shadowkat: (warrior emma)
[personal profile] shadowkat
1. Picked up Practical Paleo at Whole Foods. Has to be the most useful cookbook, nutritional guide that I've seen.

Having read and reviewed various nutritional guides and sites - the one constant is:

* avoid all glutens like the plague, and grains.
* avoid refined sugars
* avoid legumes if you have digestive issues

Everything else seems to be rather controversial. Does make breakfast tough though. But I've discovered my tummy can handle poached eggs in the morning.
And a combo of chia, buckwheat, and hemp seed sprouted in almond milk.

Trying to figure out how to heal my digestive track, so I can do stuff without discomfort or pain. Learned that I am doing more or less the right things, just have to tweak a few things. Exercise wise - yoga, stretching, and walks is best. Strenuous activity would stress my system and make things worse. 30-60 minutes of jogging or biking is not recommended. Meditative activities, calm or gentle yoga, and quiet walks outside is however recommended. Goal is reduce stress. And heal.


2. Dallas Buyers Club was a better movie than expected. Had read mixed reviews. It does wander a bit, and is jagged in places, lots of filler moments with the characters doing drugs or wandering aimlessly. But overall is a rather good if not great film. I actually liked The Sessions better - it was tighter and better written. Dallas however, had two powerhouse performances, which deservedly won awards. Mathew McConaughy as Ron Woodruff was excellent. Particularly if you watched the film How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days before it. He's almost unrecognizable. And the film is at the end of the day, a character sketch. It focuses on his character, who is a bit of an anti-hero. Jared Leto, plays Raymond/Rayna, which is another powerhouse performance worthy of multiple awards. Leto is unrecognizable in the part. Both are rail thin and look like they have AIDS.

This completes my McConaughy film fest. My favorite of the films was the Lincoln Lawyer. And the best written may have been True Detective. But this was his best performance.

He plays a heterosexual rodeo rider and electrician, who contracts HIV through unprotected sex with a woman, who was a needle user. Told that he has 30 days to live, he goes all out to find a way to survive. Going to Mexico and other countries to find cures. And puts together The Dallas Buyers Club - to distribute what he's found to others with the ailment, while making money off of it. People pay 400 dollar monthly membership and get all the medication.

The film is not complimentary of either the FDA nor the pharmaceutical companies, with their drug trials, and toxic meds. But it's not preachy or sanctimonious about it. And a lot of the things it says are sort of true. The irony is Woodruff, who is making a buck, is more honest and compassionate than the FDA, hospital administrators or the pharmaceutical companies portrayed in the film.
Jennifer Garner portrays the nice doc that Woodruff flirts with.

3. This is just ...words fail me:

Student Requests For Trigger Warnings For Literary Works


Should students about to read “The Great Gatsby” be forewarned about “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism — like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or “Things Fall Apart” — have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.


Suddenly, I'm highly relieved that I did not pursue a career in academia or as an English Lit Prof.

Date: 2014-05-23 04:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ponygirl2000.livejournal.com
Again though I think you're confusing the idea of trigger warnings with spoilers. Did you really start reading The Fault In Our Stars without hearing it was a tragic love story? Back in the day just calling something a tragedy or a comedy let the audience know from the start whether things were going end in death or marriage. And would you give Stars to a friend suffering from cancer without any cautions? It might be something they could really connect to but I can't imagine you not saying that it deals with illness and death. We prepare ourselves all the time with reviews and recommendations, book covers and movie ratings; we have expectations of what we're getting into but it doesn't mean we've been spoiled.

In an academic setting we aren't reading for pleasure, we aren't self-selecting beyond choosing the classes, it's important to know why certain works are being studied, who chose them and why - that's part of critical thinking, and that's a big part of what I mean when I talk about providing context.

When you say that someone who doesn't know about Huckleberry Finn or LoTR must be living under a rock, you're making a huge assumption about that person's background - that they say grew up in an English-speaking country with similar pop culture references to you. For a lot of university students that's not the case. And things that read one way to you may strike them as very different. Giving them some preparation and background, and even warning that the author's viewpoint may be very different from their own, can help them understand what they're studying and why.

Date: 2014-05-23 02:46 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] shadowkat67.livejournal.com
Well to be fair - the article combines trigger warnings and spoilers. And yes, I did actually read The Fault in Our Stars without knowing anything. [ETA: Just realized that I came to that book completely blind - it had just been published, I'd never heard of it. The friend who rec'd told me two things - it reminded her of Buffy and I should read it, now! I didn't know it was about cancer patients until I read the first few chapters.] The death did shock me.
I read it prior to the hype. ;-) And I'm glad I wasn't warned - the warnings from my perspective would have been spoilers. And yes, I've lost loved ones to cancer.

And in some cases, the item that they want to be "warned" about is in fact a "spoiler". Example? Seeing Red, BTVS S6. To this day, I wish I had not been "warned" about that episode prior to watching it.

So, I think we are both erring on the side of generalization and assumption here?
Edited Date: 2014-05-23 02:55 pm (UTC)

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