recruiting my strength

It’s an old phrase… popular in the 18th century. It showed up in my head during acupuncture, and I imagined pairs of mitochondria, in uniform, visiting cell-to-cell… <knock knock> Excuse me. Have you any mitochondria present, willing to serve with vigor and energy? Kinda like Bill Watterson’s ‘tiny Calvins’– which I couldn’t find in the […]

flattened

Big, soft thumbs are pressing on my cheekbones by my nose. They push my eyes closed, even when I try to pull the lids back open. The band of forehead just above my eyebrows feels the same way: heavy without being weighty, buzzy. There must be a weather front moving in. Just when I was […]

out of practice(s)

It is 2:45pm on a grey, un-climate-ably* cold day. I folded an undershirt, another undershirt, and inexplicably walked out of the laundry room. I walked into and across the living room, noticing the yoga mat abandoned there an hour and a half before. I paused there, started to roll it up, idly wondering why I […]

where’s the trade in the tradeoff?

This is just to say that since I’ve given up all but one cup of coffee, I am super-tired by 6:30pm each night. Or, wait… was I also tired by 6:30pm two weeks ago? <raises one eyebrow> Anyway, when one gives up caffeine, isn’t one supposed to gain some positive thing in return? Which would […]

Quackery?

It feels later than it really is. It felt as late as now right after supper, when My Sweetie asked me whether I would drive him (and his dilated pupils) around our corner of Austin for some holiday errands he needed to finish. As I leaned against the kitchen counter, and thought wearily of the […]

Tangled appetites

My formerly-a-nutritionist-friend was right on the money when she said The Shape I’m In would require daily maintenance. Not that I doubted her; she’s the kind of scientist I’m accustomed to and only speaks verifiable truths in her field(s) of expertise. So I’ve stood on the scale nightly even after the Half-Plate Project wrapped last […]

Brains run on carbs?

The good news is that the strands of rain streaming from the sky outside the Student Lounge window mean that the oppressive sleepiness spreading from my sinus cavities has passed. Mostly. I wish I knew why pending rainstorms give me a knee-buckling case of the sleepies, because I don’t think this makes any sense. How […]

Oh, right, there’s not a mole

The mole is the unit of amount in chemistry. … A mole of a substance is defined as: The mass of substance containing the same number of fundamental units as there are atoms in exactly 12.000 g of 12C. Fundamental units may be atoms, molecules, or formula units, depending on the substance concerned. The Mole—Chemistry […]

Absorbing/food

About two weeks ago, I heard a term that evidently had its first moment without me: ludic loop.  If you have missed ludic loop’s intermittent moments, it describes a certain kind of nearly zoned-out behavior loop, like the one that happens to people playing slot machines, or Candy Crush, or Facebook… . My ludic loop […]

An apple a day

I was rummaging around in the fridge for another dose of cream to go in another cup of coffee when the red orb registered through the foggy vegetable-tray: apple. I hadn’t eaten an apple yet. I fished one out of the bin and… Back up: One of the side effects of how we run the […]