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Watching Strife

My friend S mentioned a few days ago that spending time with her parents is like watching a tragi-comedy unfold. She is at their home trying resolve some serious and long-neglected health conditions that have rendered her father almost immobile. She experienced some guilt over her reaction to their way of communicating with each other. The parents have been in a love-less marriage for as long as S remembers. They are deeply incompatible but managed to raise a couple of kids and build a family together - each contributing equally. When they were younger, S recalls loud arguments, her mother crying because she felt completely unheard and misunderstood.  Her father would rage and sulk by turn for similar reasons. Nothing ever changed for the better. The two kids learned to isolate themselves from the chaos and take care of each other while their parents returned to whatever normalcy was attainable in this family. As time passed, both the frequency and intensity of these events reduced...

Gold Spots

Nice essay about the history of the blinking cursor . It's everywhere, serves a very useful function but does not call attention to itself. Made me think about what part of the human body it would be most like - eyelashes perhaps maybe the pinky toe? I found it hard to assign the blinking cursor the value it deserves the items we cherish, protect, and even ignore in our daily lives are all part of a larger and often unexamined picture. Small moments or inventions may not live vividly in the public consciousness, but they are still nonetheless crucial points of color -- like strikes of gold creating a pointillism sun. If we can appreciate small legacies like these, maybe we can learn to appreciate our own as well. So much around us in our everyday life are this "strikes of gold". The things we are so accustomed to that we don't recognize it to be special. Any time I reach out for my needle threader, I give thanks to whoever thought to invent it. The same is true for na...

Good Cycle

A young woman I know is pregnant with her third child. I did not know until she shared the news recently but there was change in the air for a few months. L went from being somewhat despondent and cynical about her professional life to being alive, alert and hopeful.  Looking back that changed might have coincided her finding out she's pregnant. It made me think about the wonderful ways in which the anticipation of a new baby can transform the mother. To L, this defines completeness for her family unit. She grew up in a large family and valued having siblings at home and relatives within reach. It's not surprising that she wants her children to have what she did.  I often think of J when I see L though they are quite far apart in age. L is the product of a complete family unit that was there for her at all times. It made dealing with many challenges big and small less daunting. Now in her late thirties, she is calm, centered and raising a family much like her own with both par...

Too Perfect

Love reading about miracle drugs that cure everything . What's most miraculous is easy it to get people to believe in such miracles. Then some twenty years later the miracles will be proven to be a series of unintended catastrophes. But until what's wrong with living and breathing miracle each day.  The patients of Los Angeles internist and obesity specialist Pooja Gidwani are microdosing GLP-1s as part of a longevity approach. “It’s becoming more and more mainstream in the Hollywood community, and many want to do this in combination with peptides,” says Gidwani, who offers GLP-1s along with IVs of the co-enzyme NAD. Addiction and obsessive behavior are other targets of microdosers, as the drugs seem to tame cravings for more than just food. Anyone on a GLP-1 inhibitor can tell you downing even one glass of wine can be a challenge, but Kahn says her patients have stopped everything from smoking to compulsive shopping. “It influences the brain’s desire and decreases cravings for...

Owning Fifty

I meet V for the first time a couple of weeks ago. She was introduced to me by a common friend who thought we should connect. V's about my age and has been in tech for her whole life- been there done that and not afraid to take on big, messy problems. She's never been married and is single - these facts were stated by way of introduction to get it completely out of the way. That was shortly followed by sharing some of the menopause related challenges she's been having lately.  I admired the confidence to tell a stranger (even if a friend's friend) within five minutes for the first meeting. We chatted about other things after but this was the most remarkable bit for me - specially being so candid about age related problems. She works for a company where the average workforce is closer to J's age than ours. I am going to guess she is pretty fearless talking about these things with her co-workers as well. V is a self-confessed health and exercise nut and it shows in he...

Toxic Limit

 A few days ago, I had to call someone out in the middle of a meeting for being rude, cutting her mid-sentence and leaving her shell-shocked. It made everyone else present very uncomfortable as well. We've worked together for over a year and this was not this person's first offense. Everyone ignored it because such is the culture of this organization.  I did the same deciding it was not worth dealing with. Post-confrontation with someone who is hyper-competitive and ties up their entire self worth with achieving goals (with no concern or understanding of real impact of their actions),is unpleasant. One has to be prepared to live in a smoke-filled room for a long time because such individuals cannot let it go until they get even. So a lot of their time an energy is spent to finding that opportunity - work does not get done in that smoke-filled room. But that afternoon, she had managed to go past what I willing to tolerate and as such a public reprimand seemed the only logical s...

Eating Right

Love the idea of having a present wrapped to look like a loaf of bread  even it is only a concept now. Everything that looks like food isn't - that could be the message a present tries to convey much like this barcode scanning app that tries to tell consumers if what they are eating is food or not as defined by what things it contains and if they are good or bad for you. ..in France, the number of additives in food products declined as Yuka grew in popularity. Noting the app’s influence, French supermarket chain Intermarché since 2019 has reformulated more than 1,100 products, removing about 140 additives. Besides Yuka, similar tools include the Bobby Approved app, developed by social-media influencer and food personality Bobby Parrish, which gives groceries a thumbs-up or thumbs-down based on ingredients. Health-tech startup FoodHealth Company has created a scoring system that is embedded into the apps of retailers like Kroger.  I like the health scoring my purchases that th...