This is day 10 on Lexapro, and though it isn’t unexpected, I’m disappointed that it hasn’t kicked in yet. I think the ashwaganda was helping, because stopping it has made the anxiety a bit worse again. I am coping with it as patiently as I can. There’s 11 more days until I see the psych nurse.
It’s… wearying, grinding. I think right now that’s worse than the mini-panics and sore muscles and digestive issues.
That “exhaler” arrived yesterday and my first try with it was the opposite of comforting. I’ve found this with some other breathwork and Qi Gong stuff, especially if I feel like I have to synchronize with someone else; I can feel my heart pounding harder rather than calming down. Belly breathing while lying down, and some other things, are fine though. Go figure.
After my research into tVNS devices, I started getting really obnoxious ads on my phone for one particular brand. It promised “brain orgasms”, drastic weight loss, specific percentage decreases in things like depression and inflammation, and had a comparison chart to Ozempic. Two problems here:
- It makes the whole thing seem less credible, like it’s just quackery and a dumb fad. There is actual science behind these devices in general. This specific device is doing a couple of things differently — and some of the reviewers think it’s more effective than the others. One particular “this one is junk science” claim is coming from a competitor, so one has to be skeptical of the skepticism. The company has a high TrustPilor score but also a lot of complaints on Reddit about return requests being ignored. It’s hard to know who who to trust (more on that in general below).
- I was served those ads relentlessly by a puzzle game I had installed, and I shouldn’t have been. I have all the options set on my phone & Google account to NOT use personalized ad targeting, and when I was browsing for that stuff I was in incognito mode which is my default for sites I don’t already know. I reset the advertising ID on my phone and that seems to have cleared it up. But I also uninstalled that particular game, because I’ve really gotten a lot less patient about having to see ads in between levels. I long for the days when the Play Store for Android was full of free and ad-free stuff.
I may have declared a favorite effects plugin just a little too soon. Create Digital Music had a feature on ADPTR Utopia, a unique spectral reverb, and I gave it a try. It really impressed me, with results ranging from beautiful ambience to impressively solid thickening to some rhythmic enhancement and weird stuff. Thanks I guess to the two-month long phenomenon of “Black Friday” it was on sale, and I picked it up.
It’s certainly not a typical reverb, and probably not a slap-it-on-everything effect but I may actually like it more than FutureVerb. And I do like FutureVerb quite a bit.
I have managed to sell most of the gear I was trying to sell, without yet resorting to Reverb or eBay. Had a weird experience with one thing though. The buyer claimed that I needed to give my name and click on a link to receive payment — which of course sounds like a scam, and I reported it to PayPal for phishing. But then a few hours later, I got the actual payment, an explanation that he was trying to use an app to pay, and everything went entirely smoothly afterward. My guess is, the app itself wasn’t legit, or else PayPal is doing something really foolish with their app. In any case, happy ending.
Recent reads:
Dr. Eric Goodman, Your Anxiety Beast & You: I’m not sure it was particularly helpful at this time; mainly it says things I have read elsewhere. But I will admit some reluctance to really start any particular process right before seeing a therapist who might have something different in mind.
Theodore Gordon, The Composer’s Black Box: this was a strange but interesting one. The four figures covered by the book — Don Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier and Sun Ra — were from the era of “cybernetics” theory. Today that makes one think of electronics implanted into humans, or at the very least “cyberspace” and “cybersecurity” and so on. But properly speaking, this is the theory of circular processes of feedback and recursion in natural processes, animal and human brains, machines, sociology, economics and other disciplines. Perception and reaction, course correction, homeostasis, etc. Synthesizers were one way of exploring these ideas, as well as exploring the interaction of human and machine, and questioning human agency. Some users of the first “Buchla Box” were indeed much less interested in music than in cybernetics and psychedelia. Buchla’s own son has even said that his father wasn’t that interested in synthesizers, which I thought was a provocative statement, but if you read it a certain way, it rings true.
Thích Nhất Hạnh, Fear: honestly something of a disappointment. Where it comes to Buddhist writers I prefer Pema Chodron, both in terms of writing style and messages. The material in the book wasn’t really new to me, and a lot of it was fairly repetitive instructions for specific meditations while breathing in and out. I don’t think memorizing a large collection of specific phrases to recite to yourself is that helpful for meditation.
T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call: really excellent fantasy/horror novel. A young girl’s mother is an abusive, possessive, manipulative and murderous sorceress who’s got a plan to marry herself and her daughter to wealthy men. Normally, I would take off points for having a protagonist who doesn’t have much agency and is just along for the ride, but here that is part of the horror. Plus there’s a second protagonist and a cast of likeable allies.
I’ve just started Bill Hammack, The Things We Make. It’s a history of various manmade objects which illustrates the very fundamentals of engineering: a particular method, not math and not really science, relying on rules of thumb found through practical experience and trial and error. The master masons of medieval European cathedrals didn’t know about stresses and strains and material properties, and in fact most of them were innumerate and illiterate. But they knew that to build a stable arch, the wall thickness needed to be a bit more than 1/5 the span of the arch — give or take a little depending on the quality of the stone. And they had a technique with simple tools and lengths of rope for making those measurements and creating the templates which other masons used to cut the stone blocks. They passed their secrets to their apprentices in an oral tradition.