food noise" was always tied to being hungry, so I'm not sure if it's actually the food noise that's gone away, or if it's that I don't have as much food noise because I'm not hungry as often. 

- I definitely don't get hungry again as quickly after I eat. Before, I would eat a full meal, and within 30-60 minutes, my stomach would start to empty out, and I would feel hungry again (even if I had eaten a big meal and there was no possible way I needed additional nutrition). And as soon as I started feeling hungry again, the food noise would start up. I didn't always act on it, but I did notice it. Now that I don't get hungry as often or as quickly, I don't think that much about food. Is it an actual reduction in food noise, or is it that I'm not hungry as much? I don't know. I still do get hungry, and I still think about food, but not as often or as much. 

 - OK, so here are just some things I've been thinking about, probably just my usual thinking on overdrive, but you know, that's why I keep a blog— so I can write about what I'm thinking about. 

So when the first dozen pounds dropped away, I had this very distinct feeling of recognition. Oh, yeah, this is what my body is supposed to feel like, what it used to feel like a dozen years ago. It wasn't even so much the weight dropping away (again, this is just my impression, I have no way to do a double-blind study), as it was something different about the way my body felt. I can believe that there was some switch, maybe something to do with inflammation, that had been stuck in the on position that suddenly seemed like it had been turned off. 

- And here's the other thing. As I told you in that previous post, the standard saw about weight loss is that it only happens if you eat fewer calories than you burn. Which makes it always, eternally, your own fault if you're not at your ideal weight. This is entirely within your control! If you eat fewer calories and burn more calories, you will automatically lose weight! Which, all right, yeah, it sounds very good and scientific and makes weight loss into a math class-- calculate the calories, burn some extra, and voilá, you look like a model. 

But thousands of us, maybe hundreds of thousands of us, male and female, know that's not always how it works. You can cut calories and cut calories and not lose weight. Some people can eat and eat and not gain weight. There are all kinds of complications to that simple formula, the IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT formula. But when the opposite happens, the "super-responder" thing that happened to me with zepbound-- it's obvious that the mathematical formula isn't all that's happening. This isn't anything I did. It’s like the weight just came off with a whoosh. Like I said in that last post, I did calorie restriction in Weight Watchers for ten or eleven months, and I didn't lose this much weight. 

There is no way I could lose twenty pounds in two months just because I wasn't eating as much. Something else is going on. It's like my body was holding on to extra weight for some reason, and the GLP-1 turned off whatever it was that was causing me to hold onto it. It makes me think that our entire weight loss industry is based on a bunch of partial truths. Maybe the question isn't how can I get the correct amount of calories in and out so that I can reach some random "ideal" weight? Maybe the question we should be asking is why do our bodies hold on to excess weight?  

I'm not an expert, I'm just an overthinker. There are so many crazy ways that our culture's obsession with thin-ness can take over our psyches. There's the problem of women wanting to avoid unwanted attention if they look thin (sadly "thin" too often equates to "sexy and attractive," like having a HIT ON ME sign taped to your back.). There's the problem of pecking order, because often in a group of women, the thin women are the queen bees and the overweight ones are at the bottom. I don’t want to lose weight! I am in solidarity with my plus-size sisters! 

There's the way that obsessing about weight can keep you feeling like a failure, so you obsess about that instead of other things.  I even had the thought, somewhere around week 4 or 5: it's not food noise that is reduced, it's self-loathing. The feeling of self-disgust, of failure, that comes when you can't do something that should be so simple (controlling calories in/out)--something that is simple for some people. 

So, yeah, there you have it, my experience with a GLP-1, nine weeks in. I have to take a week off from the injections this week because-- TMI alert!! -- I have a colonoscopy coming up. This is what happens when you read a boomer blog, people.

I've only done the most basic editing job on this thing because we are sort of on vacation this week (as much as you can be on vacation when you're retired), so I'm just sending it off. Have a great weekend. And don't overthink it. 

I'm melting! Melting!

I thought about writing a setup post before writing this one, something that would explain why I'm doing this before actually admitting I'm doing it, because I feel ambivalent and a bit guilty about it. But the setup post was starting to get a little too coy, so I'll just say this right up front: I started on a GLP-1 (Zepbound) a little over two months ago. There. I said it. 

I was going to explain that I firmly believe that women can be healthy and active at whatever size they want to be. I absolutely still believe that there is way too much pressure on women to be thin. I am still in favor of you managing your health however you want to do it, whatever that means for you, at whatever weight you think works for you. All of that.

But. I kept reading about off-label uses of GLP-1s (meaning, improvements that people report that have nothing to do with the official, sanctioned uses of the meds, which are mainly for managing diabetes). And two of those off-label uses are for people who have experienced long covid, and people with chronic migraines. 

If you've been following along, you know that I had covid early on and ever since, the frequency of my migraines has gone way up. It seems to be my version of long covid. I went from having maybe 6-10 migraines a month--not great, but manageable with triptans-- to 24 or more days per month. I just always had a migraine for awhile there. It has been better recently, but still I'm averaging 10-14 a month, which is too many.

After reading several articles in a row about the surprising off-label uses, I decided to talk to my primary care provider about it. I had halfway-expected that she would look at me with surprise and say, what? oh no, you don't need a GLP-1! But she thought it was a great idea, ha.

I had no idea how they would work for me, but I figured I could give them a couple of months, and in that amount of time, I couldn't lose that much weight. I'm not going to claim that the possibility of losing some weight had nothing to do with it, but I would never have done it only for weight loss. Or at least not with the data the way it is now, because really, scientists don't entirely understand how GLP-1s work at this point. And although people have been taking them for "on-label" use for years, there's not much data out there about what the long-term effects are for people who don't have diabetes. 

But it turns out that I am probably a super-responder. Apparently there are people who don't respond to GLP-1s at all (non-responders), and there are people who response is heightened (super-responders). According to google, a super-responder is someone who loses 15-20% of their body weight within a year. In two months, I lost more than 10% of my body weight. It has been insane. 

Figuring this out has been complicated by the fact that I have refused to weigh myself since 2017, a few months after I quit Weight Watchers. I decided I had become unhealthily obsessed with the number on the scale while I was doing WW, and really, I can tell if I'm gaining weight by how my clothes fit. So I stopped weighing myself. I even refused to step on the scale at the doctor's office except for once a year at my annual exam. 

Which means I don't know exactly how much I weighed when I started-- like I said, I wasn't doing it for the weight loss. In November at my annual exam, I was 175, so that's what I'm using as my starting weight. When I weighed myself last week, I was 156. That's the least I've weighed since I went through menopause 15 years ago, and several pounds less than my WW low. In two months. 

I guess if my goal had been weight loss, I would be thrilled. As it is, I just feel confused. what IS this? what is it doing to my body? how can you possibly lose this much weight this quickly? It sure isn't from calorie restriction and exercise. I did that with WW, and I didn't lose this much weight in a YEAR. It's like somebody just swapped out my body while I was asleep one night.

I have many more thoughts about this, but this post is already long enough. There will be a part two, maybe by the end of the week. As for the long covid and the migraines, it's too soon to tell. I think I'm having fewer, and that I get over them quicker, but for me, weddings are migraines, and I was never going to get through helping to put on two weddings without having some bad days. I don't think I'll really be able to tell for another month or two. 

Stay tuned. 

Update: Part Two of this post is here 

Related New York Times gift link: The Great Ozempic Experiment 

Miracles and Other Reasonable Things by Sarah Bessey

If you've ever journaled or written blog posts or maybe any kind of writing, you've probably had the experience of writing something that was profoundly true, but you didn't know it until you wrote it. It's one of my favorite things about writing. 

A couple of months ago, I read Sarah Bessey's 2019 book Miracles and Other Reasonable Things: A Story of Unlearning and Relearning God. She is a compelling writer with a uniquely strong voice. Our experiences don't always match up--we are in some ways very different people, in other ways quite similar-- but there were some sections of the book that were deeply meaningful to me. 

I may end up re-reading the book again soon, but what I have continued to think about, what more or less blew my mind, were the words that came out when I wrote my review. So here is that review, slightly expanded since I have more space here than I generally like to use on Goodreads.

I was raised evangelical, left it behind in my twenties. The process of extricating myself was far more protracted than I expected (it’s probably still happening more than I want to admit), and also sometimes deeply painful. I have ended up in a progressive Christian denomination (PC-USA) because our local congregation is the best fit I’ve found in the area where we live, but honestly my personal theology is much less "Christian" than the church I attend. Not to mention still a bit, uh, fluid. I am eternally grateful that the people of our church accept me, because I have discovered to my surprise that belonging to a community of faith is one of the few non-negotiables of my life.

So I approach a book like this with a bit of trepidation and a bit of hope. I’ve read so many books by Christian authors that made me feel excluded by my unorthodox theology, but I’m always hopeful I’ll find a kindred spirit. This is the first book I’ve read by this author, and I’m grateful to find that she might be one of those kindred spirits. She is more orthodox than me in her theology, but less orthodox in the expression of it, if that makes any sense. My personal theology barely qualifies as Christian (which I've written about extensively before, and may be writing more about soon), but anyone observing me from afar would probably think that I am a by-the-book Presbyterian, because I just don't have the personality for flamboyant flouting of conventional church life. I am comfortable living inside the lines, even if other things are going on in my head. 

Anyway. If Sarah Bessey and I were to sit down over a cup of coffee, I’m pretty sure we would have no trouble connecting, even though we might disagree about many things if we got into the weeds of Christian theology. Which is not true of some of the other authors her age I’ve read. 

This book took me back to some of the early stages of my departure from evangelicalism, and made me aware of some steps I’d missed. My original impulse in my 20s was to run from a system that seemed to my young and arrogant self to be wildly hypocritical, and offered me only traditional roles I would never have been able to fit. Over the years I’ve come to value things about my original faith that I can bring forward into my current reality, and Bessey made me aware of quite a few more. Also, her struggles with fibromyalgia had some surprising (to me) parallels with my history of migraines. 

I admit I occasionally rolled my eyes toward the end, but in the most loving way. :) This is a good book. It probably has limited interest outside of people of faith, but if you are a person of faith, I recommend it highly.

the dog ate my homework

I don't really have anything to say, I just thought I should report in and tell you that I won't be posting for the next two or three weeks. Our son's wedding and two other weddings are coming up during the month of June, so I have a good excuse. 

You know, this blog has never had much traffic, which is not really surprising since it's just me, ruminating, long past the point when anyone would consider a personal blog relevant to anything. But my pageviews keep going up and up and up. Like, stratospherically up. In the last 30 days, I've had over 65,000 visits. I am not making that up, and that is crazy. Even back when I had the RSS feed up it was rare for me to get a thousand views in a month. No freaking way do I believe that I averaged more than two thousand individual visits a day from real people who are reading this nonsense. 

It makes me wonder if the LLM AI people are that desperate for content. Would that run the numbers up? We'll scrape anything that won't sue us for copyright violation. I mean, technically, I do own the copyright to everything I write here, but I have no idea how to do anything about it if someone steals it, and they must assume bloggers like me wouldn't. And if they're training AI on blogs--there aren't nearly as many as there used to be, but there are probably still many thousands-- we are in way bigger trouble than we knew, right? 

In other news, our 42nd anniversary is this week. Go, us. That is a long time. 

late night thoughts about wine, the self, and culture

1. Years ago our local community college offered a six week wine-tasting course that promised to teach people how to appreciate good wine. (This was back in the days before my frequent migraines, so drinking wine wasn't the problem that it is now.) We were super excited about it and signed up immediately. But as the course approached, we started having second thoughts, and we ended up canceling our registration (the continuing ed office was thrilled since apparently there was a long waiting list). The reason we canceled was because we figured if we learned to appreciate good wine, we wouldn't want the $12 bottle anymore, we'd want the good stuff. And if we got really enthusiastic about it, we'd turn into snobs and end up spending thousands. 

Of course there are plenty of good reasons to want to be a wine connoisseur.  Maybe you were raised in a family that has a long history of appreciating good wine, or maybe you are a chef, and understanding how wine and different foods interact is important to the work that you do. Maybe you just really love wine. But for us, it made a whole lot more sense to leave well enough alone. 

2. About a month ago, I listened to a couple of very smart men on a podcast talking about Buddhist meditation practices. They both have engaging personalities, and the conversation was fascinating. But there were two things about the conversation that I've been thinking about ever since. One of them I'm saving for another time, but for the purposes of this post, the part of the conversation that interested me was listening to them try to come to terms with the Buddhist concept of  "no self." 

Traditional Buddhists believe that the self, as a separate, well-defined entity, doesn't exist. To a Buddhist, the question of "who am I?" is not answerable. The podcasters really got into the weeds about what it means that none of us has a self. They had some good points about why this is a useful belief-- for example, if some aspect of your beliefs about yourself is irrevocably changed (maybe you are a professional musician, and a car accident renders you unable to play your instrument), the harder you cling to the way you define yourself, the more traumatic the experience will be. 

But for the average human, does it really matter? OK, so we should hold ourselves loosely and with a bit of humility. But how important is it to devote yourself to upholding this particular teaching? Is it really that important to buy into the idea that there is no such thing as a self? I mean, if you knit me a scarf for my birthday, I didn't knit the scarf, you did. If you're reading this post, you're reading it, and I wrote it. If you're sitting at a table eating dinner with eight people, you are each an individual person with your own history, experiences, tastes, and opinions-- and you all know this and understand it, and the conversation would be super boring if that weren't true.  

For all practical purposes, for normal everyday life, having a deep, well-considered understanding and belief in the concept of "no self" is an academic interest. If you find the Buddha's teachings fascinating and illuminating and you want to devote yourself to the study of his ideas, then yes, by all means, go there. Or if you have some other reason to dive deep into the idea, then do it. But most of us are going to get through life just fine without even knowing that that particular teaching exists. And feeling all superior about yourself because you know you don't have a self when some other ignorant slob is still laboring under the delusion of selfhood-- well, that just makes you a snob.

3. So where the heck am I going with this. This stuff is so complicated to talk about, and so emotionally loaded. But I've heard some people who are progressives, liberals, far left thinkers, who have thought themselves way out on a limb about identity, race, gender, orientation, whatever. If you're interested in deconstructing culture, it's fascinating. It's practically addictive. And then they surround themselves with people who agree, and pretty soon they have no idea how far away they are from how most people understand their lives. 

(If the idea of cultural criticism is new to you, the usual example is that we're all like fish swimming around in an aquarium without knowing that we're in water-- cultural criticism/theory is the process of becoming aware of the water. It's about questioning your assumptions and ideas, becoming aware of things that you've always thought were set in stone, but really are just products of tradition and habit. In moderation, it can be super useful. But if you keep going and going, it becomes more and more obscure, and leaves you with an ever-smaller circle of people you can hang out with, because other people don't get it. It can even make it impossible for you to function in the, uh, aquarium.)(Did that help?)

Is that level of detailed analysis genuinely helpful in our current public conversations? Is it creating constructive change in the culture? or is it just tearing it down for the joy of intellectual superiority? I mean for an academic whose life work is understanding social structures and how they work, yes, of course it's important knowledge. But for most of us, it just makes us into snobs, disdainful of people who haven't been initiated into the unending, ever-deepening minutiae of cultural criticism. It creates a gulf of understanding, instead of helping us understand each other.  

I've been that person. I can argue with this myself. But at some point we've got to start reaching across the aisle instead of making the aisle wider and wider. Surely we know that if we're going to live in a diverse society and support each other in our diversity, some of the other people are going to be conservatives? There are going to be people who have every right to their opinion and their beliefs and their religion who believe things that are exactly the opposite of what we do. That's just basic to the whole idea of democracy. And if we're not willing to be supportive of that, we're part of the problem.  

I would never have posted this before I turned off the RSS feed, but you know, this is the new me. 

Same as the old me. (Insert brilliantly clever remark about my self here.)  

Related: The Vanilla Ice Cream Problem 
and this one from 2010(!!) back when I was in grad school: ooooh shiny!