Time to read: 11 minutes
In this week’s newsletter:
The Timbit Times
Kate Film Club, 22 of 52: “Undercurrent”
Kate Film Club, 23 of 52: “The Sea of Grass”
French Study
We Can Have Nice Things
I’ve got one full and one in-progress experiment to report on this week! I’m now up to a full dose of a probiotic called Zen Biome Dual, which has been doing unexpected, interesting things for my circadian rhythm. When I first started at 1/2 cap, I was waking up around 6:30a consistently, feeling unusually rather awake—not just for 6:30a but for mornings in general. That’s earlier than would work for me to get up right now, when accounting for my typical bedtime and amount of sleep I need (9 hours every night), so I would mostly go back to sleep after that. But I’ve been wanting to pull my sleep schedule earlier, so I figured at some point I would actually get up super early, have a crap couple of days, then start falling asleep at an earlier point in the night.
And that’s somewhat happened, but by the time I worked up to a full dose of 2 caps daily, I wasn’t waking up at 6:30a anymore. Instead I’m waking up at a respectable 8:30a (ish) and being ready to get out of bed sooner than I might usually. Previously, it could take me a full couple hours before feeling like it was physically safe to ask my body to get out of bed (in a cardiovascular sense), but I’ve had a few days recently where I’m getting out of bed around 45 minutes after waking, which is phenomenal for me. My best guess is this improved morning wakefulness is due to the impact Zen Biome Dual appears to have on cortisol levels. (If you’re interested in reading further, there’s more on that via the research papers on the product website.)
If you’re new to ME/CFS things, here’s a quick primer on cortisol. In a healthy human, cortisol follows a 24 hour cycle where it’s highest in the morning—helping to kick your bodily functions into gear for the day ahead—and then slowly decreases throughout the day to allow you to peacefully get ready for sleep. In many people with ME/CFS, waking cortisol is lower than it should be. Some folks even have higher evening cortisol than morning cortisol, causing problems at both ends of the day. One of the few victories in my illness journey thus far is we’ve gotten my cortisol back into the normal range for the whole 24 hour cycle, even though it’s still rather low-side normal in the mornings. My hypothesis is that perhaps this probiotic is improving my morning cortisol further, although I haven’t retested it yet. I didn’t expect this to happen; I mostly chose this probiotic because I wanted an MCAS-friendly bifido strain (this product has two), and the research results showing that it tends to lower stress and improve sleep sounded nice.
Anyway, as always, it’s been an adventure.
The other, in-progress experiment that I’ll mention briefly is that I’m trying out those fancy compression boots. I got the Normatec 3 by Hyperice. So far I really like them, but I think my spine does not–I suspect that I aggravated my low-level CSF leak that has actually been behaving great ever since I moved out of a moldy townhouse last year. It took me a few days to get back to baseline after pausing using with the boots. Since the Normatec 3 allows you to choose specific zones to work, I may try them again on just my feet and calves instead of my whole legs. I’ll report back on that soon!
This week and next I’ll be playing catch-up on Katharine Hepburn movie reviews, so I’ve got another two for you this week! Also, funny cat (not mine) news, a boba tea protein powder recommendation (?!), and the oldest book I will have ever yet read.
The Timbit Times
My friends’ cat has decided to add the arm of the outdoor couch to her backyard perch rotation. She just sits there and stares at me, sometimes for an unsettling amount of time, but I’m choosing to believe she is so impressed with my resting ability that she’s taking notes. Not many humans lie down as much as I do; I wonder if she thinks I’m just a very big cat.
Kate Film Club, 22 of 52:
“Undercurrent” (1946)
It feels a little silly to admit it, but: this the first film noir movie that I’ve ever watched! Or at least, Wikipedia tells me it’s in the film noir genre. In my head I understood film noir to be more typically following around a detective, but here we have a lady (Katharine Hepburn) who’s married a guy who increasingly seems like bad news, so she inquires around to try to figure out what his whole deal is. There’s some mystery surrounding his brother, and not too far into the movie we’re given reason to suspect that the husband possibly murdered said brother. Uh oh girl, you’re in danger.
There’s a heavy psychological thriller element to “Undercurrent”, and I’d be very interested to compare it to the famous film “Gaslight”, which came out just three years prior. The cinematography and music create an atmosphere that rightfully (I think) classifies this movie as a film noir. At no point does this movie give you reason to think everything is going to turn out ok; you’re just sort of rooting for the least bad among not-great possibilities. And yet—part of what I found so engaging about this film was it was still very good at making me second-guess myself, right up until the end. We know the husband is a bad guy—the foreshadowing is laid on pretty think, even the possibly neutral things he says have a menacing aspect to them—and yet I kept hoping, somehow, it was all just a terrible joke and everything would turn out fine.
I’m not going to spoil the ending, because besides that being my usual practice anyway, the publicity poster adorably requests: “Please don’t tell the terrific ending!”
Rating: 3/5 – But I’d more highly recommend watching this one than my middle-of-the-road rating implies. It’s an interesting film, a whole mood.
Where to watch: Streaming on Apple and Amazon.
Quote: “I-I like my tea very strong.”
Kate Film Club, 23 of 52:
“The Sea of Grass” (1946)
It’s a week of firsts this week, as “The Sea of Grass” is my first western movie! I’m sure I must have watched some westerns when I was a kid and perhaps just don’t remember any? But as an adult anyway, I’ve never had any interest in them since to me, the whole genre requires a convenient memory-holing of the genocide of Native Americans as the price of admission. This movie gave me a lot of time to ponder what’s possibly appealing to so many people about westerns, and I think I have a better understanding of that now, but the whole thing still feels like such a sham to me.
I digress. Let me tell you what this movie’s about before I (rightfully, I’d argue) diss the whole genre.
“The Sea of Grass” opens on a bride (Katharine Hepburn) getting ready for a fancy wedding in St. Louis. She’s marrying a guy (Spencer Tracy) who’s one of the biggest cattle ranchers in the then-territory of New Mexico. (The story takes place in 1880.) But he gets held up and can’t come to the wedding as planned, so he sends her a telegram to meet him in New Mexico and they’ll get married there. She arrives early, and finds that her husband-to-be is on trial. He’s acquitted, but the tension between the ranchers and those that would like to settle and farm the land is firmly established. And that’s, in a way, the central tension of this movie: humans having different ideas about who should be in charge of the land and what’s best for the land itself, as a separate and whole entity with unalienable rights.
But again this takes me back to: why do people like westerns? This movie is centered on a bunch of white people arguing over what the land needs, with no one thinking to ask the Native people who’d already been living on it for millennia for their advice. Or, you know, just leave the Native people their land in the first place! It seems to me that westerns are superficial sandboxes for white people to play in and make believe and fancy themselves as tough, self-reliant, and “free”—but the minute you look behind the curtain, you can see that supposed freedom was violently stolen from another people.
So anyway, I still don’t like westerns.
At different points in “The Sea of Grass”, the focus varies among Hepburn’s character, Tracy’s character, and even a notable supporting character for a bit. I found that interesting structurally, and to me it was fitting for the scope of a story that spans literal decades—such a story should feel bigger than any one character. I think if I were a professional movie critic, I might try to add flourish to my review by arguing that the main character of the film was the high desert of New Mexico, the land itself. And there’s probably something to that argument, but more concretely: I think this is a movie about how humans grapple with circumstances and themes that are beyond our silly little mortal control, how giving ourselves the illusion of control is a short-term drug with long-term consequences, and how love can sometimes find its way back.
Rating: 2/5 – I might’ve given this a 3/5 if it weren’t for the western setting.
Where to watch: Streaming on Apple and Amazon.
Quote: “Why do women insist on loving men for what they want them to be instead of what they are?”
French Study
July’s book (“La princesse de Clèves“) for the club des lecteurs at the Alliance Française Boston was published in 1678! I’m sure I’ve read snippets of things older than that in school (“The Canterbury Tales” comes to mind, Arthurian legends, portions of the Illiad, even) but this will be the oldest full book I’ve read I think. Supposedly this work is viewed as a significant influence in the modern development of the novel (across all languages generally), particularly what’s known as “psychological fiction”. Anyway, I haven’t attended the members-only monthly book club before, but I think my reading comprehension is getting to the point where I could finish it in time. I’m currently awaiting my copy in the mail!
Another reason I want to read “La princesse de Clèves” is because I could use a break from the behemoth Lupin novel I’m in the middle of right now (“La comtesse de Cagliostro”). This novel is not as fun as the first collection of stories that I read, but I’m determined to read it anyway since it’s the prequel to the novel that’s referenced at the end of the most recent season of the Netflix show “Lupin” (that novel being “La Cagliostro se venge”). I’m curious if there are any clues in there as to what to expect next season! Or even just to better understand what happened in this most recent season.
Anyway, back to “La princesse de Clèves”. I’ve read that 1600s French is easier for modern French speakers to understand than 1600s English is for English speakers. We shall see!
We Can Have Nice Things
I’ve been on the lookout for a protein powder that I can tolerate other than hemp, both to balance out the specific amino acids I’m getting, but also because a person needs variety. (Also, hemp powder has an overpowering flavor that doesn’t always make me excited to use it in certain contexts.) Independently, one day I was trying to find taro powder online, when I happened upon…this magical unicorn of a protein powder.
It truly tastes like a not-too-sweet taro boba tea. I mix it with half almond milk, half water. My mind is blown; this is the most fun I’ve had with food in a very long time. I’ve already signed up for a monthly subscription; I’m drinking it every day. If you’re also interested in trying it, here’s the link. (Sadly that’s not any sort of referral link, just a regular link!) They even sell boba on their site that you can cook at home if you really want to go all in on the boba tea experience. And if you can tolerate caffeine, they’ve got other flavors too that look amazing.
Anyway, help me support this business so they never go away, ok? This protein powder is now both nutritionally and emotionally load-bearing for me, ha.
Kate Violette 