Toy Stories and pretending; taking Peter to the store; why Tammy doesn't drive now

3:00 PM 11/30/10

I'm resting today. No caffeine pills this morning, but I am having a little bit of coffee now. I'm recovering from one of those stomach viruses where I figure out that I'm sick so I stop eating and stop drinking, and I never throw up, I just get really dehydrated for 12 hours or so. I couldn't even take more than a sip of water at a time.

I 'got the file out' a few more times today and yesterday. I have a backlog of garbage that I have mostly cleared out. The piles of trash in my bedroom are gone, but I have 'objects' on the floor now, mysterious unexplained things that need an official place to be. They're not garbage, and I mean to keep them. But they need a more permanent place besides sitting on the floor in my bedroom.

This is going slowly, but at least I am doing a little bit. I don't trust myself. Anytime I've tried self-improvement or time management, bad things have happened, or the enthusiasm wears off after a few weeks, or it's just a passing fad, or I have a disaster and I end up worrying about and dealing with the disaster, and when I go back to trying to do the time management again, I feel too hopeless to try. I really would like to practice time management for the rest of my life, till the day I die. I would like to be conscious of my time management. I don't mean that I need to be obsessed with it or anal-retentive about it. I don't mean that it has to be perfect, or that every second of every day has to be scheduled down to the smallest detail. I just want this to be something I am aware of, and trying to do, forever, so that I can achieve more of the goals that I set for myself, the ones without deadlines, the goals where nobody will come to my house and arrest me if I fail to do it, the no-pressure goals where nobody cares, except me, if I never achieve the goal.

Somebody at my apartment complex doesn't watch Toy Story! There were a few toys in the dumpster today, and a bunch of them fell out when the trash truck lifted it, because the dumpster was overflowing with stuff this time. (I usually don't notice. I haven't been going to the dumpster for a while!) There were some rubber dinosaur toys. I used to have a bunch of those. They are probably still in the attic at home. The dinosaur toys next to the dumpster were actually pretty cool. I would have wanted them if I was still collecting dinosaurs. There were some matchbox cars too (I don't know if that was their official brand name or not, but they were matchbox-like cars). It makes me sad because I feel like toys are alive and they have feelings, just like in the movie. I really, sincerely used to feel exactly like that.

I haven't been buying or collecting any toys for a long time, but I still sometimes feel that desire to collect them. And now that I'm an adult, I have so much more money. I could collect every single toy and I could make the collection absolutely perfectionistic, and I would have every single piece, and every single thing ever made in that toy collection. I used to try to do that with Hasbro's My Little Pony toys.

What did I used to 'play' when I played with toys? Sometimes I played alone. Sometimes I played with my brother, and sometimes with the neighbor kids. We had various 'plots' for the stories that we would play. Sometimes the plots were very creative. Other times they were dull, reassuring routines. My brother John and I both felt like we were 'losing our creativity' as we got older, and the plots for my toy stories weren't as interesting as they used to be.

I remember one big story my brother and I did. We had Fabuland Legos, and the animals went on an adventure and got stuck in The Glue of Time. It was like being in a time-travel rift or something. They were trapped in another dimension and some of the other animals had to go rescue them.

Also, when Bonnie Bunny got mad, she sort of sounded like Miss Piggy from the Muppets. She would say, 'mad, mad, mad, mad, mad... BIGGGGG BUNNNNYYYY!' and she'd transform herself, and then we would bring out my huge, pink, stuffed bunny which was hundreds of feet tall compared to the Fabuland toys. Then she would do whatever she needed to do.

I had one of the 'dull, reassuring routine' plots that I often played with the neighbor kid Jeremy in West Virginia. It was 'feed the dinosaurs.' The dinosaurs were made from hollowed out rubber, and some of them had a big hole in their mouths which went into the hollowed out body. So you could stuff things down in there, as long as you could get them out again. We used to make them eat grass and weeds and other growing plants. We just sat there feeding the dinosaurs. Then, when they got full, we would hold them by the tail and beat them so that the food would fly back out of their mouths and they would be empty again. That was all we did. Sounds boring, doesn't it? But it was comforting. I guess it was like wanting to grow up and become a shepherd and watch the sheep grazing, or something. It's also a lot like playing Roller Coaster Tycoon, and watching the little people as they buy burgers and pizza from your little shops. It's satisfying somehow.

Playing pretend, while cooperating with someone else, is an interesting process, and I'd like to read more books about it. I have a book somewhere in my 'google books' list online, but I forget what it's called and I'd have to look it up - oh, it's called 'The House of Make Believe,' that's it. Anyway, when we cooperatively played pretend, one person would suggest something: 'Let's pretend that he can't talk anymore.' (Yes, that was the result of me 'hearing voices' right now while I'm typing.) So one of the toys would be trying to give a message to someone or ask for help, and they weren't able to talk, because they were under an evil magic spell. And you almost always say 'yes' to whatever they suggest, and try to go along with it. Then you adapt the story that's developing to whatever they suggested. And you don't know what the outcome will be.

You can see social dominance in whoever gets to decide what the main plot will be. Sometimes one person does most of the suggesting, and the other person does most of the adapting. Sometimes you play with kids who are more violent and aggressive, and they want to fight battles with you constantly. I didn't usually like plots where you fought battles all the time and were always competing and trying to win. I liked peaceful scenarios and cooperative scenarios. I liked it when there were good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys lose in the end, but neither I, nor my friend, are stuck in the role of 'bad guy,' but we both might help to operate the 'bad guy' toys, and then cooperatively fight against them.

Playing pretend with toys might be helpful for writing fiction stories as an adult. I could remember what types of things I liked to pretend, and try to remember why I felt that the plots were somehow boring or unsatisfying later on. For whatever reason, after a while, I felt like I wasn't getting what I needed from playing with toys. One reason was because my best friend Jeremy moved away. The other friends I had weren't the 'cooperative imaginary playing with toys' kind of friends. Many of them were the 'physical outdoor play with large objects' kind of friends. For instance, we might play volleyball, or do gymnastics, at my friend Christina's house. And my friend Sarah and I once built a sort of treehouse, but really, it was just a couple of big heavy branches and ropes strung between two trees, and the branches were big enough to walk on. Neither one of them liked imaginary toy scenarios. I liked playing with both of them, but I couldn't expect them to play toy stories with me.

I wrote fiction stories as a teenager, and many of the images came out of the dreams I had at night. This was before I was consciously aware of 'hearing voices,' and anytime I heard voices or talked to anybody in my head, I viewed it as a 'psychic' experience instead of an attack. So that was how I got a lot of ideas for my stories.

Later on, there was Rachael, my best friend in middle and high school, but she didn't play with toys either. With her, I had the most interesting intellectual conversations that I've ever had with anybody. And she enjoyed reading my fiction stories and cheering me on, and she would wait excitedly and impatiently for the next bit of the story to be written. (No, my stories weren't that great. She was just a very good friend and a very enthusiastic person.)

So I mostly liked cooperative, peaceful scenarios. I didn't like competition, and I felt that I wasn't very good at it. When I tried to compete, I felt like I usually lost. I didn't like submitting and being inferior. I didn't like playing with bossy kids who wanted to beat me down and brag about how great they were for winning against me.

But it's interesting to look at the pretend scenarios that I used to play. We play them because we want to, because they make us feel good. I'd like to know what kinds of stories make me and other people feel good, so that we want to play them, or read them, or watch them, whether it's a video game or a book or movie.

I didn't play in many sports, but I did run track. Running track was competitive, but I didn't get off on thinking about how great I was compared to all the people I had beaten. I was more into enjoying the excitement of traveling in a bus to go to some other school, and the fear and terror and excitement just before the start of a race, and then, running as fast as I could and enjoying that, but also, I had my limits, and I was a mediocre track runner, and I didn't win a lot there either. And I wasn't obsessive about trying to win.

I was a really fast runner if I was in a small group of people. In a small group, I could beat almost anyone. But if the group of people got larger, I became more mediocre in comparison. More and more people could run as fast as I could. So I didn't win much at the multi-school track meets. In fact, I still remember the two little girls who always beat me. It was the same people at every track meet. I think it was these twins, and I think they were black. Am I crazy? Am I remembering correctly? I seem to remember these two black girls who were twins and they were small and they could run the hundred-yard dash faster than I could, every time, and it was hopeless. Maybe it was only one girl, and it's not very likely that she was black, because we had almost zero black people in the area where I grew up. I think I'm remembering wrong. I just know that this one girl (or twins) could ALWAYS beat me at the dash, and there was no hope, ever. Their legs were just designed better than mine.

Actually, I had some problems, over time - my knees started to hurt, and I had 'shin splints' (where the bones in your ankles are slightly cracked, a tiny bit, and it hurts) and I couldn't run very well anymore, and I didn't have any energy either. That must have been during my 'chronic fatigue' phase that was happening in my teenage years. I think I was having a reaction to pesticides at that time, but also, I wasn't eating well. We didn't always have a lot of good food at the house, and I ate tons of cereal and pop-tarts, constantly, because there was nothing else to eat. 'Being trapped in a house with nothing to eat' is one of those things that almost all teenagers experience. You're helpless, you can't drive a car, and you don't have a job, so you don't have much money except maybe a small allowance, and you might not be allowed to cook freely either. And that's right when you're growing and getting a lot bigger really quickly, so you need huge amounts of healthy food. (Steak for breakfast.)

I'm waiting for Peter to call. He wants to go to the grocery store this evening. His wife has a problem with her driver's license. This is one of those things that I can understand and relate to, but at the same time, it never happened to me, because whatever happened to me, it wasn't quite as bad as it was with her. Here's the story.

First, Peter isn't allowed to drive, because he hasn't been able to control his low blood sugar attacks, and the doctors took away his license. The one doctor said that he could have his license back, maybe, if he used a constant blood sugar monitor. He has the monitor now, but he's not using it, and it doesn't matter anyway, because they don't have a car right now.

They actually have two cars. One is a van, and the other is a white car, I forget what kind. The white car is sitting in the lot at the tow truck place. It's basically possessed by the tow truck people now, and they would have to pay a big fee to get it back. The van is sitting in front of their apartment. Both cars are either barely working, or not working, and need lots of repair and maintenance. Both of them have expired registrations. Both of them have expired auto insurance. Both of them are uninspected.

Tammy is trapped in an 'I can't do paperwork' rut. She had the money. She had a job. But for whatever reason, she couldn't bring herself to do the paperwork, fill out the forms, pay the fees, and keep the cars legal. I actually understand EXACTLY how that is, but somehow, I got myself out of it, and it's happened to me several times.

There's kind of a funny story to that, for me. This happened earlier this year, in 2010. I had an expired inspection sticker on my car. The cops pulled me over two or three times for OTHER things - once was because my registration was expired, and once was because I had a headlight out. Both times, they ignored my expired inspection sticker!

I wondered what was going on. I looked at the sticker. It said: 08 10. That actually meant that it had expired in October, 2008 (a long time ago!). When the police glanced quickly at the sticker, they were mistakenly thinking that the sticker meant it would expire in 08/10, or August 2010. It was almost a year and a half expired, since October 2008, but they were reading it backwards. Apparently, the position of the numbers was strange, or reversed, and there was no obvious indication of which number was the month, and which was the year.

I sat there in terror while the cop walked up, looked down at the inspection sticker on the front, and said, 'Inspection's okay,' and continued giving me his ticket for the expired registration. I was thinking to myself, 'What??? The inspection is OKAY? It's been expired for a year and a half now!' He was reading the numbers backwards.

Soon after that, I did, actually, get an inspection, and now it's up to date.

But Tammy has had something similar happen. It is that terrible feeling that you cannot bring yourself to do some piece of paperwork. It is a physical pain, a block, an anxiety attack. I usually got myself through these attacks by using an antidepressant, St. John's Wort, if things were getting badly behind. But for whatever reason, Tammy couldn't get through it. Her health problems are worse than mine. She's taking thyroid medication now because her thyroid is too low. Her face and body used to be all swollen, and it's been improved since she started taking the thyroid pills. But she never had any energy. I can understand how that pain and anxiety of not being able to do paperwork made her not do it, for so long.

She no longer has ANY up to date paperwork for driving. Her driver's license, insurance, registration, and inspection are all expired. The cars need repair. One of them, as I said, is waiting in the tow truck lot. Every piece of paper that can possibly be illegal, is now illegal.

Peter tried to do some of the insurance paperwork for her. But he says that the insurance people told him they need HER signature on something, and they needed to talk to HER about it, because Peter wasn't a legal driver in the house. For whatever reason, he wasn't allowed to finish it. I have a feeling that this is actually not as bad as he's making it sound, but for whatever reason, whenever he tries to get Tammy to do it, she freezes up and can't do anything. She often starts crying when they fight and when Peter tries to make her do it.

Now Peter tells me that she actually didn't even get a driver's license at all when she was a teenager. She got one much later, as an adult, in her twenties, I forget how old. She was used to just not driving, and didn't really care about not leaving the house and not going anywhere. It doesn't bother her that much not being able to drive.

That's the reason why I sometimes drive Peter to the store. But lately I have been losing patience with this, because Peter always takes a REALLLLLY long time at the store. I am impatient because we have been doing this on my days off, and I never have enough time on my days off to rest, and to deal with my OWN disasters, like the garbage pileup. I have trouble sleeping, because of the drug residues and because of the attackers waking me up every few hours all night long, and it's hard for me to even get out of bed before noon. Then I spend the whole afternoon with him on his errands. In some ways, I enjoy being with him and I enjoy spending time with him, but when I am worried about my own disasters, it frustrates me to take so long on something else when I could be at home, when I'm finally awake, when it's the afternoon and I'm finally out of bed.

He will go to Wal-Mart, and he will take three hours to shop. I had complained a bit about how long these trips took, and Peter blamed it on the fact that he is riding a slow-moving motor powered shopping cart because he has foot blisters, but that's not why it takes so long.

Peter does everything slowly. I had forgotten about that. When Peter used to work overnight at McDonald's, people always complained that he was too slow. He would take hours and hours to do something. He shops like that too. I get impatient, and I want to run through the store and just grab something off the shelf and keep moving. But Peter has to pick it up and look at it, compare the prices to all the other prices on the shelf, pick up another item, compare the prices, gripe and complain about how the prices have gone up $0.20 because of inflation, talk about how much it costs at another store someplace else, and so on. Sometimes, he just seems to stand there, picking up one thing and then another thing, and not talking, and I don't even really know what he's doing or why he's doing it, which tends to happen more when his blood sugar is crashing. ('They' told me Peter is an SJ. His awareness of prices is something that I like about him, actually, but it can be annoying.) And he will do this with every single item he picks up. I wouldn't care how long he takes, but I'm the one driving him, and I'm the one escorting him around the store, watching (and smelling) to make sure his blood sugar doesn't crash, and it almost always DOES crash, and he's not using the constant blood sugar monitor either. The longer we stay in the store, the more likely his sugar will crash!

Peter started taking Wellbutrin to help him stop smoking. He still smokes, just not as much. But the Wellbutrin is an antidepressant, and ever since he started taking it, I've noticed that he's more mellow when his sugar crashes. He will obey a suggestion if you tell him that you think he needs to check his blood sugar. In the past, when he wasn't on Wellbutrin, he was - I can't remember the word for it, but it's a word that they always use to describe diabetics having an insulin reaction - it's a word that means something like 'feisty, noncompliant, fighting, defensive,' something like that. I think the word was 'combative.' They say 'no' over and over again and won't do anything at all. They won't eat or drink anything either. He would deny that anything was wrong, and he didn't know his sugar was crashing. He doesn't do that as much now that he's on Wellbutrin. No, I am not an advocate for antidepressant use - I always say that I would like to solve the root cause of the problem or find a better way to do it (for instance, the Feingold Diet to help hyperactive kids and adults). I see antidepressants as a temporary thing that you might use out of desperation, but not use them forever. But still, I have observed that some things are easier to deal with when he is on Wellbutrin.

I'm going to post this now. I've just been sitting and writing most of the afternoon. But I got rid of some of the trash, and I made another trash can out of a cardboard box, and I have some plans for what I am going to do to prevent these problems from happening (as badly) again, even if I get another severe chronic fatigue attack. If the system is hard to use, nobody will use it. So I'm asking 'why does this happen?'

The smell of fear: Someone had a seizure during Harry Potter

11:14 PM 11/29/10

I'm very annoyed about something. I am reading about some experiments where they meant to test whether there is such thing as a 'smell of fear.' I know absolutely for sure that there is. However, these tests, all the ones that I'm reading about, were focused on the armpits. They always tried things like putting a pad under the armpits to collect the sweat while you watch a scary movie or when you were about to go skydiving. They assume that it's a 'smell' and that it comes from the armpits because the armpits smell and because you are sometimes consciously aware of sweating from your armpits when you are anxious. It's true, I know that I myself have sometimes sweated from the armpits when I was anxious. But that's not all there is.

Those tests are badly designed and I was very annoyed every time I read about yet another 'armpit sweat' test. The 'fear smell' isn't even a 'smell.' I don't smell an odor. Not only that, but it could come from lots of other places besides the armpits. There is no reason to believe that the armpits have anything to do with it at all. It could be breathed out of the lungs, whatever it is. It could be sweated all over the body through the skin, not just the armpits. It might even be an oil-soluble substance secreted through the oils of the skin.

It happens when Peter's blood sugar crashes. When I walk into the room, I feel fear immediately. I feel it in myself. I feel terrified for no reason. My heart starts pounding. It's a normal room and I don't see anything scary. I just feel terrified for no reason, right away. I know myself. I'm 36 years old. I know when it's normal, and when it isn't normal, to suddenly get terrified and feel my heart pounding.

I don't 'smell' anything at all. But as soon as I breathe the air around him, I become terrified. I know right away that his blood sugar is crashing.

I didn't talk about this incident. Something happened the first time I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It was during the scene where Harry and Hermione are alone, and Ron has just recently left. In fact, I think it was just before the dance scene that I liked so much. Harry and Hermione are walking around up on top of a cliff. The ground is rocky and irregular. Tiny snowflakes begin to fall. They talk about going to Godric's Hollow, and Hermione agrees to go.

Right at that moment, I heard a strange sound coming from behind me in the audience. It was way up near the top. Some person started breathing in and out making loud whooping noises. I thought that it was a retarded kid or an autistic kid or somebody who made uncontrollable noises. I've heard that sound made by many different people for different reasons.

Suddenly a kid ran out the door, followed by a couple other kids. The kid shouted 'I don't want to be here anymore! I want to go home!' The other kids followed her out the door. She just ran away for no reason. I didn't know what was going on.

Then a minute later, a guy stood up and said (yes, he really said this, for real, just like on TV), 'Is there a doctor in the house?' Nobody went to him. Nobody answered. They then started making phone calls to 911, and somebody got a movie theatre employee to stop the movie while they waited for the ambulance.

I started tapping my face, my hands, my collarbones, and my ribs using Roger Callahan's Thought Field Therapy, but actually, I wasn't using any particular sequence, and Thought Field Therapy is very specific and it claims that the order of your tapping is very important... so actually, I was using 'Emotional Freedom Techniques' or EFT, instead of TFT. (I looked this up on the net again. I've known about it for years because of Nathaniel Branden mentioning it.) I was just tapping myself randomly wherever I felt like tapping, in no particular order.

The movie people came in and made an announcement that the movie would start up again in a few minutes and everything would be okay.

I was tapping myself because I started to feel fear and panic. It went right through the whole audience. I smelled that same fear that I always smell when Peter's blood sugar crashes.

I was tapping myself also, because I had the urge to go help the guy who asked, 'Is there a doctor in the house?' I'm not a doctor. But my dad is a radiologist, and my mom is a nurse (although they're not working anymore). I've studied medicine, and alternative medicine, on my own. I have experience with a person who has a chronic health problem that causes him to have incidents of low blood sugar and ambulance calls. So I thought there was a chance that I might know the answer to their question, if someone had an unexplained attack, and if they didn't know what was causing it.

After a minute of tapping, I calmed myself down. The tapping actually works. I still smelled and felt the fear, but I was calm and in control of myself. So I got up, and I quietly walked over to the people in the back row. I walked down all the steps, to the front of the audience, and walked across the room in front of everyone. I was the only person who did this. It was unusual, and actually, I was embarrassed. But I thought that now is not the time to worry about inappropriate behavior, because this is an emergency.

So I walked up the steps on the other side, and went to the people who had the problem. The row in front of them was empty except one guy who had stayed there. (After a couple minutes, that guy left, while I was still sitting there.) I sat next to him because he was right in front of the people with the problem. I quietly asked the one guy, in the row behind me, the guy who was standing up, next to the person who seemed to have passed out, the guy who had said 'is there a doctor in the house,' I asked him, 'What was it that happened?'

He said, 'I don't think people should be coming over here and asking questions.'

I said, 'I'm sorry I made you angry.'

'What?'

'I'm sorry I made you angry.'

He nodded his head and didn't say anything else to me. This felt to me like 'I accept your apology,' and I didn't leave, I stayed, and I persisted.

Then I looked at the lady who was holding the man in her arms. He had passed out and was lying with his head back. I could see that he was still breathing, and he was alive. He was passed out and not talking. The smell of fear was very strong all around these people. The children had moved out of the seats, and they were sitting against the wall instead of sitting in the seats next to the guy who passed out. That was one of the kids who had run away, the girl who had said 'I want to go home.' She had come back and was now waiting with them for the ambulance. She was crying. Her mother was holding the man passed out. Her mother was talking to her and telling her that we were waiting for the ambulance and it was going to be okay. I think there were three kids. One was a little girl, then an older boy, then a teenage boy, if I recall. One of the kids said, 'This was the worst Harry Potter ever.' That would have been kind of funny, if it weren't in such a bad situation. The kids will always remember that one time when they went to see Harry Potter and dad passed out and had a seizure.

I knew it was a seizure because that's what they said when they were talking. I was listening. I found out that they already knew what had happened. The mother was talking to someone else. It might have been when she was talking to the 911 people on her cell phone. She made a couple of phone calls during this time. One person she talked to was a friend or family member, someone who knew them.

This guy had had a brain tumor. He had had surgery on the brain tumor. For a while, he was on anti-seizure medications because of the tumor and the surgery. This had happened before. But he had been off the anti-seizure medicine for a few months. She said that the last time he took it was in February.

So now I knew what had happened. I quietly asked her, 'Does he just fall asleep after a seizure?' She nodded. Because he seemed to be asleep. He was snoring. ('Why's he snoring?' the little girl asked anxiously.) I knew he was probably going to be okay, now that I understood that it was only a seizure, and that he was still breathing, and seemed to be asleep. He needed to recover and wake up, and the smell of fear was causing everyone else to be terrified too, and it was a very, very strong smell. I didn't smell an odor, but it was in the air all around them. There was no odor at all. I just knew the air was bad. It made me feel uncontrollably terrified, and the only thing calming me down was that I was, now and then, tapping the Callahan TFT points.

I was there because I thought that maybe, whoever it was, they wouldn't know what was going on. I thought it could possibly be something I would know the answer to, in case they didn't know. There was a chance. I'm not a doctor, but I know a lot of random things from spending years and years reading about medicine, having parents who were both in medicine, and having a friend who gets frequent ambulance calls and goes to the doctor a lot. But they knew what it was: a seizure.

So I stayed there until the ambulance people came, and I watched as they lifted him up and took him away, and the whole family went along. I wasn't able to tell them anything useful. After a minute or two, I got up and left too.

I went back to my seat. I said to the lady beside me, 'He had a seizure. That's what happened.' She just nodded and said, 'Oh.' The movie started up again. The smell of fear was still very strong. I felt sick and unable to relax for the rest of the movie.

That's why I went to see it again a second time that very same night. I ended up in a different theatre than I was in the first time. I was much more relaxed that time.

So if anyone says, 'Is there a doctor in the house?' and if nobody else says 'Yes,' I might possibly pretend to be a doctor, if I happen to find out that nobody else knows what to do or knows what's going on. I am not a doctor, but I play one on the internet. I am a doctor of last resort.

It was a very strange experience. I didn't talk about it, because I wasn't really happy about it. It was scary and unpleasant. I already knew that Thought Field Therapy or Emotional Freedom Techniques actually work - I've used them before. They made me much calmer than I otherwise would have been. They are the reason why people naturally hug each other and hold each other, and touch their own faces or hug themselves, in scary situations. People already know this, but some observers have made it into a more exact science, and so we have EFT, TFT, acupressure, and other systems. They give you a more specific idea of which places to tap or put pressure on. And you can feel a pleasant tickling, relaxing sensation when you are in the right place.

I'm not going to argue about whether or not it's a 'placebo...' The 'placebo effect blog' is still on my infinite to-do list. I want to talk about why 'the placebo effect' is a huge fallacy misleading millions of people. But that's for another day. You have people who are helpless in a scary situation, and then, you have people who know how to control themselves using 'the placebo effect.' It doesn't matter if it's a 'placebo.' It works. That's enough arguing for now.

Well, I was reading about the smell of fear because I am still trying to understand why I can't eat bone marrow. I don't have a definite answer yet. I don't know the name of the hormone or chemical in the bone marrow that caused me to get sick. I just know that it happened.

Placebo effect blog... some other day... enough for now.

The redhaired Amish boy had a baby bird in his arms

7:13 PM 11/29/10

Today I went out to buy some Amish milk. First, while I was on the way there, I went to Burger King. I was delighted to see Joe, who used to work with me at Nittany Mall McDonald's, working at the drive-thru at Burger King. I told him I'd see him again because I'm always there.

Then I went on to the Amish house where I buy the milk. I saw one of the little boys, the redhaired one, out walking around. He saw me driving up the road. He recognizes me by now. Most of them have seen me. I've gone there every couple weeks, on and off, for a few months now.

He walked up to my car. Usually I get out and wander around for a few minutes, while the dogs bark at me, and the barking dogs alert them to know that I'm there, so somebody will eventually come out of the house or out from the barn. There's a sign saying you can honk your horn if nobody knows you're there. So it was unusual for him to walk right up to my car.

I opened my window and I asked him how he was doing. 'Good, but I found this little bird in the barn,' and he showed me that he was carrying a little white baby dove. 'I didn't even see that you were carrying that!' I said. He had had it protected in his arms. I asked him when he had found it and if he had showed it to anybody else yet. I felt like he needed to tell somebody about it, to get help. He said he would show it to his brother because his brother knew a lot about birds.

I was getting my money out while talking to him, and I got out $1.50. He said, 'Could you hold it for me while I go get your stuff? It looks like you want one half gallon?' I said yeah, and he handed the little bird to me, and it made a little 'cheeeeep' noise, but then settled down. And then he ran off to the barn where they have the fridge full of milk.

I held the little white bird in my arms while I sat in the car. It was trembling. He had said it was a baby, and it couldn't fly yet, and it fell from its nest. It didn't struggle while I held it. It was quiet.

When he came back and handed the milk to me, I handed back his bird. It clutched a couple of my dreadlocks with its feet. 'It's got my hair, it wants to hold onto something,' I said, and I gently pulled the locks away from it. He took the bird, I thanked him, and he walked away. 'See you later,' I said, still sad and concerned about the bird. Then I left.

(The raw milk is the best milk that I've had in a long time, and I'm having the fewest digestive problems with it. It's much better than grocery store milk. But it's not perfect. When I drink the milk, I tend to get constipated more often than I used to, and I'd rather not have that happen. But now, I've gotten so used to going over to that house that I look forward to it. I don't want to quit drinking the milk. I haven't solved this problem yet. It's not just about the milk and my health problems anymore. Now it's about the people, the familiar faces that I like to see.)

**********************

I spent some time today 'getting the file out.' I had garbage piled up from months worth of fast food. I have had a severe chronic fatigue attack which is finally starting to get better, and I'm pretty sure it was caused by the pesticide spraying that started a couple months ago, around the beginning of October, I think. So all the garbage was a backlog.

Mark Forster talks about backlogs. It's when you have a whole bunch of old stuff that's been piled up for a long time. I always felt like I had to get rid of the backlog, the piled-up stuff, before I could do anything else. Sometimes I would think about 'building infrastructure,' as I called it - build some solution to keep this backlog from happening again. If there's too much garbage on the floor, you need another trash can. That kind of thing. But building a solution to prevent the problem - that seemed like a luxury, something too hard for me to do. I could sometimes do it if I was on drugs.

Mark Forster is saying that you have to focus on the cause of the problem first. You have to swear that there won't be any more backlog from now on. Everything that comes in, in the present, right now, must go into the trash can.

But 'brute force,' or 'sheer willpower,' or 'making a rule and following it,' doesn't always work. That's the 'New Year's Resolution' method. Sometimes, it's hard to do something, and that's why you're not doing it. Like, say you don't bother to go check your mail every day, because your mailbox is a mile away from your house. I can understand that. I probably wouldn't check my mail even once a month if I had to walk a mile to get to my mailbox. You don't just make a rule saying, 'You must walk to the mailbox, rain or shine, no matter how tired you are, every day, to check for mail!' Nobody will follow that rule because nobody wants to walk a mile to go to the mailbox.

That means you have to have a solution that's easy to use. The trash can might be too far away. It might be hard to find trash bags because they're in another room. There might not be enough trash bags. You might have trash cans made out of old cardboard boxes, like I do, so you're afraid that the bags might leak liquids onto the carpet. So you have to have more trash cans, with boxes of trash bags right next to each one, and they must be double-bagged (and you can leave the second bag in there all the time without taking it out) to make sure no liquids leak through them. They have to be easy to reach. I don't want to twist around while I'm sitting in my seat at the computer. I would like to easily reach out to the side to a nearby trash can without stretching or leaning too far. Right now the trash can in my bedroom is way behind me, and there's no way I could reach it from where I'm sitting at my computer.

Curtis had something like this happen to him when I visited him the other day. We sat outside on the bench where people smoke cigarettes. Another employee walked by, sweeping the sidewalk with a broom. He swept a cigarette butt right from underneath our feet. (Guilt trip.) As soon as he left, Curtis muttered, 'I swear, I put my cigarettes in the ashtray, I swear...' 'Why? Was that one yours?' I whispered. 'Yeah, but this thing is always full,' and he pointed to the ashtray where you were supposed to put the cigarettes. I looked at it. You have to reach to the side, and aim for a tiny hole and put the cigarette in there, and if it's full, you have to stuff them in. If there was an open bucket full of sand, right in front of the bench, it would be easy to put the cigarettes right in it. But that ashtray was hard to use. If it's hard to use, people won't use it. My whole life is like that. If it's hard to do something, then I can't just make a rule to force myself to do it. It has to be easy to do.

So now I am thinking about setting up structures in my house that will make it easy to prevent me from piling up garbage on the floor when I get chronic fatigue attacks. And every other recurring problem that I have, including drug residue contamination outbreaks. Those are very hard to prevent. But the MF website is making me focus on the preventive structures, the easy-to-use systems, the trash cans that always have bags nearby and are always a short distance from wherever you're sitting, the open bucket full of sand for cigarettes, and all that. Those are the most important things for me to do.

I really like adding things to the infinite to-do list. It's true that the list is getting longer and longer, and I haven't been dismissing anything, and MF says that dismissing items is the key to the system working the way it should. When I do start dismissing items, I'm going to rewrite them on a page in the way back of the notebook so that I don't forget them forever. I might write a brief reason why they were dismissed. You don't have to dismiss them forever, either. You might do them a long time from now. But they cannot be on the to-do list unless you change something to make them more relevant to your life right now.

I still have a lot of cleaning up to do. And cleaning up isn't even progress, it's just recovery. For REAL progress, I'd have to move to my own house, in a place where the airplanes never fly overhead spraying gypsy moth spray (they say it's nontoxic and it isn't a pesticide, but it's something that disrupts the gypsy moths' digestion - and when they sprayed it, it disrupted MY digestion, and not just a little bit, but a lot, and for a long time), in a place where there are no landlords or handymen walking into my house or my yard spraying pesticides and herbicides near where I live. If I live someplace where I don't get sick so much, then I can make real progress in my life, and not have to lie in bed all day. There are other health issues that I need to solve by moving into a particular kind of house, but pesticides and mold are the worst ones.

Anyway, I did a little bit of work today. I don't trust myself yet - this is just a passing fad. I still think I'm having a reaction to a drug that I was exposed to, and that I've gotten it onto some of my stuff. It doesn't matter. Cleaning up drug residues is something that's on the to-do list anyway.

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.

Mom and Dad are old

I'm visiting my mom and dad in West Virginia next week. I already requested a vacation from work. But for some reason, they came up here to visit Aunt Jeannie today. It was unexpected. They come up here every once in a while, but it's usually Dad alone. Mom has trouble traveling because she gets uncomfortable sitting in the car for a long time, and also, she doesn't like leaving the horses alone, because one of them is sick. But anyway I went over to Aunt Jeannie's house and saw them tonight, very briefly, just to give them a hug and say hello.

When I saw them, I decided I'm going to go down to West Virginia more often. It's going to be an official routine. They're old. They're going to die. They are going to be gone forever. I'm lucky that nothing has happened yet to either one of them.

I saw my dad's neck. It's been a while since I saw him. His neck has that loose skin hanging down the way it does on old people. It wasn't like that a few years ago. I knew their hair was getting gray, although it's still not completely gray for either one of them. But they are both getting old saggy skin, and it was more noticeable than it ever was before. So I am going to go down a couple times a year to visit them. I am not going to wait anymore.

I was always hoping that I would be able to visit them with good news. Yay! My life has finally gotten better! I'm married and I have kids! I have a good job and I'm making a lot of money! I'm healthy and I have lots of energy! I'm working on creative projects and doing my artwork!

I hardly ever go down to West Virginia to visit them, mostly because I've usually been working two jobs, and so I have to schedule the visit at least a month in advance to make sure I can get the week off for both jobs. Technically, I could make an eight-hour trip down there, stay for a day, and then drive back up here, during my two days off work on an ordinary weekend. But that would suck.

It was the heartbreaking feeling of pain and grief that I felt when I said hello and then quickly left again after not seeing them in a long time. That's what made me decide. I'm not seeing them enough. It was because I have to go to work early in the morning tomorrow (which I don't usually do), and that's why mom didn't want me to stay long and talk. So I was there only a couple minutes.

This will be my official routine now. A couple times a year. I'd love to go down there four times a year, once every season. Even if I don't have any good news at all, I should go. They're going to die. I want to show them their grandchildren, but that's not ready yet.

I love AutoFocus!

11:00 AM 11/27/10

I love AutoFocus and closed lists!

I'm reading Mark Forster's web page, and he has something called AutoFocus. He also uses something called closed lists. I love closed lists. Here is what you do.

When I write a to-do list, I never look at it again. I can't stand it. Looking at the list causes too much anxiety. The list is impossibly long. The more I try to do, and the more I think about it, the longer the list becomes. I keep adding things to it. It is infinite. It never ends. As soon as I start thinking of things to do, then there are infinity things to do. It's impossible. I can't even imagine where to start. And I *KNOW* that the list will never get done.

So you close off the first page of your list. You're going to look at that same page, over and over again, for days and days and days. You add other pages after it, but you don't worry about them. You keep writing new stuff at the end of the list, on the next page in the book, and then the next page after that, but who cares about all that new stuff. You're still stuck looking at the same first page over and over again.

If something is urgent and it has to be done, then, of course, do it. He says, use common sense, if you absolutely have to do something now, then do it of course. But this long, neverending, infinite list is the stuff that doesn't really have a deadline. It's stuff you want to do, but nobody is forcing you to do it. The IRS will come to your house and arrest you if you don't pay your taxes, but they won't do anything if you, for instance, never get around to that project of eating a healthier diet. Nobody will arrest you if you just don't bother to do that. So it gets put on the infinite to-do list.

You read this same first page every day.

I also took his suggestion of writing down a group of three, and only three, things that you absolutely will do today. They were three small things and I did get them done, yesterday. It was: fill out as much of a job application as I can (but there will be a few questions that are hard to answer, like, what is somebody's name or phone number that I've forgotten and I have to go find it); go take a picture of a contaminated item that I am thinking of throwing away, but I still have to touch-test it to see how bad my reaction to it is; and the last item was, mail off a letter to order something that I wanted to buy where I had to pay with a check. (That was 'Harvey Putter and the Ridiculous Premise.') They were three small things and I actualy did them yesterday.

Any small thing that gets done is better than zero. Usually, I do zero things. If I do *one* thing, that's better than zero.

Today, I was forced awake early in the morning, after not having slept very well. I don't sleep well, because of the drug residues, and because I am being attacked, and because my thin little foam cushion isn't very soft. (I don't mind the foam cushion very much if it has clean paper on it and if I'm not reacting to any chemicals. The drug reaction is the worst thing disrupting my sleep. I don't have control over the attackers though.) So I started my morning routine of lying awake, wishing I could get up and do something, wishing I could go back to sleep, tossing and turning, not being able to sleep, talking to the voices in my head, eating some leftovers from the fridge, taking a small fragment of a caffeine pill, taking another small fragment a little while later (and I don't have a coffeemaker anymore - it's on the infinite to-do list because there are some problems I was trying to solve first), and then, eventually, getting awake enough to start moving around.

So I picked up the notebook where I had written the infinite to-do list yesterday. Or I should say, where I STARTED writing the infinite to-do list.

I reread the first page. The items were familiar because I had already looked at them several times yesterday. It's the same list and it isn't getting bigger.

I noticed that there were several things that were too big or too vague. Some of those things had been suggestions from 'the voices,' because the voices always add things to my to-do list and they always add comments while I'm writing or talking to anyone.

If I'm 'searching for something to say' in a silence, that means that the voices are about to force me to say something that they want me to say. I am starting to believe that there is *no such thing* as 'searching for something to say' in a silence. There is only comfortable silence. I am starting to believe that 'uncomfortable silence' or 'awkward silence' does not exist. The awkwardness is fake and it means that 'they' are trying to force you to say something fake. It's like they're a radio station and they are required to avoid any 'dead air,' silence on the radio. Sometimes awkward silences are the time when you are supposed to feel close to somebody. You're supposed to feel comfortable and happy and at peace with them. Sometimes you're supposed to touch them.

Anyway, I expanded a few of the 'too big' items by writing a few of the necessary steps, or questions about them (What? How? Why?). I have one favorite item on the list and the autofocus seems to be on it. I'm starting to want to do that one particular thing. I had already decided on this a couple days ago anyway. I'm not sure if that is the item that's been chosen or not, but it's seeming that way. I wanted to set up the bookkeeping table again and start keeping track of my money.

What happened?

I taught myself bookkeeping, first by reading web pages, and later, by buying a Schaum's Outline and doing the whole book. I actually finished it! This is a huge achievement. I never finish anything. I dropped out of school. But I finished the Schaum's Outline of bookkeeping. And I started doing it for real, as though I was a small business. My life is a business. I had already read other books about money, years ago, like 'Your Money or Your Life.'

I had a contamination incident in my apartment. For a few weeks, the new apartment's carpet wasn't contaminated. But there were a few incidents of people walking in and breaking the rules. The landlady and the maintenance guy would walk right up the stairs, but you have to leave your shoes at the bottom of the stairs, because that's where I kept the shoes that were contaminated from having touched the floor of my car. I would walk barefoot up the stairs at first. I can't do that anymore, because now there are footprints going up the stairs, and I will have an ephedra reaction when I walk on those footprints.

The ephedra got up the stairs after a few incidents. Then it got walked around the floor of the whole apartment. I had my bookkeeping books on the floor in the family room. I had a bunch of papers and books spread out in one small place. They eventually touched some of the footprints on the carpet. After touching one thing and another, I got ephedra all over the books and papers. It only takes a couple molecules to have a severe reaction. So I would become extremely uncomfortable while trying to do the bookkeeping.

Every book that I buy eventually becomes contaminated, just like every piece of clothing I buy. So nowadays, everything I buy, I view it as disposable. I see everything as eventually going into the trash. So I don't buy unique items, sentimental items, or expensive items. The clothing is $0.29 Goodwill clothes, and I throw them away when they get contaminated. I wear the same thing again and again then eventually throw it away. Books are more expensive, and I try to avoid buying books, but every now and then, I can't resist buying some book. The Schaum's Outlines are a 'teaching' book, so after I learn what's in them, after I learn how to *do* something, it's okay to throw the book away because it's in my head now. I don't WANT to throw them away, but if I have to, it's no big deal. They are not unique books. It IS a waste of money, and I want to stop all of the contamination completely. But that's on my infinite to-do list. And I don't have control over the things that the murderers do. There is so much waste caused by the murderers. I'd have been able to get a lot more done if my sleep wasn't disrupted.

Anyway, the 'closed list' is what I'm enjoying about this experiment. I see the same things again and again, the same first page of the list. I'm not overwhelmed by the infinite list, but yet, my mind is reassured because when I think of something else, I can still add it to the end of the list, and I feel safe knowing that it's there and it's written down and I won't forget it. It's getting some of my attention just by being written down. And I scan that part of the list, the end, where the new stuff is, but I don't focus on it and I don't try to do it. I just look to see if anything urgent is in there.

I tried making a 'project workbook' a couple of times in the past. I got a three-ring binder and I used looseleaf pages and I wrote a separate page for each big project. Then I was supposed to write notes, and break it down into steps, and put dates for completion, and that kind of thing, in each separate 'chapter' of the workbook. I did that, but it was overwhelming. I liked writing the projects into the book, but I still couldn't bring myself to do any of them. There might still be a need to write down large complex projects someplace, but I still always need a 'to do list' made of small things instead of large complex things.

I have a big complex project: move out of this apartment, move out of ALL toxic apartments, move away from anyplace that uses pesticides. I strongly suspect that this latest outbreak of severe chronic fatigue was caused by the pesticides. We have these harmless little black and orange stinkbugs, and there were hundreds of them trying to get in the windows and crawling up the sides of the house. I'm not afraid of them. They've never stung me or bitten me. I don't think they do anything at all. Every year, a few times a year, the maintenance people will spray the apartment with pesticides. It happened at my other apartment too. I requested to my previous landlord that he NOT spray INSIDE my apartment, and he agreed not to. Every time they've sprayed, I've gotten deathly sick not just for weeks, but months. I don't think they sprayed inside my apartment this time, I think they only sprayed outside, but if it's just NEAR my apartment I get deathly ill for months. I'm pretty sure that's what happened this time. I was doing pretty well and then all of a sudden I was horrible. And it's right about when the stinkbugs appeared and they started spraying.

I HATE PESTICIDES. Pesticides cause face, jaw, tooth, and skull deformities, and other bone deformities. I believe that Weston Price didn't know the whole story. He thought it was only caused by nutritional deficiencies, but I believe that toxic environments in the modern life are one of the major causes of the deformities. Not the only cause, but a big one. The people on the Weston Price website know about it, though, and there are some articles about it, like the story about the deformed whitetail deer in Montana.

(*Disclaimer. There are things in the so-called 'Weston Price Diet' that are not safe. Nobody explains, for instance, that eating bone marrow will cause you to have the most severe food poisoning you've ever had in your life, that you'll be vomiting and passing out and fainting and it will go on for hours and hours, that you will feel the most terrible feelings you've ever felt because you are eating the hormones that come out of the bones whenever you have a severe injury, so you will feel the same sensations that you feel when you are severely injured, and the hormones act like a drug - nobody gave any kind of warning about that. I'm sure that eating other internal organs would do the same thing. I'm pretty sure that the native Americans were hoaxing him when they claimed that they ate the adrenal glands of the moose, and that if you ate a bunch of adrenaline, you'd drop dead, or you'd WISH you were dead, either way. People claim to eat bone marrow, but they might have some other way of cooking it, and whatever they're doing, it must destroy all the drug-like hormones that were in the marrow that I ate. And I only ate a little fragment of it. And there was no warning that the vapors from the cooked marrow would fill up the fridge and then land on all the other food and drinks, so that you would start vomiting again anytime you ate or drank anything out of the fridge. Once again, an obscure, esoteric, unknown warning that they never gave. I am now the world's expert on residues and vapors, whether I want to be or not, because nobody else seems to be talking about this on the internet. Anyway, if you try anything from the Weston Price diet, like internal organs, then try only a tiny piece, and then wait, like, twenty minutes, to see if you start vomiting or passing out or having hormone-drug effects. Everybody else believes that food poisoning is caused by bacteria and parasites, and they believe that's the only kind of food poisoning that exists, and nobody else knows about the poisoning from eating the hormones of the body.*)

Anyway, off topic. Back to the to-do list. Building a shield is on my to-do list too. I want to find out what I care most about when I'm blocked from being controlled by the murderers. What would I want to do if they couldn't tell me what to do?

I'm going to post this now.