goodbye pants

I skiied all day yesterday up at Alpine. Wow I am exhausted (and a teeny bit sore). Still, I slept so well last night that I’m thinking I just need more exercise if I’m to fix my sleep schedule. Too bad I can’t goof off today, there’s just too much to get done for work.

Today while washing clothing, I got bleach on my favourite old pair of black pants. Stretch fabric from Express, they were medium weight, stylin’ and went with anything. They won’t re-dye correctly, either, I’m sure. Oh well, I guess it’s off to that horrid place known as “The Mall” tomorrow after work to find a replacement…

Oh, and my friend J. had her baby! Congrats to her, to her hubby, and to the happy new family!

berocca

My Berocca Performance tabs showed up today in the mail. Canada’s Redoxon-B isn’t a bad substitute, but I need my calcium, folic acid, vitamin C and zinc as well. The new Performance stuff isn’t quite as reddish as the original Berocca was, nor does it quite have the same taste, but I guess the new Tang-like flavour is preferable, anyway.

Wikipedia’s article on Berocca links to a serendipitous, fantastic study in the Medical Journal of Australia regarding treatment of anxiety disorders via various means, including Berocca. It covers just about every alternative treatment I’ve seen, and does a fantastic job of surveying the literature for evidence/lack thereof on efficacy. (For reference, Berocca is ineffective.)

We need more of these guides. And for those of my friends who are holistic health practitioners, remember: there’s nothing wrong with admitting that ‘faith healing’ is just that — based on faith. It’s not the Bach flower remedy or the raw vegetable that causes the improvement in mental or physical health, it’s the well known placebo effect. Be proud of the power of the human to heal itself. Just stop doctoring it up as “magic” (k or no k.) ‘k? k.

(On that last link on the placebo effect, at least read the first couple of pages, and the conclusion. It’s well written and conversational in tone. Look for the “PDF” link.)

is that all there is

Life passes me by in some interesting ways. I made a conscious decision years ago to not have a traditional family; these days, it seems that at every turn some friend I thought of as perenially single is getting married, already married, pregnant, raising children, or some combination of the above. Fighting the biological urge to reproduce for overriding social and humanitarian reasons is difficult, and there’s no one cheering me on from the sidelines, either — quite the opposite, it seems everyone is trying to get me into some steady relationship, engaged, and onto the child-rearing bandwagon. Neither my body nor my mind is strong enough for that right now.

Folks, I don’t air my dirty laundry in public, but there are a lot of good reasons I think it’d be a bad idea for me to be a parent. I also think it’d be stupid for me to carry on the defects in my genetic line, though I’m still flattered by those of you who tell me I’m too beautiful to remove from the gene pool.