[books, embodiment] further grousing

Aug. 16th, 2025 11:14 pm
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Just, you know, For My Own Reference: a list of the exercises included in Hypermobility Without Tears. I am going to come back through and add links to Pilates and physio explainers for all of these.

Read more... )

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Jeannie Di Bon is a "Movement Therapist" who "specialis[es] in Hypermobility, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Chronic Pain." In the introduction, she talks about her own experiences in a way I find very sympathetic:

I've lost count of the number of times a doctor has told me it's all down to IBS and instructed me to eat more fibre and try Pilates or yoga to relax. Dismissive in its nature and kind of ironic now, as I trained to become a Pilates teacher in 2008.

And, you know, the actual core (yes I did that) of her Integrated Movement Method is sound: she's giving advice about fostering body awareness, of when and where you're tense and when you're not, working through a pretty standard sequence of breathing exercises and gentle movements. All the exercises in this book are the kind of thing that show up pretty early on in any full-body physiotherapy programme, that have loads of progressions available (particularly within the Pilates model), and they're absolutely fine and probably useful to folk who've not been able to access care covering this kind of topic.

If it were just the exercise programme, it would be ... fine. More or less. I think a bunch of the ways she explains movements are unclear and counterintuitive, but hey, presumably they work for at least some people.

Unfortunately, there are all of the bits in between.

Chapter 4 is where they went from "okay, you're simplifying to the point of lies-to-children but you are also explaining why" to "... either you're deliberately misrepresenting things for personal gain or you're wildly incompetent", and I'm still not sure which of those it actually is. (I am trying not to think too hard about the possibility that the answer is "both".)

Read more... )

tl;dr there is nothing you will get from the Integral Movement Method that you won't get from competently-taught or -explained Pilates except scaremongering and misdirection... and unlike IMM, you can get decent Pilates resources for free. Don't bother with this one.

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I am now well over halfway through the book, and spent most of chapter four screeching to anyone who would listen about the extent to which either she is deliberately and cynically misrepresenting approaches that aren't Her Personal Programme in the interests of selling the latter, or she's just incompetent.

The actual suggested movements -- the strength-building and the stretching -- are totally reasonable, and also totally standard. It's the surrounding framing that has my eyebrows crawling into my hairline; I... tried to summarise and rapidly discovered I was launching into the full rant, and it's past bedtime, so let's start with: while there's a References section it's a whole 15 items long, and she's blithely saying "X states" or "Y says" as though the fact that something has been published in a single peer-reviewed paper means that it's unquestionably true, and of those fifteen one is a systematic review of any kind and... Several... are under the aegis of an organisation specialising in complementary medicine.

More details tomorrow, probably. With excerpts.

finally it is tomato o'clock

Aug. 13th, 2025 10:40 pm
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a tomato with a dark purple upper and red lower, speckled with gold

(This cultivar is called Blue Fire. I was very late getting my tomatoes started, but I am about to have lots of them and I am excited by this! Rainbow planting didn't quite work partly because none of the Yellow Pear-Shaped made it but largely because I lost track of which were my purple plum tomatoes and which were instead my orange, but -- I'm about to have A Bunch of ridiculous coloured tomatoes, and this is probably the showiest of the lot of 'em!)

etymology of the day

Aug. 12th, 2025 10:05 pm
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Arancini. The small balls of risotto coated in breadcrumbs and then deep fried.

*Little oranges*.

This is not in any way an obscure or difficult to look up etymology, and yet somehow it was not until yesterday, on the tube, that I suddenly needed to look up from the book I was reading and *stare*.

(Earlier this week -- no, wait, late last week -- I was indexing a cookbook that included arancini. This week I am reading *The Land Where Lemons Grow*, because it's mostly a history of citrus cultivation in Italy with occasional recipes, so I wanted to read it Properly before indexing it and getting rid of it again. Apparently what it took for me to Have A Realisation was the combination in temporal proximity...)

vital functions

Aug. 10th, 2025 10:43 pm
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Reading. Allie Brosh, Jeannie Di Bon, Helena Attlee, Louis MacNeice, friends misc. )

... and several of the magazines that have been sat around causing Guilt and a sense of Obligation, subsequent to which I have happily recycled them. Favourite fact from the three so far: Garden Organic/the Heritage Seed Library are trialling using tuning forks to pollinate their tomato crops! ( Facebook | Instagram )

Bonus: sifting through a pile of notebooks etc to try to work out who the hell they belong to, mostly salvaged from the pile that was due to go out to event-freecycle on the basis that SURELY I could do something useful with them if, you know, I sat down with them at a time that wasn't in a field under Significant time pressure while Very tired. And I could! One and a half remain unidentified (I say "half" because We're Working On It).

Writing. A lot of lost property e-mails.

Cooking. One new recipe from East: paneer, spinach and tomato salad, accompanied by the herbed naan from the Leiths How to Cook Bread book (this is probably on my To Cook Through list). I was into this!

Also vaghareli makai ("spiced Indian corn") by way of David Lebovitz, and a slightly underwhelming lemony fennel and broccoli pasta (significantly improved by the addition of pine nuts).

Eating. STRAWBERRIES. Blackberries. Local plums are starting to be ripe!

Exploring. Poked around the green belt a bit to see how the plums were doing! And I think that's most of it?

A very brief poke around the entrance to the Pimp Hall Nature Reserve following a successful drop-off of Objects to the adjacent Household Waste Recycling Centre; tragically the signs on the gates claimed that they'd be locked at 4 p.m., which we had not quite anticipated, and we only reached them at 3.58. Next time, perhaps!

Creating. Hmm. Does sitting around knolling for the purposes of the big lost property post count? I think it probably does; certainly while the photos still aren't good (am I contemplating a lightbox and a tripod of some kind of this specific terrible hobby? to my slight horror, I kind of am...) the arrangements are getting much easier to parse visually, I discovered upon going back through a bunch of them, which I am pleased about.

Growing. Found a surprise pocketful of dried Sugar Magnolia pods, so I am definitely in the black when it comes to number of seeds for next year, which is a pleasant surprise!

victory of the day

Aug. 8th, 2025 11:58 pm
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Today I have got Somewhat Caught Up on last event's lost property Situation. My GREAT TRIUMPH was, partway through the paperwork, going "... I'm sure that brooch in particular is... Oddly... Familiar..."

-- and indeed upon going back through my records it transpires that I HAD RETURNED IT TO ITS PERSON AT THE FIRST EVENT THIS YEAR.

So my spreadsheet is duly updated and they can have it back again at the last event of the year :)

(Some other victories: cut-price overripe strawberries. More of my mother's birthday cake. Rye and caraway and poppyseed bread. the elderly niter kibbeh in the fridge still being Definitely Food and substantially enlivening dinner. Shitposting in the PD crew Discord. Starting Solutions and Other Problems with A, and the cake, and the strawberries.)

Redactle-related fact of the day

Aug. 7th, 2025 11:53 pm
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I did not, until a few hours ago, know that diesel was named after Rudolf Diesel, "... who invented the Diesel engine, which burns Diesel fuel".

(Some cheerful things, in brief: turns out shimmer inks really do work better when you thoroughly scrub the feed of your fountain pen clean at least occasionally; I am excited about tomorrow's bread; I was Greatly Honoured by the Toddler in a truly toddleresque fashion the details of which I shall not go into; I have finally got my act together to order a copy of the Roti King cookbook; glorious comfort reread of a thing I'd totally forgotten was even available for comfort reread, and for bonus points there are new bits!!!)

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
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For Redactle reasons, yesterday I wound up working my way through Wikipedia's List of oldest continuously inhabited cities.

This turned out not to be helpful for Terrible Game Purposes, but it did mean that I came across a city in Anatolia, Turkey, "founded by the Phrygians in at least 1000 BC[E], although it has been estimated to be older than 4,000 years old".

The name of this city? Eskişehir.

"Eski" is the Turkish (and possibly Turkic?) word for "old" (antonym of "new" -- antonym of "young" is a different word). "Şehir" means "city".

We are so good at this.

[embodiment] physio notes!

Aug. 5th, 2025 11:05 pm
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Today was Lower Limb Class #2, as ongoing follow-up for the most recent ankle reinjury. (On which status is: still a biiiit weaker when I'm pushing to limits, but not really noticeable in day-to-day life, e.g. I'm no longer regularly wincing when I jar it getting off a bike; definitely still feeling the work up the outside of my right leg when doing e.g. isometric holds on double heel raises.)

I am very amused by how "???!!!" the physios got when I tried to faint from things that "shouldn't" have been significant cardio and indeed aren't by my standards for cardio but crucially involved a lot of moving around and position changes while upright: sit-to-stand, lunges, crab-walking with knees bent. Apparently I have carefully selected for exercise done while seated or prone for really solid reasons, i.e. that would be the orthostatic hypotension. Which I apparently hadn't told the physios about as its own thing. ...whoops.

notes )

vital functions

Aug. 3rd, 2025 10:40 pm
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Celebrating. Two birthdays! Both, conveniently, in Cambridge.

Reading. The Age of Seeds, Fiona McMillan-Webster (finished). Cannot articulate why this turned into a bit of a slog (kept running off to look other things up? suspicion about the materials science fluency? difficulty engaging with The Climate Situation for leisure purposes? lots of other things going on?) but I did finish it and I have learned things. Sort of. I at least now have more of a vague outline about how seed dormancy works (on multiple levels) than I did previously, even if I did spend a lot of the explanation going "okay but what does that MEAN???"

Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh. Two chapters left!

I also continue to take steps towards getting my head around neuroanatomy; today I have been particularly annoyed by (1) the terminology of "ganglion", and apparent variation in whether it is used strictly to refer to the peripheral nervous system, and also (2) Nerve and Muscle cheerily providing an incomprehensible-to-me introduction to the concept of action vs resting potentials, and the difficulties inherent in measuring them. This is possibly going to be another case of "read three pages, then go and do a lot more reading elsewhere to fill in". Have also been poking at a couple of wikibooks on neuroanatomy.

Listening. Bats! More than seeing, really.

Cooking. Birthday cake! "No, really, don't use pre-ground hazelnut meal, your mother prefers a more Rustic texture" now firmly established.

Eating. FIGS. SO MANY FIGS. MY MOTHER'S FIG TREE IS RIDICULOUS. We have brought about a kilo home? I think we have genuinely brought about a kilo home and that's after the quantity I've eaten in the past 36 hours.

(Schwarzbrot + Yarg + fig: yes excellent thank you.)

Exploring. Small adventures around Darwin Green and various other Cambridge back streets. Tragically the known black mulberry tree is not quite ready for Significant harvest yet, and also there was someone sitting (and smoking) on the bench once needs to climb upon to reach the majority of the branches that overhang the public highway.

Growing. Greenhouse chillis potted up before vanishing to a field: not dead! Sugar Magnolia: continuing to produce more pods! Tomatoes: still not ripe!

Observing. Many bats. Good dragonfly. Lots of red admiral butterflies on the buddleia. A SQUIRREL in a WALNUT TREE the existence of which I had not previously been cognisant: the pitter-patter of little bits of walnut fruit was somewhat perplexing until the involvement of Horrid Little Hands and Horrid Little Teeth dawned upon me, whereupon I was absolutely delighted to get to watch this creature in Action.

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