Nom de Plume

A few years ago, Steve’s mother Pam pulled out this book that Steve wrote when he was in the second grade. It cracked me up, and she gave it to us. I’ve been meaning to post it to the blog for eons. I was looking for stamps the other day and found it. It’s really very sweet, though still very funny. (“I like your baby anyone”??) Also, it’s clear that Steve used up his lifetime store of compliments very early on. Apparently, he had a crush on his teacher. And finally, he won an award for it. So with no further ado …

Mr. Nom de Plume started his new job this week. Much to his dismay–and much to my amusement–they gave him a BlackBerry. This evening, he came home with his new laptop too. “I need to hook my Outlook into my BlackBerry,” he explained.

“You need to sync it?”

“Yeah, I’ve tried everything, but it doesn’t work. So I figured you could help me.”

“Do you have a cable?”

Silence.

“Oh. Maybe that’s the problem.”

“Does it have bluetooth?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it does. But I have blue teeth too so I don’t really know what that means.”

Actually, to be honest, I can’t figure this thing out either because I don’t know if it syns locally or through the server. So I told him the same thing any self-respecting tech support person would. “Take it back to IT.”

Well, I assume you’re a Mr. because I assume that most people who search for porn online are men. But I could be wrong. In which case, please accept my sincerest apologies for making assumptions about your gender. And I’m assuming that it’s not your gender that’s in question here. I mean, it’s not like you were googling “transsexual porn” or “shemale” or “girls with penises” or any of those other things that I’m seriously going to regret putting into a blog post because the search engines are going to go crazy now.

No, what apparently interests you is “vitiligo porn.”

This is, of course, yet another post about vitiligo. I’ve been getting lots and lots of hits on the blog, so thought I’d share the latest updates. Warning: this is a very long post.

So the progress:
1) My face has completely repigmented. There are a couple little section that are still paler, but it looks like normal, uneneven skin tone rather than anything else. I’m still using Protopic on my face, though I’m down to once a day, rather than twice.

2) My wrists and inner forearms seem to be getting better, though this could be because I’m losing my tan. I noticed a few weeks ago that the fleshy pad at the base of the hand (what is that thing called, anyway) is losing its color right at that section where you go from the palm color to your regular color. Sorry, that was very awkwardly stated, but I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s worse on my left hand than on my right, but the right is starting to go a little too.

3) I’m getting a little bit more on my fingers, right around the nail. On my hands, this started around my thumbs, and now is on my fore and middle fingers as well. It’s not major; you can barely see it, so it doesn’t really bother me that much. I have a couple of small spots on the back of my hands too–and every time I see another one, I freak–but at this stage, they’re the size of a pin head. I have the same thing around some toes. It’s not super noticeable unless you look. I haven’t been using Protopic either on my fingers or toes.

4) My shins aren’t getting any better. I think they’re getting worse. Not quickly, but they are.

5) My underarms, well, I think there’s something going on there. It’s always been worse on my left side; my right side was trying to play catch up for a while, but it’s almost completely gone on the right. On the left, the spots are still there, but it seems to me that they’re not quite as white.

6) Ahem, there. Now this is really interesting, because while the spots are definitely there, they are smaller. A couple of months ago, it seemed to be spreading like wildfire, with large swaths obviously in the process of depigmenting. Now, there are two or three spots. They are smaller than they were before, and the depigmenting spots have stopped depigmenting. So what’s the interesting part, you ask? Simply this: I have not done a darn thing for those spots: No Protopic ever.

7) There are also a couple of other areas that I haven’t been Protopic-ing: One small round area on my shoulder; a dime-sized area smack in the middle of my chest, another dime-sized bit high up on my ribs; and a little section at the base of the spine. Interestingly, the rib one is getting progressively smaller. Actually, I just looked, and it’s now the size of a pencil eraser.

Ultimately, I think Protopic is really working–it started working on my face almost immediately once I started getting some sun. But obviously there’s some other stuff going on too. I think the supplements are helping–a lot. And I wonder about some other stuff, which are all listed below. I know that my posting some of these things will probably make you doubt my credibility. Not that I should be relied on as being credible in any case, because I’m just one person and so this is all anecdotal. But for a lot of this, I figure, what’s the harm in trying it. So here they are, in no order of importance:

1) I’ve abandoned commercial deodorant in favor of either this or of my own mixture of cornstarch, baking soda, and arrowroot powder (with some rose absolute thrown in to make it smell good). Both work surprisingly well.

2) I’ve replaced lotion with a straight coconut oil and CoEnzyme q10 mix. If you google coconut oil, you’ll get all sorts of stuff about how great it is for you. I take a lot of this with a grain of salt, but I will say that my skin looks better than it has for years. The q10 is for the oxidative stress theory, and I think that’s working too.

3) Regular kefir drinking. Kefir is supposed to be incredibly wonderful for you; among other things it is claimed to be an immunomodulator. Who knows if all this is true, but it’s like drinking yogurt, and can’t hurt.

4) I’m really trying to eliminate processed foods as much as possible. We’ve never been big fast food eaters, but we often rely on Trader Joe’s frozen stuff. I’m trying to cook more, using whole ingredients, limiting white flour, etc. I’m also going the organic, no hormone food route.

5) I’m also cooking with coconut oil these days instead of olive. This is kind of an experiment here. As I said before, it you google coconut oil, you’ll get all these pages about why it’s good for you, how people never had heart disease when they used it, and blah blah blah. There are even people who take coconut oil by the tablespoon plain, which is, in my book anyway, just another reason to take it all with a grain of salt. However, there were a few things I found really interesting. First, unsaturated oils oxidize at high cooking temperatures, creating free radicals, which then contribute to oxidative stress. Second, coconut oil is high in Omega 6 fatty acids, which my naturopath has me on fish oil for anyway. And third, coconut oil appears to have antimicrobial effects, and is claimed to have antiviral effects too (though I was unable to find objective research–i.e., not on a coconut oil site–to back it up). Including cytomegalovirus. Stay with me here. A while ago, I found (and promtly forgot to bookmark) a very obscure research paper that said that all subjects were treated for cytomegalovirus and had their vitiligo disappear. There MAY be a causative link between cytomegalovirus (search cytomegalovirus and vitiligo at pubmed.com). So I figure it can’t hurt.

6) I’ve discovered how much I like juice fasting. But I really wish that there were some true studies about whether it’s a healthy thing to do. If you search juice fasting online, you get all sorts of weirdos, fanatics, pseudo doctors, and people who just plain want to believe that it does something and thus get a placebo effect. If you believe all you read, juice fasting will cure everything and solve that nagging question of world peace to boot. I don’t know. But at the risk of devolving into the worst of alternative quackery, I have to add this. I like the way juice fasting makes me feel.

It hasn’t done a darn thing for the vitiligo as far as I can tell, and I don’t know whether the “detoxifying” stuff is valid, whether the “retracing” thing is for real, or the “healing crisis” bit is true or any of the rest of it. However, I can tell you how I feel about it and you can make up your own mind. I do feel “detoxified” after I’ve done it. Of course, one goes for days without eating solid food, so that can be part of it. The first time I did it (6 days), I felt like crap for three days, slept 15 hours a day, and emerged feeling really great. The second time (3 days) and third time (5 days), I slept normally and felt fine. In all cases, I ended the fast when I got to the point where I felt like I needed to eat real food again, and felt energized at the end. This is, I know, purely subjective and can be contributed to eating again as well as to a host of other things. But I confess: I like it.

This last fast, I was very, very itchy, got a whole bunch of rashes, hivey looking things, and pimples that all appeared and disappeared within the space of less than six hours. I can’t explain this because the rashy stuff wasn’t going on before. I should, however, add that ever since I started using Protopic, I’ve been itchy all over–and not just in the places that I apply the medication. Of course, being me, I worry that I have chronic urticaria now, psoriasis, AND eczema concurrently, and also that by this time next year, I will be completely vitiligoed (apparently, vitiligo can make some people itch). But I think it’s the Protopic because I didn’t use it at all for the week we were in Oregon and I stopped itching altogether. (If there is anyone else who has experienced this, I would love to hear from you.)

I was feeling rather vindicated when I googled “underrated novels” and ended up on this article that cited both Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai and Calvin Baker’s Dominion right off the bat. And while I ended up getting a whole bunch of other books that I haven’t read off that list, I have one to add: Christopher Wilson’s The Ballad of Lee Cotton.

I picked this up in Powell’s having run out of everything else on our camping trip. It looked interesting. Hoo boy. You don’t know the half of it. I was riveted until three in the morning, huddled in my sleeping bag with the Petzl on my head. Why, oh WHY isn’t this better known? Why aren’t all the reviewers singing its praise? Seriously this is up there with The Last Samurai and Transmission and all those other wonderful, unforgettable novels that make whatever is on the New York Times Reviling of Books pale in comparison.

So. Lee Cotton is born to a black mother and an Icelandic father. He looks white. I mean, really white. Which is a problem in the South, pre-Civil Rights. But that’s not all of it because he can hear what people are thinking without them saying a word. He hears voices, a gift he gets from his obeah grandmother who lives in New Orleans. But he manages to get by–until he starts rolling around in the hay with a white girl whose father just happens to be the most rabid Klan member around. Who finds him out. Who beats him up and throws what he thinks is a dead body into a railroad car, which takes him to a hospital in a large city.
Where of course he passes as white, and thus starts a new chapter in his life. And this is just the beginning of Lee Cotton’s story, and of his many transformations into Lee McCoy (as in “the real McCoy”).

Part Zelig, part John Irving at his most wonderfully weird, and really, probably the best novel I’ve read this year, this is a rollicking story that is seriously clever. I loved it.

There are some books that become inextricably linked with a time or a place, and even looking at the spare cover (with the Today’s Book Club logo on it that almost dissuaded me from reading it entirely) makes me think of our Oregon trip and camping next to a peaceful lake in the pine trees. Ahh, those halcyon days. Wait a minute–oh, yes, that was the site where we had the generator on one side and three full generations of alcoholics on the other who only shut up after they lost and rediscovered their car keys twice and the camp host came over thrice.

But anyway.

The Schwartzes live in Bellwether, Connecticut, a place that is exactly as it sounds: staunchly middle class, white, relatively affluent. But underneath all this perfection, of course, lurks something else (insert Jaws music). Bernard, the father is ineffectual and clinically depressed–if affable–after his wife leaves him and moves to California. Chris and Cathy, the two children, muddle along until Bernard combines pills and ends up in a coma. No one knows how to deal with it. And so they don’t–even when Bernard awakens with the mind and motor skills of a child.

This was an odd novel. I liked it. It certainly wasn’t one of those blend-into-the-rest-of-them sorts of books. I could say that it represents the breakup of the American nuclear family, or turns the Holden Caulfiend coming-of-age on its head, or even that it’s about the never-ending ability of Americans to remake themselves. And while none of these are false, what really makes this book is the fact that Sharpe manages to convey all the heartbreak of the Schwartz family without ever losing his sense of humor or irony.

As the queen of procrastination, I naturally picked up this jaunty orange-colored book thinking it would be a witty romp through the hours of the day. And it’s certainly a romp through the hours, but, well, there’s no way to say this nicely, so I’ll just say it: It’s just not that witty. Or funny. Or even that interesting, to be brutally honest. Sure, Hodgkinson makes some interesting points and observations (among them some admittedly pithy observations about daytime vampires), and backs everything up with quotes from other, more famous loafers. But ultimately, I abandoned this. After all, if I need lessons in idleness (which let’s face it, I don’t), I have a much better role model.

Well hello …

Or perhaps, because they’re edible, vittle-igo.

Okay, okay, that was beyond bad.

Anyway, the dry leaf whatsit has taken over a lot of the pumpkin leaves, so I did some ruthless hacking this afternoon. And obviously, some of the tomato leaves have been starved for sun. It’s actually quite pretty:

And look! I have not one, but TWO pumpkins:

I just finished rereading all the little house on the prairie books, and next year, I think I’m going to try one of those milk-fed pumpkins that Almonzo grows in Farmer Boy. Which, in case you’re wondering, is most decidedly NOT a good book to read while you’re juice fasting, with its long descriptions of wholesome, fattening farmhouse fare.

“I’m bored,” Steve said.

“Let’s go over to Geoff’s,” I suggested. “He rebuilt his wall and wants you to see. Plus, I’m curious how our cheese is doing.” Geoff and I made kefir cheese yesterday.

So across the alley we trompled. Steve admired the wall; I admired the cheese. Not that there was much to admire; it’s resting in a bamboo steamer with a glass and 25 pounds of free weights on top of it. But anyway, Geoff was talking about how he was going to pressure wash something and Steve bemoaned how dirty the river rock wall is. I reminded him he was bored … and long story short, he’s been on a tear for the past three hours. He just called me outside, saying that he had a present for me:

It warmed the cockles of my heart, and I told him so. To which he replied, “That’s pathetic.”

Well, we take what affection we get …