let them outnumber the culture that i loathe

11:17 PM 3/30/11

I have a high tolerance for talking just to hear myself talk. I was playing my videos and looking at my photos again. I am fascinated with myself. I see myself as strangely beautiful, ugly and gross, deformed, sometimes majestic and dignified, hideous, ridiculous, perfect, amazing. I love the sight of my own image and I love to watch myself talking. I also have grown to love the dreadlocks. They look like camouflage. They look like twisted tree branches or vines. They look like part of the trees and woods behind me. They look like the hair of the Ents in Lord of the Rings. They look mystical and fascinating and strange. And, this is really gross, but I finally figured out what else they remind me of. You know how when a cat barfs up a hairball, and it's this tangle of wet matted hair wadded up. My dreadlocks look just like that. Go look at a cat barf hairball someday and you'll see what I mean.

I think people are going to remember that I said that.

Watching my own videos and looking at my own pictures is somehow satisfying and comforting. It's like saying, I exist. Other people might call it narcissistic or 'vain.' I remember that my mom told me I was vain, when I was a young child and she noticed that I always watched myself in the mirror whenever I walked past it.

It's true that I do talk just to hear myself talk. I've been writing blogs for years and I don't ask for many comments, though I do get a rare occasional comment now and then. It's mostly just to hear myself talk. I'm glad that people are reading (my blog stats show a steady trickle of people every day), but it isn't really interactive.

I get kind of scared when people do answer me back. I got scared and overwhelmed when I went to the typology central forum and people instantly answered everything I said. Suddenly I had to be careful about what I said. I had to think about how people were going to react to it. I had to think about what people wanted to hear or didn't want to hear. In my blog, I write whatever I want to write, and people can simply choose to ignore it if they don't want to bother with it. My blogs are usually too long-winded, sloppy-grammared, and talking about nothing in particular, so you can just quickly scan through the paragraphs and see at a glance if anything interesting is going on. Every once in a while I write a post that is actually a good read, a well written piece, but usually it's just lots and lots of words.

What would I change about the way I look?

I would make sure that, during and before pregnancy, my mom would eat the right foods so that she would be properly nourished, and also, she might want to relocate to a healthy location without pollution or poisons. I don't know exactly what it was that caused me to develop the Weston Price jaw deformity. But I have it. (Mom tells me that she had too much morning sickness while pregnant with me, so she ate almost nothing but Pop-Tarts and Coca-Cola, because that was all she could stand.) I have a very long, narrow face, and my lower jaw is very small. My nostrils are narrow, as described by Weston Price, instead of broad and flared the way they are supposed to be. My voice is nasal and stuffy-sounding because of the narrow, deformed sinuses. My teeth were maloccluded, and I got braces. If I could do it again, I would choose not to get the braces or have any teeth removed. I didn't have a choice. It was done to me before the age of consent, and it never occurred to anybody that I might want my four permanent teeth back, and also my four wisdom teeth.

If I could change the way I look, I would also make sure that I never, ever plucked my eyebrows. It's not mom's fault - nobody ever taught her how to question the mainstream grooming rules. But she was the one who taught me that I should pluck my eyebrows over the bridge of the nose to make sure that there wasn't any hair there, and also to thin down the eyebrows because thick eyebrows are bad. So I plucked them down to almost nothing, for years and years, and this gave my eyebrow hairs permanent scar tissue at the roots, from all the yanking and plucking, so that the hairs never grew back and never will. Some of the hair grew back, and some of it didn't. So I would change that if I could - I would want to get back all of the eyebrow hairs that were permanently destroyed.

Would I get rid of the mustache? No, I actually like it. I like natural hair so much, on both men and women, that I feel that the whiskers add something interesting to my face. I have extra details that other people don't have. There's something else there to look at and touch.

If my face were healthy and undamaged, then I would like everything about the way that I look. It's hard to convey to anybody how it feels to be obsessed with natural hair, to love it as much as I do, to have this desperate longing to see more hair on more people, but instead, every day, to walk through the world and be constantly frustrated because something is missing. Most people just don't feel that way, or aren't aware of it.

I'll upload the photos and videos sometime this week, I think.

The 'beliefs cluster': I should go find this quote so that I can show it to you. There is a group of beliefs that tend to occur together. It is associated with my personality type, and I think it's part of the self-preservation instinctual subtype. There was a lady on the dreadlockssite forum who started a topic called something like, 'Do you call yourself a "hippie?"' She said that she doesn't call herself a hippie, and then, she listed everything from my beliefs cluster, as though she had taken the words right out of my mouth. She didn't mention being anti-circumcision, but I'm sure if I talked to her and mentioned it, she would say yes to that too.

The belief cluster is something you find if you look up one of the beliefs on the web. If you read about one of them, inevitably you will see links to other pages talking about the rest of them. If you read about breastfeeding, chances are that you will see links to pages about co-sleeping, attachment parenting, cloth diapers, baby-carrying instead of putting them in strollers, and so on. The beliefs link together on the web. If you find one of them, you are likely to find the rest of them.

She listed everything: not seeing yourself as a 'hippie' because the connotations of that word are negative to you; natural childbirth, co-sleeping, breastfeeding, babywearing (this is close, but not exactly, what I want - I see people with those slings and the baby in it and I actually don't like that, I would want to merely carry the baby in my arms and not have it in a sling at all, but maybe I'll change my mind about that after holding my heavy baby for a few hours every day - although the baby might learn to hang onto my hair so I won't have to hold its weight - we'll find out whether that's practical or not - it might break my neck! - but I believe dreadlocks were made for carrying babies), homeschooling, washable cloth diapers (I was intrigued with the kai dang ku pants (did I say that right? it's Chinese) where the pants are open at the crotch and the child just pees and poops freely without any diapers at all - why bother wearing any pants then? but they do, it keeps them warm - I was intrigued by the idea of simply letting the child go wherever and you clean up after it, and avoid using any diapers at all, and just get used to the harmless bodily fluids that our culture is afraid of - anyway, the point is, I go so far as to say 'no diapers at all' instead of just cloth diapers, but if I had them wearing diapers, they would be cloth), and a couple other things that I can't remember offhand. It was all of my beliefs cluster about the right things to do and the healthy way to live and raise children.

I can't wait to create new children and do the best I can to protect their bodies and use all of the knowledge that I have gained over all these years. Childbirth might be a disaster for me. I am 36, the age when women's childbirth becomes more and more difficult. I might start having twins, for instance, which are more difficult and dangerous. I might have mentally retarded children. I don't know what will happen, but I am going to try anyway.

I also want to remove my plastic dental fillings from my teeth before I get pregnant. And I want to get rid of all the drug residues in my belongings. I will do what I can.

And I want to get a job working from home, working independently, being self-employed, so that I can earn money (so that my husband doesn't have to earn ALL the money, and we won't have as many fights and arguments or physical violence and abuse and dependency) and also take care of the children the way I believe they should be taken care of, because I don't believe in putting them in daycare, and I don't want to put them in public school (although I might *possibly* break down and give in on that one, but I won't be happy about it) - the only thing I like about public school is the fact that the kids get to socialize and meet large numbers of people of all kinds, while, if they are homeschooled, even if you and a group of other parents are all homeschooling together, which is what I would want to do, still, that would be a smaller number of people. They wouldn't meet the hundreds and hundreds of kids that they meet in public school. They would only meet a few dozen other kids.

I have all these beliefs and plans and opinions about what's good and what's bad to do. I want to use that knowledge.

I'm sorry for saying this, but I have to say, thanks to Julian Simon, because I do not feel guilty about having children. I used to think it was wrong to have children and burden the world with them. I don't see it that way anymore. Not only that, but it makes me feel even more sure about it when I think about the fact that MY culture is having more children than 'THEIR' culture is having, and I like my culture better, so if my children gradually outnumber their children, as 'they' voluntarily stop themselves from having children, then so much the better. So I want to pass on a good culture to my children, who will pass it on to their children, and let them outnumber the culture that I loathe, so that a good culture will gradually replace it.

There are also people who live in such an unhealthy way that they become infertile and aren't able to have children. Many people have problems with infertility, when they ought to be fertile. (It's usually because of drugs, but not always.) I have knowledge about how to troubleshoot infertility. I can't troubleshoot ALL kinds of infertility, but I can troubleshoot some of it.

Having children gives me the chance to make myself all over again without the mistakes. Some people worry if you say things like that - they say, you'll have unrealistic expectations of your children - you'll expect them to be perfect and to do all the things you never did. But that's not what I mean. I mean, I have gathered a lot of knowledge about how to troubleshoot and prevent problems, and I want to try that and see if it works. I'm sure that at least SOME of it will really work for real.

Anyway I guess that's enough for now. I'll probably write more stuff later.