Baldness: A big rant. Also, stuff about my fridge, the forum, the voices, and information categories. Very random.

1:18 PM 1/22/11

My little fridge suddenly was full of pools of water on every shelf the other day. It had defrosted itself. I don't know if this caused it or not, but I had just recently closed the little door on the freezer section at the top. The freezer section door had been stuck open for a while and the little box was full of thick frost.

But also, we've had a couple of power outages recently too, brief intermittent ones, and maybe it got a power surge. Whatever, it's not really working the way it should now. It's slightly cold, but it doesn't seem as cold as it was. It's doing something but not enough.

Why is this a big deal, well, because I cooked bone marrow a while back and put it in the 'real' fridge, and it filled the fridge with vapors that make me sick when they land in my food and drink. I've aired it out, I've scrubbed it, I've sprayed it with bleach, but last time I tested a little cup of water that I put in there, I still had a reaction to it. So I bought a small 'college dorm' kind of fridge and I've been using that.

I'll fix this, but it's an urgent project that I didn't want to have to do right this instant.

It's Edward de Bono who uses single quotes. I went to his web page yesterday and I saw the single quotes thing all over the place. I knew I had seen it in an old book long ago, but I forgot that EDB had encouraged me to do it too. I'm thinking of Esme Squalor from Lemony Snicket's books: 'Single quotes are in.'

I'm enjoying the forum. Somebody said something to me whenever I wrote my welcome message to say that I was joining. I said I was nervous about joining the forum. This guy said it was ironic to worry about not fitting in, when this was an all-around personality types forum. I thought that was hilarious. In other words, all types are included here, because this is a forum about the various different types of people. (I realize there are some limits to this. Extremely obnoxious, hurtful, troll-like types might not be as welcome as others if they fill the forum with spam and mean comments. But I'm not that.)

'Laughing a lot' has been the theme of the past week. 'They' urged me to go read about metaphors, and it led me to read about mixed metaphors, and I laughed so hard I almost puked, which is what I wrote on my facebook page. I also laughed at some things people said in the forum, but I don't remember all the details now. Then they used this as a way to get a picture of me with a real smile, because I don't like to put on a fake smile for pictures, but I can smile if I think about something funny, so that is what they did, and they also had me take a walk by Fisherman's Paradise, a place where I love to go. It's a creek and the air around it seems to be full of negative ions, because I always get excited and refreshed when I go there. So going there and taking a picture was 'their' idea.

The forum is my online social life, the only thing that I have enough energy for right now. I can choose to interact with these people, but also, they will survive without me if I can't. If I'm too busy or too sick for a while the forum will still go on without me.

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They wanted to urge me to do something. I seem to have more than one controller and they do things differently. The most recent one has been behaving like an NF idealist, maybe, because they are trying to understand my way of doing things and customize things to work with me. They actually ask me why I won't do something, instead of just screaming 'DO IT! BECAUSE I SAID SO!', that kind of attitude.

I am always skeptical about whether or not there really are 'new people' controlling and interacting with me. Sometimes it seems like there are.

Other times I think that they do this as a 'reward' for me - they torture me whenever I am doing something they don't want me to do - for instance, the murderers were torturing me for weeks because my car registration was almost expired, and whenever they torture me, they never tell me the reason why they are doing it. So for weeks I was suddenly sitting straight up in bed because I was suddenly attacked with a 'reflux up your throat' attack which makes you panic and feel like you are going to vomit. It happens when you don't feel sick at all, and when you haven't eaten anything, and there's no reason at all why you would suddenly, out of nowhere, have reflux up your throat. They did that to me years ago and they explained at some point that they did this whenever I had to fill out some kind of government paperwork that I wasn't filling out.

Anyway that particular murderer who does things that way likes the 'reward and punish' paradigm, and so they also 'reward' me by being 'nice' to me and letting me talk to 'nice' people who don't act like murderers, instead of talking to OBVIOUS murderers who do torture and cause pain and suffering and act like murderers.

As you can see, I don't believe in the 'reward and punish' paradigm, but I'm not getting into that right now. That's a long discussion and I don't have time.

Well, anyway, the last couple days I have had nicer personas in my head. They seem more understanding of how to do things my way, and how to ask questions instead of just screaming at me that I must do it this way.

The new idea that they were asking me about was that they wondered why I didn't start a social movement to encourage people to follow my grooming rules. They were actually ASKING WHY and listening to the answers and trying to understand what my reason was. We were looking at this from a Jungian functions point of view, because that's something I've been reading about that I wasn't familiar with. I have a brief tangent...

...I read about the Jungian functions long ago, but I dismissed them. I happened to read somewhere on some web page that somebody believed the Jungian functions were bad, and I never forgot that. Somebody thought that it was 'reductionistic' or something. It might have even been David Keirsey who disapproved of the idea of using the functions as separate functions.

There is the Myers-Briggs system, where you have one 'whole type' (ISFP for me). Then there is the Jungian Function Attitudes, where each function is a separate thing that you are able to 'do,' and everybody is able to use each function in different circumstances, but you prefer one function the most.

And somebody somewhere said it was 'bad' somehow to look at them as separate functions, so I went years and years and years IGNORING everything I read about the individual functions (Fe, Fi, Te, Ne, and so on) because it was a 'mistaken belief system.' But now that I'm looking at it again, it's fascinating and useful and valuable, and I'm wondering which disinformation troll gave me the idea that it was bad. Some troll somewhere in the distant past had a long-lasting impact on me. They might not have done it intentionally, they might have been well-meaning and sincere, they might not really have been a 'troll,' but somebody convinced me that a valuable thing was worthless, and I went years and years believing it.

(Then there is the 'overlay the Jungian Functions onto the Enneagram types' approach, which I *TOTALLY DISAGREE WITH* and I actually need to get this straightened out so that I can continue a discussion on the forum. It's a huge subject that has to do with information and categories, and 'they' have been talking to me about it, and I have this intuitive mental image of what 'information' looks like - it looks like a mountainous landscape with fractal waveforms, and within each mountain, there are smaller mountains, and each mountain represents a category, and the mountains can be large, medium, or small, and the largest ones are the fewest, and the smallest are the most common and least relevant - this is my 'neurolinguistic programming.' So I was using this metaphor to talk about what happens when you try to overlay one belief system on top of another belief system, based on 'numbers.' There might be five 'mountains' (categories) in one belief system, and nine 'mountains' in another belief system, and if somebody tries to lay one belief system on top of another one and force the categories to match up, well, that's very bad. Those mountains might be drastically different sizes! Just because you have a 'number' of categories doesn't mean that you can match it up with some other 'number' of categories in a different belief system. So that was last night's discussion about why you can't just lump together two different belief systems and say they're the same.)

(I really like the one chart in the back of the book, and the book is a tiny little beginner's intro to the enneagram, and it has these silly cartoon pictures in it of people. It's a small yellow book and it's somewhere in my boxes in storage so I can't look at it. In the back it has a chart that shows a real-world observation of which Myers-Briggs types HAPPENED to fall into which enneagram types. The chart showed a dark gray color for the most common types, ranging to light gray for the least common ones, to fall into a particular enneagram type. I like that approach much better than trying to make a one-to-one correspondence between the Jungian functions and the enneagram types. The two systems are talking about two totally different things, with two totally different motives or forces behind them.)

Why was I on that tangent???

They were asking about the grooming rules and baldness. Baldness is a huge issue and it affects all of men's decisions about their hair. Baldness is more common nowadays, probably because of drugs and plastic dental fillings. I don't know all the causes. I know that I myself have a small amount of 'male pattern baldness in females,' which started at age 20. My temples receded. Then when I hit age 30 I had a whole bunch of hair fall out at once, tons and tons of it. (I did research, read about 'telogen effluvium,' and memorized that phrase.) I have a thin spot on the upper right side of my head and I've speculated about what caused it, but that's another story and I don't have time today. (Dental fillings? Barrettes pulling too hard on the roots? Chemical styling products? and so on.)

While asking me about this, we viewed me as using my 'feeling' function, a decision-making function, a judging function. It judges things as good or bad for me according to my moral values.

(I want to talk someday about how the Myers-Briggs test is worded, and how the wording causes people to make the wrong choices on the test. I don't view this as 'feelings.' To me, 'feelings' are what happen when I'm listening to a song and I burst into tears, or get goosebumps, or when I'm terrified of going to meet somebody that I have a crush on, that kind of thing. 'Feelings' are not the same as what I'm using whenever I make moral-based decisions and plans in my mind. I don't sit there getting goosebumps or bursting into tears while I'm making my plans. Enneagram Three has a 'scrambling of the thinking and motion centers,' and the 'feeling center' is 'separated' somehow. You are in either 'feeling mode' or 'functioning mode.' It doesn't feel like 'feelings' to me whenever I'm making plans based on my moral values. It feels like 'thinking.' Sorry, lots of quotes there.)

(Also, long ago I was reading Ayn Rand's books, and you were going to go to hell if you made decisions based on feelings instead of based on reason, so I would never, ever answer a question on a test and say that I made decisions based on feelings... so that made it hard to give accurate answers on the Myers-Briggs test, and I was coming up as 'INTP' and 'INTJ' in the beginning, because Ayn Rand liked me better that way.)

So anyway, if I can ever get through all these tangents. And still have time to get ready for work.

They were asking me about my feelings, and this time, I tolerated calling them feelings. My feelings about why I would or wouldn't do something. My evaluation. My values. Even if I didn't burst into tears or anything. They were still feelings.

They had asked me why I wasn't trying to start a social movement to encourage people to grow their hair long, and also grow a beard (if their ethnic group has beards, if they're not Native American or something), while also going bald. This is the worst taboo of all. Even natural afros are less taboo than balding long hair. Natural afros have their devotees, and there are websites supporting men and women who want to grow out their natural afros. But I didn't find any websites supporting bald men who want to grow the remainder, the 'ring' around the back of their head. So this is a taboo. But I believe in it.

Well, one reason why I didn't start this social movement was because of a couple conflicts. I would want to see and interact with people locally. I like the idea of local groups meeting in person and supporting each other in the real world.

However, I imagined that if I made an advertisement and web page supporting the bald long hair movement, and allowed the men to contact me and meet me in person, then I was going to get bombarded with hundreds of men asking me to go out on dates or have sex. This inevitably happens whenever you are interacting with single men and telling them that yes, you exist, and yes, you are a worthwhile human being, which is what I want to tell them. I just don't want to be bombarded with hundreds of sex requests. Not all of them would ask for sex, but a large number of them would. I have been on dating websites and I know. There are many men capable of restraining themselves and not asking. There are many men who will ask you lots of times, but they still take 'no' for an answer, but they'll try again and ask again, and it's a nuisance, and I don't enjoy rejecting them and hurting their feelings. I'm not saying that I would be raped, I'm just saying that I don't like hurting people's feelings and rejecting them over and over again. It's painful every single time I have to say 'no' to somebody.

So we were clarifying this: There is a difference between 'social aesthetic value,' the beauty of long hair, the pleasantness of looking at a room full of long-haired people instead of short-haired people, especially in a group where everyone looks that way and you don't feel deprived and frustrated - versus the 'I want to have sex with you' value. Just because I enjoy someone's physical appearance DOES NOT mean that I want to have sex with that person. I want to change people's physical appearance, both men and women, but I don't want to have sex with every single human being that exists.

This is something that nudists would understand right away. Nudity is not sexual. Nudity has nothing to do with sex. Naked people have nothing to do with sex. If I were talking to a nudist, they would be jumping up and down and shouting 'YES!' about this, because I understand. Peeping toms who spy on naked people, and get sexually excited about it, are ridiculous. Everyone should be naked all the time and there would be no need to hide in the bushes and spy on people. We would wear clothing only if we were cold, or if we wanted to prevent a sunburn. We could wear bits of clothing to be purely decorative if we wanted to. But we wouldn't wear clothing to hide the erogenous parts of our bodies. We would simply accept that it is normal to look at people's bodies and to feel sexual feelings and desires when we look at them. And meanwhile, we wouldn't do stupid things like circumcise our children or force them to stop breastfeeding before they're ready to stop.

Well anyway. So 'they' were asking, what if I made an anonymous ad and website promoting balding long hair (and I've been thinking about an easy way to say that, because it's hard to say, and I need some kind of phrase that will describe this phenomenon), without giving any contact email or telling them who I am. It would be anonymous and I would not interact with them. And I would set up a Flickr group and ask people to post pictures of their progress over the months as they grew their hair and their beards (if possible).

I *ALMOST* agreed that it would be okay to do this. The interaction would be limited and I would not be bombarded with dates and sex requests from men who were delighted by the fact that I told them they exist and that they are beautiful and worthwhile. Because that is exactly what I want to tell them, but I also don't want to be bombarded with their needs. It is overwhelming.

Nobody else, anywhere (well, I'm sure a few people have), has told bald men the specific thing that I want to tell them. Almost everyone else is telling them 'embrace baldness - shave it all off.' Nobody else is telling them, 'Argus Filch is doing the right thing.' Or that butler guy on 'Rocky Horror Picture Show.' Or Devin Townsend. (They don't have beards, but they have long bald hair. Devin Townsend had a partial beard. I saw another picture of him with a completely bald head, so I guess he shaved it all off later. Why don't you go ahead and shave your eyebrows and cut your eyelashes off then! Hair is bad!)

Sigh... I have to go to work today, soon.

I guess I'll post this and reread it and then get ready to go. I'll have to have a hair-and-grooming rant sometime later on.

Anyway we were asking, is there anything I can gain by doing this if I won't be seeing the men in the real world, or even knowing for sure whether I had an impact on anybody or changed anybody's behavior. People might read it, and a tiny minority would, actually, change their grooming habits, even if only a little bit. Even if only 'I'll let my bald hair grow a visible ring around the back, but I'll keep it short.' For God's sake, just grow a ring around the back! What is so wrong with that! Why does it have to be absolutely, totally, completely bald! Your face was always bald! It's just that the dividing line moved backwards! If your face was always bald, then you ought to have 'embraced baldness' from the moment you were born, because some parts of your body have ALWAYS been bald!... I don't have time for this. Gotta go.