• hydrate it by drinking lots of water

• eat dark chocolate and blueberries and walnuts and salmon and other foods high in antioxidants!!

• play little brain games on your phone; I like wordconenct! anything that makes you think!

• read books. It’s simple but necessary. Even better - join a book club, or read with a friend, so you can have discussions after. This will improve your reading comprehension.

• do puzzles - it doesnt have to be sudoku, I love playing Beat Saber on the Oculus Rift because it makes my brain have to match colorful patterns to physical movements very quickly!

• learn a new dance - even a tik tok trendy dance. Learning new dance moves are proven to strengthen synapses!!

• go bird watching, or foraging, or anything outdoors that requires you to explore pattern recognition and visual searching

• watch a movie with the intent of analysis - this is best done with a cinephile friend!! talk about tropes and symbolism and character growth

• cross stitch, or sew, or do anything that requires matching nimble hand movements to patterns

• play or learn an instrument!

• develop a consistent sleep schedule (or as close to consistent as you can get!)

• when eating, try to identify the ingredients and flavors you’re perceiving!

"i know your pizza order" "you have freckles on your ears" "you make this face when you're tired" "you order green tea on a good day black on a bad day" "you always make that face before you try something" "the tips of your ears turn red when you're angry" "i knew you'd say something" "you must be exhausted to miss the class" "your favorite pie is pumpkin, right?" "i know your phone number, don't worry" "you miss me, i can tell" "you fiddle with your pens when you're bored" "you don't like converse unless they're high tops" "your favorite cereal is cinnamon toast crunch and you first ate it when you were 8"

And you know what’s even sadder than that? If you’re making $40,000 a year, then you’re making almost FOUR TIMES what it takes to be considered above the poverty line in the United States. If a CEO is having a particularly diarrhea-rific afternoon, he can make that amount while taking his daily shits. Throughout the day, in the time it takes for one (average!) CEO to unzip his $1,000 business pants, sit on his ivory toilet seat, take a diamond-encrusted crap, and wipe his ass with Louis Vuitton toilet paper, he’ll have earned an entire year’s salary for someone at the poverty line.

Add to that the fact that if you’re at the poverty line in the United States, you’re still richer than almost 85% of the rest of the world. Your income is more than 8 times the global average. Roughly 2.5 billion people in the world survive off less than $2 per day. These 2.5 billion people, one third of the world’s population, earn $730 per year, tops. The average CEO will earn that every 5 minutes.

Y'all, it’s only Day 1, and things are looking GRAVE AF. Today Trump re-instated a law that will kill thousands of women – and I am not exaggerating here. He did this 2 DAYS after the women’s march, surrounded by a group of smirking old dudes. Lovely. The policy is called the “Global Gag Rule”.

Here’s what you need to know:

The Global Gag Rule bans health organizations around the world from receiving US funding if they so much as *mention* abortion. The organizations are also banned from providing abortion services – even though other funding sources, like donations, are used to pay for them. (The Helms Amendment bans the use of US funds for abortion abroad.)  The GGR is not a budget cut, it is a special stipulation for funding targeting reproductive health organizations specifically.

As you might imagine, this policy puts international health centers in a very difficult position. They either lose funding for things like STI screenings and birth control, or they leave patients seeking an abortion to do it on their own.

We saw the devastating impact of this policy when President Bush signed it into effect in 2001. Take Ethiopia, where unsafe abortion is the second-leading cause of death (after HIV/AIDS). Organizations there decided they could not turn women away, and thusly experienced a massive birth control supply crisis as punishment. 16 other countries also saw US donations of contraceptives and condoms abruptly cut off.

I know it’s not their thing, but the GOP desperately needs to put on their thinking caps here. What happens when you cut off birth control access? Oh yes! More people get pregnant! And what happens when you cut off safe access to abortion services? Oh, right. People die. Every year 50,000 women die from a lack of access to safe abortion. The last time the GGR went into effect, the abortion rate INCREASED. There are literally 90 katrillion studies showing that banning abortion *does not stop abortion from happening*, it just means they happen in dangerous conditions. That’s a fact. And, at least to this chick, facts still matter.

Then there are the effects that GGR has on HIV/AIDS prevention efforts. In some of the communities affected by the rule, HIV infects as many as 1 in 4 people.

Overall, this is a law that has well documented effects of death and destruction. On what fking planet is this policy “pro life”? I’m pissed, naturally. It’s unbelievable (well, not really) that our government would put women around the world in this much danger FOR LITERALLY NO REASON. Seriously – WTF?? I will not stand for it, and I hope you’ll join me in sending a vocal NOPE to our leaders.

This week, Senator Gillibrand and Senator Shaheen are introducing bi-partisan legislation to permanently REPEAL the Global Gag Rule. They are calling it “HER Act”. It’s unclear to me what is possible given that we have a 1-party government now, but given that lives are on the line, I am going to do what I can to fight back at every turn.