How to Take Pills

Last updated: Tue Dec 10 2024

Hello from the second week of a pretty awful chest cold.¹ I cannot particularly recommend getting sick. ²

I’ve been relying on Mucinex the last two days. This is a change, because: I couldn’t swallow pills growing up, which is apparently called pill dysphagia. The prospect of having to take a pill was a source of deep anxiety — I would inevitably start to choke every time I felt the pill on my tongue.

I only successfully swallowed a pill two years ago!³ So here’s how I did it, which may be useful in the unlikely event anyone reading this is suffering from pill dysphagia.

• Place the pill on your tongue. Don’t panic.
• Fill your mouth with a swig of water. You should feel the pill float around your mouth.
• Immediately knock your head back and look towards the sky.
• You’ll swallow without thinking as the water drains towards your throat. Importantly, the water will carry the pill with it, but you won’t feel the pill in your throat.
• Pull your head back. The pill is gone 😄

Once I had done this successfully a couple times, the anxiety went away and I haven’t had problems swallowing pills again.

Linkblog Linkblog

Here’s a few links I’ve been enjoying:

• “My Heinous Gift Guide for Sworn Enemies” is possibly the funniest thing I’ve read this year?
• The Half-Life 2 anniversary documentary is worth every minute of its two-hour runtime if your childhood, like mine, was spent battling headcrabs and metrocops.
• “But here’s a thing that happened to me, and which surprised me at the time: most of the plot-lines of my life never resolved. At age 18 or 22 there were a few Big Stories in my life, they each felt momentous, and the thing I feared was that they might resolve ‘against’ me. But what actually happened is that they never resolved at all. Some of the most important people in my life just dissolved from it entirely – whether gradually or all at once – and mostly I’ve never heard from or about them ever again. The stories we were co-writing never reached their crescendo.”
• Here’s a fun story about a petroleum engineer smuggling his former employer’s documents back into the company because they had, institutionally, forgotten how their plant worked a couple decades later. (I have some thoughts about software archeology for next newsletter, so that may be why this resonated.)
• I met a neat fellow named Kasra a couple weeks ago and sure enough it turns out I follow his newsletter. A few months ago, he wrote a great essay about why philosophy is sometimes a deadend, which resonated with my capital-P Pragmatic tendencies.
• Charles Fort is, somehow, one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, despite not really making a lot of sense. (He would have loved my reference to the inexplicability of the Lead Masks Case.) So here’s a long article in Public Domain Review about the man and his very strange books.

In Other News

I wrote two articles on software I love: fish shell and Raycast.