Do you become anxious if you don't have an opportunity to check your social media?

It doesn't seem illogical then to choose to interpret that timely little random social media gesture as Lauren's way of getting through to me to say she'd be at our side for yet another excruciating day. But that wasn't the only way she tried to get our attention. As we travelled the four-lane highway on the outskirts of Ottawa, while I continued to marvel at what had just shown up on my computer, we were passed by what we remember to be a white car. In this lies the explanation of why they did not need to go through the self-castrating practice of denying Eros and the daimonic, as modern Western man does. The sense of the archaic period is shown even in Rilke's curious last sentence, which seems at first (but only at first) to be a non sequitur: You must change your life. This is the call of passionate beauty, the demand that beauty makes on us by its very presence that we also participate in the new form. Not at all moralistic (the call has nothing whatever to do with right or wrong), it is nevertheless an imperious demand which grasps us with the insistence that we take into our own lives this new harmonious form. How the oracle of Apollo functioned and where the advice it gave came from are, of course, fascinating questions. But unfortunately little seems to be known on this subject. The shrine was veiled in secrecy; Plato tells us that a prophetic madness overcame the Pythia, the priestess who served in the temple as mouthpiece for Apollo. From this madness there emerged some creative insight, so Plato believed, which represented deeper-than-normal levels of consciousness. It is to their madness, he writes in his Phaedrus, that we owe the many benefits that the Pythia of Delphi and the priestesses of Dodona were able to bestow upon Greece both privately and in public life, for when they were in their right minds their achievements amounted to little or nothing. Toxins being carried by the blood for cleansing in the liver, like bilirubin and ammonia, now back up into the body and cause other problems, including that sallow color. Some 25,000 people across the United States die each year from liver cirrhosis caused by prescription medications like acetaminophen, exposure to other toxic chemicals, and alcohol abuse. That prompts a message to all Americans: if you even moderately consume alcohol, remember to limit yourself to one drink a day if you're a woman and two if you're a man. The most common liver virus is hepatitis--contracted through contaminated water, needles, or bodily fluids such as blood, semen, and saliva. Some 200 million people around the globe, and more than 3 million in the U. In some cases, genetics play a part and you've inherited the disease. In other cases, an autoimmune disorder prompts the immune system to attack your healthy liver.

And there is the big C--cancer--escape from which none of us is guaranteed. If you're traveling to certain countries or in a high-risk environment, talk to a doctor about a hepatitis vaccine. Be careful to use a condom during sex with a little-known partner, and if you're headed to a tattoo parlor, be sure it's clean. In fact, many of us have probably participated in some variation of the drink-nag dance. How does the cycle start, and how does it become so vicious? To understand that, we need a closer look. Let's peek in on the dance between drinker, Tom, and complainer, Jane. If we look to Tom's childhood, we can see the roots of his self-numbing behavior. Tom's parents had very poor boundaries, and he was frequently the target of their unjustified, in-your-face confrontations. He longed to disappear and, as a teen, discovered that alcohol helped him do just that. When he drank, he felt calm and could detach from the intensity of his parents' projections. We can imagine that his drinking, while soothing him, likely justified his parents' accusations and actually strengthened this early vicious circle. And, where drinking is involved, the body responds with a vicious circle of its own, delegating to alcohol the role of activating calming neurotransmitters. From this theory alone he deduced that the course of light rays must be bent by the curvature of spacetime, and had gone even further to speculate the exact bend of the arc for rays of starlight grazing the sun. To the astonishment of scientists and the public alike, during the solar eclipse of 1919, astronomers were able to precisely verify Einstein's speculation. It seemed that only someone with superhuman brain capabilities could deduce such a measurement simply through abstract reasoning. The fame and reputation of Albert Einstein as a freakish genius was born at that moment and has remained ever since. Although we like to assume that a genius like Albert Einstein had powers far beyond our capabilities, his great discoveries depended on two very simple decisions he made as a young man. First, at the age of twenty he determined that he would be a mediocre experimental scientist. Even though a heavy immersion in mathematics and experimentation was the conventional route in physics, he would go his own way--a daring decision.

Second, he would consider his primal distaste for authority and conventions as a great strength. He would attack from the outside and unburden himself of all the assumptions that were torturing scientists in relation to Newton. These two decisions allowed him to play to his strengths. The colour of the car matters little, compared to its licence plate. Rob pointed it out to me; I'd been looking down at my computer screen, answering listeners' emails. Did you see that? That licence plate. For a moment, the two of us were speechless. Those two words were exactly what Lauren had said when I asked, during our Mother's Day interview, how she felt about motherhood. We don't know why we saw that licence plate at that time on that road on that day. But we do believe Lauren was again reminding us that she was with us and always would be. And, oh, how we needed that nudge and the accompanying feeling that she had her arms around us and would hold us up during the difficult hours, days and years to come. Apollo spoke in the first person through the Pythia. Her voice changed and became husky, throaty, and quavering like that of a modern medium. The god was said to enter her at the very moment of her seizure, or enthusiasm, as the root of that term, en-theo (in god), literally suggests. Before the seance the priestess went through several ritualistic acts, such as special bathing and perhaps drinking from a sacred spring, presumedly with the customary autosuggestive effects. But the oft-repeated statement that she breathed vapors issuing from a fissure in the rocks of the shrine which induced a hypnotic effect is disposed of summarily by Professor Dodds: As for the famous vapours to which the Pythia's inspiration was once confidently ascribed, they are a Hellenistic invention. Plutarch, who knew the facts, saw the difficulties of the vapour theory, and seems finally to have rejected it altogether;

Dodds goes on to remark pithily that less has been heard of this theory since the French excavations showed that there are to-day no vapours, and no `chasm' from which vapours could once have come. The Pythian priestesses themselves seemed to be simple, uneducated women (Plutarch tells of one who was the daughter of a peasant). But modern scholars have a high respect for the intelligence system of the oracle. Being careless in both situations can lead to your contracting hepatitis. And finally, watch your weight and diet: obesity can lead to fatty liver, which looks a lot like one affected by alcohol--even if you've never had an alcoholic drink. essential oils may have a bright future in your world. WHAT essential oils CAN DO: Research published in 2017 in Pharmacognosy Research suggests that essential oils may interact with CB2 receptors to aid in antiviral activity, and scientists recommend further testing as a potential treatment for viral hepatitis, especially when used with existing therapies. For those who consume alcoholic beverages, essential oils may be a light on the horizon: First, it has many of the liver-protectant qualities found in the milk thistle compound silymarin: It's rich in flavonoids, making it both anti-inflammatory and an antioxidant. Studies using silymarin show that it may help prevent toxins from infiltrating liver cells and from interacting with CB1 and CB2 receptors to keep the liver from developing fibrosis, which leads to toxin buildup in the body. Second, an animal study published in a 2017 Scientific Reports found that essential oils helped arrest liver injury caused by alcohol, possibly by blocking inflammation. It also suggested essential oils's therapeutic potential for alcohol-related liver diseases based on inflammation, oxidation, and fatty liver. A human trial may be coming soon. After a day hiking in the woods, you feel refreshed and relaxed. The body signals the craving for this replenishment, and the more Tom drinks, the more alcohol his body needs to do the job. Tom meets Jane. Jane knows Tom had a rough childhood, and her compassion for him deepens her attachment to him. Tom sees her as someone who gets him and provides the solace so lacking in his former life. Wachtel's theory allows that, even if one of the participants is the primary instigator of the dynamic, the dance pulls the partner in and both become complicit in the vicious circle. So, while Jane probably has her own Echo-like motives in the dance, we'll focus on Tom as instigator. Tom drinks.

He does so secretly at first, and then, more and more, in her presence. He brings with him anxieties that Jane is not as trustworthy a supporter as she seems, along with some guilt and shame about his drinking. Jane, the helper, notices the drinking but does not want to become his abusive parents. A third factor can be identified as well: his love of the violin and the music of Mozart. To others who would marvel at his feel for Mozart, he would reply, It's in my blood. He meant that he had played this music so often that it had become part of him, his essence. He had an inside understanding of the music. This would become the unconscious model for his approach to science: he would think himself inside complex phenomena. Although we tend to imagine Einstein as the ultimate abstract thinker, his way of thinking was remarkably concrete--almost always in terms of images that related to the everyday objects around him, such as trains, clocks, and elevators. Thinking in this concrete way, he could turn a problem over and over in his mind, consider it from all angles while walking, talking to others, or sitting at his desk at the patent office. He would later explain that imagination and intuition played a far larger role in his discoveries than his knowledge of science and mathematics. If he had any qualities that were extraordinary, they were his patience mixed with his extreme tenacity. After what can only be considered as well beyond 10,000 hours of contemplation of one problem, he reached a transformation point. We had spent the days between Lauren's passing and the first of the two memorial services preparing a digital photo display with the same dedication and attention to detail that we'd brought to planning her wedding less than two years earlier. Rob and I tackled the gruelling task of putting together the right pictures to show during musical selections, as well as a continuous stream of pictures from various moments in the lives of her and her family. And the technical gods were not playing nice. I don't know if you've heard of Mercury retrograde, or if you believe it's a thing, but many people do, including us. According to multiple sources, it's an astronomical phenomenon that occurs a few times each year, and it can have mysterious and negative effects on many forms of communication and technology. We were right in the thick of it for the entire second half of that month. Computers would unexpectedly and inexplicably shut down, screens would freeze, work we'd done would disappear and we were seriously worried that we were going to lose everything.