11:56 AM 3/30/11
Well, it's probably going to be harder than usual for me to communicate clearly today. I met Chris yesterday in person. I predicted that I would react to his drugs and I was right, I did react very badly, but not until several hours after seeing him. It probably would have been all right, except that I hugged him goodbye, and then we talked for a few more minutes, and I hugged him goodbye a second time - so I had two exposures to his body and clothing - and then he gave me a book to borrow and a crystal, both of which I will have to give back to him. So I have touched this book and the crystal as well.
I didn't do my official decontamination shower afterwards. I sat in the tub, but that doesn't count. When you sit in the tub, it just spreads drug residues around in the bathwater. I wasn't that worried about it at that time. It was a couple hours later that I started having problems.
I was going deeper and deeper into misery and grief as the night went on. I had been reading something online, but started to feel like I just couldn't handle it anymore, so I laid down in bed. I started wanting to cry, and feeling like I was going to throw up. Then I started doing bizarre behavior, like walking hunched over, while taking one tiny step slowly, and then another tiny step slowly, lifting each foot up and then placing it down and barely being able to move. I started flapping my hands and arms around while crying and wailing. I was shaking and trembling, all of my body, my arms and legs, and I would stop for a few seconds and just stand there shaking and crying, in between each step that I took while walking hunched over. I had this tickly, electric feeling inside my stomach which made me almost vomit. Then my heart was beating strangely, too fast or with arrhythmia or something, and I felt dizzy.
I am familiar with this behavior because I have done it several times before, and it is either a drug reaction or hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) and I'm not sure which one. I have a blood sugar tester, but I didn't have the presence of mind to go find it and use it last night. So the first thing I did was drink the rest of the orange juice in the little bottle that I had bought earlier that day, and I also drank some water.
I got in the shower and did an official decontamination shower. I scrubbed out the bottom of the bathtub with Comet scouring cleanser. I kept repeating, out loud, quietly, over and over, 'get through tonight, get through tonight, get through tonight, get through tonight...' I was talking out loud to myself in a crying, hysterical voice and saying, 'are you going to the hospital? it's as bad as I said it would be, it's as bad as I said it would be, it's as bad as I said it would be!'
After the shower, I got back in bed after putting a fresh piece of paper on top of the bed (I have this paper that I put down which I just throw away if I get anything on it that I'm having a reaction to). After lying there for a while, still trembling, with the light on overhead so I wouldn't be scared, I had my eyes open and I was staring at the muscle of my right arm. The muscle was twitching and twitching and twitching all by itself for a while. Eventually I fell back asleep and woke up feeling almost okay again. But I felt sick at my stomach and didn't want to eat anything. I ate a little spoonful of sugar in case I did have low blood sugar.
This morning after I finally got up, I started handling my spiral notebook and pen, where I was writing out the draft of an advertisement that I was working on. But I think that I had touched the spiral notebook and the pen last night after seeing Chris, I'm pretty sure I did. I started having a reaction again shortly after handling the pen and paper. I became unable to think. My thoughts in my head just stopped and I couldn't think of anything at all. I sat there motionless and staring at nothing for a long time. I was unable to force myself to move. As soon as I noticed this reaction, I remembered that I had touched the pen and notebook last night, so I wiped off the pen over and over again with one of my wipes that I bought the other day (I went a while without having any).
After my experiences, I now believe that 'obsessive compulsive behavior' is a genuinely helpful, useful, appropriate response to the presence of real contamination. Cleaning something off ten times in a row is the appropriate thing to do when tiny quantities of a drug or poison residue can totally incapacitate you.
So it took several hours before the withdrawal symptoms began, and it was mostly the withdrawal that gave me the problems, and not so much the reaction to the drug itself.
Seeing Chris again is out of the question - or rather, I will give him back his book and crystal, but won't be spending time with him.
In addition to that disaster (which I had known would probably happen), he did something enneagram-Three-ish. I don't know if this was a genuine accident, or whether 'they' urged him to make this mistake. But, he accidentally sent me a text message which was meant for some other friend, after I went home. He said something unkind and backstabbing and cruel about me, to his other friend. And the message went to my phone, but it was referring to me in the third person ('she') and it was obviously not meant for me to read.
My reaction to this was numbness and resignation. I said, don't take it personally - there was nothing to gain by reacting to it and getting upset. We will just go our separate ways and that is all. However, the bad feeling wouldn't go away, because I was having the drug reaction.
'They' had been asking me if I was a Nine recently, and I had also been thinking Chris was a Nine, but this morning, 'we' decided that both Chris and I are Threes.
It was this morning that I started to understand those little images that people have in the forums, where it says 'Haters gonna hate,' and it shows some person doing something which would be viewed as ridiculous or humiliating or laughed at. I never really understood those before. It means, no matter what you do, somebody somewhere will hate you. You can try to conform to the most mainstream standards possible, if you want to reduce the number of people who hate you, but usually there will be a few things you don't have control over (for instance, severe obesity), and so, no matter how hard you try, somebody somewhere will hate you just because you are what you are. Or you might not like the idea of 'conforming to the mainstream standard for the purpose of making fewer people hate you,' and so you just try to be what you are. So that's what 'haters gonna hate' means.
The judging actually went both ways and was perfectly reflected off both of us. I thought that HE smelled horrible. There was some kind of sickening perfume on his clothing or coming off his skin, and some of it might have been because of the drugs he uses. This particular perfume was nauseating, cloying, and revolting. It was kind of like perfumed vomit. He didn't like the way I smelled either.
He also complained that I had a mustache, which was a surprise to him, although I had told him that I have dreadlocks and I don't shave. (I didn't say this to him, but, of course, I don't like it that his hair is short and he shaves his face.)
As always, there is some kind of 'exception to the rule' instead of a 'unified, consistent principle.' As always, it's okay not to shave SOME things, but NOT OKAY to not shave OTHER things. And there will always be some specific thing which, for some reason, is an exception to the rule. They might gradually accept one small thing after another, but each new thing is a new unthinkable and impossible thing. Ignorance never ends. Ignorance is always new and infinite, and clueless newbies will always appear to replace the old formerly clueless newbies that you taught something to yesterday. The Frequently Asked Questions are there for that reason. They might finally understand that it's okay to stop shaving your legs, BUT IT'S UNTHINKABLE to stop shaving the hair between your eyebrows (for example), because that would be a unibrow and unibrows are unthinkable and unibrows are an exception to the universal rule of 'don't shave ANYTHING.' For some reason, this particular thing doesn't fall into the universal category of 'anything and everything.' This one exception is always 'something else.' They don't understand the principle applies to everything without any particular exceptions.
And I myself didn't know that either. Remember, the other day I wrote about how 'they' suggested one further step after another to me, suggested that I try this or that to take my hair and grooming rules to their 'logical extreme.' Going to the logical extreme never occurs to anyone on their own unless someone else has noticed that a universal principle exists and that there is something to be gained by applying this universal principle.
So, neither of us liked the other's hair and grooming methods. This was unfortunate, because he had said in email that he liked dreadlocks and liked it when women don't shave... so it seemed as though he might be more tolerant.
I'm still going to be having some reactions to things for a few days while I wipe off all the surfaces that I touched after touching him. He was the last straggler out of the people who had responded to my ad. I never thought the ad was a good idea in the first place, but it was one of those things I was forced to do, and they never let me express what I really think and feel and want, and they never let me follow the goals that I believe are appropriate for me, using my own strategy. So the ads didn't work out at all, which is what normally happens when I try to meet people by using either dating websites or Craigslist ads. Being forcibly prevented from telling the truth about what I want, and being forcibly prevented from using the strategies that I think are appropriate, keeps me from meeting anyone at all who is capable of understanding me.
This morning, while lying in bed thinking all this over, I thought of RDL again. I could see him differently. There are some things I never noticed before. He is trying to make a lot of money so that he can go traveling, and he wonders whether it's worthwhile to go to college and get a degree so that he can make more money in the future, but he will be at risk of not being able to pay off the college debt and having someone garnish his wages. He wants to go to college and get a degree in geography, which would lead to jobs where he gets paid to go traveling, a job where they pay you to do something that you would happily pay someone to let you do. (That's always what they say about jobs. It's a good job, if they pay you to do something that you enjoy so much, you'd pay to do it.)
I disagree with his peak oil belief system, however I agree with the caution about whether the economic system will be stable in the future, and whether he will be able to get jobs. But there are certain kinds of jobs that are more vulnerable to economic crashes than other jobs.
I never thought about this before, but I'm not sure of RDL's opinions about war. I wonder if he would want to get a military job or government job. I can almost see it. The theme of today was 'being horribly disappointed by the reality of someone, after having a fantasy image of that person in your mind for a long time.' I was imagining, what if RDL turned out to be horribly disappointing somehow? I already know that he would react negatively to my physical appearance, or I don't 'know' it but I assume it is very likely. Not only that, but he is probably a Three, not a Seven (at least the way I'm seeing it this morning, though I will change my mind later). His motives for everything he does will be similar to my own motives for the things I do.
This was because of Chris's behavior last night, the backstabbing thing. I'm looking at RDL and imagining ways that he might be likely to do that. There are several possibilities, and one of them would be, if he went and got a job with the military because he'd get paid to travel. That's why lots of people join the military. They love getting paid to travel and see the world. The government is the most stable job you can have in a collapsing economy. They make all this fuss about cutting back on government and how they can't meet their budgets, but none of that is really serious. The government will just print more money, especially the federal government. The state governments will have a harder time, but the federal government will continue to do whatever it wants to do, as we have seen now, after all this complaining about how we don't have any money, but we suddenly have enough money to go bomb Libya and wherever else we've started bombing. Government employees, and businesses connected to the government, will continue to be high-paying, rich, safe jobs, no matter what happens in the economy.
So, if you work for the government, it should be the FEDERAL government, not the state government. The federal government is the one that prints the money and who always seems to mysteriously come up with money from somewhere even after the media has been saying that the budgets don't balance and all that. Don't believe a word of it. They really don't care about whether they're bankrupt or not, or whether they've been bankrupt for over a century (according to the interpretations of some authors).
He believes in Peak Oil, so he thinks that money isn't the problem, he believes it's a real shortage of oil. There isn't a real shortage of oil. The rising price of gas is caused by things that are happening to the money supply.
However, a disrespectable person cannot tell him this. I don't have the credentials and the social superiority needed to convince RDL that this is true. I am just a humble blogger with bizarre problems that nobody understands, and not a highly educated person. Educated people believe in peak oil. Educated people do not believe in astrology, so RDL doesn't believe in astrology either (and neither do I). I was seeing it all this way this morning. Hopefully soon, my interpretation of RDL will go back to being a more trusting and less cynical interpretation. But he is not going to change his mind merely because *I* tell him that peak oil is a mistaken belief system and that something else is causing the price changes.
So he is thinking that people will gradually stop traveling as they run out of gasoline. Nobody will be traveling anymore, and he won't be able to have a job as a geographer where he gets paid to travel around the world and write about the countries he visits. So he doesn't know whether it's worthwhile to borrow money to get a college degree so that he can receive a job that someone else has created, and receive money from a money source that somebody else tapped into (whatever that source may be, if it's government money), because he doesn't quite know how he could directly make money by himself doing that job. He's already self-reliant and self-employed, and he isn't sure how he could earn money directly by working as a geographer traveling around and writing about different countries. But he wants very much to do this. And it seems tempting to imagine that somebody else out there has a source of money to pay him with, if he shows them his college degree. It's that feeling that the money source is more secure, and larger, if it comes from some government agency or big corporation.
So, I was ruthlessly ripping him apart this morning, and yet, strangely, I can relate to all of this, because all of the same thoughts have gone through my own head, over the years and years. But my reason for not getting a college degree is because I don't trust that I will be able to finish the goal. My health problems or electronic attacks are likely to make me fail at completing all the work that I would need to do, and I might drop out somewhere along the way. That is quite likely to happen, so I haven't gone back to college yet, until I feel sure that I am healthy and safe enough to actually finish getting a degree without dropping out or flunking.
RDL is thinking about his money. He is looking at years and years and decades of money and life ahead of him. He is looking at a future where he travels around as part of his job, or a future where he stays in one place, or maybe occasionally moves from place to place over periods of years, after saving enough money, and after finding places that have a relatively good quality of life, at a low cost, with low rent, and few physical risks, and nice places to go nearby like woods and lakes. He also wants enough money to go hiking, because hiking is an expense that doesn't earn profit directly (although I wonder if someone could get paid to go hiking, which I'm sure he's wondering too).
I'm still having some drug reactions. I wiped off the keyboard and mouse, which I used after I got home from seeing Chris. The extremely negative mood will persist and will keep recurring until I have cleaned up most of the drug residues. It is a cynical mood, and the feeling that everyone everywhere is an untrustworthy backstabber. I hope that very soon I go back to viewing people as, overall, being mostly trustworthy and honest.
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