today

i started reading choke, at barnes & noble, because it was actually there this time. when i went looking for it before, that book was missing. i looked at one of the other ones instead, invisible monsters, and i didn't like it because i couldn't stand the characters and couldn't get into it. but i was okay with choke and i read the first couple chapters before i left. it was more mellow than invisible monsters. after i get used to his writing style and get to 'trust' him i could probably go back and read invisible monsters some time in the future. i was enjoying choke. i just didn't stay to read the entire book. (when the air was so bad that i couldn't stay in my apartment two years ago, i spent a LOT of time at b&n, and i read the entire lemony snicket series of unfortunate events books.)

i went to b&n because i had to get out of the house, because it was a bad air day. (i didn't intend that pun until after it was written.) i told joe that the air was bad again, and he decided to fix it immediately. he actually came in and broke apart the shelf with a pair of plier-like things. the wood was weak and soft because it was just particle board. i took a photograph of the mold. he argued that 'the mold was from a long time ago' and it was 'all dried out by now.' i have argued that i've actually SEEN water dripping down onto the mold, recently, and i've seen the mold covered in a pool of water, and that's how it was when i opened the cabinet and nearly puked/passed out from the fumes and the smell.

he also removed a ceiling tile. the irony of the ceiling tile problem is: it didn't even occur to me that the ceiling tile could be moldy; but actually, that ceiling tile was stained brown because there is a sink above it, and a couple years ago, i used to live in that apartment above, and i complained to the landlord that the sink was leaking underneath, up in THAT apartment, and it was staining the wood in the cabinet with mold the same way this one was! but when i complained, he didn't do anything about it. he put some kind of wallpaper-like covering over top of it, instead of removing and replacing the wood. at least, that's what i remember. i would have to go look and see if my memory's correct, i think he put down a sheet of wallpaper or something. i could be mistaken. but i remember, he wasn't willing to remove it.

and now that i'm down below, i saw that it leaked through the floor and into the ceiling tile of this apartment - but it was recent, because the tile was fine when i first moved in. i noticed the stain appeared later on, and i never paid any attention to it, and wasn't thinking 'gee, that could be moldy too.' but HE thought of it, and he removed and replaced the ceiling tile. so i took a photo of that ceiling. he removed the tile, but the ceiling/floor above is still rotten and has cracks and a hole through it from above where the water soaked through from that sink. so i'm somewhat concerned that the actual floor, the big cracked area, might still be moldy, in a way that is huge and impossible and expensive to repair.

so i'm assuming that this is why he wants me to get out: he says that for whatever reason, everybody else can tolerate this, but i'm the only one who can't. he doesn't want to have to fix something so big and expensive, because yeah, it goes all the way through the floor above, and it is a really bad bunch of cracks and holes from water, and it HAS to be moldy.

and i wasn't even the one living in that apartment when the sink leaked badly enough to go all the way through the floor and into my ceiling. it was other people who made that sink leak THAT badly. so i can't say 'i did something wrong that made it leak.' i was thinking, maybe it's because i used a portable dishwasher, but, like i said, the ceiling tile got stained like that AFTER i was living DOWN HERE for a while, and it was other people living in the place above me. when i lived above, i had seen it staining the inside of the cabinet - just like the one in my kitchen now - but it hadn't gone all the way through, and when i moved down here, the ceiling tile was still white and wasn't all stained.

it bothers me when people give me a long list of every mistake and every misinterpretation i've ever made, long after i've changed my mind about that thing. joe listed every disaster that i've ever had while i lived here, and the conclusion was: you're crazy, something's wrong with you, you imagine problems that aren't there, and i can't deal with this anymore. meanwhile, a lot of the stuff he listed, i've long since changed my mind about. i no longer interpret some of the things the way he described them, because he still remembers my old interpretations, whereas i've learned a lot more since then.

the one example was that i complained to him, when i lived upstairs, that the downstairs guy was turning on the hot water every time i took a shower. i forgot all about that until he mentioned it. that was BEFORE i started getting attacked with radio frequency weapons. i had never HEARD of such things, had never read of such things, and i wasn't going around on the internet reading everyone else's experiences and 'getting ideas' about 'what could possibly happen.' it was all new and unexpected to me. i really was getting in the shower and then a minute later, i would hear the sound of the water running in the other apartment below, and feel the water pressure drop, and i would lose my hot water. i would actually hear the sound of it. i recognized the difference between a normal shower, versus a shower where somebody else starts running the water while you're in there, because i can hear the sound and feel the pressure drop. and it would drop A LOT, because that place had low pressure to begin with. as in, it was a major big deal if somebody messed around with the water pressure while i was in there, because it would come out as barely a trickle.

and i was trying to complain about it, and this was happening at the same time that the person was sending me emails with photographs of other women who looked exactly like me.

anyway, joe brought that up again, mentioning that 'i remember dan, he was a really nice guy, he would never do anything like that.' (turning on the water while i was in the shower.) well, there's where joe still remembers my OLD interpretation, and doesn't know that i've changed my mind since then. i used to believe that maybe dan was doing something maliciously, on purpose, to harass me, and that was my old interpretation. but i've decided that maybe dan really was a 'nice guy,' and he simply DIDN'T KNOW WHAT HE WAS DOING.

there are two ways this can happen: 1. somebody completely blanks out and goes unconscious, and is forced to do something which they have no memory of later on - it's completely forgotten - that's only 'theoretical' to me because i don't know if i experience that (and if i did, how would i know?), or 2. somebody remains awake, is aware of what they're doing, remembers it, but has some rationale for why they had to turn the water on at that particular moment, and thinks it was a normal thing to do, and of course, wasn't intending to cause harassment, and wasn't intending to mess up my shower and take all the water away, and is sincerely innocent, because they were forced to do it.

for whatever reason, i'm not inclined to believe that people are being paid money to harass other people - i think the majority of them are puppets, and only a few are getting paid. yes, i could be wrong about that, but that is how i usually interpret things. i have to mention that i've read other people's blogs and they experience a lot more harassment than i do involving people who do things which are openly hostile and visible, such as walking past you, staring directly in your eyes in a threatening way, bumping into you, walking all the way across an empty street to get right next to you and bump you whenever there's plenty of room, etc. that stuff hasn't happened to me.

(although, in the beginning, i had people driving their cars into the oncoming lane straight towards me on a two-lane no-passing zone road, several times. and another TI mentioned that he himself had been forced to lose control of his driving and go the wrong way on a one-way street directly into traffic. it sounds too awful to believe, but i believe it. and while that hasn't happened to me - and i don't want it to happen - i do recall that i was 'getting lost' really badly, going the exact opposite of where i wanted to go, and not just once, but over and over and over again, in spite of my looking at a map, and i felt confused and disoriented, and when i tried looking at the map, i got zapped really badly and my attention shifted every time i looked at it. so yeah, i think that people are forced to lose control and to go into the opposing lane of traffic, without intending to.)

but i usually interpret my own harassment as 'puppets' because i found out that you can control people without implanting any chips in them. chips aren't needed. so if you can control a person remotely, with no implants, then you can control any random person at any time, a normal person who doesn't call themselves a 'targeted individual' or doesn't interpret themselves as being under 'mind control.' and i've experienced the puppet phenomenon myself. i've said cruel and insulting things to people that "I" would never have chosen to say, on 'random impulse,' and then regretted it immediately when i saw the look on their face, and i could see that it was an out-of-character thing for me to say. or i've told people things about themselves, as though i knew 'secret information' about them, when in fact i had no understanding of the significance of what i was saying, or how they would hear it, or what it would mean to them - it's usually rationalized as 'i was just joking' or 'i was talking about something else, not that.' and the comments usually have a certain theme or style to them which is consistent and recognizable.

well, anyway... the landlord brought up the old interpretation: 'dan was a malicious guy deliberately turning on the water so that i had no water pressure upstairs,' and then explaining how ridiculous that was. and i've changed my mind about that since then, but he hasn't kept up with all the things i've gradually learned and reinterpreted and the things i've experienced. and he was using that example to argue that all of my beliefs and experiences were wrong and insane and impossible.

then he suggested that i call my mom and discuss it with her. i did, later on. her advice was that i should see a psychiatrist and do trial-and-error with some other new drugs that i haven't tried before. i tried prozac and decided never to use psychiatric prescription drugs ever again. i'm using one of the most well-known herbal antidepressants, st. john's wort, that everybody descibes as 'very mild' and 'well tolerated by most people,' yet i still have to use a very miniscule dosage of that, or i have problems. and i can get that FOR FREE instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a prescription. i paid a trivial amount of money to buy the seeds to grow in my pot; and then, later on, i learned to identify the wild-growing varieties, which i can find pretty easily now. the only argument that i have AGAINST sjw is that it has some unwanted side effects: it changes the way your body metabolizes other chemicals, and it can cause you to sleep too much. (usually, when that happens, i wake up feeling refreshed and glad to have slept a lot.)

i talked with mom a long time and she was using the phrase 'chemical imbalance' to describe what's wrong with my delusional brain. you have a chemical imbalance that causes you to believe stuff is happening, when it isn't really happening. when i hear the phrase 'chemical imbalance' i have to just change those words into meaningless noise. we have meaningless words, 'bzzzt bzzzt.' you have a bzzt bzzzt in your brain that causes you to bzzzt bzzzt. it's like Mad Libs. fill in the blank with any noun/verb you want. you have a zebra in your brain that causes you to ballet dance. the words 'chemical imbalance' don't mean anything.

i grew up with a dad who was a radiologist, and a mom who used to be a nurse. (yes, they met while they were in medical school.) my mom worked in a mental hospital for a while. so she knows all about those phrases and concepts like 'delusional' and 'chemical imbalance.' and they believe in 'the placebo effect.' (i've kept promising that someday i was going to write a blog about how the entire IDEA of 'the placebo effect' is totally wrong, a superstition, and i haven't gotten around to writing it. the placebo effect belief system is almost completely wrong all the way to the core - it doesn't exist. there is no such thing as the placebo effect. there IS something that happens in reality, but it's totally different - it's a completely different phenomenon - than the way that people USUALLY use that phrase. usually it means, 'you're experiencing the placebo effect; therefore, all you need to do is talk yourself out of it, convince yourself it's not real, and the problem will magically go away! yippee! you're cured of your hypochondria!' if only it were that easy. i can't start talking about it, or i'll write that really long paragraph in parentheses, and i won't know how to end the parentheses and start a new paragraph so it will be readable, and i'll have to write multiple paragraphs with a new set of parentheses around them. it's a whole huge subject of its own.)

anyway, she threw all of the typical things at me, the stuff that i can go read on the 'official government-sanctioned websites' about 'delusions.' you have to get them on the right medications, which may take some trial and error, and it's hard work, and it won't happen overnight, blah blah, but eventually with the right medications, you can be cured. (and, please note, we were merely discussing the rather mundane problem of 'something in the house is making me sick.' we weren't even discussing anything all that controversial! i wasn't talking about 'hearing voices' or anything else which is usually considered delusional. yet just because i insisted 'something is making me sick,' she decided i was delusional, that i had 'convinced myself' that this or that was making me sick, when it really wasn't. so, i guess she believes nothing is wrong with me at all, and that if only i talked myself out of it, i could magically convince myself to leap out of bed, healthy and full of energy, able to do whatever i want, if only i can out-argue my 'delusional belief system' by using logic.)

it was inevitable: she also had to bring up the 'you're reading stuff on the internet instead of reading reliable sources' argument. i told her that yes, i DO get my information from the internet, and i'm PROUD of that. i told her that i get anecdotes from other people who experience similar things to what i'm experiencing. i told her that i also go to 'official' websites where scientific studies have been done, and the studies directly contradict each other and can't agree on things. one official scientific study says one thing, and another official scientific study says the exact opposite, and they're both on the same official, scientific websites. (vaccines don't cause autism VERSUS vaccines DO cause autism.)

i go to a lot of different websites for my research, and i've been using the internet for research for quite a few years now, and it helped me think of theories and possibilities far beyond anything that a doctor would tell you. doctors don't even bother to ask you 'what are you eating?' whenever you go to them complaining that your stomach is so sick that you can't swallow anything and you're starving to death for six months. (that happened to me in 1999 when the chronic illnesses began. NOBODY bothered to ask: what are you eating? not one! i went to a couple different doctors telling them i had a stomach problem! NOT ONE of them made me write a list of everything i was eating and drinking! i eventually started the feingold diet, and removed a few things i had been eating, and my stomach got much better very quickly, without drugs - without Prilosec. Prilosec was the first response to 'i have a stomach problem...' 'okay, try some prilosec.')

i told her that i might have been more open to the idea of prescription drugs, except that the very first one i ever tried was prozac, and it was so horrible that i went and read about psychiatric drugs afterwards, and i learned that yes, they cause impotence/anorgasmia, and yes, they cause suicide and homicide, and shooting into groups of strangers at the mall or at a school, and jumping out of a moving car, and the voices in your head get CLEARER instead of going away! when i was on prozac, i could clearly hear every word the voices were saying! usually, i hear static and noise, like a badly tuned radio, and the voices are quiet, like the volume is turned down low. on prozac, the volume was turned up and the tuning was perfect. the voices had perfect audio quality when i was on prozac. so i am not going to believe anybody who tells me that drugs will make the voices and the delusions get cured. and nobody is going to convince me that the drugs are 'safe' if only you 'find the right one' at the 'right dosage' after some 'trial and error.' after what i experienced, i hear the phrase 'trial and error' and i think, 'yeah, you can change the dosage of the drugs AFTER they go into the mall and shoot ten people and then shoot themselves. that's trial and error.'

in health class, back in school, we learned about illegal drugs. we were warned about drugs like PCP, for instance. they said that PCP was so horrible, it made people think they could fly, and they would jump out of windows thinking they wouldn't get hurt. and it made them extremely strong, so that when they fought and struggled, they could hurt people really badly. my experience of prozac was about like that. i knew immediately that it was very dangerous and very wrong, and i had enough common sense to stop using it. but some people lose control too quickly, and they don't even get the chance to say, 'gee, something's wrong with me, it must be this drug!' they don't get enough of a chance to realize that, and by then, it's too late, they've gone out and killed a bunch of people. i haven't ever used PCP, and i haven't used all the different types of legal, prescription, psychiatric drugs that exist, but i would say that they do something similar to PCP, which is illegal. they make you feel so strong, and so numb, that you have no fear, and you don't care about anything or anybody, and you have no emotions, and nothing matters to you, but at the same time, you have endless energy and can do whatever you want, and also, you're so uncomfortable that you can't sit still, and you have to do something. they call that 'akathisia,' if i'm spelling that correctly.

so i am not going to play around with the 'trial and error' method of finding out which drug doesn't make me anorgasmic and which drug doesn't make me go out and kill people. if i do trial and error with anything, i don't mind the process of using trial and error to figure out which environmental chemicals are making me sick, or which foods are better or worse for me. that type of trial and error is much safer.

(today, at barnes & noble, something made me happy. there was a highly visible book, displayed on the shelf with other books about ADHD and autism, and i forget what the name was, i think it was called 'healthy eating for autism' or 'eating right with autism' or something, it was a white book with a boy on the front, and some fruits and vegetables below him - it was relatively non-technical sounding. i picked it up, just out of curiosity, and it turned out that i thought it was a really great book, and i agreed with it. it was very well-written and the doctor mentioned all of the things that i just described, where NOBODY asks you the question 'what are you eating?' and doesn't connect anything to nutrition or foods at all - it's unthinkable to imagine that foods can affect what your brain is doing.)

i talked to her about something which i've been thinking lately. actually, i've known about this for a long time. the idea is: lots and lots of people experience chronic fatigue, except that usually, they don't have the words to describe it, and they don't call it 'chronic fatigue.' or 'chemical sensitivity.' they think that they way they feel is normal. i said, this is what's going on whenever somebody sits in front of the television for ten hours a day. somebody else might look at them, and say 'you watch too much tv. that's bad for you. you have TV addiction!' they might think the person is addicted to watching tv. well, maybe you can be addicted to it, i agree, to some extent. but when somebody is watching ten hours a day, and doing nothing but that, THEY *PROBABLY* HAVE CHRONIC FATIGUE. they just don't know the words to describe it. whenever you feel healthy, alert, and energetic, you get a natural desire to do something else besides sit on a couch all day long. if you sit on the couch all day long, it's probably because you're physically sick, but you don't know it.

i said this also applies to extreme alcoholics. everyone thinks that the alcohol is causing that person's health problems. but when somebody is a severe alcoholic, and all they do is drink alcohol, all day every day, and they don't even eat food, they just get all their calories from alcohol, and they sit around at home all day sleeping or passed out - everyone will look at them and blame the alcohol for it, and not go any further than that. however, if that person STOPPED using the alcohol, they would notice, 'gee, without alcohol, i feel tired and miserable ALL THE TIME. i must be... addicted to alcohol!' but no, they have a chronic illness of some kind. something causing chronic fatigue, or constant pain, or chronic stomach sickness. it's a pain and discomfort that they are trying to treat by using alcohol. the alcohol makes them feel better, because SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THEIR HEALTH TO BEGIN WITH. nobody goes that far into the troubleshooting. i'm not referring to social drinkers and i'm not saying that everybody who drinks alcohol has a chronic illness. i'm referring to the people who are obviously severe alcoholics, and drink all day every day, alone, at home, and aren't even eating much food.

so i was telling her: other people have chronic illnesses too, and it's something vague that they don't know how to describe. other 'normal' people don't use the words 'chronic fatigue' and 'chemical sensitivity' to describe what they're experiencing. they don't diagnose it at all, and many of them don't even realize that it isn't normal to sit for ten hours a day in front of the tv set. so i was trying to explain to her that it isn't unusual or rare or extreme what i am experiencing. it's just that people either don't talk about it, or don't use the same words.

well... that was the day. nothing got decided for sure yet... the under-sink shelf got ripped out and i took a couple photographs.

i don't necessarily WANT to stay in this apartment forever - in fact, i want to go someplace better in the long run, and i am gradually forming plans and thinking of my preferences. but buying a piece of land is a huge decision and i am not hurrying. it may be a very long time before i choose a place and own it myself, permanently, or join a community if that's what i decide to do. i am not staying here forever, but also, it's not easy to just move out of here right this instant, especially when i'm sick and everything takes forever to do. so the decision hasn't been settled... and if i do move out, i will have to live in another temporary type of place, some other apartment. and i'm concerned that the environmental illness could be just as bad in the new place, and i don't know what to expect. i'm going to assume that yes, i have to leave, but i'm not actually DOING anything about it just yet. and i'll see if i feel better with the moldy shelf removed, and the ceiling tile.