9:35 AM 12/27/10
I hunted for Curtis today, but I didn't see him. I saw the manager-like guy, though, and he is the one who I originally asked about Curtis. I made eye contact for a fraction of a second but then I looked down. I'm paying attention to what my eye contact is doing, because it strongly relates to my drug residues. There are some drug residues that cause me to make prolonged eye contact comfortably, without fear.
Just now I took one of the St. John's Wort pills, because I need to continue with my time management, my projects and tasks. I've had stomach viruses over and over again for the past week, although they weren't as bad as the first one was. So I've hardly been eating anything, and I've spent a lot of time just lying in bed struggling not to vomit, and not doing anything.
Anyway, I didn't see Curtis today, so I bought a couple of small items and then left. I will try again. I'm still not ready to try texting him, and I'm also not ready to ask for more contact, although 'they,' or 'we,' were thinking about it, thinking that it's a conceivable possibility to ask him to let me visit him away from work, and to spend a short, limited time with him, and we will be required to talk about something other than work. We would be required to talk about something personal and get to know each other.
It could be boring, but we would just follow the rule that we were required to be together for a specific amount of time, and then I would leave. It would give me less anxiety, because if I were going to spend an unlimited amount of time with him, I would worry that either he, or I, would get bored and uncomfortable. (Although, I can imagine playing video games with him for a long time.)
I'm also trying to find a way that I won't be disturbing his relationship with his girlfriend. This was just a fantasy. Playing video games together actually seems believable. I don't know how he would feel about a psychological interrogation while I practice my questioning skills.
I was noticing how hard it is for me to talk to people about anything except work. It's like the only question I have is, 'How do you pay your taxes?' I don't ask that, and I don't phrase it that way, but that's what it comes down to. We are all working to pay our taxes, whether they are direct taxes or indirect taxes.
(Some people don't really understand it or realize it, but paying the rent is an indirect tax. The reason rents are so high is because of the property taxes on land, and because the government's banking system has distorted the price of land. So it's an indirect tax, and it's a huge tax - a large portion of our money goes to rent.)
Anyway, I don't know how to talk to people about personal subjects. What do you like? What do you dislike? What do you care about? What scares you? What bores you? What excites you? What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What do you not really care about one way or the other? What do you remember from your past? What do you see in your future? What's going on in your life right now? What do you want? What's on your to-do list? What do you dream of doing? And then you can ask 'Why?' about all those things too. You can ask people a million questions about how they feel about things, and I never ask those questions, and I never know people.
I had an entertaining day reading the internet a couple days ago. I was having a drug reaction and it was causing me to do lots of wandering and exploring and reading. I started out by reading about children's fantasy play and pretending, which is something I'm very interested in. I feel as though I still need it, as an adult, but it's something I can't do easily while being attacked.
Then I started reading about the questions children ask their parents, and they are often very hard, unthinkable, surprising questions. Some of them made me laugh and laugh. One kid asked, 'What would happen if there weren't any mosquitoes?' Another kid asked, 'Where does the water go?' when it goes down the bathtub drain, and every time his father answered, the kid said, 'Then where?'... 'Then where?'... 'Then where?'
Asking questions is an art. Your questions are shaped by the mood you're in, and by the overall spirit of the answers that you expect to find. If you are in a bad mood, you will tend to ask negative-leaning questions that direct you towards negative answers. If you are in a good mood, you will ask positive-leaning questions that lead towards happy answers. Both people will believe that they have found 'the truth about the world,' but in reality, their mood gives them a way of looking at the world, and the mood came first.
You could categorize questions - I've been thinking about 'categories' - what type of question is this, what is the concept behind it, etc. The 'no mosquitoes' question is a 'NOT' question. There's something in the world, and you imagined 'What if NOT X?' The libertarians (and anarchists, and anyone else who doesn't want a government) asked 'NOT' questions: what if there were no taxes, what if there were no government, no regulations, and so on. Then they saw all the invisible potential things that don't exist because they never happened - all the money we would have had, to spend on so many other things. All the free time we would have had, to achieve so many things. Those things are invisible and unthinkable to most of us.
You can always ask more than one question about something. If you think that you found a good question, it's actually only one possible question among many other questions. Sometimes you can find a really good question that gives insight, but you sort of already have to HAVE the insight BEFORE you ask the question. If you're stuck in 'questioner's block' (like writer's block), then your questions feel shallow and you can't see or learn anything from asking questions. You get answers that you already know. That's why I wanted to make categories of questions, to help people who have 'questioner's block,' so that they can try to ask questions from various categories, deeper and more insightful questions, to break the block, to help them see the subject differently. This is a lot like Edward de Bono's writings about creativity, actually.
The page I was reading said that children's questions were interesting and challenging because adults 'take everything at face value.' We've already seen everything, and we already know what happens. It's unthinkable to imagine 'what if' about something so familiar that we see it every day. What if there were no gravity on earth? We don't even bother to think about it.
Questions are very hard to see. You don't know what subject to ask questions about. If some whole area of consciousness is blocked out of your mind, if there's some subject that you hardly ever think about, you won't even know it exists and that you can ask questions about it. If you happen to see someone else asking those questions, you might feel bored and impatient, and look away from it, feeling like you already know this, or you don't need to know it. Edward de Bono said that people tend to say, 'We already tried that, and it didn't work,' or 'That's exactly like something we're already doing.' He said to focus on the differences. No, it ISN'T exactly like what we're already doing. No, it ISN'T exactly like something I already know.
My time management attempts are not going very well. But yet, that's not entirely true. I've done more 'stuff' than I was doing before. I just haven't done things reliably and consistently no matter what the circumstances. And it depends on taking St. John's Wort right now. I want the habits to be so strong that I can continue them even when I'm off the drug, but right now, it's very hard to keep trying when I'm off the drug, and getting hit by other drug residues that make me want to do nothing but sleep. I want my habits to be strong enough that I can mess up for a couple days, but then get back into it again. I am trying to make realistic lists of things to do and then actually do them.
I'm finding that I have categories of tasks and projects. The book that I have, Mark Forster's 'Do It Tomorrow,' describes a few categories of tasks and projects, but it wasn't enough for me. I started to feel like I was doing too much of one thing, and it was making my life not worth living. I need to do something each day that makes life worth living.
Let's imagine that all I did all day were chores. Life would not be worth living. I'd wake up and start cleaning the house, doing the laundry, cooking, and so on, and if that's all I did all day, I wouldn't have the spirit to do those things forever and ever. But if I do something else that I know is making progress in my life, making things better in the long run, or something that I really enjoy doing and that I really care about, then I can tolerate doing some of the meaningless routines and chores, because I know it's not all there is to life.
So I started writing all these categories that I've observed in my own lists. These are only an arbitrary group of categories out of an infinite number of possible categories. Categories are so flexible and so arbitrary that each person will see them differently. Whatever is important to you, whatever is noticeable and meaningful to you personally, will stand out and will have its own category. Those categories are useful to you, but they might not be useful to someone else. You can make huge, general, all-encompassing categories too, but they won't be specific enough to be useful. And even those are flexible.
I've seen authors and philosophers who like to put things into categories, and they act like THEIR categories are the only possible categories for everything in the universe. Like let's imagine someone characterized all objects in the universe as being either 'Blue' or 'Not Blue.' And those two categories are all you have to choose from! And somebody says that those categories are enough to describe everything that exists. It's true, you could categorize things that way, but there are infinity other possible ways that could be more useful. Things can be either 'Living' or 'Nonliving.' And so on. It depends on what you want to use the category to do.
So all my tasks and projects are being categorized. I need to categorize them because of how they make me feel. If I do too many tasks in the 'Life is a meaningless, miserable chore' category, then I will get depressed and hopeless.
'Task' and 'Project' are categories that the book gave me. I already vaguely felt that, when I looked at my to-do list (the original, infinite list where nothing ever gets crossed off), that there were some tasks that were small and quick and I could do them in a few minutes, and other things that were big and complex and they would take days, weeks, months, or years to complete. 'Task' is a small quick thing, although it can be slightly larger and it can have subtasks, but mostly it's something you can get done all at once, in one day. When it's done, it's done. 'Project' is a larger thing, with more subtasks and subprojects, and it takes several sessions to complete, maybe days, weeks, etc.
But I have other categories of things that I see on my list. And again, these are not the only possible categories. They are only things that I myself see in my list. 'Disaster Recovery' is a category for both tasks and projects. I have to waste a lot of time and money cleaning up drug residues and throwing things away and buying new things to cope with the accident a few years ago, and I shouldn't have to waste my time doing that, but if I don't, then I have terrible reactions. 'Patching up' is when I have to do something that's a temporary fix, without fixing the source of the problem - for instance, putting new clean paper down on the bed where I sleep, because it's always getting contaminated.
The books describes 'organization projects' and 'continuous projects.' Organizational projects are projects that are meant to achieve a specific goal, to create something, to start a program or build something, to make a new system of some kind. The project has an end. That would be something like, 'Start my own business.' Continuous projects are something that you must keep doing forever, or for a long time, and it's the same thing every day, like practicing a musical instrument, or jogging every day.
Because I've been reading about the enneagram for the past few years, I have mental structures that are based on the enneagram and the other psychological systems that they've connected with it. So I made categories called 'Productive,' 'Protective,' and 'Leisure,' which were loosely, vaguely based on enneagram type three, six, and nine. The enneagram gives me ideas for categories, but I know those aren't the only possible ways of looking at it.
I also have 'social, sexual, survival,' because of Ichazo's instincts. When I looked at a page about Ichazo's work, he actually had much longer more detailed lists of instincts, and it was confusing, and of course he always had things in groups of nine. A lot of that stuff isn't talked about much in the 'Americanized Enneagram,' the enneagram that is familiar to most of us. He has a lot more detail in his original work. So if I wanted to, I could take lots of his instincts as a suggestion for my categories.
An example of the 'Leisure' category: doing things that have to do with getting music and playing music. Authorizing my laptop yesterday was a task intended to help with my leisure, getting music to enjoy it for its own sake.
'Protective': Disaster recovery, fixing the bad consequences of an accident I had. Preventing future disasters, by doing things like a monthly check on my vehicle, according to the instructions in the owner's manual, to check the fluid levels, tire pressure, etc. Finding ways to save money, to avoid loss of money, to avoid wasting money, to cut expenses, to reduce the harmful consequences of something, to fix problems and prevent them.
'Productive': Creating something. Writing a story or a song. Learning a new skill. Finding a way to earn more income. Expressing myself.
But all of these three categories can be 'applied' to the three instincts. 'Applying' a 'higher level category' to a 'lower level category' or 'different group of categories' is a concept or mental structure that I have, so that there will be categories within categories. So for all three of those, productive, protective, and leisure, you can 'apply' the three categories of social, sexual, survival.
That's an enneagram system mental structure, after years of reading those books and thinking in those terms. So there are nine possible categories: Protective/social, Protective/sexual, Protective/survival, Leisure/social... and so on. And it's hard to think of what would fit into those categories.
'Sexual' doesn't just mean sex when people talk about the instincts and the enneagram - it also means 'close, personal, intimate relationships' and 'charismatic, warm, friendly personality' (instead of cold and formal) and it also means 'intense experiences.' An example of Protective/sexual might be... (this is hard to think of)... activities, projects, and tasks that are geared towards preventing you from getting hurt in relationships?
When something is hard to think of, that's the whole purpose of making these category structures: it forces you to look for something that's hard for you to think of. It isn't in your usual familiar group of categories, the easiest things to think of. But to someone else on earth, that category might be very, very important, and it's all that they think about all day long.
This kind of thing is useful if you're trying to create a story character, for instance. What does SOMEONE ELSE worry about all day long, someone different from yourself? These personality type systems are meant to explain why some people are so very different from ourselves.
If you look at the celebrities in the magazines, if you read about celebrities, a lot of them are the 'sexual instinct' type, and all that they worry about, all day long, is whether they are attractive to other people, and whether they're having enough intense experiences, and whether they are in love with somebody. Then there are other people, like a Social/Self-Preservation type, who don't worry very much about that, and they're more concerned with whether they have a job, and material safety, and they're being respected, and the people around them are like-minded and cooperating with them.
Anyway, that's something I like about the enneagram, or any personality typing systems. They give me categories that I can use to think differently from my usual way of thinking.
I've noticed people who use the word 'You' more often than I do. 'You' is almost a taboo word to me. It makes me squirm and feel uncomfortable. I almost feel like I'm sexually molesting them or harassing them. If I say 'you' to a female and ask personal-directed questions, I feel like she thinks I'm a lesbian. If I talk to a guy and I'm saying 'what do you think about this' or whatever, I feel like I'm flirting with them or suggesting that I'm attracted to them. It happened once when I asked a girl 'What are you doing after work?' or something like that, and I was just asking in a casual way, not meaning anything, but I had this feeling that I was a lesbian and that it was like I was going to ask her out on a date or something.
Then, afterwards, it feels like we have a 'special relationship' and I am supposed to give them priority above other people. So if someone else walks in, I am supposed to value this one person more than the other person. And if I then talk in a personal way to the other person, it lowers the first person's status and feels like competition, like the first person will want to butt in to the conversation and try to make themselves important and special again. If I did that with everybody, then everyone would be competing all the time to be the most important and the most special person. If someone gets left out, I feel bad. I don't like to have a conversation where somebody is standing off to the side feeling excluded.
So I don't like to say 'you' to co-workers or have lots of personal conversations. And I almost never do it, unless I'm using St. John's Wort, and it's always the puppeteers who suggest that I speak directly to somebody or jump into a conversation.
I noticed, many years ago, that it was very hard for me to remember and keep track of everybody's likes and dislikes. There are some people who can name a friend or family member and then say 'He likes this, this, this, and this, but doesn't like that.' It helps you with things like gift-buying. It means you know someone really well. But even when I'm dating someone, I don't know them well enough to quickly and easily make a long list of all the things they like and dislike. Even when I was dating Eric, and living in his house with him, it was still hard for me to know what kind of gifts he would want me to buy.
I was sitting at Barnes & Noble a couple weeks ago, and at the next table beside me, in the cafe area, there was a guy and girl who were clearly 'going on a date.' They were two strangers getting to know each other for the first time. They were talking directly to each other and asking questions, 'do you like this, do you like that, why do you like it?'
And their conversation was boring, and fascinating, and irritating, and disgusting, at the same time. The guy seemed fake and annoying and I didn't like him. He was putting on a fake persona. He was self-conscious and he was aware that I sat down next to them and that I could overhear their conversation. But he gradually relaxed as I continued to quietly look at my magazine. And when he asked the girl 'do you like this or that,' those questions seemed to excite him, and I could feel the sexual excitement between them, and to me it was strange and unpleasant and disgusting. I didn't look at him, I didn't see his face, and when I sat down I didn't even glance at the two of them - I saw enough to know that they were in the 'doesn't exist' category of people, the people who are totally unattractive and boring to me personally. I saw him for a fraction of a millisecond, long enough to see that he had short hair and was clean shaven and wearing normal clothing, so I put him in the 'doesn't exist' category and ignored him. He was just another member of the faceless crowd. So it was strange and uncomfortable listening to him asking these personal questions and getting excited.
And the girl seemed stupid and smart at the same time. She seemed weird and neurotic. She seemed both shallow and deep. She had a slightly nasal, stuffy voice, like someone with allergies, or someone with the Weston Price facial deformities that affect the sinuses. (Yes, I also have face and jaw deformities.) I was annoyed with her, too.
And I felt at the same time that both of these people would never like me. The feeling went both ways. I didn't like them, and they didn't like me. I envied them, and wished that I could be on a date with someone asking them stupid, trivial, annoying personal questions. 'I like black cats.' 'Why do you like them?' 'I don't know, it's sort of that creepy Halloween thing, you know, the spooky black cats with the green eyes, that kind of thing.' 'Do you have any brothers or sisters?' Every question, every topic, was you, you, you.
In the English language, we don't have a formal and informal 'you,' but other languages do. Some other languages have a formal 'you' that puts distance between you and the person you're talking to, as though you're talking to someone important, talking respectfully, in a cold and impersonal way. The English equivalent word might be 'They.'
Imagine if you talked to someone and referred to that person as 'They' and 'Them.' 'So, what did they do after work?' and the person would respond, 'We went home and watched TV.' Or you could use formal titles, like 'Where is my lady going on vacation this year?' Or 'Sir' or 'My Lord' or 'Sire' or some other formal title. (Yes, I looked these words up on the net a few months ago. I was curious about what words could be used.) When you talk to people that way, it puts a cold formal distance between you. I tend to talk to people that way, with a cold distance.
But other people have a more warm, personal 'you.' In their conversation, they observe things about me personally. 'I see that you like to do this,' 'What will you be doing?' 'What do you think about that?' They are directing it at me personally, as an individual. This is the 'sexual' instinct, which is why we say that it doesn't just mean 'having sex.' It also means 'individual person instead of a group,' or 'personal.'
Have you ever had a teacher, for instance, ask you the question, 'When you write an essay, do you need to imagine a specific person is reading it, or do you talk to a faceless group of people?' When I write, I can talk to a faceless group. Sometimes, I vaguely have a specific person who I want to be reading it, but I am comfortable addressing a whole group instead of individuals. Some people don't feel comfortable that way. They want to focus on one unique, individual person with their lists of likes and dislikes, past and future experiences, and so on, which are always different from one person to the next, and no two people are exactly alike.
I know someone at work who I feel pretty sure is a So/Sx type. She is 'everyone's best friend.' No matter what she's doing, you can interrupt her with a personal comment or a conversation, and she will focus on you, listen to you, and have a response directed at you, and you feel that she cares about what you're saying. But if someone else walks in the room and says something, she is just as likely to hear that person, and then get into a totally different conversation with them. She is warm and likeable. She targets her focus towards one person at a time, and is temporarily in that person's world. But there are many different people who can temporarily have her focus. That fits the So/Sx description.
I get a lot of this from a web page called 'Info from the underground' at www.ocean-moonshine.net. That web page has a malfuctioning first page, so you can't just type in that address in the browser, you have to google it. If you type the address, it gives you some kind of error message. The real address is something like www.ocean-moonshine.net/aPIU23hPOId_3ewpiuc1380734187dkjs, some kind of nonsense code.
I'm interested in these instincts because I want to know more about what's missing in my life. That's why I've been trying to pinpoint my personality type for so long. But I have made the enneagram system look like it's not reliable at all. I have a long history of changing my enneagram type, and before that, my Myers-Briggs type.
Here is my enneagram history: First heard about the enneagram when I was doing telephone therapy with Judith Swack (which is also when the severe electronic harassment began). I thought I was a Type One, because I have perfectionistic tendencies, and strong beliefs about what's right and wrong in society. Then I thought I might be a Nine. Then, a Six. Then I thought I was a Seven. Then, a Five. Then a Four. Now a Three. The only ones that I was sure about were the Eight and the Two. Those descriptions are clearly 'not me.' I'm not a 'strong, dominant, controlling person,' and I'm also not a 'warm, loving, giving, helping, controlling, manipulating, flattering' person. (I sometimes do helpful things, but the description of the Two is much too extreme to be me, in being helpful and other-focused, all of the time. I know I cannot possibly be that.)
Many of the changes were suggestions from 'the voices,' who have been controlling me for years since the therapy. I had electronic harassment experiences before that, but they were never so severe and life-ruining as they have been in the past few years. It was like the voices wanted to deliberately prevent me from feeling sure about who I am, to prevent me from understanding myself, to prevent me from being able to control myself, to prevent me from seeing outside my limitations.
Either the voices are really, really stupid and incompetent, or really, really malicious and evil. Either way, they have done extremely harmful things to my life for a very long time. They either intended to harm me, or were trying to help me but were so stupid and incompetent that all that they did was cause more damage. Whatever, the result has been that I have gone for a very long time unable to meditate, unable to ask myself questions, unable to look at myself, unable to look at the future, unable to make decisions for myself, constantly bombarded with zaps and loud noises whenever I try to think.
Yes, I could use a tape recorder and I could record the audible-to-everyone, physical, external clicking and snapping noises that they make on objects inside and outside my house. The voices are not just in my head. Other people hear these noises and they call it 'The house is settling,' or 'the boards are creaking' or 'the temperature change caused the wood to snap' or 'the temperature change made your windshield glass shrink or expand,' which is how they explain the snapping noises.
If I drive someplace in my car, park the car, and sit there and meditate, I will have a couple of minutes of quiet, but very soon, there will be loud banging cracks on the windshield, as though someone is throwing rocks at the windshield. And it will happen again, and again, and again, and again. Those noises are harassment, an attack.
Sometimes, during or after a snap, I can hear voices, as though it was a sonic bullet and when it exploded it delivered the payload, a message, a signal, a high-frequency audio message. It's my understanding that the snapping noises are caused by ultrasonic attacks, not radio frequency attacks, but, like all the victims, I am just guessing, based on what I've read, because I don't spend my time and money to collect and use these weapons against people, so I don't know what does what.
I got into writing a very long blog with no ending, just because I am entertained by the activity of writing, and because I haven't decided to do any other activities, tasks, or projects, or whatever. I should read over this and try to wrap everything up.
Because of reading and writing this, 'they' started to wonder if I might be a so/sx type instead of a so/sp type. Fine, whatever you want to wonder about, go ahead and wonder. They'll probably change my instinctual stacking a hundred more times before they settle on one thing. I'm keeping it so/sp for now.
http://www.ocean-moonshine.net/e142857369/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=20&MMN_position=83:80
Okay, I read over it, and I inserted a few more paragraphs and comments. And I broke apart the huge, gigantic paragraphs that are so hard to read. I'll go ahead and post it now.
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