1. Interactive chart for comparing pollen levels across 245 locations in the continental US over time. Here's a snapshot:

   

2. Time series choropleth map from smoothed time series:

   Smoothing is done with LOWESS independently for each location. Noise seems to account for only a small amount of variation in the data; the primary effect of smoothing is to remove fluctuations caused by rainfall.

3. Time series choropleth map from the raw time series:

4. Map of total pollen burden (the integral of pollen burden over timespan of data collection — expect this to change substantially with the 12 month update):

   

Pollen data sources

While researching potential data sources for this investigation, I found four sources (well, three plus n). I chose to use pollen.com’s data for the above graphics because of its spatial granularity and frequency of update. Contact me for up-to-date data.

It’s worth noting that regional pollen data doesn’t necessarily reflect the symptoms an allergic person will experience in that area. Symptoms depend on the specific plant species a person is allergic to and the concentration of pollen from those species in their immediate environment. Different species are major pollenators at different times of year. And, while pollen can travel miles in good (“good”) conditions, the major pollen sources are also determined by hyper-local factors like which tree species were fashionable in your parks department when they planted on your block.

Some data sources do list a few species that are most responsible for the pollen collected at pollen counting stations, but I’m not aware of any public datasets that fully disaggregate pollen counts by species.

National Allergy Bureau

The National Allergy Bureau (NAB), is a collection of pollen counting locations in the US, certified by the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology.

The NAB data benefits from transparent methodology, an exact addresses for each station, and a history of pollen data for each station. The records include pollen counts for the three major categories (tree, grass, and weed), as well as lists of the top species within each category, though they don’t give an indication of how much of the pollen comes from each species or how much of the pollen comes from species other than those.

The major downside of the NAB data is its sparsity. The 62 NAB-affiliated pollen counting stations are in 57 cities across 28 US states, Canada, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Peru. 28 states is barely a majority and the Northern Great Plains are especially poorly represented, so it’s not exactly clear what you’re supposed to do if you live in the middle of North Dakota and want local pollen data (aside from kys). Further, the frequency and regularity of pollen counts varies by station, with many seemingly not having recorded data in the last 6 months.

Pollen.com

Pollen.com reports pollen levels from 245 locations in the continental US, updated daily. They don’t provide names or addresses for the pollen count locations, but they do provide the zip code of those counting stations at their map API.

Pollen levels are reported as a “pollen index”, with unclear relation to raw pollen counts. The three speices most responsible for the pollen are also listed, though they don’t give an indication of how much of the pollen comes from each species or how much of the pollen comes from species other than those.

I didn’t find a page describing their methodology for counting pollen. Pollen.com is owned by IQVIA, which manufactures the Rotorod sampler, so it seems likely that they count spores trapped by Rotorod samplers.

Logged-in users get access to annual overviews for each location. These basically show the same information as my interactive chart, but more coarsely and without the ability to make side-by-side comparisons

. They look like this:

Weather.com

Weather.com reports pollen levels for locations around the US, updated Monday through Friday. The 92 collection locations are listed on this page.

These data are broken down by category but not by species, and no historical pollen data is provided.

Ubiquitous 1-5 pollen scales

Finally, there are many sources that report pollen levels on a 1-5 scale at high spatial granularity (including around the globe). These include Google’s Pollen API, The Weather Underground, Accuweather, and tomorrow.io. I didn’t find information about data sources for any of them, and they often disagree with each other. None of them reports historical pollen levels.

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1. I did my first 40 minute sit1 a few weeks ago! This was about 2.5 months into my zz practice.

2. I’ve been noticing that different tissues get stretched during zz as my practice has progressed. At first, it was exclusively the external rotators of the shoulders and the tissues around the ribs. Later, it was mostly the shoulders and the back of the neck. Recently, deeper tissues have started to get stretched — some tissues of the neck, around the larynx, and in some tissues behind my sternum.

   Interestingly, this sequence of moving from superficial tissues to deep tissues mirrors the approach taken in some modes of bodywork (tweet). Also, the deeper tissues seem to correspond to Myer’s concept of the deep front line (video video), which suggests that longterm zz practice could improve deep tissue quality.
   It’s not all deep work at this point for me — I do still feel stretched in the shoulders, the back of the neck, and other superficial tissues.

3. My posture has improved dramatically, but reverts back to its previous state very quickly. After as few as two days away from zz, I notice that maintaining a stacked posture (in the Ida Rolf sense) requires much more attention. It’s unclear whether I’m fully back to my previous posture within two days or it’s just that my sensitivity to poor alignment has increased.

4. My breathing is much less vigorous than when I started, and becomes quite shallow.

   When mouth taping was popular, one test that was promoted for measuring carbon dioxide tolerance was to measure the amount of time that elapses while holding the breath before the nose involuntarily twitches. I didn’t find any trustworthy sources for this information, but the claim was that the nose twitch is a reflex that happens when blood CO2 becomes higher than you can comfortably tolerate, and is supposed to be a metric that (1) occurs at a safe threshold and (2) isn’t sensitive to willpower / willingness to do self-harm. I’ve noticed that I often experience a nose twitch while sitting, after about 10 minutes.

5. I’ve only sat for longer than 30 minutes a few times, and zz between the 30 and 40 minute marks feels very different than zz between the 10 and 20 minute marks.

   Readers may be familiar with trauma-releasing exercises (video), in which trauma is purportedly released through some convulsions. I’ve found myself experiencing TRE-style shaking and stretching during extended zz, especially intense after the 30 minute mark. I figure this is okay (or good).

6. 40 minute sits seem to be substantially (i.e. non-linearly) more effective at remodeling tissue. But they’re quite challenging physically and leave me fatigued and for a few days after completion. I’d like to work up to be able to tolerate more frequent long sits.

7. At some point, I thought that I might develop a theory of modes of organization in zz.

   What I mean is, in zz the body has to meet some postural demands, staying upright and counteracting the torque exerted around the torso from the placement of the arms. This can be done in many ways, flexing different muscles to maintain the position of the legs relative to the hips, the curvature of the spine, and the position of the shoulders and arms. To keep the hips level, it’s possible to move tension into the adductors, which can keep the legs extended and pull the hips into neutral while releasing tension from the abdomen. The relaxation of the abdomen seems to shift some of the burden of stabilizing the scapulae from the muscles of the back to the serratus anterior, I think because the back muscles no are no longer opposed by the rectus abdominus and so can’t contract very hard without shifting the posture. I’m thinking of this pattern of postural oranization, starting from the engagement of the adductors, as one “normal mode”.

   I thought I might be able to interrogate these patterns and decompose the act of standing into normal modes, in the same way that colors are decomposed into RGB or vibrating strings into superpositions of sinusoids, decompose standing into, maybe, adductor-dominant, quad-dominant, and hamstring-dominant modes. I haven’t succeeded yet.

8. I once bought a whole goose at the grocery store, and stuffed inside it with the offal was its neck. It’s a strange object, long and sinewy, muscles tightly packed in their fascial wrapping, fascia precisely machined to thread through the vertebra, vertebra seamlessly articulating as it bends.

   I’ve been thinking a lot about that neck.

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To put some numbers to it, each year, we spend more than $300k but make about $100k in ticket sales. The rest is made up for by donations and grants but, since some grants that we used to rely on were directed away from organizations celebrating dead white men, last year we ran a deficit of around $20k.

This is obviously a pretty big deficit.

We’re not in danger of going bankrupt soon — the simplest model of our finances that includes investment returns and inflation gives us 10 years of runway before we’re out of money — but it was still a shock to go from thinking “people pay to hear SFBC sing; everyone gains from trade” to realizing that ticket sales cover a minority of our expenses and so we’re entirely dependent on donations and grants. And honestly, much of the audience is friends and family of SFBC singers, and it’s appropriate to view their attendance as being in the spirit of a donation.1

What would it take to have an amateur choir perform classical music sustainably, i.e. through ticket sales alone? In the next section, I’ll say that the analysis in this section isn’t the right way to think about the issue. I’m including it because I found it helpful to ground my thinking in concrete numbers — just, don’t get too attached.

There are three main costs: occupancy, the orchestra, and the artistic director.2

For the 2023-24 season, occupancy cost SFBC $35,927 for 167.25 hours of rehearsal and performance at a choir size of ~60. Assuming occupancy costs are linear in time and choir size, this is about $3.5 per singer-hour. It takes SFBC 30 minutes of rehearsal time to prepare each minute of performance, so rehearsal occupancy costs $1.75 per un-duplicated minute of performance per singer. (“Un-duplicated” in the sense that, once the choir has prepared for the first showing, it costs no more rehearsal time to prepare for the second.)

Orchestra costs depend on the size of the orchestra, which in turn depends on the size of the choir. I’ll base my estimates on these figures provided by our artistic director3:

Regressing number of singers against orchestra size, there should be 1 orchestra member for every 4.5 singers. We pay musicians $200 per call, and call counts from previous concerts suggest that the musicians we hire need 1 call per 15 minutes of performance. Rehearsal calls thus cost about $2.96 per un-duplicated minute of performance per singer. Performance calls cost about $44.44 per performance per singer (NB: per performance, not per minute of performance).

Because we’re limited in the rate at which we learn music, we sometimes ask musicians to perform instrumental pieces. Using the same ratio of rehearsal to performance time for musicians, rehearsal costs are $13.33 per minute of performance per musician. Costs associated to performance calls were already accounted for in the previous paragraph.

Altogether, the costs come to4:

• $1.75 per un-duplicated minute of choral performance per singer, for rehearsal occupancy

• $.06 per minute of performance per singer, for performance occupancy

• $2.96 per un-duplicated minute of accompaniment in performance per singer, for rehearsal calls

• $13.33 per minute of instrumental performance per musician, for rehearsal calls

• $44.44 per performance per singer, for musician performance calls

Here are the costs associated to a few ways to organize an hour of music (single showing):

The wholly-unaccompanied concert is feasible, assuming that singers have friends and family who want to see them perform and are willing to pay a small fee. The wholly-accompanied concert is probably infeasible to cover by ticket sales alone, but the excess is relatively small per singer — many choirs have dues on the order of the costs that would remain after ticket sales.

The main levers for cost reduction are:

• Cheaper rehearsal space. SFBC generally rehearses and performs in the same space, which has the advantage of limiting performance week adjustments for acoustics, but it’s not strictly speaking necessary. There may be other advantages to having an established relationship with the venue, but these are unknown to me if they exist.

• Better singers. Decreasing the amount of rehearsal required decreases occupancy, which is a large part of the cost at current margins. Of course, at some point the singers start expecting to be paid, which adds another cost.

• Volunteer orchestra. High-quality community orchestras are rarer than community choirs, but they exist (e.g. the Awesöme Orchestra in SF).

The main levers for revenue increase are:

• Higher ticket prices. This one trades off against the next.

• More tickets sold per singer. Marketing is the standard tool here, but inevitably most audience members of community choir performances will already know a singer — if you’re going to go to a show where you have no personal connection with the performers, you go see professionals. The best tool is to have all the singers be 26 year old extraverts.

You may have noticed that we haven’t accounted for compensation of the artistic director. Considerations of supply and demand, and the Baumol effect, are left as an exercise for the reader. Suffice to say that, for some groups, this quantity can easily be as much as the other costs we’ve considered combined.

As I say above, I think this counting pennies approach to choir finances takes the wrong perspective. The danger of looking at every expense as an opportunity for cost reduction is that every expense is made in service of the goal of creating a great choir experience. Choir is a huge time commitment, and if it’s not great it’s not worth doing. If it is great, we’ll be able to find donors who recognize what we’re doing and want to support us.

Here are some ways to create a choir that people want to participate in:

• Be friendly and cool

• Actually be friends with other singers, so the choir becomes a real community

• Learn your part well, so the performance sounds amazing

• Learn your part early, to make it easier on others singing your part

• Take *great* snacks

• Take on a functional role (board president, treasurer, etc) so others don’t have to

• Yes, look at the budget and figure out how money can be spent better

• Don’t harangue people about making the choir experience great (or about anything)

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4

Defining the following variables

• n showings

• d dollars per singer per minute occupancy

• r₁ performance minutes per rehearsal minute

• r₂ performance minutes per call

• o singers per orchestra member

• c dollars per call

• t₁ a capella performance minutes per showing

• t₂ accompanied performance minutes per showing

• t₃ instrumental performance minutes per showing

a general formula for the cost per singer is given by:

(This model makes some assumptions.)

1. When I first encountered it (day of), I thought zhan zhuang probably worked because it:

   1. challenges the postural muscles

   2. stretches tissues whose tightness typically pushes people into bad posture

   3. disencumbers the breathing mechanism

   4. and because it does (a)–(c) in a self-correcting way

   It's much harder to hold the zhan zhuang position with bad form, so (b) and (c) naturally become more true if you follow gradient descent into an easier posture to hold.

2. I no longer believe this. It's not that it's not zhan zhuang doesn't improve posture, and it's not that those aren't the mechanisms for that change. But… well, long-time qigong practitioners describe the sensations of energy flows across the body. I believe these energy flows are a balm for the mind, a tonic for the nervous system, and a cure for psychosomatic ailments. See (5) and (6).

3. Uhh, I find it this practice very addictive? I assume the zhan zhuang posture at least once every few hours. In the past month, I've watched a half dozen tutorials, read two books and a smattering of articles, gotten 5 friends to try it (this is the majority of my friends), and decided that it would be the cure to my aging parents' ailments. A friend’s parter has described it as my idle animation.

4. When I try to think carefully, I think I'm probably being irrationally exuberant. My specific health issues have to do specifically with standing (POTS) and breathing (asthma, covid), and it's almost certainly true that there's been some psychosomatic component to those. As one of the 5 friends who were underwhelmed by the experience of trying zhan zhuang said to me, I “have standing trauma”. So, zhan zhuang seems designed to work on my specific (t)issues.

5. Working directly on your issues is hard! The first week I did zhan zhaung, I was too tired to get any work done. At first I thought this was because of my difficulties standing. But a few days in, I had an extremely emotional night reliving some of the worst moments of my acute illness with covid, and I felt something unravel. And after another few days, I was breathing better and had noticeably more stamina. Look, I'm not saying I'm cured, but we’re going to celebrate every increment of improvement.

6. Here is a quote from River’s description of his experience with ayurveda:

   There are some other things I’ve experienced with Ayurveda that are honestly weirder than I want to talk publicly about right now, partly because I don’t think some of you would believe me unless you experience it yourself, and partly because I wanna keep collecting data and seeing if they remain true for a longer time before I say them in public.
   One of the ones on the border that’s just a little weird: A couple months I started a series of medicines whose stated purpose was to scrape out old metabolic waste that had gotten stuck in particular tissues of my body. I cycled on and off of these a couple times, and every single time I started taking them, the next day I’d be awash in old memories from a very specific period of my life, a difficult period that I’d never really dealt with and processed. I spent a lot of time those days having those old emotions wash over me and process through my system.
   …As far as I can tell, the medicines that were physically scraping out wastes were also releasing and scraping out trapped emotional waste from that very specific period in my life, which was related in ways I won’t get into here, but… I don’t know man, it was weird. I didn’t expect the mind-body connection to be that direct and that strong, just from an herbal mix with a fun name and some basic dietary instructions.

   See (2).

7. Most video tutorials for zhan zhuang are low in detail or low in information density. I've found two exceptions (one, two), which have been most helpful. Master Lam Kam Chuen's series gets an honorable mention for being short and entertaining.

8. The way I'm currently thinking about form is:

   1. The goals of zhan zhuang are accomplished when the hips are level, the abdomen is relaxed, the spine is lengthened, and the head sits gently on top.

   2. The purpose of the arrangement of the legs and feet is to provide stability, free the hips, and allow the abdomen to relax. If the abdomen has to tense to keep the hips level, then the legs aren't arranged well.

   3. The purpose of the arrangement of the shoulders and arms is to provide torque so that the back muscles can lengthen the torso and so breathing is unencumbered.

9. I expect that there will come a time when I find high-level metaphors more useful for guiding my practice than focusing on nitty-gritty details of alignment. Ioannis Solos spends a lot of time in his book discussing various bubble visualizations, which I currently get no value out of. But with my approach, body parts shift out of alignment when they're not the focus of my attention, so I spend my stands shuffling my attention around playing whack-a-mole with errant joints. Hopefully with practice I'll be able to intend at a higher level of abstraction.

10. In the meantime, I've been getting a lot of mileage out of attending to the feet. I encountered the idea of the three points of balance a long time ago, but never explored it. Different instructions will say, “distribute the weight 60 to the back of the foot and 40 to the front” (or vice versa), but for me there's a distinct point where my weight feels perfectly balanced and the whole foot feels alive. When I get it right, there's a specific muscle in the medial part of the arch that engages and feels like it lifts the whole foot up.

11. There's a tendon at the outside of my ankle that often gets sore when I start running. It's a real annoyance, because it's often limiting in how much I want to run (well, it was before I got covid). Interestingly, this tendon has also been getting sore during my stands. My current enthusiasm around zhan zhuang has me believing that this tendon soreness will resolve with a few more days/weeks of practice; hopefully that will translate to not being bothered by it if I ever get back to running.

12. Yes, I get fluctuating sensations of heat and coolness and tingling in the nerves. There's a temptation to ascribe value to them, and maybe get a little attached to them as markers of progress, which I'm resisting. I expect that the tingling and rushing coolness will cease with time. I'm basing that expectation off of this helpful chart from Yu Yong Nian's book:

    

13. Yes, random tissues are sore afterwards. Recently, a lot of the little tissues around my ribs have been sore. It's common for people new to wrestling to have sore ribs from getting their bodies mashed into the ground (I wrestled very, very briefly in HS), and the soreness I've been getting from zhan zhuang feels exactly like that.

14. Turns out your phyical activity can't just consist of zhan zhuang and laying around all day. Tissues that aren't occasionally lengthened get short, and most tissues aren't placed anywhere near the ends of the ROM in zhan zhuang. I've also noticed my legs carrying residual tension, but I think this would happen less if I were better at zhan zhuang.

15. I do think it would be good for my parents.

There are three (non-exclusive) options:

• Option 1: Get a hypoallergenic cat

• Option 2: Feed your cat anti-cat-allergen antibodies

• Option 3: Spray your home with an anti-cat-allergen spray

People who are trying to solve their own allergies might also benefit from cleaning, medication, immunotherapy, or finding other ways to reduce inflammation.

Option 1: Get a hypoallergenic cat

Some cats provoke no allergic response or weaker allergic responses, and this is consistently true for some breeds of cats. The relationship between allergen levels and allergenicity is unstraightfoward1, so in order to determine the hypoallergenic potential of some breeds of cats, I identified Reddit comments with personal anecdotes about having (or not having) allergic reactions to cats of different breeds and coded them as one of:

1. ⁠No reaction

2. ⁠No reaction after adjustment period

3. Reduced reaction

4. Full reaction

Breeds commonly mentioned as hypoallergenic include the Siberian, Balinese, Russian Blue, Oriental Shorthair, Sphynx, Cornish Rex, and Devon Rex cats. I'm uninterested in hairless cats and aliens, so I only investigated the first three. Extending this to other breeds is left as an exercise for the reader.

There is much discussion on Reddit about the hypoallergenic potential of Siberian and Russian Blue cats; for those, I stopped when I realized that I had collected at least 50 comments. I only found 8 comments claiming personal experience with Balinese cats. Links to all comments are provided in a footnote.2

The data suggest that Siberians and Russian Blues trigger no reaction or reduced reactions for 70-80% of cat allergen sufferers. The sample size for Balinese cats is too small for me to feel comfortable drawing conclusions. There are some additional methodological nuances and concerns about interpretation, which I relegate to a footnote.3

This option costs around $2000, upfront.

Option 2: Feed your cat anti-cat-allergen antibodies

If you already have a cat, or are committed to getting a cat other than a Siberian or a Russian Blue, you have the option of feeding that cat Fel d 1 antibodies. These were introduced in a 2019 paper from Purina touting a 47% reduction in Fel d 1 levels after feeding cats food with added Fel d 1 antibodies. To be clear, the cats distribute less allergen because much of it is neutralized by antibodies added to their food. These take a few weeks to a few months to take effect.

Since then, a number of copycat (heh) products have come onto the market, though the method of production differs somewhat between them.

• Purina LiveClear is made by inoculating hens with Fel d 1, then isolating and concentrating anti-Fel d 1 antibodies present in those hens' eggs, and then adding those antibodies to Purina dry food.

• Catigy, SaFeline Pet, and Bella Baking Accents expose hens to cat allergens by raising them alongside cats and/or adding shed cat fur to their nesting, then dehydrate and powder those hens’ eggs. The powdered eggs are sold to consumers to add to separately-purchased cat food.

• Pacagen isolates camelid anti-cat-allergen antibodies and engineers yeast to produce the associated single-domain antibodies. These nanobodies are added to a supplemental food topper, which consumers add to separately-purchased cat food.

I repeated the methodology from Option 1 (simplified to Reduced Reaction / No Change) to determine how much success people had with this intervention. Links to the original comments are provided in a footnote.4

The sample sizes are obviously quite low here, likely because of how new these products are. I believe Purina LiveClear was introduced to the market in 2020, and the other brands are years younger.

I’ve put considerations about methodology and interpretation in a footnote5, but it’s worth noting here in the main text that a few people’s cats had strongly adverse reactions to Purina LiveClear (example 1 example 2). The same might happen with the supplementary antibody options.

The cost of this option depends on the brand used:

• Purina LiveClear costs about $4.50/lb, while normal dry food costs about $1/lb. Assuming a cat eats a half pound of dry food per week and lives for 15 years, that’s a cost of $1365 over replacement over the lifetime of the cat.

• Catigy/SaFeline/Bella Baking cost $15-25 for a month’s supply. That comes to $2700-4500 over the lifetime of the cat.

• Pacagen costs $50 for a month’s supply. Under the same assumptions, that’s a cost of $9000 over the lifetime of the cat.

Many Redditors complain about the cost of these products. For what it’s worth, this product category is very new and prices will probably decline in the coming decade.

Option 3: Spray your home with an anti-cat-allergen spray

If you already have a cat, it has coated your home with allergens, and you need to neutralize those allergens with some urgency, the best option is to use an allergen-neutralizing spray. (It may also help to clean thoroughly, use an air purifier, etc.)

Different allergen sprays work through different means. To my understanding, the options are:

• Allergy Defender (sometimes also called Allergy Asthma Clear) works by changing the pH of surfaces to break down allergens.

• Allerpet works by creating a protective barrier on surfaces to trap allergens. Note that, unlike the other sprays, Allerpet is applied directly to the pet.

• Pacagen contains anti-cat allergen antibodies, which bind to cat allergens and prevent them from triggering an immune reaction.

• Allersearch and Live Pure have proprietary formulas, which probably work by some combination of breaking down allergens and creating barriers to trap them.

In case it’s helpful, here are the ingredients of these different sprays:

As before, I scoured Reddit for comments relating experiences with these sprays. Links to the original comments are provided in a footnote.6

Methodological/interpretation considerations are similar to those for the section on foods with anti-cat-allergen antibodies. I’ll just note that the degree of allergy reduction depends on the spray used—e.g. all of the Allerpet anecodotes except for one mentioned using it alongside other interventions, like air filtration or frequent laundering, where Pacagen was more likely to be sufficient on its own.

The cost of using the spray will depend on the size of the space that needs to be treated, so I will just report the cost of 32 oz of each at time of writing:

• Allergy Defender: $15

• Allerpet: $61

• Pacagen: $172

• Allersearch: $14

• Live Pure: $20

Again, because Allerpet is applied directly to the pet, this comparison overstates the cost of using it, but users will still need to use another method to clean the environment. Pacagen is just expensive, lol.

General impressions

Reading back over what I’ve written, I notice that I’ve gotten some general impressions that don’t come through very clearly in the data I’ve presented. Specifically, in terms of proportion of people who are helped and the extent to which their allergies are reduced, the most effective interventions seem to be:

1. Pacagen spray

2. Purina LiveClear, and probably the Pacagen cat food topper

3. Getting a Siberian or Russian Blue (or maybe one of the aliens)

4. Other foods, and other anti-allergen sprays

For my purposes, hosting moderately-allergic guests ~1 x/mo in a small apartment, using the Pacagen spray to prepare for their visits seems like a good solution. People who are allergic to cats and expect to be guests where cats are kept could benefit from taking a bottle of the Pacagen spray with them.

For people who are allergic to their own cats, especially those who live in a full-sized houses, spraying Pacagen across the entire living space every 2-3 days seems effort-intensive and expensive, so it might be better to get a hypoallergenic cat and/or feed the cat anti-cat-allergen antibodies. Using the Pacagen spray during any adjustment period could still be helpful, of course.

It’s a bit disappointing that no intervention was perfectly effective, but my review of the evidence leaves me believing that, in almost all cases, cat allergies can be entirely eliminated or substantially reduced, which is great news.

A lot of the joy of reading the book is just the joy of getting to witness Mystery, the PUA, who’s an amazing character. For a sense for what he’s like:

“Besides, my goals are changing,” he continued. “It started with wanting attention. Now I think I’m looking for love. I want to be in a relationship where I can feel butterflies in my stomach. I want a woman I can respect for her art, like a singer or a super hot stripper.”

and, after he breaks up with his girlfriend and she, at his encouragement, sleeps with his roommate:

“I want to kill her.” He rolled onto his back and moaned like a dying dog. “Logically, I know I’m being controlled by my emotions. But my logic is just 2 percent right now. I feel emotionally raw.” He clenched his bedsheet in his fist. “I feel strange and empty, like after a shit.”

He rolled over and started sobbing again. “I feel shit empty.”

I love this man.

At some point, Strauss is seduced by the sister of two of his fans, and she becomes his first groupie.

“My last boyfriend was the sweetest guy, and he did everything for me,” she went on. “But I didn’t like him. He got on my nerves. After I started reading my brothers’ pick up stuff, I understood why I wasn’t attracted to him or any of the other guys at school. They’re all so boring. They don’t understand cocky funny.”

What’s funny about this quote is that, uh, PUAs are losers. I don’t mean that people who are unsatisfied with their lives and try to improve them are losers, in general. I also don’t mean that guys who try to sleep with lots of girls are losers, necessarily. I mean—as Strauss describes it, PUAs at seminars would routinely copy his and Mystery’s outfits and routines wholesale:

Every Friday when they arrived, Mystery or Tyler Durden stood in front of the pillow pit and taught them pretty much the same openers, body language tips, and value-demonstrating routines. On Saturday afternoon, they all went shopping on Melrose. They bought the same four-inch-platform New Rock boots and black-and-white striped shirt with bits of rope hanging from the sides. They bought the same rings, necklaces, hats, and sunglasses. They went to the tanning salon.

We were breeding an army.

At night they descended on the Sunset Strip, a swarm of player bees. Even when the seminar and workshop ended, students lingered in the clubs on Sunset for months afterward, working on their game. You could spot them from behind by the matching boots and the rope dangling from their shirts. They clustered in groups, prowling for open sets and sending in emissaries to say, “Hey, I need to get a female opinion on something.”

It’s all in such poor taste. If the main reason Strauss is interesting is that he has a cult following, but everyone following him is clearly an idiot, should that count against him? At what point should his groupie recognize that his status rests on weak foundations?

But I suppose if there are men, like her brothers, with bad taste, then why not women with bad taste, too. I hear taste runs in families.

Another thing that jumps out at me is the dissolution of Project Hollywood as the different factions fight for control and over women. “A bunch of PUAs decide to move in together to work on their art” sounds like the beginning of a comedic tragedy, and of course it is, partly because PUAs are typically socially awkward nerds who don’t know how to build community, but mostly because they’re hyper-sensitive to social dynamics and hyper-obsessed with status.

I’ve read that cats and rabbits coexist peacefully despite one being a predator and the other prey. For cats, to groom is understood to be dominant behavior; for rabbits to be groomed is—so the cat grooms the rabbit and everyone is happy. But I guess this is impossible if you all go for the same girls and read the same Real Social Dynamics pieces about Stylemogging.

I’m reminded of this excerpt from BLAP’s essay on characteristics of scenes and villages:

[E]very scene suffers from the absence of the traits it selects against. The paucity of old people and children is common across most scenes. But each has its own vices, too. A common one is an undersupply of people who serve as social glue; scenes are often peopled by nerds or quasi-nerds, because they so heavily reward singleminded intensity of interest. But failure modes abound. An artsy or anarchist scene can end up unable to organize or coordinate groups or maintain physical infrastructure. A libertarian scene that prizes independence can fail to achieve the communitarian ties required for people to coexist in peace. A tech scene can throw party after party with no music, the vibe foundering for lack of the two or three hyperextroverts needed to imbue a gathering with life. A leftist scene bringing together all the most conscientious activists can collapse under internal policing.

A PUA scene involutes under the weight of everyone AMOGing each other.

Near the end of the book, when Strauss’s two-year-long sex binge finally lands him a girlfriend, the quest arises as to whether he needed game to get her.

She rolled me off her, so that we were facing each other on our sides, our faces an inch apart. “You don’t need to take their advice,” she said, her breath intoxicating and intoxicated. “Everything I like about you, and everything that makes me think you’re rad, is all the stuff you already had before you met those PUA guys. I don’t want you wearing dumbass jewelry and Pee-wee Herman shoes. I would have liked you before all that self-improvement shit.”

From outside, we heard the sounds of men climbing the hill, flush with the excitement of another night out almost getting laid. “All the things you learned from the PUAs almost made us not come together,” Lisa continued. “I want you to just be Neil: balding, nerdy, glasses, and all.”

In the text, Strauss ends up with a kind of compromise conclusion: what Lisa likes about him is his nerdiness, but it took all of the self-improvement shit in order for him to have the confidence for them to get to know each other.

My read is somewhat more cynical. I think that people generally don’t understand the reasons why they like things, and that more often than not the cause is other than what they attribute their liking to.

Maybe this will be clear with an example. I used to live near Alamo Square, in SF. Alamo square is a beautiful park on an SF hilltop with gorgeous views of the city, large Monterey cypresses, and, for much of the year, the fog melting overhead as it dissolves on its flow westward across the city. The thing that draws tourists to Alamo Square is that the Painted Ladies, a row of colorful Victorian houses, one of which was the fictional setting of 90s TV show Full House. These tourists can often be overheard remarking on how beautiful the houses are, but I don’t buy it. My belief is that it’s the cityscape and the trees and the fog’s melting that are what really make the experience beautiful, and that the houses, as the most salient, discrete aspect of the park, get the credit. Maybe you need the houses there to get people to remark on the beauty, but they’re not its cause.

Here’s Amy Chua in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

In imparting these lessons to the girls, I’d constantly remember things my own parents had said to me. “Be modest, be humble, be simple,” my mother used to chide. “The last shall come first.” What she really meant of course was, “Make sure you come in first so that you have something to be humble about.”

And I think, similarly... make sure you get the girl, so she can believe she likes you for your balding, dimpled head.1

As I was reading the book, the thing that seemed least appealing to me about being a PUA the apparent repetitiveness of it all. Evidently, if you’re committed to maximizing throughput, you basically need to memorize a bunch of routines and apply them over and over again.

Strauss mentions, but doesn’t deeply interrogate, a few aspects of his experience of being a PUA that are related. He does mention that it feels rote; he also says that the use of canned lines creates a feeling of separation between himself and the character that he plays for women.

But, on reflection, I’m not sure that these criticisms are sound. Most of the things that people do for fun are repetitive. Think: chess, tennis, swing dance, League of Legends, running, mediation, teaching, jigsaw puzzles, swimming, cooking—most people who spend their time doing anything at all spend it in repetitive ways.

In fact, the primary substitute to sleeping around, being in a relationship, is also often very repetitive. As ava says, this is a major challenge:

I believe that romantic relationships are really difficult because you are trying to surprise and delight someone over a long period of time, and most people don’t really have the attention span or the stamina for that. Or, honestly, the psychological acuity. And it’s not just about dedication to the person—over a long time, in order to be interesting, you have to keep pulling from the external world. Like how you want to arrive at lunch with your best friends saying: Guys. You will not believe the gossip I have for you. You have to remain generative in order to keep things interesting.

For all of these activities, presumably including PUA, the repetitiveness is countered by growth and a changing relationship to the activity. Growth is the most legible, like an increasing ELO score in chess. Changing relationships are usually mediated by an increased sensitivity to and appreciation for differences between different instances of the activity, like a finer sense for the contribution of different spices to the flavors of different meals. And, with enough presence, any can become a flow activity—like breathing meditation.

Anyway, now I’ve convinced myself that the least appealing thing about pickup would be having your social life be PUAs and party girls.

The solution he found was to start an anonymous blog in which he could try out new perspectives and personas. With the only expectation being a self-imposed one to get words on paper, he was able to disregard the pressures he felt at the main blog and get ideas out more freely. He calls it his trash blog.

I'm already anonymous. I don't have an audience (I think I have literally 0 subscribers at the time of writing). I make my livelihood in other ways. And yet, I still find myself blocked by the desire to represent myself well through my writing. And, perhaps like Henrik, this has prevented me from writing a number of pieces that I would love to have written—pieces where the ideas now feel old and tired because my excitement for them has passed.

The irony is that, in not writing more often, my ability to write well atrophies. So it's time I treated this like a trash blog. To set expectations for myself, here is what I plan:

• They're to be thought of as "pieces", not "essays"— viz. "incomplete part", not "determined attempt"

• More frequent writing (2+ pieces / mo)

• Shorter pieces, similar to or shorter than this one

• Only two rounds of editing allowed

And that's it! Trash here we come.

If you don’t want to read this whole thing, the suggestion you’re least likely to find elsewhere is to put a dehumidifier set to 45% RH in the closet you store your clothing and sheets in.

If you do read this whole thing and have questions or suggestions for additional tips, please reach out. As you can tell, I’m desperate.

Facts about dust mites

I’ll get to the tips and tricks in a second, but first it’ll be helpful to know some things about dust mites and the allergens they produce. Unfortunately, I’ve lost my reference to the paper that I distilled this information from, so you’ll have to take it on faith :)

1. Dust mites are microscopic arthropods that consume microorganisms and shed human skin.

2. Dust mite allergies are triggered by proteins in mite carcasses and mite feces.

3. Dust mites are well-adapted to environments that are suitable for humans, and especially thrive in warm, humid environments.

4. At 72F and 70% relative humidity (RH), dust mite populations grow enough to trigger (my) allergy symptoms within 2-3 days.

5. Dust mites don't grow well below 50% RH.

6. Dust mites can survive continuously low humidity for weeks, can survive low humidity indefinitely with as little as 1.5 hr/d of elevated humidity, and can reproduce with as little as 3 hr/d of elevated humidity.

7. Porous materials that come into extended contact with humans, like clothing, bedding, and upholstered furniture, are microenvironments with mite food sources (shed skin) and elevated humidity relative to the ambient environment.

8. Porous materials with pore size smaller than 10 μm block the passage of dust mite allergens.

9. Dust mite allergens readily become airborne with disturbances, but settle within 15 minutes.

10. Dust mite allergens are removed from fabric by standard detergents by hot- but not cold-water laundering.

11. Benzyl benzoate (Acaryl) and Allersearch's proprietary ADMS can be added to cold-water wash to remove mite allergens.

12. Tea tree, eucalyptus, and cinnamon essential oils, and tannic acid repel and kill dust mites.

13. Some people (me) with dust mite allergies experience cross-reactions to the following triggers. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list.

    1. Other arthropods, most notably crustaceans.

    2. Mite-contaminated flour. This is known as oral mite anaphylaxis or, colloquially, pancake syndrome.

    3. Salicylates, especially in asprin and spices. This is known as salicylate sensitivity, or sometimes aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease (AERD).

Taken together, these paint a picture where, except in arid climates, dust mites are ubiquitous and their allergens are especially concentrated in bedding, clothing, upholstery, and carpeting. Because allergens produced by dust mites persist if dust mites leave (and are generated when they die), effective strategies for allergen abatement emphasize preventing dust mite growth. However, because of their ubiquity, some amount of allergen removal is typically required.

Techniques for managing allergies

The following is a list of strategies to reduce exposure and response to dust mite allergens, ordered from 'change the environment' to 'change yourself'. Unless you're willing to move to the Rockies, you'll realistically have take action down the list.

Some of these are elaborated after this list; most are not. If there’s any that you’d like more detail on, reach out and I’ll write it up.

1. Prevent dust mite growth

   1. Live in a dry environment

   2. Store fabrics in a dehumidified closet

   3. Use insect repellants/acaricidals (cautiously)

2. Elimiate habitable environments

   1. Replace fabric with non-porous alternatives where possible

   2. Use mite-unfriendly fabrics where necessary

   3. Replace carpets with hard surface flooring

   4. Avoid exposed brick, unfinished wood, and other rough surfaces

3. Remove dust mite allergens

   1. Launder clothing and bedding frequently with an anti-allegen detergent

   2. Vacuum, mop, and dust frequently

4. Occlude dust mite allergens

   1. Encase bedding in small pore-size covers

   2. Wear a mask (/ respirator)

   3. Use a filtered CPAP machine

5. Ameliorate symptoms

   1. Reduce inflammation

   2. Take antihistamines (intermittently)

6. Try immunotherapy

Live in a dry environment

Controlling relative humidity is the most straightforward way to prevent dust mite growth: if the humidity is continuously below 50%, dust mites won't grow. The simplest way to achieve this is to live in a desert or at high altitude.

At baseline, the absolute humidity indoors matches the absolute humidity outdoors, and the relative humidity is determined by that absolute humidity and the indoor temperature. Various activities perturb the indoor humidity, e.g. showering and cooking raise it; traditional AC (ie not evaporative cooling) lowers it.

The relationship between temperature, absolute humidity (I'll use "dew point" interchangeably), and relative humidity is non-linear, but one data point to keep in mind is that the relative humidity is 50% at a temperature of 70F and a dew point of 50F. As the absolute humidity increases, the relative humidity increases; as the temperature increases, the relative humidity decreases.

To give a sense for which cities support this strategy: Colorado is well known for not supporting dust mite growth. US East coast cities are especially bad during the summer. San Francisco is known to be bad for dust mite allergy sufferers, in part because its poorly-insulated houses run cold, which increases the relative humidity.

If you’re curious about seasonal dew point variation in your location, find a weather station near you on the Weather Underground and look at the history for that station. If you're curious about whether a particular combination of dew point and indoor temperature will support dust mite growth, you can use this dew point calculator.

A word of caution: places that are dry enough to entirely preempt dust mite growth are also dry enough for efficient household cooling via evaporative ("swamp") coolers. These increase indoor humidity enough to moot the benefit of living in a dry environment.

Store fabrics in a dehumidified closet

Even if ambient indoor humidity can't be kept low enough to prevent dust mite growth, it's often still possible to create pockets of low humidity to store particularly dust mite-sensitive objects, especially bedding and clothing.

Closets with hinged, single-piece doors make ideal spaces for this: with a little weather stripping, low capacity dehumidifiers are enough to keep the space sufficiently dry. I use a combination of silicone door seal and rubber weatherseal tape, and a 22 pint dehumidifer. This dehumidifier comparison chart may be helpful.

The reason this technique makes such a big difference is that, in humid conditions, dust mites grow even in fabric that hasn't been used since laundering, and can produce enough allergens to trigger a response within a few days. Keeping a dehumidified closet allows you to delay the starting of that countdown until you're ready to put the sheets on your bed (or clothing on your body) without having to launder on immediately before changing them.

I don't recommend applying this dehumidifier approach to entire households, because it's just too hard to maintain humidity differentials between indoors and ourdoors. This has been formally tried and results were underwhelming (I lost the link to this paper, too).

Use insect repellants/acaricidals (cautiously)

I mentioned six substances that repel and/or kill dust mites: tea tree oil, eucalyptus oil, cinnamon oil, tannic acid, benzyl benzoate, and Allersearch’s ADMS.

Unfortunately, all six of these are respiratory irritants (and tannic acid turns things brown). Benzyl benzoate in particular is noxious and not recommended. My sense from unrigorous experimentation is that the Allersearch formulations work as advertised and are less irritating than the other options on the list.

Replace fabric with non-porous alternatives where possible

Some suggestions:

• Wood flooring instead of carpet

• Waxed cotton, leather, or synthetic material for outerwear

• Leather or synthetic material for couches

• Wood or plastic for blinds, instead of curtains

Use mite-unfriendly fabrics

In order to qualify as mite-unfriendly, fabric must (1) have a small pore size and (2) be amenable to frequent washing. It’s difficult to get pore size estimates for fabrics; a good proxy to use is water resistance. Random notes about specific fabrics:

• Technical clothing is often a good choice.

• Of common yardage fabrics, ticking fabric is the most tightly-woven, followed by percale.

• Wool is often billed as mite-unfriendly, because some properties of the fibers slow dust mite growth, but the fact that most wools shouldn’t be washed frequently in a machine has taken it out of my wardrobe.

• Denim is, unfortunately, very mite-friendly.

Vacuum, mop, and dust frequently

This type of cleaning is, annoyingly, important to do on a regular basis to keep allergen load low.

I don’t recommend robot vacuum cleaners: the side brushes they use to move debris into the path of the vacuum kick a lot of dust up, and the whole robot inevitably becomes toxic with dust. My current strategy is to use a HEPA vacuum with a large enough dust bin that it’s not a big deal to ask a friend without allergies to empty it very, very occasionally.

I’ve gone through a few mops in the past few years, and I’ve found this youtuber’s recommendations (in the description of the linked video) agreeable. Using disposable microfiber mop pads does feel a bit wasteful, though.

Encase bedding in small pore-size covers

This includes mattress encasement, pillow encasement, and comforter encasements. Mattress and pillow encasements marketed specifically for allergy sufferers are common, but I’ve had more trouble sourcing the comforter encasements recently. The company I used to purchase from, National Allergy, seemed to start having some issue with their stock. The best option here may be to purchase cotton ticking (or maybe percale) fabric yourself and sew it into comforter encasement.

Reduce inflammation

The challenge here is that allergen exposure worsens systemic inflammatory status, and systemic inflammation worsense allergy symptoms.

Look, it’s well understood that diet and lifestyle have a large effect on inflammatory status. I’m not going to recommend a specific approach to diet, because that seems to be the most reliable incantation to summon angry internet hordes (or maybe that’s how to get this blog to go viral??)

Take antihistamines (intermittently)

Antihistamines can be helpful for relieving upper respiratory symptoms, but they aren’t ideal, because tolerance is developed in less than a week and tolerance transfers between antihistamines. They also exacerbate some of my other health issues (POTS), so I forego them entirely these days.

If you do want to keep some around for the occasional intervention, it can be helpful to have Desloratidine or one of the other strong, fast acting ones on hand.

Try immunotherapy

I don’t know much about immunotherapy (it wasn’t a good fit for me when I tried it), but it’s been transformative for some friends. In the past few years, the option has been introduced to do immunotherapy by taking daily pills (instead of weekly shots), which makes it much more accessible.

This concert's program featured a selection of pieces by J.S. Bach and his extended family: Johann, Johann Christoph, Tobias Friedrich, Wilhelm Friedemann, C.P.E., and Johann Christoph Friedrich.

This is, obviously, a lot of Bachs, and nobody in the choir was familiar with all of them. My theory is that our artistic director got some negative feedback from the choir for last autumn's program's diversity — it included Appalachian, Samoan, Sephardic, and Romani music, as well as some jazz — and decided to spite our closed-mindedness by stuffing as many Bachs into one program as she could.

Honestly, I didn't mind, voluminous German text notwithstanding. We all like this music; it’s why we joined the Bach(s) choir. For a taste, here are recordings of a few of the pieces we sang:

• J.S. Bach - Lobet den Herrn

• Johann Bach (likely) - Weint nicht um meinem Tod

• C.P.E. Bach - Et misericordia eius

Preparation

The autumn concert rehearsal period is only 6 weeks, and it always feels rushed for me. Unfortunately, that was exacerbated this round by some work-related stress. Readers will know that my health isn't great, and working ~50 hour weeks, feeding myself, and keeping my apartment clean are about all I can manage during our hot Indian summers. Note that “studying Bach choir repertoire” isn’t included in the list.

The truth is that the way I’d learned rep in previous sessions wasn’t very good. The approach was:

1. Split the material into 4-12 measure chunks

2. Practice hearing the notes in my mind, using Anki to schedule review

3. When I felt very confident about the notes, add the text

This is a great way to learn the notes very well (i.e. by heart), but it requires a lot of practice time per measure, and neglects most of the challenges of singing — producing pure vowels and crisp consonants with precise intonation and expressive dynamics, all while staying relaxed and keeping the breath flowing.

So it’s probably a blessing that I didn’t have the time for my Anki note study routine, and instead used a more direct approach:

1. Learn the text, at least enough to comfortably recite it

2. Record myself playing sections of my part on the piano, and sing along with these.

Learning the notes is easier, because I just copy the piano, and I can more quickly see what will be vocally challenging about any given line and address it.

A mature version of this approach would involve recording all the parts of each song into a DAW, then singing my part in relation to various combinations of them, to get a clear understanding of the harmonies. I won’t do that for the upcoming concert, but it’s something to work towards in time.

The concert

For me, at this stage of my relationship with choral singing, a concert is successful to the extent that I accomplish two things:

1. Don't make the choir sound bad

2. Feel emotionally engaged in the music

For a given level of preparation, these two goals are in-line with each other. On any given day, the primary factor in determining the quality of my rhythm and intonation is my health is, and it also determines the extent to which I'm able to feel the music. On a good day, I can have crisp timing and precise intonation, and I've been known to choke up during a show; on bad days I slip out of tune and out of time and feel numb besides.

Unfortunately, the concert took place at the end of a heat wave, and it was rather hot in the church day-of, which I don’t tolerate very well. By the time the concert started it was a struggle just to hold on. I think I sang ok, but it’s disappointing to work towards a concert for more than a month and then have the experience degraded by a random late-October heat wave.

Nevertheless, thanks to Magen and the rest of the choir. I’m already looking forward to the next one in December.