The Couch 115: Corduroy Pillows Are Making Headlines!

Ellahmae, thanks - it is hard to know what to do re body stuff. Maybe I should talk to my T about it.

Sorry to hear it's difficult to have spouse around. I can sympathise to some extent - for instance I rather dislike the fact that today is a holiday, because, you know. Holidays. Takes all the fun out of it being Monday.

So I'm about one or two or three Hobbits, depending. That seems about right!

I've been reading up on it a bit because my whole life, physical exercise has made me feel worse but I've been told that it should make me feel better. From what I understand (and I'm a layman here so I may have misunderstood things) it's pretty much a genetic luck of the draw: exercise releases a bunch of hormones, and if you're lucky those horrmones will include things like endorphines and oxytocin, but for some of us it's mostly cortisol (which is necessary to keep the body moving, but it causes feelings of stress in the brain). Something like that, anyway. I don't think there is very much research on it which annoys me because just as you say it does affect a lot of people. And being told that it will actually make us feel better, and not being believed when we say it doesn't, makes it worse. Seriously - if everybody felt a sense of well-being and/or additional energy when they exercised, surely more or less everybody would do it? Humans are suckers for immediate gratification, after all.

I know that exercise will make me usually feel good after about the first few minutes. Walking makes me feel really good.

Exercise wipes me out (exhaustion, not endorphins) and seriously affects my cognitive capacity for a while (like I can barely string a few sentences together), not to mention really screws up my sleep.

I still force myself to do it because else, it feels like my muscle strength just deteriorates rapidly.

Guess I need to start thinking up a new couch name and intro with all the czars....

Dancing with the.... ?

I like that one better than the one I just came up with!

I feel worse when I exercise. Aerobic exercise can lead to a panic attack for me, which is something my T found rather fascinating when I first told her about it. But H likes to exercise and says I need to do more of it (true). For him, it's energizing, so he doesn't understand that it makes me feel worse and much more exhausted than it makes him. And in the summer heat? Even worse...

Yoga (the non-hot kind!) can be OK for me though. I should get back into that.

I'm lucky that H doesn't care. He probably thinks I should exercise, and he really doesn't believe that it makes me feel worse, but he's not interested enough in what I do to mention it to me.

That is positively brills!

Aw. It's not my own, tho. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...1447fb692c.jpg

Hi couch
Anyone want to come walk the dog with me? It's v lovely out

I'd like to walk the dog with you! It is nice out. So sunny and not too hot. Perfect!

First we need to determine how to spell czar.

Czar?
Csar?
Tzar?
Tsar?

Crocus - can you explain this a bit better?

The 'ts' spelling is a transliteration of the Russian 'царь', but the 'cz' spelling is what interests me more. To me it looks Polish, where 'cz' is common, but is pronounced as English 'ch'. Where did this second form come from?

Agreed - I've always known the english way to be Czar and Russian Tsar, however... I'm not an expert on spelling/languages.

I think English may prefer the C because the word derives from Caesar.

Well, "czar" and "tsar" are both correct English spellings... I did not know the background of the weird spelling "czar" (it is weird!) but I found this: The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories . (I hope the link points to page 129 where the explanation is.)

I lean towards the 'tsar' spelling, I believe. That page was great - thanks

Yes, and starting a word with "ts" is against English spelling conventions (though there are other loan words that have it, like the annoying tse tse fly). But of course "cz" almost doesn't exist at all in English, so there is that. Some sources say that British English favours "tsar" over "czar" but I don't know whether that is really the case.

So on the new couch should it be czar or tsar ..... If it was up to me I'd do tsar but....

I vote for tsar

We are tso tsmart!

Except of course you could not vote for the tsars. But you know what I mean.

<-- not a crown such as the tsars had, but at least a funny-looking hat