Progress made in disaster recovery

9:29 PM 6/30/10

Oh, by the way. I saw a poster of the band Lamb of God when I was walking around the mall today. Lamb of God has the hair and beard style that I'm talking about. I should find a link that shows a photo of them, but I guess you can google it.  - Okay, I googled it myself.  Actually, I should say they ALMOST have the hairstyle.  It looks like they shave some parts of their face, while letting the rest of the beard grow long.  ARGH!  I thought I had a good example.  This is so annoying!  Why shave PART of the face?  I hate this!  It really looked like a full beard without any parts missing, in the poster that I saw at the mall.

Today I did a couple of things. I bought a small fridge, another one. The first time I bought a fridge, I got the cheapest one, and it turned out that it wasn't designed to hold perishable foods. It can't get cold enough and stay cold. It was only made for holding non-perishable beverages that don't need to be refrigerated, like bottles of water and soda. I found this out the hard way. And I read the instructions, and the instructions said that no, it wasn't made for perishables. The cooling method used isn't strong enough to keep it really cold. So I was watching out for that when I bought another one today. It was slightly more expensive, and it showed pictures of perishable items in the fridge. I haven't tested it yet.

I had to do that, because I tested my real fridge again the other day. All I did was open it up, and fumes from the bone marrow poisoning floated out and made me feel weak and dizzy. I felt like I was dying and I wanted to pass out. This happened even though I had the fridge door open and a fan blowing directly into the fridge, for many days, and I even turned on the fridge with the door open so that its internal fan would circulate air from within, where the fumes might linger, back deep inside it where the air comes from. Still, after doing all that, and wiping it all down several times inside, it still has enough residual vapors from the bone marrow that I can't eat anything I put in there, because the vapors land in the food and drinks, and they trigger the vomit reflex if I eat them.

So buying another small fridge was part of my disaster recovery today.

I have a perspective on this disaster, a perspective that 'the voices' gave me, and it helps me to feel better about it. Technically, there really have been only TWO major contamination incidents, one of which was in 2007, and the other of which was in 2010. The first one was really big - the drug residues, at my other apartment. It got all over everything, and all of the contamination I've had has been leftover since then, because I haven't been adding any more to it (other than drugs I get at Peter's house or drugs I get from going to places like the doctor's office, which are minor outbreaks, not the type of thing that ruins an entire apartment full of my belongings). The second incident was the bone marrow poisoning, a totally different kind of poison contamination, from 'food,' in the refrigerator. It ruined the refrigerator and made it impossible to use. Technically there have been only these two major contamination incidents. It reassures me when I look at it that way. It seems like I've had a million little incidents, but actually the drug residues are all from that one time long ago, and they are gradually being reduced as I get rid of things.

I didn't just buy a fridge today. I also went to the storage unit and threw away a few things that I could get rid of. I can throw away things that aren't sentimental, things that aren't extremely expensive, and things that aren't electronic devices or important data or papers. I have a bunch of categories in my mind, exceptions, things that I will keep, even if I have to put them inside a box and seal it up and label it 'danger: contaminated.' Or whatever.

The one thing I wished for, while going through the storage unit, was I wanted a new place to move stuff into if I was going to keep it, so that I could push things aside if I had already checked them and decided to keep them. I don't want to move things into my apartment yet.

I had to fight with the voices. The voices were frequently telling me not to throw this or that away. They don't understand that the objects I'm throwing away are NOT sentimental. There are a lot of things I own that I don't really care that much about. And the slightest bit of ephedra residue, or any other drug residue, can cause a major outbreak. It is too much of a risk. And when I throw something away, if I feel sad or wasteful because of it - I don't like to do it, and I've always complained about Penn State students buying lots of furniture and then leaving it on the curb when they go home - but I'm doing it for a good reason: I want to have kids. When I throw stuff away and feel sad, I remind myself that I am protecting my children. A few years from now, when I have kids, they will be crawling around and touching everything. They would be touching the drug-contaminated legs of the tables from that apartment, getting ephedra onto their hands and into their mouths, and little toddlers staying awake all night long and never sleeping due to ephedra poisoning is a very, very bad thing. I would rather be sad about throwing away a couple of non-sentimental items, instead of totally miserable a couple years from now because my babies are being poisoned by drug residues and I don't know where it's coming from. And you can clean something, over and over and over again, but not get rid of all the poison. I know because I've done it.

When I feel sad about the objects in the trash, I think of my children. Which should I keep, and which should I throw away? If I keep the contaminated objects, then I am throwing away my children. If I throw away the contaminated objects, then I am keeping my children. Which matters more?

I watched Toy Story 3 - I don't remember if I ever saw Toy Story 2, but I saw Toy Story 1. I used to feel that way about my toys. My toys were living things. It was unthinkable to throw them away. I'm not throwing away toys or things that resemble living creatures. Still, I feel that there is some life in all of the objects that I own, some part of me, just because they belonged to me, even if they aren't toys or animal-like objects. It reminds me of Dust, in the His Dark Materials books. Everything I own has some Dust on it that indicates that it belongs to me. But the 'life' of those nonliving objects is less important than the life and the health of my future children. I fight with the voices about this, over and over, every time I try to go through my stuff.

Anyone who hasn't experienced a drug residue contamination can't understand this. You can't imagine how tiny of an amount it takes to have a major outbreak. A few molecules of ephedra on your clothing will give you insomnia for months. It's the type of insomnia where you NEVER sleep, not a single instant, not at all. You will be awake 24 hours a day for weeks, and maybe you will drop off into a doze for a couple minutes now and then, if you're lucky. It is unimaginable. And I have other drug residues besides ephedra, and they cause other symptoms.

Today, I finished the book at Barnes & Noble, The Amber Spyglass. You all know I'm going to give out big spoilers, in case you haven't read it yet. I wished Will and Lyra would have stayed together somehow, and I was disappointed. However, I believe that people can fall in love with more than one person in their lifetime. You don't just have one, and only one, true love. So they can both fall in love again. But it's not likely that they would find many people who could talk about, and understand, the strange experiences they had had, traveling to other worlds and fighting against The Authority.

In a way, I know how that feels. I've had such strange experiences, no one can understand them. It's odd, everybody might think that 'hearing voices' and talking to them in my head and being followed around by people reading my mind and controlling me - you'd think *THAT* was the 'weird experience' that no one else on earth could understand. However, I've been able to find lots of people on the internet who have similar experiences. And if I loosen my definition of electronic harassment, so it includes all of the people who believe that they are 'psychic' or that they are dealing with 'ghosts', 'poltergeists,' and other paranormal phenomena, then there are HUGE numbers of people who can understand what I'm going through. They just interpret it differently.

It's the drug residues that no one understands. I haven't seen anyone on the net writing about how they tried to grow, for instance, marijuana plants in their closet with a grow light, only to find that they plants put out vapors and left oils all over their belongings so that they were constantly high on marijuana even if they didn't want to be, so they had to throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of their belongings because it wouldn't clean out. And no, I wasn't growing marijuana, but that's one of the most likely drug plants that people would try to secretly grow indoors, in a closet, in a place where it's going to contaminate everything they own.

(LSD flashbacks are probably caused by residues left on objects and clothing. Some people believe that the LSD is trapped inside your body somewhere, but I believe it's OUTSIDE your body, and you're having a new exposure to it, and it goes through your skin again. My experiences are just like LSD flashbacks.)

The drug residues are life-ruining. This is something that I feel NO ONE understands. I could search for people who have similar experiences, but from what I've seen, it's not easy to find, and it's not easy to describe in the right words so that I have the right search terms to get them from the internet.

Ugh, I have to get up early to go to work tomorrow. I don't know what time I go in, and I have to go down to the car to look at my schedule. But I will hopefully be wearing a new fake uniform tomorrow. The shirt will be way too huge, and I might tuck it in. I'll try it on tonight sometime. I don't know if I work with Curtis or not. I'm thinking of his conflicting messages, and thinking of how his mother did the same thing, sending conflicting messages, flirting and encouraging the manager, and then deciding afterwards that she didn't want to be sexually harassed. I can interpret Curtis's behavior the same way. For some reason he feels like he has to flirt with me and encourage me, but then doesn't want to actually talk about it and get everything settled and out in the open so that we can both know what type of relationship we have in the real world. I just need to know.