Immunity is a group project and we would be in a better situation if more folks took personal responsibility for their immune systems and behavior!
I keep thinking about what would happen if Beyoncé declared she was running for President. (Like for months, I keep thinking about this.) We could all write her in or install her at the DNC convention and her ground swell of support certainly could win. I left the Democratic Party in 2020 but I think the party is going through a total Tower moment. In the Tarot, a Tower moment is a sudden change, chaos or upheaval because something in your life has been built on a shaky foundation and it’s likely to come crashing down.
Happy Pride month! I call it Gay Stamina Month because there are so many things to do. Pride began as a protest and, I believe, our liberation is all interconnected. May it continue to be not simply a protest but the gathering together of joy, rage and ideas to create the world we want to see!
I was on LinkedIn (are we pals there--let's link up!) and their robot overlords asked me to answer the question how folks can move from an internship to paid work* in event planning. I think this advice could apply to any industry! And I didn't want to let LinkedIn profit off my advice if I could host it here on my blog!
My mom made this recipe on special occasions when she needed to feed a crowd. A crowd pleaser and total labor of love. I didn't even try to guess the time on prep for this recipe but last time mom made 12 for just her, me and Pat (her spouse) she said the prep clocked in at 3 hours.
I started saying this at Glowing Goddess Getaway events when I would be stationed at the Glow Bar helping goddesses decide how they wanted to consume cannabis. Being a loud gal, I hollered out "Are you as high as you want to be?" as an enthusiastic way to remind folks they came to unwind.
But it's also a good reminder for yourself to actually set an intention for how high you want to be BEFORE you consume. You can always get more high, it's really hard to get less high!
The three main resources all of us have available to us are our time, treasure and talent.
Much like our beloved mushroom friends function as an underground network of mycelium, I try to move my resources and nutrients very intentionally between places that matter to me.
I think going into family gatherings with a list of compromise, fairly neutral media to screen together is a good idea. (My family loved to go to the movies together on visits.)*
I find it easiest to deal with folks like that to focus on what we have in common. I think this documentary could create some family harmony for potentially up to 1 hour and 47 minutes.
My intention with this piece is to teach anyone who is trepidatious about going to a gathering some of my favorite tools for hard conversations and difficult people. I've been working on healing from social anxiety intentionally for nearly five years and I've learned a lot about how to release defensiveness and needing to be "right" which helps a lot with harmonizing conversations.
We’ve been in this pandemique for four and a half years and to my knowledge I haven’t ever gotten infected with Covid 19, the virus that causes Long Covid.
Of course, half of infections come without symptoms, but it feels nice to say I haven’t felt sick from an external infection, even a common cold, in 5 years*! As a result of the precautions I take!
About every six months I add something new to my repertoire of personal fortification, some of which I’ve blogged about before.
A friend asked me to write up what I’m doing and I thought I’d share with the world wide web because I would LOVE to be a good influence on you.
Immunity is a group project and we would be in a better situation if more folks took personal responsibility for their immune systems and behavior! Every time you get another Covid 19 infection you deplete your immune response and increase your likelihood for long covid! Which makes it harder for everyone else!
Before I see people/interact with people unmasked:
Nasal Spray! I currently use Covyxyl. It briefly (less than a minute) feels like cinnamon in my nose and I use two squirts in each nostril (following the directions on the bottle, and I re apply every 6 hours or when my intuition says I need it). I started nasal sprays for higher risk occasions in Sept 2023. Covyxyl is out of stock so I’m switching to this bee brand that has both xylitol and propolis from bees!
Hard conversations! I will ask for an open window or outdoor hang if I can (it does mean dressing in heavy layers 9 months of the year where I live), I will ask for more social distance from people or just take it if my intuition says I need it.
People who say they are “cautious” mean that in a wide spectrum of ways. My bestie Rachael got Covid the first time from a family member who hadn’t disclosed her risky behaviors. It’s best to be clear with folks what risks you’re willing to take!
At the end of the day (especially after higher risk activities):
I use a mouthwash with CPC! (I use the Glister brand, there are other brands out there.) CPC kills viruses and bacteria you may have breathed in with others after one minute of swishing! At the airport I do it before and after a flight. Even though I mask on planes it’s just such close quarters. (Here’s a guide to covid safer flying.)
Nasal irrigation! I like this version but you could do classic neti pot. Years ago I did this daily for my allergies and was inspired to pick it up again after reading about a study that nasal irrigation can prevent infection and even if someone is infected the symptoms were lessened. (Viral load matters, and of course so-called mild symptoms can still lead to Long Covid.) Nasal irrigation feels a little like drowning momentarily but it’s worth it if I don’t have to deal with getting sick!
Daily Practice:
*Hand washing! My intuition says it’s the most effective thing I can do. 20 seconds, warm water and soap when I can (not everywhere has warm water).
FYI: The Norovirus is rampant (you do not want to get that if you can avoid it, such a distressing 24+ hours) and is only killed through soap and warm water not hand sanitizer.
*Take my vitamins! Here’s what I take that especially helps my immune system prevent Covid:
- Vitamin C extended release
2. Vitamin D (I’ve read this helps prevent hospitalization if you do get C19)
3. Prebiotic (Fiber) and Probiotic, some ayurvedic herbs, fermented superfoods and more (Gut health is immunity health!)
4. CBGA & CBDA through an RSO I get at my local dispensary. About six months ago my intuition shifted me from a 6:1 to a 10:1 CBD:THC ratio. More info on why I use this in this blog post!
5. Ashwagandha for stress (reducing stress supports your immune system)
Not all vitamins/supplements are created equally—it is an unregulated industry and you want to see that your brand is 3rd party verified (my brand is NSF certified and very effective). Costco / drug store brand vitamins are often just peed right out of your body.
(I use additional supplement protocols, book a one on one with me to discuss more. I’m happy to share what I do for my optimal health and help you build your optimal health plan!).
I think being an “outsider” my whole life has given me so much practice being resilient to what people think about me. Being Covid cautious is less stressful than coming out was!
Air purifiers are great! I like to ask venues if they have them before booking (and I disclose that in the ticketing information for my in person Fat Kid Dance Party aerobics classes). I wish we had more widespread air quality requirements for public spaces. We deserve clean air inside just like we have clean filtered water.**
Masking! I still mask 100% of the time in stores, on planes, on public transit and healthcare environments. Vulnerable people matter! All that staying home in 2020 and masking in 2020/2021 was about vulnerable people, right? Why aren’t we still masking in these mandatory environments?***
Mask 4 Mask: If an employee someplace has a mask on I will mask when I interact with them. (I rarely go out to eat but if I did and the waitress had a mask on or the person at the counter had a mask on I would mask when I interacted with them. Or if someone in a drive through was masking I would mask when our windows were open together.)
I don’t mask inside people’s homes unless there’s a present risk (someone has been exposed or is symptomatic). But I rarely enter people’s homes! If something doesn’t feel like a full body yes I don’t do that thing.
I rarely do big events/concerts. (I have gone to 2 big events and 1 concert this year.) When I do I have to be careful about my air flow because I have a history of fainting in crowds. I went to a 10,000 person arena conference in April and tried masking, got woozy to the point of thinking I might faint and decided to rely on my other protocols. I did not get sick!
Everything about this pandemique is about risk assessment and doing our best.
*I deal with ongoing chronic digestive issues that force me to rest, occasional migraines, injuries, and in 2024 an undeniable fatigue which my intuition says is just part of a cycle and I’ll have renewed energy next year. My overall rule is to ask the question “What does my body want?” When she wants rest I give her rest. I think that helps my immune system, too!
** Everyone, everywhere deserves clean water and that’s not even available to every human even though we have the resources. Another rant for another day!!
***To be honest I have very complicated feelings about folks who once masked for moral reasons to protect vulnerable people and now do not. This pandemique has given me on the ground training to not judge people but I feel really let down by the so-called “liberals” who chose to “vax and relax” and abandon vulnerable people. Vaccines help but they don’t prevent being a carrier of covid. I know there was a lot of terrible leadership around pandemique behaviors! I value folks who look at the data and act according to their values, not just what feels comfortable or going along with the crowd.
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I keep thinking about what would happen if Beyoncé declared she was running for President. (Like for months, I keep thinking about this.) We could all write her in or install her at the DNC convention and her ground swell of support certainly could win.
I wonder if that thought is co-dependent. Like I’m looking to someone else to come in and be the hero and save the day because the other options on the table are so bleak.
I wonder if that thought is demanding labor from a Black woman?
I wonder if it’s because she’s all decked out in Americana for her Cowboy Carter marketing? Each time I see it I think “This would be SO FUN if she was running for President.”
I wonder if it’s because she’s a billionaire now? She is the most capable billionaire I have heard of. And as a Virgo, she is more than competent to run the country. She’s stress tolerant, hard working and (seemingly) compassionate.
I heard a rumor during the early Black Lives Matter movement that Beyoncé and Jay-Z gave lots of money to bail funds for protestors. I like to think that’s true and they low key support leftist movements in their own way and she might care enough for us to grace us with her service for four years instead of just all of her incredible art.
(But her art is enough! Again, this is just my fantasy about how the problem of the 2024 election gets solved.)
I don’t intend to think about the Billionaire Class every day but it seems like it gets talked about daily in my circles. How the very concept of being a billionaire is hoarding wealth.
I heard a statistic that a person only needs about 50 Million in personal wealth to really spend everything they can, living luxuriously, and that anything in excess of that is just hoarding.
There’s the classic meme that Dolly Rebecca Parton is a millionaire not a billionaire because she gives so much away. (And while I frequently wear my Dolly for President tee shirt I think she, at 78 years young, should do what she wants and not take on the stress of the job. But if she was willing to do it I have no doubt she also could be elected based on the response to my shirt.)
In my little corner of the world where my net worth is six figures of law school debt, I find the more I declutter and the more I give away the better I feel.
None of these billionaires seem particularly peaceful or happy except, perhaps Beyoncé Giselle Knowles Carter.
She’s also my favorite of all billionaires and, frankly, the one who would be most competent at the Presidency. I wonder if she would do it for us as a favor, maybe we all promise to buy a sweatshirt from her every year of her term?
I watched the Max dot com series Girls on the Bus (it’s excellent!!! Put it on your watch list!). There’s a scene in the last episode at the Democratic National Convention in a VIP suite filled with billionaires and corporate oligarchs. They declare openly that they are running our politics through their monetary influence.
If only they were that plain spoken to everyone.
Would plain spoken corporate 1% evil even make a difference?
I think about how my Democrat friends are glued to their tvs about the trials and indictments of 45, they cheer so much, and how none of his fan base care about any of it. I don’t think any of his legal issues will keep them from buying a narrative of gibberish and hate and dangerously mobilizing.
What if those Democrats used their obsessive political and news watching TV time to make meals for struggling single moms or unhoused people and how that might change things more?
Beyoncé for president could be monumental mobilizing. Look at her stats from the Renaissance world tour.
And the Weekend at Bernie’s job the Democrats are doing with Biden. This man should be at home surrounded by his family gazing at a garden not “making decisions” for the United States (as though he’s actually making them).
I left the Democratic Party in 2020 but I think the party is going through a total Tower moment. In the Tarot, a Tower moment is a sudden change, chaos or upheaval because something in your life has been built on a shaky foundation and it’s likely to come crashing down.
Their support for the genocide in Gaza has lost them essential support from the far left and frankly, anyone with a conscience. We could end houselessness and have universal healthcare if we weren’t funding genocides. Israelis have free healthcare. We do not.
I left the party because even though I was raised a Democrat I realized they don’t actually follow through on anything they say they stand for. I’ve seen them win the popular election twice in my adulthood but still they haven’t moved to abolish the electoral college. Why? I watched them roll over and let the Republicans deny them a supreme court nominee when Obama was leaving office and then when the Republicans claimed the nominee when 45 was leaving office anyway the Dems rolled over and did nothing.
I think the two party system is inadequate for actual human diversity. I’m not part of it anymore. I talk to strangers in my purple part of Washington (meaning much of the rural area I live in is very red and many pockets of very blue). Nearly everyone agrees we deserve universal healthcare. What I think is funny is when people blame Joe Biden for gas prices. Who is to blame are the fact that there are only two oil companies and the three corporations in one trench coat running both parties.
I’m feeling abandoned by the government and salty about it and would love this to have a hero’s ending. I know the victim/hero mindset is a trait of coloniality and it functions to disempower people from stepping into what power they do have.
A lot of people doing a little bit makes a HUGE difference.
One of my favorite creators and thought leaders in this time is Logan Grendel of Focused on Infinity (like myself, Logan is a Patreon supported artist and activist). About voting they say:
“I vote in every single election, but until the next one I’m not going to waste a whole lot of time thinking about it, because if I’m not doing the work every day I’m going to be left with nothing but the shabby choices that are put in front of us by the vulture class.
So for those of you who have been haranguing us to vote, your move. There are 363 other days this year and lots to be done.”
Logan also posted a great video about how the victim/hero dichotomy is disempowering—I return to this video frequently.
The thing about a Tower Moment is that the outcome is always for our own good and the lessons learned (if one chooses to learn them) can launch us into a greater thrive.
The Democratic machine just pushed Biden through the primaries and wasn’t willing to have the hard conversations that those of us being affected by their decisions demanded.
Having a general election debate on TV this early is pageantry and ratings for CNN. I hope the Democrats replace Biden at the convention and I hope something unexpectedly good comes out of the current poop show of US politics.
But more than that I hope YOU, gentle reader, DO SOMETHING to make the world better the other 363 days of the year. The more of us who divest from extractive capitalism under the current model, the more swiftly we can make change.
Here’s my treatise on how I think tipping can change the world.
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Happy Pride month! I call it Gay Stamina Month because there are so many things to do. Pride began as a protest and, I believe, our liberation is all interconnected. May it continue to be a protest AND the gathering together of joy, rage and ideas to create the world we want to see!
While the flashpoint that began the modern day Pride movement, and what we celebrate on the last weekend of June, is the Stonewall Rebellion, queer people have always existed. Every person throughout herstory who chose to live and love queerly was building this movement.
“In 1978, Harvey Milk asked Gilbert Baker to create a unifying symbol for the growing gay rights movement, and on June 25 of that year, Baker’s Rainbow Flag debuted at San Francisco’s Gay Liberation Day parade.” You can read more about the creation and intention behind the pride flag in the book Rainbow Warrior: My Life in Color.*
For decades we partied, protested and gathered under the original rainbow flag–designed after the sky with meaning in each stripe. “Red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, blue for serenity, and violet for spirit.”
In 1999 Monica Helms designed the Trans Flag. (Which I absolutely LOVE because if you know me you know how I feel about pastel colors, pink and blue specifically.) The pink and blue represent the traditional gendered girl and boy with the white middle stripe for folks who are intersex or in transition.
In June 2017 the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of LGBT affairs, under the leadership of AJ Hikes (a friend I met during our mutual year in Los Angeles), unveiled an updated design of the pride flag. It was called “More Pride More Color” and it was intended to be a symbol of solidarity and recognition to the LGBTQ folks of color who have lead our liberation movements.
There was backlash to the 8 stripe flag but in such a short time it’s rooted in and ushered in a whole new wave of Pride flags. It’s kind of wild to think ten years ago we didn’t have the variety of flags we do now! I look back at those gay pride celebrations and don’t see the flag diversity we have now!
There have been many lesbian pride flags (one site I found said 13 different ones) and as a culturally lesbian person it really tracks that our community has so many different symbols because we don’t all agree on one. Have you ever tried to come to consensus with a group of lesbians? There has never been one big lesbian processing meeting to pick one.
Truth be told I kind of hated the most common lesbian flag–the orange and pink one. “My sisters, aesthetically we can do way better and we deserve more!” That’s what I would have said at our lesbian processing meeting about the flag.
But then one day I realized orange is my mom’s signature color (a lesbian) and my signature color is glitter but among my favs is pink and when I realized the flag was the two of our colors blending together I got over my offense at how ugly it is. It made me cry sentimentally, our gay family in a flag.
We have more access to “stuff” than ever before–because of Amazon’s swift delivery and exploitative factories over seas. Making pride flags of all kinds easy to buy and wave and trash. We have never had more trash on earth ever before! As all of our liberation is bound up in one another it makes me so sad to see so much waste in the name of partying.
Last summer I was reflecting my own queerness and how my sexual identity is far more of an unrestrained openness to the most important power in the universe–love.
Queer is in opposition of all compulsory heterosexuality and the very idea of holding hostage our belonging to our conformity. Afraid people are easier to control–who profits off your self loathing?
The most important thing queer community has taught me is solidarity. And solidarity is something I learned very strongly modeled by working class and poor queer folks. Our very survival is bound up in our working together to ensure our mutual liberation and support.
I thought of a new flag I’d like to get up our poles for Pride season and all year long.
A tie dye rainbow piece of fabric (please make it second hand if you can) with “We’re All in this Together” screen printed on it. (Please get together with your comrades for a screen printing party.)
If I had access to my first love doing graphic design for me right now I’d have it as a graphic but for now we just gotta imagine it.
Happy pride, beloveds! Whether you are LGBTQ+++ or an ally, remember we speak truth to pseudo power by continuing to stay alive and support one another.
*(A reminder that any link I share to Amazon gives me a small commission at no cost to you. I strongly suggest and support indie bookstores so shop local when you can, but if you’re going to use Jeffrey Bezos, please cut into his profits a lil bit!)
**I was once gifted a pair of pride Nikes and the pink triangle wasn’t upside down. The IGNORANCE that is perpetuated in the corporitization and sanitizing of pride.
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