I want a text editor that acts like a pen and paper

11:27 AM 11/29/10

(This became obsessive and I went off on long rants about off-topic subjects, so there really was no real point to this. I was taking a caffeine pill to wake myself up, and I haven't eaten breakfast. Caffeine + no breakfast = obsessively long rants about small things.)

I want a text editor that acts like a pen and paper.

There are times when I WANT to use a physical pen and paper instead of typing something on the computer. Why would I want to do that? There are some things that computer screens can't easily do.

Word processors and computer screens can do lots of wonderful things that pens and papers can't easily do. With a pen, or even a pencil, it's hard to erase large blocks of writing and rewrite them in another place. You'd have to erase almost everything, or cross it all out and draw little arrows pointing to the place where you wanted to move it. On the computer, you just insert something and it moves all the text out of the way easily. There are lots of other things word processors can do.

But there are features that I don't like to use on a word processor. I don't like to use underlines, for some reason. Usually, I don't know that I want to underline something until after I've written it and then reread it. Sometimes I want to make the computer do the things that I do with a pen, and I can't, so I do something else or do it the wrong way. I can't write italics when I'm handwriting. The slanted letters don't look very different from my regular letters, and they don't stand out. So in handwriting, I usually underline something if I want to emphasize it and make it stand out. But officially, it's supposed to be in italics, not underlined. In books and printed materials, it would be in italics. So when I write on the computer, I just don't bother to use either italics or underlines. For some reason, I don't want to take the trouble of pressing ctrl-u or ctrl-i. And I don't want to use italics, I want to use underlines, because that's what I do on paper, and I want to do the same thing on the computer. I just don't want to use italics at all. It doesn't feel like 'me.' (You'll notice that I use only one apostrophe instead of a "quotation mark", too. There was a book that I read, years and years ago, which used a single apostrophe instead of quotation marks, so I decided it's okay to do that. It might have been 'The Bobbsey Twins,' or something, a very old copy of that book at my grandmother's house, some really old book that probably isn't around anymore. I don't have to press the shift key while typing a single apostrophe.)

(Oh, yeah, speaking of 'old books' written on sepia-colored paper: I noticed, while watching Harry Potter for the third time, that the Three Brothers story is drawn in black, white, and tan, to make it look like it's happening on the pages of an old book, in ink, on old tan-colored paper. And they cast shadows onto a back wall, as though they are closed inside a small space, because they're closed inside the book, instead of moving around out in the real world.)

Sometimes that's because I'm writing on Notepad. I like a small, simple, fast text editor instead of a slow, big, bulky one, so I write almost everything in Notepad. I don't like to see lots and lots of toolbars and tools and menus at the top that I don't know how to use. It makes me feel anxious and uncomfortable. I sit there thinking, 'One of these days, I should learn how to use every single one of those things.' And I can't focus on my writing as much, because I start thinking about how I'd like to learn how to use EVERY SINGLE FEATURE in Microsoft Word. And they have classes, and big books, that teach you how to do those things. I've actually taken some classes (for free, at a job training place) years ago, and I learned how to use Excel and Word. But nobody really knows how to use every single feature, and becomes an expert on it, and can use it perfectly, and uses it often, and can do it easily... only to find that Microsoft has made another update or a new version of the program and there are new features to learn how to use, or something got moved to a different menu and you can't find it anymore.

I don't even like to use Wordpad much, unless I make something that's too long for Notepad's memory, which sometimes happens. I don't know if that's a bug with my hacked, spyware-infested computer, or if it's a normal thing with the Windows 98 Notepad, but sometimes if you write a really, really long text file, it will stop you and say 'not enough memory to complete this operation.' So you have to save some of it in a new file.

Anyway, in Notepad, you can't do underlines. You HAVE to use italics. I don't know if there's a shortcut key to do that. You have to go up to the edit/set font/ menu. And I tried that just now, and it made my WHOLE FILE into italics, instead of just one word. So when I want to emphasize something, I write ALL CAPS, and if I'm even madder than that, I'll write *ASTERISKS* around it too. So that explains some of the style that you see in my blog - I write everything in Windows 98 Notepad.

Today, I was thinking about what I would do when I went to visit my parents. I am going to suffer from 'enforced idleness.' I can't get anything done when I'm here at my apartment, but at least I feel like I COULD get something done if I wanted to. But when I'm visiting my parents in West Virginia, I'm trapped in a place far away from all the things I need to do, and there's no chance at all that I can do anything.

So I thought about bringing my laptop with me, which I have sometimes done, and I've played video games or written song fragments on my laptop while I've been at my parents' house. And I was thinking, 'Fiction writing?' I've considered writing books, but I haven't been serious enough to actually start one yet. And my first thought was, 'Nah, for that, I'd want pen and paper.'

So I asked, 'Why?' (And when I say 'I' asked, it usually means 'they' asked, because this was when I had been woken up and was lying in bed talking to the voices. And lately, the voices have been into the time management stuff that I've been reading from Mark Forster. That's the latest fad, and I want it to last forever instead of being a passing fad. And I think I've had a drug residue outbreak too and I'm reacting to something which is making me more ambitious. But anyway.)

Why would I PREFER pen and paper for writing something?

Well, I can easily draw lines on the paper if I want to. I can also choose where to put something on the paper easily. If I want to put something all the way at the bottom, I can just go down and put it there, instead of having to hit 'enter' to go all the way down there, only to find that if I go back and write anything above it, it 'inserts' all those enters, and pushes the bottom words farther and farther away instead of keeping them at the bottom of the page. If I put them at the bottom of the page, I want them to stay there, and I don't want to have to mess around with menus and special tools and techniques and commands to force it to stay there. I guess I'd have to go hit 'insert' or 'overwrite' to do that, but I don't want to have to think about it. I tried doing that just now in Notepad, and it ignored me when I pressed the 'insert' button.

(Wow, I really must be on drugs. I was looking at 'page setup' in Notepad, and I decided to hit the little question mark and ask what it meant when it said 'header: &f'. So I was reading about how you can print the name of the file at the top of every page, and as I was looking, I noticed that the & symbol looked like a little handicapped wheelchair symbol, and then, it also looked like a breast cancer awareness ribbon. I don't usually do image distortions. My brain is doing unusual things today.)

So anyway. Here are all the things that I like to do with pen and paper that I can do easily. Sometimes I want to divide the page into two or more columns. Like 'pros' and 'cons,' the good side and bad side of something. You can do that with word processors, but you have to learn how, and it takes thinking and planning and using tools and toolbars and menus and commands, and you have to know what they mean, and you might even have to, heaven forbid, use NUMBERS to tell it the exact location in inches or pixels of where you want to draw the line on the paper. I don't want to use numbers or make everything perfect. I'm not doing this for publishing. I'm doing it for thinking. It's a sketch. I don't care if the line is located precisely 4 inches from the side of the paper, or, was that 4 inches from the margin, or what?

I could make an ASCII art line in Notepad. I could make a | symbol (that's called a 'pipe,' if you ever have to say it out loud). But I have to make each individual one and then make sure that they all line up.

blah blah blah | bleh bleh bleh
asefd weqr wqer| aaepwroi wepriour

and so on.

I want to use the mouse like a pencil. I want to left-click the mouse and draw a line on the page like I would with a drawing program. And I do NOT want to draw a line made from 'two points,' that is, I don't want to click a place where the first point will be, and then stretch the line (a perfectly straight line) which sticks to the first point that I put down, and swing it around while it holds onto that point, and then click to put down the end point of the line. I just want to draw the line manually. It really annoys me when I'm used to drawing something and I try to do it on the computer and it doesn't feel the same. I grew up writing things by hand on paper! I'm 36 years old! We didn't have a computer through most of my childhood! And when we got one, it couldn't do very much! So I still know how it feels to just put the pen down and draw a line on the paper without having to count the number of inches away from the side of the page or anything like that.

I have dozens of old spiral notebooks packed in the storage unit somewhere. I have been writing in spiral notebooks for decades. I cherish my spiral notebooks. And I never like to be without one. In the past, I even took the trouble of taping a piece of string to a pen cap (so that if the pen ran out of ink, I could replace the pen and leave the cap attached to the string), and then taping the other end of the string to the back of a little notepad, and bringing it to work in my pocket. (I had a whole bunch of free post-it notepads from a business that went bankrupt, a place where I used to work, but I threw them away because that box of stuff got contaminated with residue.) I can't imagine NOT HAVING a spiral notebook in the house somewhere. It just occurred to me that other people might not feel that way about spiral notebooks. There are people who, you might go in their house, and look around, and not find a spiral notebook anywhere. They might have a pen or pencil here and there, but only for writing on a stray piece of paper. They are not going to have five or six spiral notebooks sitting around with journal entries and thoughts and drawings and random things in them.

I don't write in spiral notebooks as much as I used to - I do most of my writing on the computer. But there are some things where a computer just won't do, and that's what I was asking about.

Planning something needs a spiral notebook. Real thinking. Making a structure. Making an outline. Seeing the big picture.

So to do that, I have to do strange things like draw a line down the center of the page, or draw boxes and arrows and lines. Or put something at the bottom of the page. Or write a list of things, and then go back up and add something else beside them. If I wrote a list of things in Notepad, and then tried to go back up and write something else beside them, it might insert an 'enter' that will push everything else on the list downwards. But on my paper, I can spread out diagonally on the side if I am only writing a comment for that one particular thing. If I know that I won't need a comment beside every item on the list, just next to one item, then I don't worry about using a lot of space in the comment on the side, and it might go up beside other items in the list. I'll show you.

A
B
C
D
E
F how much I
G to talk about
H - I just wanted It's a great letter, H.
I love the letter H.
J
K
L

(Oh no! This thing deleted all those spaces! They were there in Notepad! See what I mean? It didn't line up like I had it. It said, 'I just wanted to talk about how much I love the letter H. It's a great letter, H.' But it got all screwed up. I had these things lined up in a diagonal way, with spaces. I don't want to mess with it anymore.)

I might make something slanted and spread it out, because I only wanted to talk about the letter H, and not all those other letters. 'Being messy' is something I can only do in a spiral notebook.

I've been enjoying Mark Forster's blog. He has spent years trying to find ways to make himself do things. You might look at him and think that he's a really competent, powerful, rich, famous person who's got it all together, because he's an AUTHOR, so everything in his life must be perfect. But actually, he's still struggling to find out how to overcome his weakness, after all these years, after all these techniques, after all these books and newsletters and blogs, after being famous. He wishes that he could easily just do things the way other people seem to. (And that was something that the voices were saying to me, too. They were saying, 'I was a weak-willed person who couldn't get anything done... SO I BECAME A WORLD-RENOWNED EXPERT ON TIME MANAGEMENT!') He still, to this day, after all these years, feels anxious and uncertain about whether he'll get his work done today. But he has a little bit more faith than he used to have.

He seems like he might be an SP who looks around at all the SJs in school, while growing up, and wonders how those SJs can make themselves do their homework two weeks before it's due. He was talking about that. He said that with some people, if their assignment is due in two weeks, then they will start doing it today, and do a little bit each day, and they will use up the whole two weeks. But *WE*, people like you and me, will wait until the last minute and do all of it the night before it's due. He says, And if that's not you, then you wouldn't be here reading this website about time management. And then, he made me want to laugh (or cry!) even more, because he said, 'And if it doesn't have a deadline, then we just never do it at all!'

And yes, that's exactly how I used to do my homework! When the assignments were easy, I could get a good grade, I'd get a 100% on an essay written in the hour before going to class. This used to make other people angry at me, because they'd spent the last three days working on it, but they got a worse grade than I did. But when I got into college, the assignments were so huge and so complicated, I couldn't do them the night before anymore. That's when the 'slow and steady wins the race' SJ types started getting better grades than I did. I couldn't do the essay in the hour before class, and get 100% and make them all mad at me, anymore. I eventually dropped out of college. I started to feel like I wasn't learning things that would apply to a real job in the real world. Instead, it's like college is a great, big, giant, expensive Myers-Briggs test to find out whether you're an SJ or an SP, and if you're an SJ, you pass the test, and if you're an SP, you fail.

But I love how-to books. I *LOVE* the Schaum's Outline of Bookkeeping and Accounting. It teaches me how to do something, a process, a procedure, and it makes me do it, over and over again, in the exercises. And that book is so cheap, it's only like $20, and I can do it all by myself without going tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a college education. I'd love to get ALL of the Schaum's Outlines and do them all, and I'd have spent less money than I would if I went to college. And bookkeeping is something that I can use right away. I can see how it's useful right now. I don't have any uncertainties about where this is going. I can use it today to work with my real money.

I had some trouble when I started trying to do math with those books. There was always a prerequisite that I needed to do before I could go further. I felt like I had to PERFECTLY understand the prerequisite before I could do anything. ('Prerequisite': Before you take calculus, you have to know how to do algebra. That kind of thing.) When I do math, I like to understand all of the theory, about why and how this works. When I was in Calculus class in high school, I was way behind all the other students because I would sit there and mess with it until I totally understood the theory.

Instead of memorizing a function, I would re-create the function from scratch every time I needed to use it. An example: There is a universal solution to a polynomial. I might be calling it the wrong thing. I can't recall exactly what it is. But if you fill in this function and solve it, you can find out the answer to any problem if it's the right kind of problem. It's like, x = +/- (the square root of) (a squared + b squared) / 4ab, or something like that. That's almost what it is. I know that's all wrong. And I could never remember it. I can't memorize things very well.

(Although that wasn't true a long time ago. I used to have a good memory, too. When I was in fourth grade, I was the only person in the class who successfully, perfectly memorized and recited 'The Wreck of the Hesperus' and was able to recite it in front of the class. 'It was the schooner Hesperus...' It's a poem about a shipwreck, and they tie the girl to the mast so that she can survive the shipwreck. I don't remember if she lives or not. I think she probably dies at the end. It was a sad poem. Everybody dies. Maybe I'll have to read it again to see if it's how I remember it. I think I vaguely recall something about a cold, dead body. So the girl probably dies.)

So instead of relying on my bad memory, instead, I studied to understand WHY that function was what it was. And I would rebuild it from scratch when I needed to use it to solve a problem. Eventually, I would have trusted my memory, if I had done this enough times to recognize that I was writing the right thing for the universal solution. But this kind of thing always made me take longer when I had to take a test.

You know, I've loved reading Antal Fekete ever since I first discovered him. And now, I've looked on his web page recently, and he has some crazy stuff about Rainbow Numbers. (It isn't on the home page, it's under one of the tabs at the top, in the 'Math' section, beside 'Popular Economics,' 'Scholarly Economics,' etc.) And I can almost understand it. It actually looks very interesting, but I'm not studying math right now, and I don't have time.

Wow, I'm so hungry, my stomach is actually starting to burn. I might eat some cereal. I've been eating cereal for a few weeks now as a test. I don't spend as much money as I used to when I would go out to Burger King and get breakfast every morning. I like to eat a heavy breakfast instead of a light breakfast. I ate bowls of cereal for breakfast through all my childhood, but in reality, I would like to have 'dinner' foods for breakfast. I don't just want bacon and eggs, either. The 'bacon and eggs' tradition, there was a reason for it. It was easy to cook. It didn't take long. And you could get eggs easily in the morning if you lived on a farm. But people mistakenly believe that 'bacon and eggs' are SACRED breakfast foods, which can only be eaten in the morning, and no other time of day, and they MUST be eaten in the morning, or it isn't breakfast. But me, for breakfast, I want liver and onions and spinach, and I want baked beans and fish (I read that in England they might eat baked beans and fish for breakfast, but I don't remember where I read that). Why do people say 'yuck' about eating certain foods at certain times of day? That always annoyed me. The only thing that I do understand about it is that it's hard to cook breakfast when you've just gotten up, you're tired, you're hungry, and you need to make something quick and easy to get you started. So bacon and eggs will give you lots of calories and fat quickly and easily, so you have lots of energy with little effort. But if it were quick and easy to have liver and onions for breakfast, I'd eat that. I always eat leftovers for breakfast if I have them. Now that refrigerators have been invented, we can save our leftovers and eat them the next morning.

Oh, anyway. Schaum's Outlines of math have prerequisites, and I would want to do all the previous books first before moving on to calculus or something. And I wasn't satisfied with just memorizing the functions and the tricks. I wanted to understand them. So I might want to use a 'real' math book that goes into detail on those things instead of a Schaum's. I tried looking at a Schaum's Outline of Physics (and I really need to know about this, because I have to protect myself against electronic harassment that uses an unknown medium - it might be electromagnetic, or it might be sonic, but I have to understand the attacks).

But it started talking about vector math, and I don't know vector math. I tried to just use and memorize the tips and tricks, but it wasn't enough, and so I went to another shelf and I got a book all about vector math. And it didn't take long before I got really, really stuck on something I didn't understand, which wasn't very well explained in the book. I got stuck on this one, small thing, very very badly, for weeks and weeks. I was trying to study it on my Tuesday evenings at Barnes and Noble from 7-8 PM. (That routine started because 'they' made me put up a Craigslist ad about my 'intentional community,' my religion, the order of Retmeishka, and I said in that ad that if anybody had problems reaching me by email then they could meet me in person at the bookstore, because I have problems with computer hackers interfering with my important emails, and possibly deleting comments that people write on my blog, or preventing people from writing comments at all, and that kind of thing. I feel like people are desperately trying to find me, desperately looking for me, but they can't reach me, because their letters and comments don't get through. That's the reason why Chuck Palahniuk insists that all of his fan mail must be written on paper and delivered to his agent. If you send anything in email to somebody who's the target of harassment and hacking and stalking, then you can't be sure that they'll get the email.)

It took weeks and weeks. I was writing in a, you guessed it, a small spiral notebook. I was trying to understand why this function was what it was. It wasn't explained well. I don't have faith in them, and I can't just memorize it if I don't have faith in it.

(I'm eating canned fish for breakfast right now. I bought it when I was stalking Curtis last week. I wasn't here just to look for Curtis! I was here to go shopping, even though I could get it more easily at a store much closer to where I live, and I never go to this store, and haven't been here in years. I'd rather not eat canned fish - I want fresh fish - and I think that cans might have a plastic lining that contains bisphenol-A, and if they don't have a lining, then you are eating dissolved metal from the can itself, and I don't want to eat dissolved metal, and I don't want bisphenol-A either, and I don't want overcooked food either... but canned fish is my compromise food.)

(I can't cook right now, and there are reasons why, and it's a long story, but part of it is because I tried to cook bone marrow, months and months ago, and the toxic vapors from the bone marrow filled up my refrigerator, and now every time I put anything in there, the vapors land on the food, and if you eat it, you'll throw up. And I tried airing it out with the door open, and I've bleached it and sprayed it and wiped every inch of it, and I've left the refrigerator on with the door open so the fan will blow, but the air circulated inside some closed-off area in the back that I can't open up, I think, and the vapors are in there. So now I'm not using that fridge at all, and all I do is go get fast foods and put them into a small fridge that I went out and bought at Wal-Mart.)

(In nutrition class in college, I learned about what people can do to get calcium if they can't drink milk. You can eat canned fish that have the bones cooked in them. I've tried that, and it's really good. You can get canned salmon, and it has the backbone in it, and you can see the segments of the backbone, and it takes a lot of courage to eat something so disgusting for the first time, if you've never eaten it before, but it's good. I don't have a bad reaction to those bones.)

(Nutrition class is where I first learned about cooking bones in soup, and that's the reason why I believed that cooking soup bones, with bone marrow in them, was something that would be easy and safe to do. I thought it was a mainstream thing to do. I thought it was normal to cook soup bones and bone marrow. But it turns out that bone marrow contains toxic hormones, something that you can feel in your own body if you get badly injured or if you are under extreme stress and trauma. This is a feeling you get if you get hurt so badly that you might not survive. It's the near death feeling, I am about to die, right now. If your bones get crushed so badly that the bone marrow is broken open, like if you fell off a cliff or fell out of a tree or off the roof of a house, or if you got in a car accident, then you would have this feeling.)

(When you get injured that badly, there are some things that happen to your body. You might pass out. People black out when they get severely injured. What causes you to black out? Bone marrow hormones. Whatever that hormone is, it comes out of bone marrow. You might vomit, and you might, pardon my language, shit yourself. What causes you to puke and shit yourself? Bone marrow hormones. When you are badly injured, the bone marrow releases things into your bloodstream. It releases new blood cells to replace the blood you're losing in the accident. Maybe it also triggers adrenaline, and large amounts of adrenaline will also make you puke and shit yourself. But it's not just adrenaline all by itself.)

(Whatever it is, you can get this feeling if you cook and eat bone marrow, the feeling that you are being killed. You literally feel like someone or something has nearly killed you, if you eat bone marrow. It's a specific sensation.)

(And I only ate a tiny fragment. Imagine if you ate a lot. You would go to the hospital for the worst food poisoning you've ever had. So all these people, in all these books and websites, claiming that they eat bone marrow, must have cooked it to death at a very high temperature, or eaten yellow bone marrow instead of red bone marrow, or SOMETHING, to make it so that they don't pass out and puke a few minutes after eating it.)

OMG, I'm obsessing about off-topics. I had one huge long paragraph, and I broke it into smaller paragraphs, and just kept the parentheses around it.

Well, anyhow. Eventually, I found the answer. I understood it. I understood WHY that vector math function was what it was. (It was something about the result you get if you add two vectors together, or maybe it was when you multiply two vectors together.) It tooks weeks and weeks of struggling. And I was way behind in my schedule. How on earth would I get through this whole book if I got stuck on one small function at the very beginning of the book, and it took weeks (although, actually, I spent only one hour, once a week, during my Barnes & Noble routine)?

(You know what else I learned as an adult? I found this out during the weeks when I slept in the car out in the parking lot, when my other apartment filled up with toxic black mold fumes and I would suffocate while I was sleeping. I learned that if you sleep in the car with all the windows closed, you'll wake up with your heart pounding and you'll be in a panic. You have to open the window to get some air. You can open it only a tiny crack, but that's enough. I had to open it only a tiny crack because it was freezing outside. But that's caused by too much carbon dioxide. You probably have enough oxygen. It's too much carbon dioxide that causes you to panic. So I found out the same thing happens to me if I sleep in the bedroom with the door closed all the way. I have trouble waking up and I might wake up in a panic or have nightmares. The door has to be open a little crack to let fresh air in. I was a little kid, saying goodnight to my mom, and I would tell her to please, leave the door open a crack, or I'll get scared. I didn't know WHY. I thought it was to feel secure, like I can see a little light from the hallway, or like they can hear me if I yell. But actually, it was probably because I would get too much carbon dioxide in my closed bedroom, and it would make me panic in the middle of the night. And I never knew that, until decades later, as an adult.)

But anyway! I finally understood the function. But I gave up on trying to do the math books because I felt like it would take too long. I wanted to be wholeheartedly committed to what I was doing, otherwise I couldn't keep doing something for months or years without knowing why I needed this. I had to be absolutely sure that this was what I wanted to study.

So that's why I really like the Mark Forster web page. I'm ordering one of his books, actually. But anyway, that kind of thing made me get way behind in math class, while all the other kids just memorized the functions without understanding them. I can brag about one thing, though. I got a 5, the highest possible score, on the AP Calculus exam. 'Understanding stuff' really helps you later on! But I still, to this day, ENVY people who DON'T MIND memorizing things without understanding them! I wish I could make myself do that! So I can read Mark Forster and I get this feeling that still, even after all this time, even after becoming the world-renowned expert on Time Management, he still envies the people who just memorize the functions and pass the tests and do their homework weeks before it's due, and they do this automatically because that's the way they are. But WE have to go through this battle of 'Am I doing this wholeheartedly?' Do I really want to do this? Why? What good is it doing me? What am I going to use it for? I can't do it unless I know why I'm doing it. He's obsessed with this subject, not because he's naturally GOOD at it, but because he's naturally BAD at it! The people who are naturally good at time management aren't writing books about it, they're just out there living their lives and managing their time.

Wow, I started this off by talking about a text editor where you can use the mouse to draw a line down the middle of the page, or insert some text at the bottom of the page without 'pushing it ahead' if you go back up and insert something above it. And I want to draw lines and arrows, and I want to draw text in any location without moving the other text out of place. And that kind of thing. So I just use a pen and paper instead.

Writing is what I do because I'm not able to get up and DO things. It's like what they said in this calendar that I picked up and looked at. The name of the calendar is something like 'The B-Word,' 'bitch,' a calendar about women being bitches and being proud of it. I think that's the one. One of the pages said, 'Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls are too busy to keep diaries!' People who are actually out DOING stuff are too busy to spend hours writing and thinking. So that's why I'm thinking about writing a book and trying to make money by doing that. I could make money because I have a terrible weakness: I'm too tired and sick to get up and DO things. So all I do is sit around thinking and writing. Wouldn't it be great if I could make MONEY by sitting around thinking and writing? For hours and hours every day? There are other people who have actually done this, you know. It's not unthinkable. Why am I so different from those people?

Speaking of Harry Potter (was I speaking of Harry Potter? no, but I was thinking of it), I am waiting for 'Harvey Putter and the Ridiculous Premise' to arrive in the mail. This is a survival story, an escape story. I like stories where people escape from a closed world that they're trapped in. Liberation stories. We are trapped inside the pages of a book, in a small, limited world. Our will is not free. We are slaves of the author, forced to do whatever the author writes about us. (I'm also thinking of Fantasia in 'The Neverending Story,' one of my all-time favorite movies.) It's a tiny, closed room, and we can't move around, like the Three Brothers casting shadows on their beige-colored walls. The three brothers are also skinny, almost skeletal, like stick figure drawings, not fully fleshed out, not warm and strong and fat and alive.

I want to be warm and strong and alive (and a little bit fat). I don't want to be a Pinocchio puppet, I want to be a real person. (Yeah, I'm having a Weird Brain Day. I'm not sure why.) I don't want to be Truman Burbank stuck inside Seahaven. I don't want to be Annie trapped in the crumbling house in hell in 'What Dreams May Come.'

So I think that this Harry Potter spoof might actually have a serious theme to it, the liberation theme. I haven't read any spoilers about how it ends, though. I read a review of it and the guy said that he liked the ending, it made him smile, but I don't know if that means they escaped or not. I don't know what it means. I'm not sure if the characters will liberate themselves or not. I'll wait and see. What is the spirit of this movie?

If I wrote a book, I want it to have the 'fully fleshed out warmth' instead of being like stick figures. I am thinking of an old book called 'Heidi,' which is a book that illustrates the Weston Price diet, the unhealthy lifestyle long ago, when people who lived in towns got sick and malnourished, but if you moved into the mountains, and ate fresh food and got fresh air, it would bring you back to life. I want my book to have healthy places where you'd love to live. A reason to survive. Something worth fighting for. People you love. People you want to see, over and over again. Places where you wish you could live. Food you wish you could eat.

They're not just going on an adventure far from home. I love adventures, but I get lonely if I am away from home for too long. I don't want to leave home and never come back. And I don't want a love story with a bad ending that *SUCKED*, and I won't mention any names, but THE GOLDEN COMPASS trilogy comes to mind! Sorry, was that a spoiler? I read all of the Golden Compass / His Dark Materials books and I liked them, but there was cold loneliness and not enough warmth and love. There wasn't enough of a safe home to live in.

At the same time, I don't want an Anne Tyler book where you're resigned to going home, no matter what, and you can't escape, no matter how hard you try, and you are resigned to a hopeless, dull, unsatisfying life forever. Anne Tyler was depressing.

There doesn't have to be only one book. I can postpone a book if I don't know what I want to do with it yet. I might not become a world-famous author starting with my very first book the way J.K. Rowling did. I might have a couple of books that suck, and then eventually, one of the books doesn't suck. I don't have to be huge, I don't have to be famous. But I wonder if anybody anywhere would ever pay a couple dollars to buy a printed, physical book that I wrote? You know, Amazon.com happens to be a successful website that's been around for a long time, through all these dotcom bubbles. People are still buying enough books to keep Amazon.com from going totally bankrupt.

I like Mark Forster's 'I'll just get the file out' technique. I've already been using that technique. I lie to myself and say that I'm only going to do one small thing. Sometimes it's the truth. Sometimes I really do quit after doing that one tiny thing. I'll just get the file out and look at it. But after you start doing that, you have momentum, and it's easy to keep going and do some more work on it.

So if I said 'I'll just get the file out' about writing a book, that means, I can just write one small book that sucks. It doesn't have to be the world's greatest book ever. It can be just a little one, and it can suck. It's okay if it's a bad book that nobody likes all that much.

I think I might be ready to get up and do something now. And later, I'll be visiting my parents. I'll probably have a spiral notebook with me. I'll probably bring a laptop. I'll be stuck in enforced idleness. But I must see my parents before they die, and I must see them again and again, not just once every couple years. And eventually, I will have to help them when they are too old to help themselves. I want to see them once every season. Can I do that? Every season of the year, four times a year? That requires planning. I have to ask for time off, over and over, and it's hard to ask. But my parents are going to die, forever and ever. That's what happened to J.K. Rowling. I don't want that to happen to me. But they will die sometime. (Note, that eventually happens to everyone. But I'm saying that the loss of her parents, or her mother, I forget whether it was both parents - that influenced her and hurt her so much that it became part of the books she wrote. The whole world could see how much it hurt her, and they could relate to it. Not all books have a 'lost parents' theme in them.)

I wouldn't have stayed here in State College. I might have gone back to West Virginia. But I got a boyfriend, and I sort of couldn't help getting a boyfriend. In fact, I didn't want to. And I fought with the voices in a terrible argument. I remember that. I remember fighting about not dating Eric. I remember arguing with a separate voice that wasn't my own. I didn't want to date him. I was going to say 'no' to Eric originally. I might not have stayed here. But I got a boyfriend, and I didn't want to.

And when I broke up with him, I got another boyfriend right away, and I didn't want him, either. I met Peter right away. Now, I don't want to leave, because of Peter.

And then, 'they' made a fake arrangement for me to be bonded with Curtis. Curtis would have been a Temporary Workplace Friend. I had a terrible, terrible crush on him, and I would have been devastated when he left. But I would have cried and cried and then I would have gotten over it. I would have moved on.

They are tearing me apart, when I want to go home to be with my parents, but 'they' want to make me stay in the State College area and put down roots and start a new life here. I've refused to put down roots, all these years, and haven't made any friends. And I can't help saying 'yes' to bonding with Curtis. I can't help it, because I like him so much. I love him like family. I want to spend years getting to know him. I want to get used to him. They pushed me to do things I wouldn't have done on my own. And I can't help saying 'yes' to it. I can't help liking him as much as I do. But I know, at the same time, that 'they' are doing this deliberately as a way of making me stay in State College, for whatever reason.

(It makes you ask the question, are 'they' really as 'everywhere' as they pretend to be? Why would it matter where I live, when they follow me everywhere when I drive long distances in my car? Who cares where I live? They can spy on me no matter where I go. Uh-oh, I ate chocolate a while ago, and no, that's not a joke, I am starting to get the 'hate' feeling again and I'm wondering why the feeling is getting worse. What made me get into the 'hate' mood? And no, that's not directed at Curtis, it's directed at the attackers.)

I should go get some real food. I haven't really eaten. I've written too long, and wandered to too many topics. I know when I've worn out my welcome. I don't want to write another 'hate' blog again.

This blog shouldn't have a bad ending. I'm going to visit my parents. I'm off work this week. I won't get much done, but I will get a little bit done. I want to make changes in my life. There are some really, really important things I need to do.