Happy Frigg and Freya’s Day Disclaimer: The topics covered in Freya’s Chambers include serious discussions of sex, sexuality and related issues. If it isn’t your thing; you can move along, otherwise enjoy and feel free to discuss. Given the nature of some subjects be prepared for nude images as there may be some. I avoid […]
“Polyamory” – Freya’s Chambers – Sexual Orientation — The Grey Wayfarer
It is obvious from reviewing my medications and their various side effects in the context of my various ailments that some of my problems may be made worse or even caused by the side effects of one or more of my medications.
I missed a couple of my medications when I listed my prescriptions and side-effects, the most important of which is Humulin 70/30 which I take in the morning with breakfast and a dinner, both 60 units each time.
Humulin 70-30 (70% human insulin isophane suspension and 30% human insulin) is a man-made form of a hormone that is produced in the body used to treat diabetes. The most common side effect of Humulin 70-30 is low blood sugar (hypoglycemia). Symptoms of low blood sugar may include headache, nausea, hunger, confusion, drowsiness, weakness, dizziness, blurred vision, fast heartbeat, sweating, tremor, trouble concentrating, confusion, or seizure(convulsions). Other side effects of Humulin 70-30 include: injection site reactions (e.g., pain, redness, irritation), skin thickening or pits at the injection site (lipodystrophy), itching, rash, weight gain, and swelling of your hands and feet.
Tell your doctor if you have serious side effects of Humulin 70-30 including signs of low potassium level in the blood (such as muscle cramps, weakness, irregular heartbeat).
Each patient’s diabetes is different, and the injection schedule and use of Humulin 70-30 is individualized. A doctor determines which insulin to use, how much, and when and how often to inject it. Humulin 70-30 may interact with albuterol, clonidine, reserpine, guanethidine, or beta-blockers. Tell your doctor all medications you are taking. Tell your doctor if you are pregnant before using Humulin 70-30. If you are planning pregnancy, discuss a plan for managing your blood sugars with your doctor before you become pregnant. Your doctor may switch the type of insulin you use during pregnancy. This medication does not pass into breast milk. Consult your doctor before breastfeeding. Insulin needs may change while breastfeeding.
Medical Editor: John P. Cunha, DO, FACOEPLast reviewed on RxList 12/9/2016
The next step is to review the side effects of each medication, and benefits of each, to determine what I should do. At the very least I need to review the interaction of these medications to figure out which of them are making my health worse, and which better.
Already I have some concrete ideas about improving my situation, including getting back into using my CPAP machine, recommitting to losing weight, and concentrate of getting more exercise.
I have not been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, at least not yet. However, the development of chronic pain has paralleled my diabetes over the past twenty-five years. For most of these years I have taken metformin or other compounds including metformin, which may have been providing some mitigation of the numerous forms of pain I have battled with over the years.
So, in addition to the pain potentially caused by “dysfunction within the brain’s small blood vessels” caused by insulin resistance, as noted in the report on this study, I think researchers should also study the link between inflammatory diseases and diabetes, to determine any causality, either way.
Having had a lifetime of inflammatory issues, starting with chronic allergies to a multiplicity of substances, arthritis, tendonitis, asthma among other painful inflammatory symptoms have laid the groundwork for neuropathy and muscular inflammation. The pain in my feet and hands has nearly become disabling from a combination of pain from neuropathy, arthritis and tendonitis.
In the meantime, my medical practitioners have their hands full trying their best to assist me in dealing with the symptoms, as well as with the underlying issues related to diabetes. My muscle and skeletal pain issues are largely untreated while I struggle with diabetes, as an insulin dependant diabetic.
From this report, among other studies I’ve read, it is clear that there is little that can be done to reduce my experience of chronic pain that does not also improve my A1C levels on an ongoing basis.
Three things need to change in order for there to be a significant reduction in both – a substantial reduction in my current weight, exacerbated by using insulin, better A1C blood sugar management, which may be a result of changing the form and administration of insulin to a much more intense dose management more closely related to my blood sugar levels and meal times, and a more appropriate combination of reduced caloric intake with a physical exercise regime which focuses as much on increasing flexibility of my skeletal and muscular systems, as on weight loss or caloric output.
I think, from my own experience, that the cited report offers some valuable clues to fibromialgia, its causes and some potential treatments. But I also think that these relationships are more complicated that they appear on the surface, and may require much more than a magic bullet to help deal with the pain.
My wife of thirty-four years and I are on the verge of divorce. In hindsight, it was always pretty inevitable since we always wanted completely different things from life, and what we wanted depended on our partner being someone completely different than who they are, especially in term of the fundamentals of marriage itself.
It took a very special kind of blindness to last this long, a willingness to overlook a fundamental flaw by pretending that it wasn’t there, but a flaw so deep that once exposed it can never be overlooked again, covered over, repaired or forgiven.
This huge rift between us goes right back to our earliest days, the days when I was married to someone else and she became the mother of my son, born as a result of a brief but torrid relationship which had resulted in his birth, less than 10 months after we first met.
Nobody would have have thought that such a start propitious. Having a child out of wedlock wasn’t something that either of us had imagined when we engaged in the obviously dangerous tryst. But for me it turned out to be less of a moral challenge than it is to her, to this day. She has never forgiven us for committing seriously immoral conduct, or herself, for that matter, for having slept with a married man.
It makes no difference to her that I was upfront from the beginning. There was no hidden marriage, or implied statements to the effect that I was single, or almost single. When she and I met, I had no intention of splitting up with my first wife, nor she with me.
We had an open marriage by mutual choice, arrived at by long discourse and mutual interest in exploring beyond the boundaries of marriage. My former wife was well aware that I had a number of outside female companions, several of whom we even shared. The fact is that we did split up within five years, but our open marriage was not the primary source of our going our separate ways. There were other, far more serious fault lines between us, not the least of which is that we both carried within us the net effects of physical, sexual and psychological abuse as children, most of which we skillfully concealed from each other, but which were the real cause of our breakup.
Our lovers had nothing to do with it. Well, maybe they did, and maybe my current wife had something to do with it. Having a baby with another woman put unbelievable pressure on my first marriage, even though I had concealed the existence of the child from my ex. Maybe this supposedly idyllic and idealistic “open” marriage had more than a little wrong with it. If everything was so open and above board I would not have hidden such an important thing as having fathered a child with another woman from my ex wife.
We’d actually discussed what we would do if this happened, although we’d both committed to using protection. We’d mutually agreed that we’d handle it together, and make room in our lives for any such child, and the mother as well. We’d extend our marriage to include them, for the sake of the child as much as for our own sake, as well.
The truth is that we had both failed to disclose important things from each other along the way, and the baby was simply the last and most significant of those lies between us.
So when my wife and I moved in together, after my ex-wife and I split up, there was a lot of things we should have discussed before getting pregnant with our second child together. By the time it came around to deciding to get married it was already too late to work out how we were to deal with our mutual expectations of marriage, and what it means exactly to get married.
There’s no place like home?
Instead we got married with a simple agreement that since it was unlikely that I would ever be sexually monogamous we would leave the “faithful” out of the marriage vows, but leave in the marriage vows, promises to stay the course, be loyal to each other’s best interests, to look out for the other person’s growth and do anything we could do to be the best partner possible, but not including fidelity.
She believes that I took advantage of her naivete, or alternatively, she really didn’t understand what it mean to live with an unrepentant polygamous man, within vows that didn’t even suggest sexual fidelity or exclusivity.
She says that she didn’t really believe me when I said that I was always likely to have friends and lovers outside of marriage, but that I wouldn’t let those relationships interfere with my relationship with her, or with my responsibilities to my kids.
In hindsight, I should never have moved in with her after the end of my first marriage, and most certainly shouldn’t have fathered two more children with her.
If she exercised willful blindness about my nature, and my apparent incapacity to live within a conventional marriage, then I also was willfully blind. I never really understood her feelings on the subject, which she never articulated in so many words, but has demonstrated without a doubt at times over the last thirty four years.
She didn’t ask, mostly, and I didn’t say. On the few occasions when she did ask about outside activities or relationships, I repeated what we had agreed to at the beginning of our marriage. We had agreed that we wouldn’t talk about it, I’d keep it away from my home, and I wouldn’t ever be intimate with a friend or close acquaintance of hers. She said that she didn’t really want to know, and I took her at her word.
I knew that our agreement was tenuous, at best, because over the years I came to understand that the only way she could deal with it was to pretend that it did’t exist, as if I really didn’t have any outside relationships, nor would I want to have any. She told herself that my refusal to promise to be faithful, or to discuss any variation on the original stance, was a cover-up, but not for my being unfaithful, but as a face saving device so that I wouldn’t have to acknowledge that I was a changed man.
She knew that my self-image always contained my sense of being independent and free to engage with anyone as a free human being. She knew that I believed that I could be faithful my promises to her, without having to accept a value system in which I simply don’t believe.
There were moments over the years when this fault line caused difficulties in our relationship, when she was sure that I was involved with someone. But since we had no dialogue about it that actually illuminated anything, she stuffed her feelings down and held back from expressing her sense of shame and outrage at my values and my inherent sensuality.
One result was the effective end of our intimate sexual relationship more than a decade ago. Although it was never raised by either of us, my unwillingness to commit to sexual fidelity seemingly made it impossible for her to fully participate in sexual congress. She submitted to sex rather than made love, a fact that made it less and less attractive to me over the years, and also made it less and less possible, due to my declining sexual performance generally.
Finally, a year or so ago, it all came out into the light. Somewhere along the way I had been exposed to a STD, discovered in a routine battery of blood work, which required me to inform any sexual partners so that they could be tested to protect themselves.
The first person I told was my wife, who went immediately into a slow burn which quickly turned into an inferno.
She said that she wanted a divorce. And sooner rather than later. Some days I think that she’s changed her mind because we get along so well, and do so many activities together. And generally we do get along really well, and cooperate in our lives together. But when I start to think that things maybe will heal over, it explodes out all over again.
From her perspective the only reason we’re not separated right now is that my health and economic situation is so bad that I wouldn’t be able to function on my own. Up until now it has been true, and without something changing it might be true for years.
My income is from CPP and OAP, for a total of $1380 a month, which when combined with her income, allows us to live a reasonable life. On my own it would be pretty much impossible, and the situation wouldn’t be much better on her own either.
But things aren’t actually getting better between us, and whatever store of goodwill and affection sustained us for so many years, despite the underlying fault line, is getting pretty thin.
I remember saying a long time ago to a friend that “when one person in a relationship has contempt for the other, the marriage is over, completely over, and no amount of effort can bring back the respect and trust once it is gone.” This has never been so true, and when I hear the scorn and disrespect in my wife’s voice, I’m scorned right to the core.
I know. I should have known better. Even then, I should have done better. Although, for the life of me, I have no idea how I could have done better, except by changing myself and my values fundamentally to suit her. Or alternative, persuaded her to adopt my views on life.
However, it is now far too late, and in her heart she really can’t forgive me for “sleeping around” on her for all those years. Even if I were to change and be willing to promise to change now, it would not make any difference to her.
She is convinced that I have betrayed her and that I continue to betray her, not for my acts of betrayal, but because I am unrepentant and refuse to apologize for being exactly who I have always said I am, and done exactly as I always said I would.
It is irrelevant to her feelings today that she knew exactly who I was, and what I believed from the first night we met. I am who I am, and to her, that’s disgusting.
Not much of a foundation for mutual respect.
Rain Coast
Sometimes I feel as if I have fallen down the rabbit hole into an alternate universe, one in which I’m no longer a person. The world has also changed, seemingly irretrievably, into a place without any kind of safety, security, and surety.
Mum used to complain to me, from time to time, when she was retired from teaching, that she felt invisible, of no consequence, and therefore, of no value to anyone, including to herself. I remember telling her that, of course, she had meaning and value, at least to her children, and that we value her for her wisdom and accumulated life experience. I believe now that my comments were, at best, well-meaning but false.
Feelings are not facts, although they weigh us down as if they are real. I am going to be celebrating my sixty-fifth birthday in less than a month. Supposedly this means that I should be enjoying the opportunity to retire from active working life, and into a pleasant meander down the road of a new journey, not so bound up in ambition or goals.
Instead, I head into retirement with serious complications of diabetes and COPD, chronically exhausted, in constant arthritic and neuropathic pain. My professional life is in disgrace, and my finances are completely destroyed. My marriage is a shambles, a mere shadow of meaning and purpose I believed it to be. Whatever self-esteem I once enjoyed has been systematically eroded to the point where I have become self-effacing and ashamed.
Accomplishments once achieved with pride, are now rued as pointless, as they were not sustained, nor followed up with long-term success. Professional competence and pride in my knowledge and skills are now the pathetic memories of a fallen champion.
I have crashed and burned before, and arose from the ashes to take on new challenges and build a life again. I’m told by professionals that I need to let go of the past, forget my shortcomings, and learn to live with my current life and health circumstances. In short, I need to refocus on a new future. Build again a life worth living, a life into which joy and laughter can once again be a part.
There is still much of value in my life, and turning to those people who continue to befriend me and support me is a part of that future. Gratitude for what I have now will be a good start.
Still, it is difficult to look around me and see a landscape filled with characters I don’t recognize and don’t think I really want to get to know. What would be even more helpful would be if I could find a mirror that shows me the man I once thought I was. The mirrors in Wonderland show me a person I scarcely recognize, and who I really don’t want to be.
I noticed a year or two ago that at least as many of the people I consider important in my life are no longer with me, as there are living people, that is, they have died. It’s probably quite normal for someone of my age (I’m sixty-five in June) but I find it totally frustrating. One, I don’t make friends easily. Two, I hate losing anyone that I have since people are so hard to replace. Three, they’re not exactly replaceable anyway and in the course of missing them I realized that I don’t want to replace them, can’t replace them and sincerely just wish that people I love would just stop doing it.
I can see a day coming when I myself will die, and then I’ll truly be without any friends and loved ones at all. Mind you, I probably won’t notice since I’ll be dead. Unless my younger sister is right, and she’ll be there waiting for me on the other side with her amazing smile.
My sister Judith has always been morally opposed to death and dying, she simply won’t have it! Mind you, she’s not been all that successful at preventing it, but who knows, maybe her attitude has forced some of her loved ones to postpone it for a year or two anyway. Maybe. Hmmm… Maybe not.
Goodbye Kathryn. I’m really going to miss you. Well, at least for now.
Would a Guide like this be useful? If someone gave it to you, would you do what it said to do, or would you do the same thing you always do when you get advice you don’t really want?
You probably will do what you have always done so far. Right? Why not? Well then, it’s got you to this point in your life, the point at which you’re asking for advice about how to make at least one good decision every day.
On the other hand, maybe you’re ready to try something new, and give The Plan a shot. If you are ready to give it a try, then let’s get to it.
First, make a list of things you can’t live without.
The list can be short or long, it’s up to you. But just a suggestion, keep it as short as you can. The more stuff you can’t live without, the more stuff with which you have to live.
Take your time making this list. It is important. Who says? Well, for one, you do. So, take at least a couple of hours thinking about it before you decide finally what should be on the list. What do I think should be on your list? You really don’t want to know. I don’t even want to know. Because it’s totally irrelevant to the Plan. It’s also lesson one in The Plan – What I think is important to you doesn’t matter, and you should stop spending so much time worrying about it. I’d probably put all sorts of stuff on the list that you wouldn’t think of anyway, because it’s stuff that is important to me rather than to you.
I am sure you have a lot of experience at figuring out what is important to me and other people in your life. We have told you often enough, in enough different ways, so you have a pretty good idea of how to get through a day without once thinking about what matters to you.
Hmm. Back to the list.
Try to figure out stuff that matters to you, and that you really couldn’t imagine living without in your life. It’s probably not stuff, at least, not physical stuff. For some of us it really is physical stuff like cars, houses and other things like that…. If it is, then put it on your list. But ask yourself whether your life would be any better or worse without it? (Just a random thought to ponder on the way to The Plan.)
“It’s no accident that most ads are pitched to people in their 20s and 30s. Not only are they so much cuter than their elders…but they are less likely to have gone through the transformative process of cleaning out their deceased parents’ stuff. Once you go through that, you can never look at *your* stuff in the same way. You start to look at your stuff a little postmortemistically. If you’ve lived more than two decades as an adult consumer, you probably have quite the accumulation, even if you’re not a hoarder…I’m not saying I never buy stuff, because I absolutely do. Maybe I’m less naive about the joys of accumulation.” ― Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?
This is where I admit that I have a lot to learn from my partner about eliminating unnecessary stuff from my life. Over the years she has driven me a little crazy, what with her habit of giving away things she no longer wants or needs, like lovely jewelry she hasn’t worn in a while. She’s given diamond rings away to our kids or their partners, and random bits of ceramics or glass wear, simply because it occupies space she doesn’t really want to maintain anymore.
Actually, she’s brilliant. She has always had a knack at being able to focus on what matters to her, and let the rest go, even at the risk of offending other people. Good on her, good advice for the rest of us.
But minimalism aside, which has critics as well as advocates , there are practical reasons for adopting a more limited list of important things to keep than just the amount of junk you have to pay to store or display.
The idea applies well beyond things, and includes non-purposeful or even destructive connections to organizations, companies, services, or even relationships. Imagine going through the things you pay for every month to determine which of them could be eliminated without reducing your quality of life.
Even if you’re resistant to eliminating television or cable vision from your life, how hard would it be to get rid of all the channels you never or seldom watch. Recently I eliminated over 50% of the channels on my Telus television subscription, and ended up basically with the minimum number of channels I could get on a basic service, as opposed to an enhanced package.
It’s not that we stopped watching television, or even that our interests had narrowed to the point where basic TV would satisfy us, rather we found alternative sources of programming at a small fraction of the cost, using internet based sources rather than broadcast TV. It wasn’t that we weren’t using these sources before, but despite using these alternatives we have been paying for all the extra channels on cable for years, even though we had stopped relying on them for content. It was a habit and being a little too lazy to go through the list and eliminate the unused or unnecessary.
We did go back, a month or so later, and added back a couple of channels we realized are of more valuable to us than we previously thought. It’s okay to backtrack. It’s rare to right about anything completely.
Now I’m going to talk about some of the harder things to reduce, eliminate or deprioritize. The harder things to let of are relationships that no longer serve a positive purpose in our lives, but in which we continue to invest time, energy and emotional commitment. Of these, the easiest ones to eliminate are people or time commitments that simply bore you to death, literally. How many social meetings or gatherings do you attend every month that actually fail to enrich your life experience? Do you really have to attend countless committee meetings, or have a hand in the governance of your local whatever organization. Is it really your duty to sit on your strata council?
For some people, these social organizations and gatherings provide meaning and purpose, and for those people they are far from unnecessary or a waste of time and energy. For most of us, not so much. So just stop going, resign or don’t offer up your time. Trust me, most often your absence will hardly be missed.
An even harder group to eliminate are destructive friends, relatives and acquaintances. It’s amazing how many of the people in our day to day lives take pleasure in inflicting misery on us. A good principle to follow – if someone really doesn’t like you, stop spending time on them. Also, if you really don’t like and admire someone, stop spending your precious life energy trying to fix them, or getting them to change into someone you might like. Stop trying to impress that opinionated aunt, or the bitchy neighbor down the block who never has anything positive to say. Don’t return phone calls to people who merely want to give you a piece of their mind on any subject you don’t want to hear. Especially people who phone or visit merely to criticize or put you down.
When was the last time you looked forward to a visit from/to your least enjoyable acquaintance, friend or relative? Just stop going, listening or participating. You’ll feel a lot better about yourself if you stop listening to poison, about yourself or anyone else you care to know.
So, make a list of what you don’t need or want. Whether it’s stuff like an old table wasting space in the family room, or a relative who hasn’t a good thing to say about you for twenty years. Invest yourself in those things and people that matter, divest yourself from those that don’t.
Step One could take a while, first to make the list, then to actually implement it. And then to revise it again. But do it with relish, and reward yourself whenever you eliminate something else or someone else that no longer serves your best interests. Enjoy the absence of unnecessary stuff as a kind of liberation. Likewise the absence of destructive individuals in your life.
A less cluttered life is by most accounts a better life.
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This morning I read an entry in Facebook which started an exchange about how women and men see the interaction between the genders so differently as to suggest that rather than simply different genders males and females of the human race are almost different species.
And of course I’d see it that way because I’m a man, based on what the feminist writer is saying about how women perceive men.
Her first point is that women spend much of their lives de-escalating the emotional temperature of interactions with men, because they perceive the actions and behavior of men through a lens informed by a lifetime of gender based abuse, assault and rape. So whether or not a man is acting aggressively towards a woman, at any given moment, she is anticipating that the interaction could very well turn into an assault or rape or at least abuse and doing everything she can do to turn down the temperature so that doesn’t happen, on this specific occasion.
So even with men who have never acted offensively in any abusive way, women are accustomed to automatically assuming that they have to behave in a manner that won’t escalate behavior into violence or other abuse, simply because it has happened so often in the past that there is an automatic assumption of risk based on real world observation.
Almost without regard to how various women process their previous experience of male/female interactions, the threatening nature of these transactions has an effect on how women perceive male intentions and actions.
According to these observation, then, it suggests that men should simply shut up and not express any opinions on any subject. And if they find themselves attracted to a given woman, they should probably keep it to themselves.
Well maybe not so much. What it does say is that men need to be extremely sensitive to how their communications are likely to be viewed by women, whether by strangers or even intimates. It says that expressing affection or attraction has to be done in a way that is not threatening to a woman, and doesn’t demean her or make her feel cornered.
It the article isn’t an overstatement of how women feel about men, in general, then I fear for the human race. Half the race is terrified of the other. And the other half has no idea how to behave so as to not further terrify the other. Neither side seems to be able to communicate with each other without being threatened or misrepresented, or being seen as a monster, simply because of gender.
This hardly amounts to gender equality. Unless by gender equality we mean that both genders are totally fucked.
I think that blogging can provide an opportunity to express ideas in progress, rather than completed or resolved. In that way, then, writing a stream of consciousness blog is a legitimate reason to change subjects or tone during a single blog, rather than make a blog more like an essay, complete in and of itself. Jumping around from subject to subject, however, makes it pretty hard for a reader to figure out where you’re going, or indeed, if you are going anywhere, at all.
I find writing a blog, especially a personal blog, is pretty difficult, and I find myself frustrated at trying to focus on a subject, yet aware that I have so much to say and yet can’t seem to say anything much at all. Part of my frustration is that I often feel the need to state conclusions to my conundrums, rather than being willing to hang around without resolution for very long. Or to let a written piece end without any resolution of the issue raised in the piece.
Writing a blog is a little bit like a conversation with my daughter. It runs all over the map without ever actually getting to the point. With her its because she’s really afraid to ask for what she needs or wants, or perhaps because she feels it necessary to justify or rationalize her requests. She’s over thirty, actually thirty-five tomorrow, and she’s way too dependent on her Dad. And that’s both of our opinion. So we’re working on it but its a new conversation without any known parameters.
And like it or not, she really does rely on me more than is healthy for either of us.
Writing about intimate relationships is hard, because I know that I believe things about the other person that don’t seem true to them. And yet which seem all too true to me. With her, it feels to her like I don’t support her, believe in her, trust her, have confidence in her ability to take care of herself and my grand-kids, etc. She says that I don’t like her. And sometimes it’s all true.
Sometimes I don’t know how to explain to her that even while all those things are sometimes true about my feelings about her, they don’t really encompass what I feel at all.
What they don’t express are my observations that she is beautiful, brilliant, talented in many different ways. It doesn’t inform her about how much I love her, and how little difference I seem to have made in her life, despite massive efforts to do so. I often feel that I am sacrificing myself on the alter, trying to care for her with all of her disabilities, illness, and violently victimized past. Ultimately, she seems broken to me, and I don’t know if she will ever be able to put herself together again. In fact, helping her often seems to be contributing to her brokenness more than to helping her to heal.
They say that the first step towards solving a problem is to acknowledge that you have one, and to express it in words.
I have a problem. I don’t know how to love her without either abandoning her and letting her sink or swim on her own, or alternatively, holding her up and destroying her by undermining her growth into a self sufficient person.
Which is the harder road? For me or for her?
Wedding picture
My nephew married a local girl in their home town of Gibsons, British Columbia. I took a lot of pictures, and have a lot of thoughts about the inevitable passage of time. It feels like yesterday when he was born to my sister, and he has become a grown man all too quickly for my taste. Still I’m delighted to be his uncle, and equally delighted to celebrate this day with him, and provide him with photographic evidence.
Rain Coast Review 