Straight Talk

4:43 PM 9/21/10

It's not long until I go to Barnes & Noble tonight, the one ritual routine that I have faithfully followed.

So, some things happened that may have been puppet incidents. There is a conflict between what Curtis says and what he does - as always. I got an email from him saying: no one is hacking his email, he doesn't need my help, he can pay his own child support. (All of a sudden now that I've started writing, there are a million things to say and I can't say them all fast enough.) But he has been doing facebook comments that make it seem as though he's reading *my* facebook page. That's a typical puppet phenomenon. He says things that seem related to things I've said. The idea is that I'm supposed to think he is interested in my life, he's still reading what I write, and he doesn't want me to leave him. But he ignores my emails and says he doesn't need my help, but he won't tell me to leave him alone either. I am trying to get a straight answer out of him. (I like the name of my cameraphone, Straight Talk.)

I told Carrie in an email that it would be best if he blocked me on facebook so he couldn't get any more emails from me, and also if he made his page private so that I couldn't see it anymore and wouldn't know what was going on in his life. I will probably resend the same email to him, not just Carrie.

I've been messing with two cameraphones. I bought them - first (yeah, my writing is jumbled today, too many thoughts at once) - first I bought one, and I thought it had a videocamera, but it didn't. The sign above it at Wal-Mart said that it *did* have a videocamera. So I was going to return it, but instead of returning it, I just bought a second one, the higher-end one that was a little more expensive. It didn't have a videocamera either. So the sign was completely wrong. None of them have a videocamera. They *do* both have a single-shot photo camera, just not a videocamera. So anyway, I haven't returned either one, and haven't decided which one I like more, and I'm keeping them both for now, and texting back and forth between them, and learning and troubleshooting. It turned out to be a happy accident that I bought two phones instead of one, because now I can send myself text messages and see how they look on the other end, and learn how to do it all without bugging other people.

They also have bluetooth. I need to learn how to use it. Nancy at Weis told me that she has a bluetooth router that lets her use her mobile phone to connect her laptop to the internet. In other words, her laptop is on, and it uses a wireless connection to a special bluetooth device, which connects to her phone, which connects to the net. You have to purchase the special router device. I'd look around at Best Buy to see if they have anything like that. I am getting the impression that there is a lot of stuff that my Straight Talk phone can't do, but it doesn't matter, because it's the learning experience that matters. What I mean is, I can learn: 'Gee, I really wish I could do *this*, but I can't!' so I know for future reference what features I want to have on my smartphone. If I find out that I want to do something, but I can't, that's the only way to learn what kind of phone I want to have, since I've never had one before. I've only had the cheapest, most basic Tracfones that don't take pictures and don't connect to the internet. All they can do is text, and actually, my oldest tracfone can't send text messages because of some unexplained technical problem, so I bought a new tracfone a while back that's able to send text messages (when I was trying to text Curtis).

It helps that I still have my iPod. I've made a bunch of new purchases of techno-devices in the last few months - many of them were puppet incidents, where 'they' decided to urge me to go out and buy something. All of this is a learning experience. I didn't know anything about what an iPod was or what it could do. It's actually easier to use than my smartphone (for surfing the net), but it doesn't have its own internet connection, and it doesn't have a camera. I thought it had a camera when I bought it, and I was asking a clueless Wal-Mart employee who wasn't sure either, and he said he thought it had a camera. I kept it anyway, even though I got it home, opened it, and found out there was no camera.

I looked up 'bluetooth ipod' on the internet, and saw some pages where they found out that iPods were able to use bluetooth, but it wasn't enabled yet, but the chip and the hardware was in there, and you had to have the latest operating system to be able to use it. If I figure out bluetooth, I might be able to do more with my phones and my iPod and my new laptop.

Summary of recent electronics purchases, bought sometime this year, after I went a really long time without buying any new gadgets:

1. New tracfone, able to send text messages. That was because of Curtis.
2. New laptop. (I already had another laptop, which is forbidden to connect to the net. That one was meant for me to do creative work on, like writing songs on Propellerheads Reason.) The new one is called a Netbook. It's a tiny, minimal laptop meant to connect to the wireless internet. But it has useful programs on it, like Excel. I plan on using Excel to do my bookkeeping. It also has a webcam. I tried covering up the webcam by sticking the little iPod's plastic sticker over top of it, the little sticker that originally comes on the iPod's screen, but the sticker keeps lifting up. I'm paranoid about webcams because I don't want hackers to set up my webcam to take naked pictures of me walking around in my bedroom with my computer on, and that kind of thing. It can happen. Not that it matters when I'm already being spied on by the highest-tech surveillance methods available on earth right now, and they can see me through my walls. But the lower-tech hackers could still gain something by doing that. Same goes for my camera phone. Hackers can find a way to take pictures automatically, save them in a secret place where you won't see them listed in 'my images' or whatever folder, and then upload the images. It all depends on how dedicated the hackers are, and how badly they want to spy on you. There are almost seven billion people on earth, and a lot of them are hackers. And they spend hundreds of hours finding ways to do secret little things that nobody else knows how to do. And they post their secrets on the internet so the other hackers can use them.
3. New iPod.
4. New Straight Talk Phone #1.
5. New Straight Talk Phone #2.

The voices are fighting and fighting against me trying to separate myself from Curtis. They want to convince me that he still cares about me, he misses me, and so on. They want to convince me to keep trying and trying and trying to offer money to him. Every time I talk about my new phone on facebook, I get voices telling me that Curtis is upset about my getting a new phone.

I have to make it through this week. One more week of too many hours - about 72 hours total. Next week I've cut back at Weis, the place where I have painful memories and I cry every morning (unless I drink lots of coffee). It's hard to describe the feelings I had for Curtis. Whenever we had a conversation, I felt this trusting pleasure simply by standing next to him and talking and listening. There was a feeling of warmth in my body, in my chest. I loved the sound of his voice, the look in his eyes, the warmth of his body when he was close to me, the trusting way he told me about what was going on in his life - and we never had enough time to talk, since we were on the clock and always in a hurry, always rushed to get back to work and not get in trouble. One time, he gave me a sprouted onion that would have gone in the trash. I cherished it as a gift, took it home, and planted it in a cup, and watered it. The sprouts grew for a few weeks, but I got sick for a few days - it was during the wintertime - and I didn't water it, and it dried out and the sprouts died. I wanted to plant it outdoors and grow it. He just did it as a silly little thing, for the heck of it, but I took it as though it was a special, wonderful gift and I wanted to keep it alive.

Because of him, I've noticed that it's very hard for adults to be close to teenagers or children. I'm thinking about this because of the voices trying to get me together with young boys, and talking about pedophilia, hebephilia, and so on. There are hardly any situations where I am close to young teenagers. And I can't think of any social environment where adults 'mix' with teenagers and children. The more I think about it, the more it seems like this is wrong, something wrong with our society. Children only socialize with other children, at school, and after school together. The only reason I met Curtis was because he was a high school dropout who had to get a job, and he wasn't going to college. All the older teens are still in school, and going to college, and you can only meet them if you work someplace like McDonald's where there are always teenagers working. What if I was stuck working in an office environment with nothing but adults? I can't believe I used to live that way. I used to work temp jobs in office environments where everybody was older. It's so much fun being around young people. They're more playful, more full of spirit, and they have so much more going on in their lives. There's so much more life in them.

It makes me think about how 'closed' all of our houses and neighborhoods are. It makes me think of intentional communities, about how we would have little small cottages or tents or wigwams or whatever, something primitive, and when you walk out your door, your neighbor's tent is right next to you, and you walk around from tent to tent and they are a very short distance apart. This desire is something that all of the intentional community people would understand, the desire to have your neighbors close to you. Our houses are too big, too far apart, with big giant lawns that have to be mowed with a lawnmower, instead of letting the cows eat the grass so that you can milk the cow and have your own raw milk for your family. It's wasteful. The zoning laws probably forbid people to graze cows on their lawns. I get angry every time I drive down the road and I see the huge, huge, huge lawn and the person driving their lawnmower over it, while I myself would do anything to have a big lawn and my own cow grazing on it and my own raw milk for my family. Think of all the money people could save, all the money they could make, if it was 'normal' for everybody to use cows and goats to graze their lawns instead of a lawnmower, and they'd have their own milk.

It would be much easier to fall in love if we were closer to our neighbors, too, and if children and adults were mixing all day, if people weren't isolated from each other. Intentional communities already know all about this. We would actually interact with people when we stepped outside. It's also a desire to 'trust' your neighbors, that they will be the same neighbors forever, instead of changing and moving every year. There is so much turnover in every apartment complex. There are always people moving and leaving every year. In State College, the town, when I walk around and look at strangers on the street or in the stores, they don't like to make eye contact. This is because we all know that we are all temporary. But in Bellefonte, strangers on the street and in the stores are trusting people. They make eye contact and they start up random conversations with you, as though they know you're safe and you'll always be there and you'll meet them again next week. People in Bellefonte aren't always changing and leaving the way people in State College do, because most of the people in State College are temporary students there.

I'm having my heart broken right now - the heartbreak has been an ongoing torture lasting for months and months and months as I've wanted to be with Curtis and I can't - and that heartbreak is making me think about 'What caused this to happen?' The answer is usually 'There's something wrong with our society.'

I'll post this for now. It's random and it has lots of different topics in it. I don't know why I'm so ADD today. I think I'm getting over a cold, because I was 'hit by a train' the last two days, and all I did was sleep, and I have a cold sore in my mouth.