Posted on: 1/24/24 at 2pm. Facebook.
Today I released ladybugs into my plant collections, as I periodically do, and I never get over the surprise at how LOUD ladybugs are.
Loud, you ask? How is this possible?
Imagine 1500 tiny cows climbing on top of a forest and falling off constantly. That’s how.
Posted on: 1/25/24 at 4pm. Facebook.
Doctor didn’t have appointment. Went to urgent care.
Me: I have my biannual chest infection because I have asthma and I vape. I need prednisone.
Physician’s assistant: Do you have any signs of sickness? Fever, sore throat, ear…? *doing all sorts of poking and listening*
Me: No, I’m quite sure I just have a chest infection from the vaping.
PA: OMG you absolutely cannot vape, you do not have the luxury, you cannot inhale anything but inhalers when you have asthma.
Me: OMG nobody ever told me that before.
PA: Really??
Me: No.
Nobody told me that getting lectured by young-20s medical professionals would get more annoying as I get older.
I know she’s right; I know everyone who has told me this is right. I quit nicotine, I quit alcohol, I even quit my eating disorder (and boy was that an Everest). I know I’m gonna quit vaping everything else someday. I think about quitting every single day, and I do not because I am waging some internal war that I have yet to win. A twenty-whatever doctor telling me, “You cannot vape,” does absolutely nothing to help me win that battle? Because here I am, right now, writing this post and vaping, and even though I “cannot” and “don’t have the luxury” somehow we’re still going.
It’s like when my midwife told me I needed to stop gaining weight so fast in pregnancy. Like…I was struggling with crushing depression, unable to be medicated because I was pregnant, feeling constantly awful, and had absolutely no way of regulating my diet or exercise while I was going through the mental health chaos storm of pregnancy. But they tell you you’re supposed to stop gaining weight like someone telling you that is the ~magic switch~ they can flip.
Give me resources to help me quit vaping weed, give me actual medically based suggestions for winning against my impulse control, or give me the dignity of silence because the alternatives do not help at all.
At least I got the prednisone though!
Posted on: 1/26/24 at 9am. Facebook.
Today King is getting his Stelfonta injection for a cutaneous non-metastatic mast cell tumor on his left mammary chain. It will cause mast cell degranulation. He won’t feel very good, so he’s on a lot of antihistamines and steroids, which also don’t make him feel great tbh.
I just keep reflecting on how much it sucks that King, who is fully our sweet little family member, so important to us, never has done anything wrong in his darn life, cannot possibly understand what is happening to him or why he has to feel bad. I know it’s just EMOTIONS but I jump straight to “welp this how we know there’s no god.”
Please turn your thoughts toward healthy vibes for King: hoping that this falls off in totality, he heals without infection, and we don’t get any more tumors for a long while. They are very common in his breed but he’s only five years old.
Posted on: 1/26/24 at 3pm. Bluesky.
every time Scott Adams exists perceptibly, I remember writing him a hate email when I was like 12. he actually responded to me. I was so confused as to why he was even reading hate mail from kids, much less responding, lmao.
(I loved Dilbert and I was REALLY disappointed to learn his politics)
my hate mail was honestly not really hate mail, but as argumentative as i always am and can never resist being. i had seen some anti-gay writing of his (iirc) and i wanted to break down the errors in his logic because, well, i loved dilbert so I Should Fix Scott Adams.
Perhaps it’s more confusing why I thought a cartoonist *wouldn’t* read all his email. I guess in my head, the guy in the funnies was the biggest celebrity ever, so I was actually just criticizing his viewpoints into a void. I did not respond to his response because it was just weird. ahahaha
leave it to a 12yo to yell at an adult online, and then when the adult yells back, just kinda say “lol loser” and wander off picking her nose
i guess the point of this story is that i’m amazed a fragile racist who can’t draw is still around, existing perceptibly.
perhaps a secondary point is that i have not changed, at all, and i will probably be 112 years old continuing to pick small debates with people in the hopes i can improve their politics/compassion/art
Posted on: 1/26/24 at 9pm. Facebook.
I decided it’s time to quit-quit cannabis, period. I’m just not a guy who can moderate. If I keep at edibles, I’m gonna get back to vaping, and I need to take my lung health seriously. So that’s that. You win, 20-something doctor who told me to quit yesterday. I will prioritize asthma.
I’m nervous because I have been on this stuff so long, I associate its use with…everything in my life. Yanno? I bet a few of you know. But I don’t even “need” the benefits anymore (I have grown so much) so it’s time.
Considering I’ve quit nicotine before, this is gonna be easy-peasy, right? I went through months of mental chaos and sweating and itching and sleeplessness with that. This one can’t be like that. My brain’s just gonna be really confused for a minute and I need to reprogram associations. I can do it. NBD. Um.
I already sent my husband around to grab all my stuff and throw it out so I’m already without Stuff. I’m gonna do it. I’m not losing my friend the happy herb; I’m losing frequent chest infections and gaining happy lungs.
Posted on: 1/27/24 at 8am. Facebook.
When I quit nicotine, I did a ton of reading about how it works, how it clears from your system, and how to manage withdrawal symptoms. There is a LOT of support for quitting nicotine – I’m sure because it’s been a public health problem since, idk, they were throwing cartons at soldiers in WWII, and we really really know how this goes.
I’m frustrated trying to find the same information about cannabis. It probably doesn’t exist because, until recently, its classification as a drug precluded most studies. Everything surrounding it is community apocrypha, and for some reason, going off cannabis has been claimed by the same right-wing aesthetes who thought you should eat Kellogg’s cereal to stop masturbating in the 1940s. I’m not kidding. You can find a bunch of *total* *nonsense* that will ultimately link you back to places like Prager U.
No thank you, I’m staying a leftist hippie and I don’t need fascism to give my life order, you predatory nards.
So I tried Allen Carr’s Easyway book, since a lot of people like it for nicotine, but the version for cannabis is just…so wrong about cannabis? I can’t get over the recurring claim that cannabis itself does not have an effect, but rather that it relieves the discomfort of withdrawal. That’s how nicotine works: It doesn’t really make you feel better, but once you’re dependent on it, you’ll feel worse whenever you don’t have it. Cannabis actually does do a lot. The whole complex of THC molecules is fascinating.
That doesn’t mean it’s not possible to develop a maladaptive behavioral relationship! We can even call it addiction if you want. But I find myself totally unwilling to take advice from a book that seems to be lying to me. They’re like, if you take it only once every three weeks, you are still ENSLAVED TO THE DEMON. I’m like, have you ever used weed? lmao.
The reason it’s hard to quit weed (imo) is that it’s a big nothingburger with very few consequences and it’s genuinely nice. Like, who doesn’t want that? Asthmatics, that’s who. And people who live in places where you can only travel by car. I don’t drive stoned so I don’t go anywhere. I want to go places again. I want to breathe. That’s it. Those are big essential things, but it’s not because weed is a demon, and it’s *hilarious* trying to treat it that way.
I mean, objectively hilarious. If you’ve ever seen Reefer Madness, you know that people have been talking nonsense unscientific crap about cannabis for generations. Stoners have learned to fully ignore people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I spent eight dollars to read a book by someone who has no idea what he’s talking about. lol.
I suppose this means I just have to do this the old fashioned way: cluelessly. I found it helpful to understand the timeline of nicotine withdrawal symptoms, but that’s not gonna happen with cannabis. I’m just going to have to feel bad and keep feeling bad until I feel better again. The end.
My best guess is that my dopamine pathways are screwed up, so I won’t be able to enjoy anything for maybe a month (which is how long it typically takes to “pee clean” with cannabis) and I’m gonna sleep real bad this week. Expect me to flop around on the internet acting depressed a lot.
