Drugs, Exercise and London

An acquaintance of mine blogged about medical marijuana being especially good for Crohn's disease, which is apparently a fucker to treat with other medications (which often cause bowel distress - I have this problem a lot and I don't even have a bowel disorder). I've heard other things about it being a good pain reliever for chemo patients, and the like. And it occurs to me that perhaps if idiots with their 420 nonsense would stop cluttering up the debate, marijuana probably could be cleared for medical use. The simple fact of the matter is that it is incredibly hard to take a product seriously when it is more famous for its associations with white people that carry Jamaican-flag-print lighters, wear weed-shaped belt buckles and tell any captive audience they can find about their last wild trip or how acid totally doesn't have any side effects than for its associations with actual medical patients who need help.

inb4 "not all potheads are like that", yes, as with all social groups there are exceptions to the rule. But the fact remains that the vast majority of outspokenly pro-weed people (I refuse to use the term "420" in a serious context because it is just so stupid) are twats who, if they do raise the medical benefits, typically do it to talk about how The Man is oppressing people because He won't admit how, like, totally okay weed is, man. When cancer and Crohn's disease patients are the most vocal demographic in favor of legalizing weed, call me.

Unrelatedly, I went for a run today after contracting bronchitis in November and staying sick until early January (and then being too cold to move for a few weeks after that), and it was agony. I was out for about ten minutes and when I got home I was asthmatic, gasping, had an excruciating headache and was shaking all over. Two months of lying on the couch can ruin a body, my friends.

I don't think exercise ever actually becomes pleasant for anybody. Pushing yourself past your limits is a fundamentally physically uncomfortable activity. Yes, your tolerance will rise as you become fitter, just as an averagely unfit person has a perfectly fine tolerance for walking around town whereas a morbidly obese person may not have the tolerance even for that, but the whole point of working out is to push yourself all of the time so that fact is kind of moot.

I think the people who say they enjoy exercise have simply retrained their minds to interpret those uncomfortable chemicals that exercise releases as positive, even if they feel unpleasant. People do this all the time - for example, skydivers, who reinterpret the physical feelings of fear as something positive that will encourage them to jump out of the plane, instead of something negative that will keep them inside it - so it's hardly a big jump. But the fact still remains that unless you do eventually reinterpret the unpleasant feelings like that, exercise is still going to wring you out and make you feel like shit.

That isn't any excuse to not exercise, because there are much worse shitty things that you put up with doing every day, that don't protect you from disease or improve your physical and mental health in any way.

Finally, I'm blogging at seven in the morning because I can't sleep. I got thinking about London and I'm too excited.

My father owns an apartment in Tufnell Park that has just been empty for literally more than twenty years,  half-finished, gathering dust and storing some of his old crap that should really be thrown out. The other day my husbands and I decided that I should call him up in a few months' time and tell him to sign the property over to me. I will then go over with writer husband, do the place up and rent it out, splitting the rent with my father. My father will then get to see me relatively regularly as my family and I will have a place to stay in London, the property will be making money instead of lying fallow, and I'll be getting some of that money. Since it seems pretty likely that my father will only have a year or two more of tenure at the University (if that), now would seem to be the perfect time to do it, and I won't have to pay 40% taxation on the property when my father dies (legal loophole in England that says if you signed it over more than 7 years before your death, the beneficiary doesn't have to pay death duties).

I can't sleep because I'm mentally picking out furniture for the apartment and making checklists of things that need to be done there, like sanding the floors, cleaning the chimneys and getting a fire escape put in.