Period 18: no one told me about all the turkey sandwiches
I’m on book tour! Which doesn’t mean I’m traveling continuously – I’m not that fancy – but so far I’ve had my hometown event (a ton of former derby teammates came as well as many friends!), Town Hall Seattle (one of my former students from about 17 years ago came!!!), and Science On Tap in Portland (I cracked period jokes while on my period and saw a friend I hadn’t seen in well over a decade). In the last event, there were about 150 people and we ran out of books in like two seconds because the bookseller only brought about twenty copies to the event. I’m now home for a few days then Monday I go to Politics & Prose in DC with Ed Yong (I KNOW) and then Labyrinth Books in Princeton NJ with Catherine Clune-Taylor (I KNOW HEART EMOJI HEART EMOJI HEART EMOJI). If you're in town I hope you come!
Here are my big take-aways from my first book tour so far:
Green rooms are just rooms where you store your shit. There are NO BOWLS OF M&MS MISSING MY MOST HATED COLOR. No big puffs full of setting powder in front of a mirror with lights all around it. The room ISN’T EVEN GREEN.
No one wants to hang out with you afterwards or do any kind of reflection or offer feedback (or maybe it’s just me? I was probably sweating copiously). They just really want to put away stuff and get home because to them this is a job even though to you it’s an embarrassingly vulnerable reflection of your self-worth and you are fragile and it would be great if someone told you whether or not you did ok.
During the book signing part, I was so focused on both really trying to listen and enjoy what people had to say to me, while also saying something cute in each book (which I eventually gave up on and just wrote “you rock, [name]!”) that I did not get to EXTRA enjoy the people I actually know who came.
I am going to second guess every answer I give and the weird expression I’m making that you can only partially see because of my mask obscuring most of it is me doing facial acrobatics to try not to cringe.
I am going to second guess my wardrobe choices because I haven’t had to put a full outfit together in three years.
You have to be at each event early – which makes eating a real dinner beforehand nearly impossible. I am an absolute monster when I’m hungry so could not wait until after. So many (most?) of my meals were turkey sandwiches… so many in fact that TWO of them were turkey CRANBERRY sandwiches.
I loved giving the talk at Science On Tap, because talks are a thing I know how to do. And oh how I have LOVED LOVED LOVED meeting people who have already read the book and loved it, or are now so excited to read it! I feel like all the stories I heard are too private to share here, but people asked great questions and shared beautiful things about themselves or their families, or risked admitting things or asking things in both a vulnerable and sweet way. If you are one of the people I met this week – thank you! I will carry the moments from the signings with me forever and you are just plain wonderful.
Links
This had me sobbing: meet the generation of Connies named after Connie Chung. And make sure to watch the little video at the end.
The surprising downside of No Mow May – I heard an NPR story about No Mow May just this week, and then someone happened to share this article on Twitter where it came across my timeline. I’m grateful to be able to keep learning about pollinators, especially as I’m in the middle of planning a bit of a garden extension!
America has forgotten the lessons of the pandemic – and honestly I don’t think this piece goes far enough in making the point. It’s not just the social safety net that we’re losing – what’s been eroding for the last year plus is any sense of accountability or community. Should we care about our neighbor? How about a stranger in the grocery store? An elderly family member, a new baby? When we stopped caring about ventilation, filtration, and masking we decided we were no longer responsible for the fate of others. I find my own life far more enriched and joyous when I am truthful with myself about who I am accountable to and how. And for me that means I’m still not giving up on taking care of you, and me, and everyone else, by continuing to do as much outdoors as I can, by filtering my office air, by wearing masks indoors.
I wish more people asked themselves what behaviors made them proud, rather than what behaviors made the smallest ripple. I wish I didn’t see so many people looking around at the majority (not the evidence) to guide their decisions. And I want to remind you that it’s always possible to change your behavior or change your mind.
Weird period fact
If you’re going to be in a car accident, best to do it in your luteal phase!
Progesterone is a hormone we tend to think of for reproduction – the big bolus of it we see in the latter half of the menstrual cycle comes from the corpus luteum, the “yellow body” left behind after ovulation. But progesterone is also an intermediate step along the way to other hormones. Check out this figure I copied from Wikipedia:
Notice that progesterone is made along the way to testosterone (which is made along the way to making estrogen!) and that progesterone is intermediate to making corticosteroids, like cortisol. Allopregnanolone is another chemical made by progesterone, and it has anti-anxiolytic effects in the brain. Progesterone gets made in all gonads and in the adrenal glands and is present in all bodies.
Because of some of the downstream neurological effects that progesterone can have (like what happens with allopregnanolone) people have been curious about other ways progesterone may be protective of brain function. One cool and relatively recent finding is that it may protect one in the event of a traumatic brain injury.
Back when I played roller derby, I was our league’s safety officer and ended up learning as much as I could about TBI. As you might imagine, even with all our safety equipment derby is a dangerous sport, because you put wheels on your feet and then hit people. Jammers (that was my position) likely suffer constant microconcussions from hitting against impenetrable walls of blockers – it doesn’t matter that no one hits our heads in those moments, our little brains are rattling around inside our skulls from the multiple impacts. And I saw multiple people get concussed by awkward falls on their faces, where there is no helmet to protect them (one of the reasons, I think, that face shields grew in popularity).
Reading up on testing procedures, safety protocols immediately following a possible concussion, and other ways to prevent them (and post-concussion syndrome, which is awful and something several of our skaters had over the years), it was hard to get a handle on what we could do to reduce risk. I brought multiple cryohelmets that we kept in a freezer, we pulled people from practices or bouts if they hit their heads, but was there anything else that might tell us a person’s risk of downstream problems if they did suffer from a concussion?
It was during one of those desperate searches one night that I found this paper. Looking at a sample of 144 girls and women admitted to emergency rooms for traumatic brain injury, they found that those who were hurt in their luteal phase – that time period one has the most progesterone – had better outcomes.
It’s not much, but maybe if you are injured in your luteal phase, it will be a comfort to know you might fare better than you would have if you’d been hurt a week or so in either direction. And it’s an important reminder that many elements of hormones have effects that extend well beyond the reproductive system.
Source: Wunderle, K., Hoeger, K. M., Wasserman, E., & Bazarian, J. J. (2014). Menstrual Phase as Predictor of Outcome After Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in Women. Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, 29(5), E1–E8. https://doi.org/10.1097/HTR.0000000000000006