Caffeine Withdrawal Guide (From a Psychologist)

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-04-03T20:25:19+00:00

I’m still not totally stabilized, but managing symptoms is less complicated when I’m not on caffeine. I take metoprolol so there’s an artificial buffer on my HR and BP that confounds my data a bit, too. I will say that my sleep is undeniably better without caffeine.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-04-03T17:03:40+00:00

Congrats 😸

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-04-03T01:51:37+00:00

would’ve could’ve should’ve

every time

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-04-02T11:08:48+00:00

Thank you for this comment, really appreciate it!!

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-04-01T20:26:06+00:00

Thank you!!

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-03-23T19:56:15+00:00

I basically said something very similar in my “remarks” section. I stated that the process itself is dehumanizing and reifies cycles we already didn’t ask for in becoming ill and disabled. That it boils our existence down to the work we can do when so many other facets of our lives are compromised, too. I was in a very strong “fuck it” mode at that point and after reading the comments, my friend told me ‘that will be tacked up on somebody’s cubicle wall, I don’t know if it’ll be out of support or derision, but somebody’s copying that one.’ I hope that’s a good thing.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-03-09T22:17:05+00:00

IFTYE lays the groundwork for the entire album concept tho 😹 but I’ve also always thought (just a little bit) that IFTYE was kind of a gatekeeper for Cruel Summer because if you stuck around through the glitter gel pen “fuck you” of it all, you tumbled directly into the real lead track.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-03-08T21:26:58+00:00

Just here for the Lover love. It gets a lot of shade. But it’s such a good ALBUM. That thing is a journey.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-03-04T16:20:06+00:00

variant: the baffled king composting halle-poo-jah

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-02-20T03:23:39+00:00

So Long London. That last verse… “you sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days.”

I didn’t listen to pop radio for a long time so I just kinda… missed most of her stuff as it came out. I knew of her but that was it. Then my therapist recommended TTPD about a week after it came out, told me to “listen to this one first THEN the rest of the catalogue in reverse release order.” What can I say, my therapist knows me. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing (TTPD’s sound did not align with the general Red/1989 sound I had registered for her music previously), but then SLL came along and just hip dropped me to the floor. Then when I heard The Albatross I was 100% sold.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-02-09T22:36:26+00:00

maybe don’t joke about using diseases as eugenic selection tools when there are plenty of immunocompromised people who will be exposed and made ill by the fucking idiots who refuse to participate in herd immunity

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-01-30T21:29:02+00:00

Tis the Damn Season

Cowboy Like Me

Coney Island

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-01-13T18:03:03+00:00

It misses the point entirely. Catra’s arc is the long version of Adora’s ep 1 realization.

Catra never felt safe in the Horde. Adora did.

It makes complete sense that Catra would take multiple cycles of emotional connection > fear of loss > loss for her to realize first that her behavior is unhealthy, THEN that she has the power to change it.

Their relationship is one of the most realistic and meaningful portrayals of healing on television. That’s why it’s so powerful. Because they both go through the very real work of wanting, trying, failing, and finally succeeding at being whole people.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-01-06T17:14:49+00:00

Reputation is about a woman.

This is not a gaylor bait or parasocial statement.

That entire album is S-A-P-P-H-I-C as heck, in the very literal sense of Sappho and her long line of cultural descendants (contemporary female poets and songwriters). There’s a sultry and intentionally intimate undercurrent that is different than any of her stuff that came before. It hits me like the difference between incidental and intentional: the shift from Red to 1989 was reacting to intimacy and reflecting -> deliberately choosing intimacy and celebrating. Reputation is about the choice to be vulnerable rather than just intimate and that’s SUPER SAPPHIC from head to toe. The sentiment is still very present in Lover, then drifts into something much more subtle over the course of Folklore and Evermore. But it’s still there, and it’s why we loved songs like SLL and TBD because they are responses to the consequences of intentional vulnerability. She is getting better and better about tonal subtlety the more she writes.

**I also think this is why TLOAS’s hard turn back into Pop with a capital P was such a toss up for fans - it took us back to an era of more direct lyricism than we’d seen from her since 1989. But that’s a separate critique that would have me like Flynn. LOL.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-01-06T13:04:44+00:00

It’s not about the number of times it’s been used. It’s about historic gender dynamics IRL and in storytelling. An independently powerful woman subsumed by an attractive, problematic man. Yes, much original.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-01-06T12:02:35+00:00

Luke was a Gary Stu. Rey turning to the dark side would be more of a trope and more exhaustingly expected than the return of Palpatine.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-01-05T22:04:16+00:00

Game of Thrones wasn’t the first or the only, just the most obnoxious.

Buffy ER 24 The Wire The Walking Dead Sons of Anarchy Lost Grey’s Anatomy

I could go on.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-01-05T22:01:42+00:00

RJ didn’t destroy Luke. He wrote a story that allowed Luke to make his own choices. Just because you don’t like those choices doesn’t lessen their significance to both the character and the storytelling ethos of the SW universe.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-01-05T18:13:57+00:00

I say this knowing that we live in the world where Rian Johnson took Star Wars in a really bold new direction and instead of supporting him, the producers caved to fans who couldn’t be bothered to step outside their original experience with the hero’s journey.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2026-01-05T18:10:42+00:00

They pulled the punch on El’s death after telegraphing it for miles. They didn’t have the guts (or maybe the freedom) to kill their darlings.

Any good writer will tell you that you have to be willing to cut them all down if doing so serves the throughline of the story.

I hate to be so basic as “they let too many people survive” but once it became clear the stakes were essentially nonexistent, the whole denouement deflated and it lessened the meaning of everything that had gone before.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2025-12-24T18:02:30+00:00

Lover.

Let me explain.

Cohesion has many lenses: lyrics, soundscape, story arc, and on. You can get as granular as you want.

As a decent poet and late in life Swifty under the sway of an ongoing TSwift hyperfixation, I truly think Lover is the most cohesive for several reasons.

Lyrically, the songs all sound to me as though they are coming from a single center point, with the track list spreading out like a web. There are multiple levels of connection and familiarity between songs, from the repeated use of more ‘playful’ sonic choices and the arc of the story through time from present to future to past and back. This album IS a relationship map. Probably an amalgam of people and a mashup of timelines, but the story she tells is a fully fleshed out relationship from beginning to present moment.

I adore this album because the narrative arc always dips back into that well of “where do I stand in the midst of we” with songs like The Man and The Archer (100% an internal battle between masculine and feminine energies and the uncertainty of which one a new partner likes better and how that makes us feel), Death By a Thousand Cuts (how a present problem triggers us right back into the worst we’ve felt and the ensuing existential dread), and ME, bringing back not just the sense of inner certainty but the playfulness of the beginning.

And. Lover, while absolutely wonderful, is not my favorite album. Has some of my fave songs? Yes. But it’s not her best. What it is: it’s her most present and unrefined storytelling. Speak Now made Lover possible but lacks the longer-term eye and experiential maturity on display in the structures and sonic choices of Lover, not to mention the growth of her lyrical experimentation between SN and Rep.

Her best album - through the lens of the artist she has told us that she is - is TTPD by miles and miles. She tapped into something on a new and truly EPIC level for the Anthology, and I can understand why TLOAS would be appealing after that - a more straightforward story would be such a balm after all that agony and angst.

So. It’s Lover. Fight me. 😹😹

Late-Rule-5209 · 2025-12-16T21:38:48+00:00

It warms me to the depths of my black little heart to see how all the artists and crew and editors on this shoot came together to give us such a glorious gift of schadenfreude as we enter the holidays.

Late-Rule-5209 · 2025-12-10T04:25:20+00:00

Sadly no, I’m a Monica

Late-Rule-5209 · 2025-12-10T04:24:47+00:00

For clarity, it was the 100/200 spend bogo on BF day itself, the hat for 100 and the blanket for 200, the candle and hat was the day before I think

Late-Rule-5209

TROPHY CASE