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My lunar holiday is coming up and I've had garbage brain the past day or two, so it's a good time to start practicing the SIGHI diet. Guess what, thiamine is a problem. It's a "histamine liberator" and a "DAO inhibitor", so it frees extra histamine into the system and then blocks the enzyme meant to break it down. That's bad. And by golly, I took my allithiamine yesterday like normal (before I read that) and the mild headache did get worse for a couple hours for seemingly no reason. So sounds like when I have garbage brain, I am just going to have to simplify what I put into my body and stick to very safe things. No multivitamin, no allithiamine. Magnesium seems safe and good - it helps create DAO. Lucky for me, I don't have garbage brain all the time, so I can probably pick back up on regular vitamins on safe days. I've got the headache on the left side - left side headaches are usually shorter and milder than right side. I slept very poorly last night (like the past couple nights) but now that I am up with my coffee (cream only), I'm feeling decent. I know I'll get tired quickly, but at least I can focus.
On the plus side, rice and potatoes are allowed on the SIGHI diet and this is VERY exciting because we love rice and potatoes and they have not been on the menu for some time due to low carb. Spouse is happy. So sure, we lose a lot of food options, but getting rice and potatoes back is pretty great! And sweet potatoes!
I've been taking those desiccated kidney capsules to supposedly supplement DAO and sometimes they help, sometimes not. I did a little more reading and apparently they have a short working life, so if you don't take them right before a meal, they aren't effective. I'm not very good at eating set meals aside from dinner - I am a grazer. So it makes sense that I'm not seeing consistent relief. Plus, by taking allithiamine around the same time, I'm cancelling out the kidney pills.
One big mystery about my headaches has always been that I seem more prone to starting them on my time off. When the headaches started up in my twenties (when I didn't drink alcohol or coffee at all), it was almost like clockwork, I'd get them on a Friday and they would ruin my weekend. I'd plan on working on art or a project or do something with friends, and then my whole weekend would get kerblooied and I'd be normalish by Monday to get back to work. All my free time would get wasted. Why do I consistently get headaches on the weekends and not the middle of the week? If this histamine tolerance is the root cause, I probably ate more naughty food toward the end of the week in celebration, drank more soda, ate junk food, and then promptly gave myself a headache for the weekend if the time was right. I remember getting headaches three weekends out of four sometimes - it was truly awful. I thought it was the break in routine, change in sleep pattern, not sitting upright at a desk. Like some buried mental process decided that work time was important and stored up all the stress until I wasn't working. When I moved to Alaska things got better. I was also on the pill in CO, and I think that contributed. I was alone in Alaska - didn't need to be on the pill. Job in Alaska was much less stressful. Headaches got better. Got my tubes tied rather than go back on a hormonal option (excellent choice, past self). Things got better but they never went away.
Lately it's not so much weekends (because I'm not on a work schedule), but during stressful times when we're taking vacations and traveling - when our routine changes. I think higher stress does play a part, but it's also when we are likely to opt for convenience food. Gas station snacks, getting processed food because I don't want to dirty up the kitchen or go have time for real grocery shopping, getting take out, etc. Like, why do I always get headaches exactly when I DON'T want to have a headache? Well, it's when you've given yourself permission to eat whatever due to time constraints or availability. When you're stressed and under a crunch. And since it's not an immediate reaction like a peanut allergy, I never figured out the source. I can even pick the low carb options, thinking I'm being good, and still fuck myself up.
Only time will tell. I'm in the Danger Zone for the next week. Next headache will be a right side headache, likely in 3-5 days. Maybe watching what I eat will let me dodge it, maybe it's too late for this cycle.
Man, I really hope it is histamine intolerance. I've been playing the "let's try this new quackery" game so long. How many things have I tried just in the past couple years? Working embroidery at the screenprint place was stressful but I could have garbage brain days and make it through as long as I met order deadlines. Tattoo apprenticeship was both very high stress and no allowance for garbage brain. There's not really any slack days that won't end in getting screamed at. It's just neverending high stress. I get why everyone smokes or has some addiction. Frankly, if I knew heroin fixed my headaches ... that would be a very bad thing to know. So if I'm going to jump back in that environment, it would really help my success if I know how to avoid getting garbage brain.
Next month or two should tell. If this isn't it ... they talk about a rice and potatoes diet, where all you do is eat rice and potatoes to see if that stops the problem, and then slowly add in individual foods to see what the triggers are. I'm excited about eating rice and potatoes again, but not that excited. :-(
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So far so good. The garbage brain faded out - the tension in my neck eased up and the pressure is reduced in my sinuses and ears. I still have a little extra pressure in my ears and slight tinnitus. Sometimes when the headache fades I get a day of feeling super relaxed - it's like I had a spa day and a really good deep tissue massage. Like someone power washed the inside of my skull and flushed all the ick away. It feels so amazing it's actually terrible because all I want to do is lay around and have delicious naps to make up for bad sleep. I can't focus properly just like I can't focus properly with a headache. I hate to complain about feeling awesome, but it's just terrible for productivity. Anyway I had that for a day since I started deliberately skipping the higher histamine foods. I take it as a good sign.
I'm still in the danger zone, I can tell. Probably another couple days.
Yesterday I made us smoothies with coconut milk, ginger, frozen blueberries and rice protein powder. I never order smoothies because of the cost, so being able to make a good smoothie at home is so boujie. We got the vitamix at costco and it came with two very large insulated cups. We felt pretty fancy drinking smoothie out of these massive matching cups. Ooo, we're like influencers, ooo. Not a bad diet so far, right? Then I talked him into helping me deep clean the bathrooms. Good start to the new year.
There was an attempt to see the aurora the night of new year's eve, but it didn't work out. Those science nerds use universal time in all their space weather forecasts. Alaska is 9 hours behind universal time. So based on how UTC divides up the 24 hours, one needs to look a whole day ahead. Dec 31 looked really good, but turns out that forecast was for the Alaskan "night" of Dec 30. So we missed the active aurora window and activity for Jan 1 was much lower. I was annoyed but whatever, science nerds. You won this one. We went to see the fireworks show downtown instead and it was all right. Didn't seem like they expected as many people as they got, so it was overcrowded and the food truck lines were very long and had no organization, which made for a lot of cranky people. Perhaps they didn't want to put too much effort into something when turnout could be so weather dependent. The people behind us in line huffed that the city should have taken the money spent on fireworks and applied it to snow removal (seems weird to grumble when you're AT THE EVENT to SEE THE FIREWORKS). C'mon, we don't have July 4 fireworks because it doesn't get dark enough. New Years is the only fireworks display the city does, as far as I know. Why begrudge a little bright celebration in the middle of the cold and dark?
So that was fine and so far the new year seems off to a pretty good start. I'm hoping I'll get my order of protein powders today so I can work on making some kind of baked thing. I still love our little house. Since we got so much snow it's made it very obvious which houses have good insulation. If a house loses too much heat, it causes icicles to build up, which can create ice dams and result in roof damage. Many houses and buildings around town have massive cascades of icicles, but our little house is nearly icicle free except for a few by the utility room where the furnace is. It's that (unconfirmed) asbestos in the insulation, right? Ya, good shit. Such a cozy little house.
I'm thinking about getting a laser cutter/engraver for art making purposes. I'm really interested in arabic/geometric patterns and multidimensional art. I really like luminaries. Like, what if I made layered paintings with some kind of surprise light element. I thought about getting something like a scroll saw but realistically, cutting a grid-like geometric pattern one hole at a time would require a ton of time and care. Laser cutter would be a lot more accurate and efficient. They're not as pricey as they used to be. I need something that will cut through 6mm birch plywood. I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about the art pieces I want to make. Especially with AI art rapidly advancing. I don't think 2D work will cut it anymore. There has to be an extra element or experience that can't be replicated in photo form. I'm reluctant to put anything online anyway. Seems like the Internet (capital I) has sucked the magic out of sharing online. You have to accept that whatever you put out there will get copied and ripped off, intentionally or robotically. It's just fodder for machine learning at this point. Everything "cheap" is, like art or writing or performing, where anyone can gamble for a fat payoff with minimal material investment. I suspect we will see more and more AI generated creative content of as many types and on as many platforms as possible, just flooding everything to see what gets clicks, like they've already done with news articles. Why put your work online anymore if you have a choice? (Money, I guess. Attention, which means money.) I think many creatives will come to regret making their bodies of work so openly available.
I think I want to focus on just being a local artist, with work viewed in person. Artists can get away with being eccentric - the more talented you are, the nuttier you're allowed to be, right? - I should take advantage of that.
Art is communication, but what's the message I'm delivering? I don't think I've quite grasped what I want to say. If you don't know your own words, you'll just fill in with what you think people want to hear. And that's the source of much of my personal struggle with art. And life, really. If you don't know who you are, if you're wrapped around delivering someone else's idea of who you should be (a parent, a religion, a partner), you'll just instinctively cobble yourself from what you think people around you expect. Like AI pulling from libraries of existing work - impressive, but ultimately doomed to regurgitate what it has been exposed to. Good enough in a lot of cases, sure. But ultimately, there's just something ... lacking. Because it can't give you something you don't ask for. (Unless we're talking about Loab.)
Anyway, I'm thinking about it. I got this house stuff to wrap up, but I have lots of art thoughts in the background that I am excited to get to. I'm making a home to live in, but I am also making a space to make art in. Both are important.