I fall asleep on my back, usually. I roll around a lot, though. Never flat on my stomach, but a lot of 45° tipped almost facedown position.
2: I think you have to decide on one position, or else we can't decide what pillow would be best for you.
those memory foam pillows are REALLY firm, and heavy, and inflexible. (and expensive)
Aren't they generally under $50? It's expensive for a pillow, but not objectively expensive to cure a stiff neck.
4: Also if you get drunk and wind up having a one-night stand that you'd rather forget, the last thing you want is a pillow that remembers.
But the firmness and inflexibility - that's what I'm worried about. That if you don't have the full weight of your body, it torques you up at a weird angle. That your head isn't heavy enough for the foam to work its magic.
I have a memory foam pillow. Not one of the super heavy ones. You can test drive it if you want.
Next generation pillows will be made of programmable smart materials. The only drawback will be the need to keep up with the software updates so they don't get buggy and try to smother you in your sleep.
I've thrown my neck out twice in two different ways, and just spent 2 weeks in a neck brace, so neck pain is something I know about. I bought a memory foam/gel pillow at Costco for $20-25, and it was a life changer. It is firm but not inflexible, and it feels solid but not overly heavy. When you first put your head on it, there's a millisecond of resistance before it molds to the shape of your head while also supporting your neck.
Goddamn it, man, that's an *actual* food item. Would you please?!
I also have a buckwheat (hull) pillow, but rarely use it.
Urple, I beg of you do not dream of eating pancakes.
I was thinking of a joke along the lines of 15, but I couldn't decide between soba and blinis.
You really want your pillow to have a leavening agent.
I managed to get rid of persistent neck pain just by upgrading from a cheapish foam (non-memory) pillow to a fatter goose down one. But I suspect these situations are very context-specific.
Oh hey I am having leg pain. I can't decide if I long term injured myself trying to start jogging or I'm just past warranty and falling apart. The desk job certainly doesn't help I guess. Why do I so often do things like using "certainly" and "I guess" in the same sentence?
Feet pain, I should really say. The doctor was like "yeah whatever, sounds like plantar fasciitis which is made up and you can't do anything about it."
plantar fasciitis seems pretty real to me. it knocked me out of running for 18 months.
but, i got rid of it by not doing anything about it. after a year of trying everything i could think of, i gave up. and it was only then, after i stopped paying attention to my feet and my stride and stretching and massaging and my shoes and compression socks and magic slippers and all the rest, that the pain finally went away. literally, i ignored it away. this is clearly not sound medical advice.
it's been a year since i started running again. the irritation and pain has tried creeping back a couple of times, but just keeping calm about it, accepting that it might get sore now and then but that it will go away has worked.
beats me.
For me its shin splints. I might actually go running from time to time if it didn't put my legs in agony.
23: That is the method my brother and sister used to beat back pain. They learned about it from John Sarno. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Sarno
For me it's my hips and back! I still jog sometimes anyway, but I hobble around the next day, and in a creaky way, not a good-sore way.
Interspersing squats throughout the run helps a lot, if you want to know.
23
I also had plantar fasciitis, and my story is nearly the same. In fact, I think ignoring it and stopping activity is the recommended treatment (largely ignored by type A runners). Only difference is that once it went away, it never came back.
Also, I've just switched to a faster cadence and it seems to be doing wonders for knee and lower back pain. It's weird because it feels like I'm taking these teeny tiny mincing steps, but I can't argue with the results.
I'm with Buttercup in 11: There's one with a cutout for one's shoulder to fit into that doesn't torque one's neck. Not expensive.
My experience with plantar fasciitis was:
1) Extremely painful for several months.
2) Got orthotics which improved things significantly.
3) Learned some techniques for stretching/icing which allowed me to manage it fairly well, but it still re-occurred occasionally.
4) Worked on posture/lower back strength and the plantar fasciitis went away almost entirely.
So I'd recommend paying attention to back issues/ergonomics as a potential solution.
That's not what people mean when they talk about "back pain"
but, i got rid of it by not doing anything about it. after a year of trying everything i could think of, i gave up. and it was only then, after i stopped paying attention to my feet and my stride and stretching and massaging and my shoes and compression socks and magic slippers and all the rest, that the pain finally went away. literally, i ignored it away.
This is not making me feel less like it's made up. (I'm mostly kidding.)
I'm trying to build up to hiking 20 miles in a day.
The greatest pain is the burden of sin, you wretches!
Sorry. Visiting New England excites my Cotton Mather glands.
The least impactful stride is reached in the high frequency, short length limit.
Why not hike 10 miles and then drink whiskey? Quality of life is what matters here.
I walk that much and drink beer now.
(It's Friday, so I skied 2.5+ hours today and then had a couple shots of Jameson. Couple glasses of Italian red with a early dinner, so I'll be plaguing you all with unhinged rants the rest of the evening.)
I'm going to a working dinner anyway.
Imagine floating along, your legs vibrating beneath you almost imperceptibly blurred. This is what you should strive for.
Speaking of unhinged rants, if we treat the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment as if it had been originally in the Constitution -- which needed to be amended because Scott v, Sandford revealed a critical ambiguity with respect to constitutional citizenship -- don't we end up dividing all citizenship into two parts: (1) born in the US and (2) naturalized? And don't we understand article II section 1 to refer to (1) and not to (2)? And aren't all statutes conferring citizenship, whether enacted before or after the adoption of the Constitution, instances of (2)?
A subsidiary rant: why are some many law professors so intent on treating statutes passed by Parliament in the 1700s as if they are part of the common law when there is in fact a complicated difference of legal fact between various states' positions with respect to whether any British statutes, or some passed after certain dates, are in fact the common law?
See p 207 et seq to head down this rabbit hole: http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8385&context=penn_law_review
why are some many law professors so intent on treating statutes passed by Parliament in the 1700s as if they are part of the common law when there is in fact a complicated difference of legal fact between various states' positions with respect to whether any British statutes, or some passed after certain dates, are in fact the common law
RIGHT ON. Of course it's because law professors (and lawyers) are with exceptions basically ignorant of history and grope around in 18th century texts hunting for words that kinda sorta seem to support preexisting positions. Also it's because they don't know what the "common law" actually is.
I wrote THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCIITIS on cushioned insoles and willed it away.
(except I have low level pain still if I walk for long periods)
44 and 45: How do English lawyers and scholars use the term? I assume (perhaps wrongly) that there's nothing magical for them about the 18th century .. and that the common law would be the body of law developed by judges and not enacted by Parliament. But I'm really ignorant on the topic.
Any good book recommendations?
In England the question wouldn't make any sense. New statutes are in effect when enacted. The question is when new statutes stop having effect in former colonies. The fourth year of the reign of James I? July 4, 1776? Statutes never are in effect? For folks that didn't click through, different states have chosen different answers.
The Nationality Act of 1790 doesn't say that white people who are not children of ambassadors born in the US are citizens of the US because it doesn't have to. Everyone knows they are. It does say that children born abroad of American fathers shall be treated as citizens, because in the absence of a statute they [likely?] wouldn't be.
46.1: Get a grant to see if that can generalize.
48: My question wasn't about when a statute would be recognized but how the term "common law" is defined in the UK. In the US it seems to mean a body of law (mainly or even exclusively judge-created case law) which existed in the 18th century in England and America. But, obviously, English people don't have a line which they draw through the law before and after 1789.
34 is works as advice for most ills
47, 51: You basically had it right with your first suggestion, as I understand it (IANAL but I cover English commercial court cases all the time). And, no, there's nothing special at all about the 18th century as far as English common law goes. New common law is being created all the time (eg around privacy recently).
As for books, I'm no legal academic, but this seems like a good place to start.
I thought Common Law was everything made up by Edward Coke in the early seventeenth century to keep alien carpetbagging Scottish kings from doing shit?
re: aches and pains.
I've been worrying a bit about my hands recently. I've been working quite a bit harder on my guitar playing recently and have been noticing left-hand problems more than usual.This isn't over-use or pain from practicing. I know what that feels like. I mean that playing more is making me more aware of deterioration of the condition of my hands. I can still play fine, but there's certain things I can't do without pain, or discomfort that I could have done in the past.
I've had chronic ulnar nerve problems in the left hand for years, but it seems worse than before. And my hands are much less flexible and more 'arthritic' [for want of a better word] than I'd like.
I can't cross my fingers, for example.
It be nice if there was something that would actually work, but I can't take anti-inflammatories, as they fuck up my stomach. Fish oil, and things, I suppose, and lots of gentle stretching and hand warmups.
Common law is basically case law. It's still being made in English courts, and, I assume, in American ones, though they may call it something different.
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Is it me, or is it weird ironic that Alanis Morissette has taken a gig as an agony aunt at the Groan?
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"Common law" has about 10 separate meanings which are generally never untangled, at least among American lawyers (everything from "any judge made law" to "the Anglo-American legal system" to "hazily remembered mishmash of legal principles from law school that must have come down from England or somewhere in the olden times") but the narrowest, and therefore correct, meaning is law that (a) was made in courts of law, not equity, admiralty, eccelesiastical courts, or otherwise, (b) was made by judges, not by statute, however enacted and (c) formed part of the underlying "common law" as elucidated by people like Coke which (Coke, but not everyone else) argued also constrained the monarch and even Parliament.
The idea that the "common law" should include 18th century English statutes would have seemed obviously wrong to lawyers in the 18th century American colonies, since a lot of them invoked Coke to claim that the Stamp Act was invalid under the common law.
In Patterson v. Winn, 30 US 233 (1831), Story for the majority says that the common law includes pre-colonization (I think he means 1607) statutes, and Johnson dissenting says no it doesn't.
Is it me, or is it weird ironic that Alanis Morissette has taken a gig as an agony aunt at the Groan?
I vaguely recall Liz Phair doing a similar gig at Salon way back in the early 00's. Maybe it's the official alternate career for female 90s pop stars.
She's taken over from Molly Ringwald. C list celeb agony aunt has been a Grauniad thing for a while.
57.5: very large daily slug of turmeric? A couple tablespoons of powdered turmeric, maybe fried with black pepper? Helps my sweetie, and is enough of an antiinflammatory that he had to stop eating it after a recent surgery.
57: You don't have any swelling of the joints in your fingers, swelling that is like a visible enlargement of the joint?
Re: 65
No, and clearly there's no major dysfunction as I can play guitar and type quickly. But there is discomfort, and a decrease in mobility/flexibility.
That's good. You're really young for actual hand arthritis.
57. Incipient RSI? I wouldn't have thought playing guitar would do it, as it's a varied action, but I know several people who have brought it on by changing gear on long regular journies (really!), and dealt with it by buying an automatic, so you might look at that possibility.
So, yesterday I finished my trip to the desert of healthy old people. The rocks there were easier to walk on than the rocks here. Less slippy. Also, I had four flights this trip and never had anybody in the seat next to me on any of them. So much room.
For a second I thought those were alternative lyrics to "Horse with no name".
I had four flights this trip
That's a lot of liquor if we're talking all in one sitting.
He doesn't spend all that time in bars for nothing.
I saw a bumper sticker today: "whiskey is my spirit animal"
57: Turmeric, for sure, and ginger (I think) act as antinflammatories. You can usually buy curcumin capsules at the health food store. Much gentler on the stomach.
33.
i think it's real. but i also think that what PF thrives on (in me, anyway) is the unnatural motion and action caused by overthinking everything about how my feet want to naturally work. especially if it's injured already, rubbing and stretching and changing shoes and my stride and everything else about how i use my feet, just makes it worse. so for me, the best thing to do is to let my feet work the way they naturally want to work. stop thinking about how to fix the problem because the remedies just aggravate things.
also, i have no doubt that we can think our way into a certain degree of pain and inflammation. so once i start obsessing about PF, it will start and i'll start changing the way i walk or run, which will make it worse, etc..
taken a gig as an agony aunt
Every time I encounter a previously-unknown-to-me British idiom, which seems to be happen with increasing frequency, I fear that we are edging towards the day when communication between speakers of British and American English resembles Monty Python's RAF banter sketch.