Mere Being 016 - August - Iron Supplements, Digestion, Love

Always, right under the wire. Every month I tell myself – I'll write Mere Being early this month. I'll choose a fresh, exciting day. Perhaps the 15th! Or the 17th, if that's a Saturday! And then — the 31st comes around.

Well — no worries. It's here now, in your inbox. I'm Nat Bennett, and you're reading Mere Being, my monthly newsletter about everything.

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We spent a lot of last week in the mountains, at 8,000 feet. That altitude is unreasonable. I'm feeling more myself now, actually breathing air.

Have we talked about the iron supplements? Last year, I was just — vaguely ill. The kind of thing that makes one wonder if the Victorians were right, about all that sea air. Daily naps. Turns out — iron. Started supplementing and it cleared up. I keep breaking into rants about it. I would tell people, "Oh, I feel sick all the time," and they would say, "Doesn't everyone?" We have become a society that celebrates being sick. I sound like the worst kind of crank when I talk about this. "The problem is, that doctors are useless." But I maintain it: If I can't exercise, something is wrong.

Anyway: the iron. Get yourself tested. Go donate blood, they'll do it for free. If it's even "on the low side, but not deficient" – supplement.

The problem with iron is that it's very irritating to the digestive system. It literally kills cells that are exposed to it. Killing lots of cells in your intestinal lining – quite bad. I started with straight ferrous sulfite, 65mm, ever day. Do not recommend. What I tolerate much better is Floradix. The Germans understand digestion.

Also: Don't take it every day. Alternate. Iron is so toxic that when you digest iron, a hormone increases in your body that prevents iron absorption. Take it a second day in a row? You won't actually get anything out of it. Take it every other day – much reduce digestive symptoms and just as much improvement.

Very little work news. The secret project is close — so close. Can you guess what it is? I bet some at least one of you can. Next month — I promise.

I will be picking up a bit of client work between now and then, of course, so this month may be a bit much — but we'll make it.

“I knew you’d love this.” Is there anything more delicious? One of my favorite sensations of this meme age — a friend was scrolling, saw something, and thought of you.

Sure — sharing something with a friend is fun. But being shared with — paradise.

It’s so intimate. We talk about scrolling mostly in the negative and — sure — it’s an addiction, it’s heroin, but let’s just accept that for a minute, let’s just let the heroin be neutral and consider — “This heroin, it’s excellent, and when I was taking it I thought of you.”

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Before I wrote about software, I wrote about love. Back in college, in poetry and composition classes, I mostly wrote about crushes. It was what I was thinking about, so it was what I wrote about. I wrote about unactionable crushes. Bosses, coworkers, men twenty years my senior — I’ve never written about the people who I dated, because I didn’t need to write about them.

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There’s this wonderful South Park episode. The boys — I feel the need at this point to reassure you, I am not a South Park person, but I’m familiar with the cant — encounter ChatGPT. It wreaks various havoc at school but the main thing I’m interested, the main thing that’s stuck with me, was a subplot about one of the boys texting his girlfriend.

She’d like more interaction, you see. More conversation. She sends long, intricate messages, and he responds with a thumbs up emoji. She finds this unsatisfying. So — he fakes it. Copies her responses into the robot, and copies the responses back out. Stops, eventually, even looking at what he’s saying to her.

There are consequences. The consequences are substantially predictable.

This was deeply socially enlightening. I am — you might have guessed this from the fact that I write three newsletters — a voluminous text-er.

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Have we talked about The Bear? Good god. How well the “New Noise” sequences convey “he’s using work to cope.” I have been there — I can’t take a break because everything will fall apart. Not the work. Me.

And Fishes! I have some friends who were not physically affected by that episode. For me — it’s too easy to imagine myself as Donna. My background is more Irish than Italian but — there I go but for the grace of therapy.

Note that Mikey is played by the Punisher.

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I’ve adopted a personal rule, recently: I don’t talk about anything serious over text. Phone calls, please. I break this rule, and I apologize.

I think the tipping point was reading Caroline Ellison’s memos. The discussion of her relationship, with SBF. I could so easily imagine myself sending those memos, and — don’t.

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My partner hated the first episode of season three. I loved it. There was a reviewer at Slate — I won’t dignify them with a link — who lamented the turn of the show away from the first season, away from the beef sandwiches, but I experience the show mostly as an exercise in cinematography. Gorgeously lit shots of people’s hands, chopping. I take these kinds of photographs — it was a delight to discover another artist. A fellow connoisseur. But by the third season — I’ve seen the beef. I’m ready to see those hands doing something else. Shucking peas.

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The problem with texting is that you imagine the other person.

You can’t see how your words are landing. But you can’t help it. You fill in. You and your interlocutor — you end up having two entirely different conversations. Even though they have the same words.