can't wait for winter to be over.

I think that my recurring health problems, which seem to happen most in the wintertime, might be caused by closing the windows and breathing indoor air pollution from whatever is in the house. It's not merely 'Seasonal Affective Disorder,' or winter depression - and yes, I do get a little bit of that. But it was late autumn this year when everything just collapsed, and it happens year after year. I feel great in the spring and summer when the windows are open, and more and more awful in the autumn as it gets cold enough to keep the windows closed all the time. And eventually, by midwinter, I'm totally incapacitated and can barely make it to work every day, much less do any projects that require thinking or effort.

I had an incident with my landlord where I went to work, on a warm day sometime last week (or whenever it was pretty warm recently) and left my windows open and the fan on. When I came home, I had a voicemail from the landlord saying that he had gone up to my apartment and closed the windows because 'the temperature was dropping drastically,' and he didn't want the pipes to freeze. It wasn't dropping all that drastically, and also, I would be home from work before late night, when it would get really cold. The pipes wouldn't even come close to having time to freeze. It was like 50 degrees outside.

If this was merely the landlord expressing his annoyance and being worried about the pipes freezing, it wouldn't bother me so much. But I get scared when things like that happen because I could get evicted if my landlord and I have too many conflicts over things like that. I did get evicted once in the past for a variety of reasons - long story.

It's almost March, and soon I'll be able to have the windows open more often. Right now, my friend gave me an air filter, and I'm using it and observing the results. I'm not sure yet. There's been some improvement in here but every time I've thought that, it's gotten bad again.

I just hate the fact that a predictable, recurring event - a seasonal change - is ruining my health and disrupting my life, year after year after year. I am really serious when I say that I wouldn't mind living in a primitive mud hut with straw bales or whatever for insulation. After sleeping in my car, I know it's possible to keep warm with enough layers.

I read something in my book and I laughed yesterday:

From Diana Leafe Christian, 'Creating A Life Together,' a book about how to build intentional communities. I can't say enough great things about those Diana Leafe Christian books and I'd recommend them to everybody who calls themselves an anarchist or a libertarian. If you think the government needs to be completely shut down, then somebody somewhere must be responsible for doing all of the 'services' that government is supposed to do. These books are about how to build an intentional community - a community where you yourself are directly responsible for community decisions about how people will get along with each other, who is responsible for community maintenance (without government, who will clean the sewers?), where does our money come from, etc. As an anarchist I must ask myself, if government didn't exist, then what would I myself do to take its place?

Well anyhow I laughed at the phrase 'Sustainabler Than Thou,' in a section of the book talking about negative attitudes that community founders can develop. People can get into major arguments over relatively trivial things seen as ecologically unsustainable. She didn't give any examples but I understood right away.

Another attitude problem: When we were starting our community, WE slept in tents for three years without heat or running water. It was talking about how community founders had hard times in the beginning before their community was stabilized, and so, when new members come in after the place is built, they haven't suffered as much as the original members, and don't know what they went through. I used to have to walk to school uphill both ways barefoot in the snow.

Anyway reading about that reminded me of sleeping in my car. I actually feel stronger because of it: it's a primitive wilderness survival skill. I know how to sleep in the car in cold weather. I used to actually be planning a phase where I would live out of my car, but I hadn't gotten around to that yet. I was going to put all my stuff into a U-Stor shed or something. It would be a way to save money I would have spent on rent. I actually almost feel like I could do it now. But cooking would be really hard to do. I don't want to eat fast food all the time.