what i'm doing - bombarding myself with vitamins and trying as much as i can to avoid smoke - is about as much as can be done for ms.

but, like....am i bleeding? wtf.

proving you have ms is hard.

and, the unfortunate reality is that it doesn't help much, because there's no treatment options.

while jumping to conclusions on this is unjustified, i'm leaning back towards that old concern about ms, again. 

i'm going to wait before i freak out.

but, my initial reaction to understanding what this means is that it's just another piece of evidence towards ms.

i also have high eosonophils, for some reason.

i don't actually know what that means, but i'm going to need to find out.

so, i got some eggs this morning and crashed half way through eating them, took a nap, was up in the afternoon, spent a while cleaning myself and made it to the blood lab at the nick of time, at just before 18:00. i'll do a write-up soon, but my blood test results came in very fast.

my estrogen levels seem to be ok. my cholesterol is absurdly low, as always. my glucose is in normal reference ranges, but i remain concerned that it keeps coming in at over 5 on fasting - it's at the high end of reference ranges, which is a little out of balance given that everything else is low. 

but, i'm apparently dangerously anemic - or that's what it looks like on first glance. but, while a number of 12 ug/ml may be dangerous for men, it's not that unusual, if definitely on the low end, for women. my rbc counts are pegged as low....for men. they're not that off, for women.

so, i'll need to have a talk at my appointment on friday, but i'm not sure what the right reaction is. how should i be measuring this, given that i've been estrogen dominant for my entire adult life?

i clearly get a large amount of iron in my diet - if it's too low, i'm just not absorbing it, which means what? internal bleeding? what?

while i get frequently annoyed by people smoking, i don't otherwise think i have the symptoms of anemia. but, both my father and his mother were always very concerned that i might develop some level of anemia, like they were concerned about something genetic. if it was ever explained to me, i've forgotten.

i'm surprised by this - my b12 levels are extremely high. i'm absorbing that. if i'm not absorbing iron, it's not anything i'm doing wrong, it's something broken in my instruction set. and, i guess we'll have to have a talk about this.

that said, these results can be finnicky as well, and i'm going to request a second test to confirm it before i react.

i'm probably going to need to finish the diet saga up to what exists  - or at least produce a rough first draft of it - in order to finish the fruit bowl.

for now, i'm just going to post an update on what is actually in the pasta bowl, if you want to give it a try:

- 55 g of fortified al dente durum wheat pasta

- 1 beet (~120 g)

- 1 garlic clove ~(5 g)

- 1 lime, including the peel (~ 67 g)

- 1 red pepper (~150 g)

- 1 italian tomato (~100 g)

- 50 g of broccoli 

- 110 g of carrots

- several dashes of frank's red hot

- several dashes of ground black pepper

- 5 tsp of pasta water

- 1 tbsp hulled hemp seeds

- 1 tbsp rubbed oregano

- 1 tbsp paprika

- 1 large tsp of sunflower seeds

- 1 large tsp of nutritional yeast

- 1 medium tsp cayenne

- 1 small tsp mustard

- 200 ml of fortified vanilla soy milk

- 3 tbsp of fortified pro-biotic yogurt

- 70 g of cheddar cheese

again, i didn't find myself learning much from the aztec episode, but it was enjoyable and engaging to watch.

where did these people come from? we should be able to trace the archaeology, but it largely appears out of nowhere. the sources we have are beyond terrible, to the point that they come off more as myths designed to uphold the conquest than anything else. if ever there was a place where archaeology was important, it's central america. but, it really does just pop up - like it came from somewhere else.

and, a commonality in the civilizations of these regions is that they tend to disappear, too - something that is true as far north as st. louis. there are good theories about cities being built and abandoned to the rains, to the tornadoes, to hurricanes, to earthquakes, to fires - this continent is horribly unstable. so, if people tend to disappear then it provides some guidance as to why they tend to mysteriously appear, as well. but, this idea of parallel or convergent evolution has truly never sat very well with me.

it's for that reason that it would be nice to have some histories, but even the story of what happened to the history seems whitewashed, itself. we see this in the norse sagas, too - these christianized histories that are really designed to co-opt the culture and put the church at the centre of it. the video points this out, but it doesn't put the emphasis on it that it really needs to have on it. so, the story is that these people used to have histories until a few years ago, when they burnt it themselves, because the rulers didn't want the history leading the people astray. i see. "it's not my fault, it was like that when i got here.". 

what remains is essentially a story.

and, that story is probably almost entirely mythical.

archaeology in this region is difficult because the jungle reclaims everything very quickly. but, it's the correct approach, as difficult as it is. while the video is actually unusually interdisciplinary, and i actually respect that, it's a mythology more than it is a history - and a real history would be focused more on what the archaeology tells us and doesn't.

but, i mean, the details are lost, whoever or whatever is responsible for it. if you want a story, this is the best one we've got.

....until we invent time travel.

it is what it is, and it can be; it's not what it isn't and it cannot be.