The northlondonhippy

Archive for November, 2008

I think they located some of this hippy ancestor’s in China.

Go on, clicky the linky good! You know you wanna!

(The northlon­don­hippy apol­o­gises for any per­ceived racist humour in the above post. You can’t be too care­ful these days.)

Since receiv­ing my diag­no­sis of Hashmimoto’s Dis­ease and writ­ing about it here, the word “Hashimoto” is appear­ing with greater and greater fre­quency, in var­i­ous forms in the list of search terms plugged into Google that get you to my site.

Don’t worry, “northlon­don­hippy” remains the num­ber one search term that finds me. I’m a proper online destination.

But very high up on the list, sits Dr. Hashimoto. Con­sid­er­ing the first time I ever heard of it was as it passed over my doctor’s lips pre­ceded by the words “you have…”, I’m some­what sur­prised at how com­mon it is.

It seems quite a few of you out there in inter­net­land have Hashimoto’s Dis­ease too, or at least you think you do.

Peo­ple search for symp­toms, search for cures, search for clues on how to live with this auto-immune disease.

I’m far from an expert, hav­ing only known of my own con­di­tion for sev­eral months, but I have been dis­cov­er­ing loads of peo­ple I know who have thy­roid problems.

Every­one wants to know what “your dose” is.

“What’s your dose?”, they all say to me, look­ing vis­i­bly dis­ap­pointed when I tell them I am cur­rently on a pal­try 50 micro­grams of levothy­rox­ine, com­pared to their 150–200 micro­gram dose.

Its true my dose is cur­rently low, but that is about to change, again. My GP is mon­i­tor­ing my thy­roid lev­els at reg­u­lar inter­vals and increas­ing my dose grad­u­ally. The key, he says, is to find the low­est ther­a­peu­tic dose, because too much can cause dif­fer­ent prob­lems. I’m due for another blood test next week and I would expect my dose to go up again as soon as I receive the results.

With me, I didn’t know I had a prob­lem for quite a while, I ignored or dis­missed all the symp­toms I now know I had. It wasn’t until my back seized up and my legs gave out that it dawned on me I might have a health problem.

Clever, eh? I had heart pal­pi­ta­tions, breath­less­ness, nau­sea, dizzi­ness, no appetite, no energy, aching joints and a slow heart beat and I just thought it was just the nor­mal age­ing process catch­ing up to me.

My doc­tor assures me that all of this is very treat­able and once my dosage is cor­rect, I will feel like my old self again. I’ve felt crappy for so long, I’m not sure what that really means.

So if you’re already diag­nosed, just be patient. Give the med­ica­tion time to even you out, just like I am.

And if you think you have Hashimoto’s, just go see a doc­tor and you are a sim­ple blood test away from diag­no­sis and treatment.

And if it turns out you don’t have Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, per­haps this arti­cle in today’s New York Times, might give you pause for thought.

Well I’m four years from fifty,
How’d I get to be…
Four years from fifty,
It’s a ter­ri­ble age to be.

And the title up there, star­ing you in the face like a mis­er­able old man is refers to where I’m at right now.

I’m feel­ing full of regrets and seek­ing redemption.

Does any­one know where they hid the redemption?

What would it mean to be redeemed? Would I need a spe­cial coupon for that?

The thing is, I don’t have any spe­cific regrets, like I wish I did this, or I should have done that. My regrets are more general.

Like I wish I spent more time with my parents.

Or I wish I wasn’t my own best and most suc­cess­ful enemy.

Those sorts of things.

Things you can’t change.

But what about the things you can change.

Like your socks.

Besides your socks.

What if you could change things?

Is that what redemp­tion is?

If it is, then I’m fairly cer­tain I’m screwed on the redemp­tion front. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

As much as I like to pre­tend I am per­fec­tion per­son­i­fied, the truth is I am a deeply flawed individual.

My life is lit­er­ally lit­tered with bad deci­sions and unfor­tu­nate choices, the results of which con­tinue to dog my days on a daily basis.

It’s fine to reflect upon ones mis­takes, as long as one is not mis­taken into think­ing that some­thing can be done to rec­tify them. The choices you make can’t usu­ally be undone and the con­se­quences will be with you until the day you die and may even con­tinue to effect oth­ers after you’re gone.

I’ve got no par­tic­u­lar deci­sions in mind, this has more to do with a gen­eral overview than any­thing specific.

I don’t want you to think every choice I’ve made in my life has been wrong, I’ve made some good choices too, but lately I’ve been think­ing about some of those moments in my life, where I zigged when per­haps I should have zagged.

It’s easy to sec­ond guess your own deci­sions after the fact, when the full­ness of time and expe­ri­ence yield the miss­ing pieces of the puz­zle that weren’t avail­able at the time of tak­ing the deci­sion. It’s also an exer­cise in futility.

Much of life is futile and point­less, so its not really enough of a rea­son not to think about these things.

There’s a the­ory that states every time a deci­sion is made, the uni­verse is split and alter­na­tive real­i­ties fol­low both paths and that all of exis­tence con­sists of a “multi-verse” of infi­nite exis­tence. Every­thing that can hap­pen, does hap­pen, just not in your reality.

Some­where in the multi-verse, there’s a ver­sion of me that suc­cess­ful, happy and fully ful­filled. No doubt taller, too.

How’d I get stuck in this real­ity? If there really is a multi-verse, then in at least one of them (and pos­si­bly many more), I’m king of the planet and in charge of you all. Don’t worry, if there are infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties, then you get to be king or queen of the world your­self, and I get to be your slave.

Not all of the real­i­ties in the multi-verse would be sunny, as I expect there are plenty that don’t turn out as well. Think about it, how many real­i­ties exist with­out me? Per­haps in some, I was still born and never even got to take my first breath.

I know that even when my deci­sions have been wrong, they’ve been right for me at the time. I have to believe that, because I can’t travel back in time and change them. At least not yet, any­way, but give me another six months and my time machine will be up and run­ning and I’ll be charg­ing loads of dosh for rides to the past and future. Think you can afford it?

My many per­son­al­ity flaws, at least as I see them, colour my every move. I’m cer­tainly my own worst enemy and I’m more respon­si­ble for hold­ing myself back than any­one else.

I used to gen­uinely believe that any­thing is pos­si­ble, but as I get older, I’m less con­vinced. As you get older, the cor­ri­dor of options nar­rows and while you may still cre­ate the illu­sion of choice, your choices become more and more lim­ited with each pass­ing day.

I can’t remem­ber where I heard this one, but it made a lot of sense: “You spend the first half of your life acquir­ing things and the sec­ond half hav­ing them all taken away from you.”

I’m unde­ni­ably in the 2nd half of my life. It’s not too much of a stretch to see where things are going for me. Its all down­hill from here.

Can you tell that my birth­day is approach­ing? It’s about 2 months away. Hey ho.

If I had the chance to do it all again, would I do things dif­fer­ently? Of course I would, what hon­est per­son wouldn’t?

That doesn’t mean I would do every­thing dif­fer­ently, but there are a few wrongs I would cer­tainly put right.

It doesn’t mat­ter because no one gets a sec­ond chance, except in the multi-verse real­ity where rein­car­na­tion hap­pens and it was just my luck not to end up in that one either.

Socrates said “the unex­am­ined life is not worth liv­ing”. If that is really true, then I have the most wor­thy life known to man.

Either that or my nar­cis­sis­tic ten­den­cies are start­ing to over­whelm being an obsessive-compulsive sociopath with manic-depressive tendencies.

You have a nice day, too.

President-elect Obama just fin­ished speak­ing. It was pow­er­ful and mov­ing, he’s quite an orator.

His mes­sage was one of hope, for the future of Amer­ica and the world. He even addressed the rest of us, not in Amer­ica. That’s unprece­dented. The cur­rent occu­pant of the White House only made threats to the rest of the world.

I felt a bit sorry for John McCain when I watched his speech. I don’t think he is a bad man, I just think his poli­cies were bad. Peo­ple clearly wanted change and that wasn’t on offer from the Sen­a­tor from Arizona.

I hate to piss all over the party, but the feel­ing I have right now reminds me of the day after Tony Blair was elected the first time, back in 1997. Strangers smiled at each other in the streets, peo­ple seemed so happy by the prospect of change. It was really amazing.

And we know how all that turned out. Not well.

I think it will be dif­fer­ent with Obama. I hope so, anyway.

Obama has a lot to live up to. Many peo­ple will be dis­ap­pointed with him when he doesn’t turn all the water into wine.

The changes Obama has promised won’t hap­pen overnight, but they will hap­pen. We need to be patient and let him do what he can. Don’t be dis­cour­aged if the happy feel­ing you have today wears off.

Trust me, it will wear off. It always does.

But for today, just enjoy it. Bask in it. Revel in it.

For today, for the first time in the bet­ter part of a decade, things have never looked brighter.

That’s it for me, tonight. I hope you’ve enjoyed my sur­pris­ingly pro­lific live-blogging this evening. I’ve enjoyed being able to com­ment on actual his­tory as it unfolds.

the northlon­don­hippy
0535gmt — 5th Novem­ber 2008

They may have been an hour behind me, but the Amer­i­can net­works have now called the elec­tion in favour of Barack Obama.

That’s right, I beat every­one else.

This is a his­toric moment. I never thought in my life time I would ever see a black man elected pres­i­dent of the United States.

It’s an amaz­ing achieve­ment for Mr. Obama, and an amaz­ing achieve­ment for the Amer­i­can people.

No mat­ter who you are, or where you are in the world, you can’t deny the sig­nif­i­cance of this moment in time.

Or as Bob Dylan said a long time ago, “The times they are a changing”.

the northlon­don­hippy
0410gmt — 5th Novem­ber 2008

I can’t wait for the net­works to call the win­ner of this elec­tion, so I am doing it myself.

It’s 10pm east­ern time, 0300gmt here in north Lon­don and I hearby declare Barack Hus­sein Obama the win­ner of the 2008 pres­i­den­tial election.

Based on every­thing I’ve absorbed in the last half hour, there’s no way McCain could reach the magic 270 elec­toral votes.

Remem­ber, you read it here first, fuckers!

the northlon­don­hippy
0301gmt — 5th Novem­ber 2008

Some­thing I noticed today, there were no pic­tures of Bush or Cheney voting.

Usu­ally, the incum­bent is seen cast­ing his bal­lot. Usu­ally, the incum­bent also speaks after vot­ing, offer­ing a strong endorse­ment of his party’s candidate.

This year is not usual in this regard as the incum­bent is so wildly unpopular.

It’s no won­der we haven’t seen much of him recently, and though he may not be cur­rently in anyone’s field of vision, he’s cer­tainly on their minds.

If any­one is respon­si­ble for the abysmal per­for­mance of the Repub­li­can party this year, its George W. (for What were they think­ing when they elected him twice?) Bush.

When peo­ple look back at the his­toric elec­tion of 2008, Bush will take a large slice of the blame. And that brain­less bimbo, Sarah Palin, who kept the inde­pen­dent vot­ers away from the Repub­li­cans in droves, will also shoul­der a healthy por­tion of blame.

the northlon­don­hippy
02:28gmt — 5th Novem­ber 2008

Penn­syl­va­nia has gone to Obama.

Appar­ently that’s a good indi­ca­tion of where the race is going.

Also, it is look­ing good in Florida, which as you may recall has been a prob­lem­atic state for the Democ­rats in pre­vi­ous elections…especially 2000 for poor ol’ Al Gore.

Even this close to a result, I am still ner­vous and unsure.

I’m still alter­nat­ing between CNN and FoxNews, though I def­i­nitely pre­fer CNN. CNN has been high­light­ing viewer reports of var­i­ous vot­ing irreg­u­lar­i­ties across Amer­ica, with a really cool graphic map. The more orange an area is, the more they are screw­ing with people’s right to a free and fair vote.

And don’t for­get the holograms!

It’s just gone 9pm on the east coast of Amer­ica (0200gmt here in north Lon­don) and accord­ing to CNN, Obama is now lead­ing lead­ing McCain with about 3 elec­toral votes to one. That’s a pretty good mar­gin, let’s hope it holds!

the northlon­don­hippy
02:02gmt — 5th Novem­ber 2008

It’s all too slow, they are being too con­ser­v­a­tive and cau­tious in their predictions.

Tell me who’s winning!

As of now, Obama is up, up, up!

All you need to do is look at the peo­ple at the two can­di­dates “vic­tory” ral­lies. In Chicago, where as many as one mil­lion peo­ple are expected, it already looks like one hell of a party, while in Phoenix, the gath­er­ing appears to be more like a wake.

At this point, does any­one really think McCain can pull this off? Even McCain him­self looked glum as he arrived in Phoenix a short while ago.

My tv view­ing is set­tling into a rou­tine, switch­ing mainly between CNN (who I think have the edge) and FoxNews, with the occa­sional stop on the BBC. SKY seems a bit slow and looks a bit cheap and the BBC is actu­ally doing a pretty good job, but the Amer­i­can net­works have the resources and speed to do the story justice.

And what a story its going to turn out to be!

the northlon­don­hippy
01:25gmt — 5th Novem­ber 2008