Leahpeah : flawed but authentic

After much discussion here on my blog, within myself, with Joe, with people in my family and some of my friends, I decided to go ahead and sign up. It makes the most sense for me since the patches are working for me and there are other people that want to sign up under me. I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m now a member of an MLM.

From inside sources, I now know that the distribution system is something that in the future they are planning on changing in some way so that the patches get through as what they are instead of part of some money-making scheme. I so look forward to that. But in the meantime, I’m happy to have access for myself and anyone else that would like to try them.

Part of what was discussed here from Sassy, a friend whom I respect, was that, ‘the LifeWave website says that nothing enters the body – that transmittance is via “the human magnetic field”… so this is in the same category as the copper bracelet and other such life-changing pseudoscience.’ I think I initially agreed with this thought, which caused me some angst as I struggled to explain to myself how I felt better using them and how I actually felt something happening ‘inside’ which made no sense if there is really nothing going on inside those patches that interacts within me. I mean, if there is no connection between the two, then it has to be just a placebo effect. Only, I knew it was more than just that.

So, first I researched nanotechnology. Is it a real science? I guess if The University of Cambridge is working with Advance Nanotech, Inc. to create an electron beam lithography (EBL) tool and Burlington CEO George Henderson is using it in his textile business and Wired has all these articles about it, especially this one about Ray Kurzweil, then I guess I’ll take it seriously as a real science. Next I’m going to study exactly how the energy fields work so I know exactly what is going on between me and the patches.

I’m the kind of person that tends to overanalyze and over scrutinize and look for the hidden agenda. I’m sure that the people that created Lifewave patches are trying to make a profit. But if the product works, isn’t that fair? And since I don’t mind paying them for a product that is improving my life, I don’t mind representing it. But I truly can’t wait until the structure of distribution is changed.

Also, leahpeah reader Ray commented, ‘The Lifewave people lay claim to all kinds of college research, double blind testing and such, and there is also supposed to be newspaper articles that have been done about this product, but when you do an on line search you come up completely empty handed.’ A totally valid thought. So, I tested it and found these:

Physician.com
Lifewave
Esquire
San Fransisco Chronicle
Santa Cruz Sentinel
Cycling Innovations
Energy Rich

Some are all pro Lifewave and some are con and some are both. But, there does seem to be some validity to them.

**UPDATE**

If you’d like to try the patches or want more info, find the link to the right or click here.

I’m so sad to see this. I loved shooting photos and doing interviews for North when I lived in San Diego. They are/were a great bunch of people.

If you are into the Plan of Salvation, and you know you are, here’s a diagram taken straight off the chalkboard from my sister’s Sunday School Lesson for the 11 year old class. Didn’t she do a great job?? Rhoda is The Rad.

I don’t do Mormon church anymore for me. I don’t believe most of what they teach. But I find myself there with my kids or in this case, my sister. Consequently, I am not the proud owner of any ‘callings’ where I get to inflict my version of religion on young, impressionable minds. I can’t even remember the last time I was in one of the Primary classrooms with the young’uns, let alone teaching the class. My sister, on the other hand, is a regular teacher and she does it with flair. Notice the nice arrow points every which way. And I must admit that even I learned something new. THAT is how good a teacher she is.

My favorite part of the class were the kids. Two of the boys seemed to have a prior rival situation going long before last Sunday. Kid #1 was pretty traditional in that he likes monster trucks and video games. He had the ‘jock laugh’ down pat and I even saw him wink at one of the girls in the class. Let’s call him Brad Pitt. The 2nd kid sat with his legs crossed and was more introspective and serious. I loved him immediately. He had interesting things to say in a very deliberate tone about dragons, lizards, how much money he has in the bank with which to buy said lizard and carried with him an aura of feeling just a little bit better and smarter than everyone else in the room. Let’s call him John Malkovich. Here’s is just a sample of the way things were:

Rhoda: So, you can see right here that if you were righteous and made good choices, you go across this arrow and end up over here.
B.P.: I can’t believe you like lizards.
Rhoda: Please don’t be distracting.
J.M.: I can’t believe you like video games.
Rhoda: Please don’t be distracting.
B.P.: You’re so weird.
Rhoda: Please don’t be distracting. And so if you chose only kind of good things on earth, then you’re probably going to end here. (draws arrow)
J.M.: (under his breath) You will die.
B.P.: Shut up. (laughs)
Rhoda: Please don’t be distracting. Who knows where you end up if you make the wrong choices?
J.M.: The day of your apocalypse is coming nigh.
Rhoda: Please don’t be distracting. Anyone know? Ok. I’ll tell you.

After which she proceeded to fill out the majority of the picture above peppered with please don’t be distracting comments, one occasion of J.M. messing with the window and the drapes (please don’t be distracting) and twice where he ‘lost’ his scriptures. The second time he lost them, I offered to come sit next to him and share my sister’s with him. Suddenly, his appeared. It was magic without the Vegas. When she was finished and asked if anyone had any questions, John Malkovich raised his hand and said, ‘Sister Anderson. I believe I know of an easier to understand way to explain this entire plan that the kids will understand even better.’ Rhoda cautiously told him to go ahead. J.M. crossed his legs and said, ‘Ok. If you take 100 Skittles an-…’ at which point my sister interrupted him and said they didn’t have enough time to hear about how the 100 Skittles related to The Plan of Salvation. I was sad about that. I really wanted to know.

And then it was off to singing time, which I must say I haven’t missed. At all. The first nugget was when one girl in front of me asked if she could look it up in the ‘Tropical Guide’ instead of the Topical Guide and when the Sister giving the lessons told the kids to ‘Feel with your feelings..!’ with such an ecstatic look on her face. But the real winner got first prize for combining food issues, religious guilt and manipulation all at the same time when she told the entire body of kids that ‘only those kids that feel like they sang their very best should take a cookie and that if they took a cookie and hadn’t sung their very best, God would know it, but it was still their choice.’

Holy Cow.
I didn’t take a cookie.

I hate MLMs. Someone starts to say ‘Multi Lev–’ and that is the end of the conversation. So imagine my discomfort now that I’m using a product that is The Rad and love it. Imagine how I feel now that I want to tell everyone about it but am afraid to open my mouth since the patches themselves are so great but come along with a distribution system I don’t want to support.

It’s hard to ignore how great I feel. Dude. Anyone have any ideas? I’ve spent the past 3 or 4 days reading all kinds of papers and supporting studies as well as tons of people that call it a hoax. The main thing I noticed, though, is that almost all of the people talking bad about it had never used the patch. Also, the placebo effect isn’t far out of my mind. But there is just too much good stuff happening in my body to be all placebo. Has anyone else used the Lifewave patch?

As many of you already know, please feel free to email me if you don’t want to leave a public comment.

No kidding. A giant popsicle? Fluids everywhere?

“What was unsettling was that the fluid just kept coming,” Stuart Claxton of the Guinness Book of World Records told the Daily News. “It was quite a lot of fluid. On a hot day like this, you have to move fast.”

Ahem.

So, don’t be surprised when you see me laughing (kindly, with a slight amount of regret) at the people forced to commute to work everyday on the plain’ol freeways while I float along over everyone’s head in my flying beanbag which has a tiny hole in it along the side where the duct tape has come undone again and lets out a piddering amount of Styrofoam beads that fall gently on the roof of your car. You exclaim ‘It can’t be! We are so jealous!’ and I make it to work in 5 minutes instead of an hour.

Now I know it will happen.

a three act play

ACT I

so i called. and she’s all – you have to pay up until tomorrow since today is when you are calling in.
and i’m all – no way. we alerted you that we moved out like sometime during the first week of april, dude. and it’s not until june 17th that you write a letter? you suck.
and then she’s all – well, that is just the way it is. it’s not our fault if you make an *assumption* about the way to turn off your service with us. (and you have to say assumption with the most sarcastic tone you can think of…)
so i’m all – it’s not my fault if you make an *assumption* that people will know to call if you don’t clearly say that on your bill. let me talk to your supervisor
and she’s all – i’ll ask for you

— hold music —

ACT II

and then she’s back after like 5 minutes and goes – sorry. you gotta pay.
and i’m all – let ME talk to your sup.
and she’s all – ok
so then imagine that the whole thing above happens again, right? except i added in – if someone else lives in that apartment that is not MY NAME then you know we moved out when we said we did IN OUR LETTER to you.

ACT III

so i take her name and call the apartments.
and lisa at the apartments tells me that she’ll take care of it since someone DID move into our old place on the 16th of april.
ha.
so there.

FINALE

and she called and now we should receive an end of service statement and if we don’t, we’ll sick lisa on them again.

FIN

the end.

oh, well played. and well told.
if we had a joint blog, we would post this there.
remind me not to play chess against you.
CHECKMATE!
hoi hoi!

A woman comes out, arms loaded, fumbles her keys and almost drops them. She points the key chain at the car. Nothing happens. She clicks again and again. Meanwhile, the almost identical car next to me keeps beeping.

A man strides out, in a hurry, dragging his son. His little boy cries out in pain when his arm appears to be getting ripped out of it’s socket. The dad gets more irritated and gives his son a yank, which makes the boy fall down and cry louder. The dad pulls him to his feet, hard, looks around to see if anyone noticed, then yells, ‘Why do you always gotta fall down like that??’

A 20ish man comes out with a hotdog in one hand and a drink in the other. His mom tells him to watch out. It’s too late. Mustard squeezes out the end and a 4-inch long yellow streak goes down the front of his shirt. His mom says, ‘well, here’s the napkin I got for you – not that it’s going to do you much good now.’

A young mom pushes her bags and 2 kids up to her car. She first unloads the baby from the cart and puts him in his car seat. The toddler boy jumps up and down a little in the cart while waiting. His mom says, ‘Mario. You have beans in your legs – the jumping kind.’ And Mario says, ‘No. They are the flying kind. Or basketballs.’

A woman comes out with only a slender photo envelope. She eagerly sits down on the bench and pulls out the pictures even before she sets down her purse. She smiles and laughs out loud, then covers her mouth and gets quiet. But the smile stays. She holds one in particular in her fingers and lets her grip loosen on the remaining stack. The wind picks up and blows about 8 of them on the ground in front of her. One comes close to my shoe as I’m walking in. I bend down and pick up a photo of a little dark-haired girl. She says thank you and sits back down on the bench. I’m on the phone so I only nod.

This story about The Lost Boys is a great example of what doesn’t work about polygamy. I grew up about 40 miles away from what we called ‘Plyg City’ which is really Colorado City. I heard stories about those boys growing up and I heard stories about what happened to the girls. I think in my head, I didn’t really believe that it all could be happening, since there were so many people living there and so many of them were ‘grown-ups’, which in my head meant ‘the grown-ups are taking care of the kids, right? – so it can’t really be true.’ I was about 14 when I realized that the stories were true and that just because someone was an adult, it didn’t mean they were nice or did the right thing, even if there were so many of them all together. There could be 50-100+ adults and they could all still be doing the wrong thing. They just did it together and covered each other’s backs.

Mainstream Mormon people kind of joke and laugh about polygamy together. That’s because no one really understands what will happen in the ‘afterlife’ in regards to multiple wives, except they presume that they will practice polygamy since it’s been stated in the scriptures that it is the divine order of things. And when you ask a question about it to someone in authority, you’re told to not worry your pretty little head about it, since it will all just work out for the best when we’re in heaven.

I’m so glad to not worry about that anymore. Not because they told me not to but because I don’t believe it to be true.

I don’t cut myself with a razor anymore.
Or put safety pins up and down my body.
I don’t rip my fingernails off below the quick.
I don’t use the toenail clippers to remove all the skin on the pads of my fingers and feet.
I don’t use knives or any other type of sharp object to carve letters or numbers into my arms and legs.
I don’t rip out the hairs on my head, one at a time for hours.
I don’t use the tweezers to pinch tiny bits of skin until they bleed.
And my stomach hasn’t had any new marks rubbed into it for about 4 years.
I don’t have an emergency sharp saved away in books, my purse, the bottom of my shoe, jean back pocket, sunglasses case, hollow pen or anywhere else.
I don’t even think about harming myself everyday anymore.
Or even once a week.
Possibly once a month.
More like every 3 or 4 months.
And the thought comes in.
I look at it.
Acknowledge it.
Tell it I know it’s there.
And that I reject it.
I show it the door.
And I smile.
I’m looking forward to 4 more years of freedom.