notageek

I submit to your meme therapy. In other news, it only took me two years or so after I came up with “lagisimo” to realise it should be “laguisimo” to be pronounced correctly in International Spanish From School, but we’re in Aztlán here.

Volume of music on my compy: I have ~50 CDs, and they are all ripped to this machine, and I think that’s more meaningful than any GB figure. I have boring taste, freak out at live shows, and in general tend to regard finding CDs I like enough to buy as a chore rather than a pleasure. Which is why I will wait good and sure I will get my $18 (or $7 or $2.99, in this last case) worth of listening out of it. I am not going to buy the new Weezer album until it’s real cheap. Real.

Last CD bought: Underworld, Pearl’s Girl. Used. At Half Price Books.

Song playing right now: “Aadays Tisai Aasadays”, off Prem, by Snatam Kaur.

Five songs that—this is a stupid lame category name and I refuse to propagate it further.
Five songs I like a lot:
“Lost Vagueness”, Utah Saints
“I Know”, Placebo
“’Til There Was You” from The Music Man
“Everything Counts”, Depeche Mode
“Pocket Calculator”, Kraftwerk

I don’t pass these things on. Would you like some lung-plague instead?

Maybe it’s a function of my hegemonic western healthcare outlook on the world and health management, but when my nose is plugged with that certain congestion that you can blow your nose raw trying to get rid of and not make any headway, I reach for TEH DRUGS and not a cup of hot water with lemon or a tincture or whatever. I need to sleep, and not breathing prevents me from sleeping, although there’s this nifty biofeedback trick involving thinking about my feet that can obviate the need for the Big Guns in minor nasal congestion.

Sure, I think there’s value and empowerment in being able to use plants and other crude organisms and their extracts to treat common illnesses, but I also don’t think there’s anything inherently safer about treating them with naturally-sourced remedies than with OTC drugs. I think the same empowerment can be felt by patients knowing how to safely and appropriately self-treat with OTCs; I’m sure as hell smug being able to dissect out the ny-quil ingredients so I can take the single-drug preparations instead of whole cocktail. That’s clearly not everyone’s cuppa, as I’ve seen people swallow nyquil to get to sleep when a bit of benadryl would do, but the bridging of that gap is what I’m supposed to do, and I’m happy to provide people with that kind of assistance and information.

No really, I am. I am a total pharm dork.

But, you see, I also want to do the other thing, the bridging of the gap between the crude plants and extracts and the chasm of public knowledge and the mentality that makes the plants into nothing but another set of pills to take.

I know pills. I am a pusher, baby. I also know plants, and I have watched them through a year, tasted their leaf, root, flower, fruit and thorn in turn. I know that the plants are their own poem, our distant relations in these crown eukaryotic taxa, and they have their own ways of knowing and growing. I talk to them, although I haven’t yet managed to listen enough to talk back. And yo, I want to do this while the people, they fix themselves. I just hand them the tools and the instructions.

I have many bridges to build over many chasms. This is what I get for being a hippie dork. Anyway, this entry has been brought to you by pseudoephedrine (for breathing), liquorice (for throat-soothing), and ginger (for nausea after getting off that bus). If that isn’t a metaphor of some kind, I’m too beat and pseudoephedrinized to come up with another one.