patching up the holes in my frayed, rotten, dull gray parachute

8:59 PM 3/28/11

Several things have happened at once.

Today I went to the library and printed out my resume and the cover letter that explains what I am trying to do. One of my all time favorite books is 'What Color Is Your Parachute?' It's somewhere in the storage unit, but today, I recalled things from it and used them. (LOL! on reread, I wondered 'What's in the storage unit? The book or your parachute?') I have that feeling of excitement again and the need to blurt out everything and it's so much that I can't say it. That's not because of the resume though. But it's stopping me from talking about the resume.

In WCIYP (that's going to be a hard acronym to type - I'll just do 'What Color?' or WC). In WC it says that you shouldn't just mail out a bunch of resumes to people you've never seen. You should go visit them in person, research them beforehand, try to make connections to them through your friendships (I skipped that step), and also, that you don't necessarily need to have a college degree in something, but you can get a job by having real-world experience in it.

That's kind of what I was doing. I don't have a degree in accounting, but I have real-world bookkeeping experience and data entry experience. I am trying to get a bookkeeping job.

I picked a semi-random 'target' by intuition. (Getting technical, it probably wasn't 'intuition.' It was a feeling of attraction to a name in the phone book based on the fact that I could see more about her than I could about any of the others.) I was looking in the phone book and picked the person who had written the biggest ad with the most information about her services. The others only had their names and numbers, but the one lady had an actual ad with more detail, so I picked her. She is the first target. I found out where she is - it's actually her house, not an 'office,' so I can't just walk up and talk to her. I will have to call her on the phone but haven't done that yet. I drove to where she lives to see where it is, which is how I found out that it's only a house.

So she will be the first person I try.

I went to Spring Creek park after stalking this lady's house. I sat on the swings. It was cold outside. I didn't wear my coat. I really want to go outside without the coat on, but almost every time I do, I regret it.

I sat on the swing. There was a group of people examining Spring Creek. Anytime I see groups of people doing something scientific-looking outdoors, I get interested. The other day I was driving down the road and a group was looking at the sides of the rocks on the cliff along the road, where it's been blasted and exposed to build the road. I thought, that's the geology class. (This was connected to that feeling I have with a fantasy infatuation, the idea that it was similar to RDL taking geography classes, although geology isn't really the same as geography, but still, I had this feeling, 'that could be him.' I know geography is something different. But I've always done that since childhood, having crushes on someone and then certain things become associated with that person, with this idealized fantasy image that I have of them. I am not able to meet the real person and get the fantasy crush to turn into a realistic view with all the flaws and imperfections.)

So anyway these people had those wading pants on and they were walking around in the creek with a big white strip of tape all the way across the creek. They were measuring the depth and the width and calling out numbers to the person on the other side. Some of them were standing around and some of them kept looking over at me, but I was sort of hiding, sitting on the swing (I love swinging and I usually start doing tricks like spinning the swing around in midair and spinning faster or slower like an ice skater by either sticking out my legs or pulling them inwards), and there were some trees and brush partly blocking the view, and I was a little distance away, but not too far. I was shy and curious at the same time. When I was younger, in college, I might have been bolder and I would have walked right up to them and stood in the edge of the group and asked someone what they were doing. But I felt timid and shy today.

I heard the sound of a ball bouncing on the pavement behind me. I wanted to see what it was but I was facing the wrong way. So I started spinning my swing so I could face the other way and look at whoever was bouncing the ball. It was a little toddler child with her mother. The toddler was throwing the ball up to the basketball hoop. I spun around and back and forth to watch the toddler throwing the ball, or watch the people wading in the creek.

Finally I left, mostly because it was too cold. But I did get out in the sunlight for a while without a coat on.

The darkness: I had been thinking of the future, of what to do with the Indigo guy, who I have continued talking to. There are so many ways to go horribly wrong with him. He is addicted to the two drugs that I mentioned the other day, seroquel and klonopin (still not sure if I spelled it right, too lazy to look it up again). Benzodiazepine withdrawal is the foulest, most evil withdrawal from anything. I know that if I touch him, I will go into benzo withdrawal afterwards.

(Uh-oh, big tangent. I started talking about drug residues and abandoned what I was saying about the darkness in the future. The darkness with Chris in the future (Indigo Guy = Chris), when I have reactions to benzodiazepine and go into withdrawal - that is the darkness. What will I do when I have these reactions? How bad will they be? Must I make a rule never to touch him or touch anything he touches, such as car seats and doorknobs? There is more to the darkness besides that. He is temporarily homeless. He is mostly bankrupt and is selling off parts of the business franchise. Intuition about future possibilities isn't always just about positive potentials, it's also about the darkness and how to avoid it. Several times in my life, I have jumped into the darkness, and I almost always knew that I was doing this.)

This isn't just something I made up. It already happened at work, at Weis, with Curtis's friend (also named Chris) who temporarily worked there. He used an anti-anxiety drug, and I forget which drug it was. But one time, he was talking to me, and I forget whether he did this on purpose or by accident - he might have been gesturing or expressing something while we were talking, or making a point, but for some reason, he briefly tapped me on the bare skin of my arm. His fingers just barely tapped my arm for a fraction of a second.

Within a few minutes, I was totally incapacitated by a severe anxiety attack and was unable to think or make the simplest decisions about ordinary routines that I did every day. I could not decide to do the dishes or mop the floor. I WAS TOTALLY INCAPACITATED. I recognized that I was having a drug reaction and I washed off my arm. I've had reactions from touching Peter before, but his drugs don't incapacitate me totally. This drug was an anti-anxiety drug, and it messes you up SO BADLY that just the slightest brush of skin against skin, for a fraction of a second as a gesture in conversation, caused me to become utterly helpless and frozen with terror until I figured out what was happening.

The implications of my drug residue observations are too overwhelming and unthinkable and scary for most people. It always reminds me of 'the untouchable caste' in India. If people actually followed my observations and structured society that way, it would lead to huge groups of people, and huge physical locations, being untouchable. You couldn't ride on bus seats after drug users had sat there. I've actually had reactions by going to the doctor's office and sitting in a chair that a drug user had sat in, and had my arm sitting on the wooden table that some drug user's arm had rested on.

However, it explains people having totally random anxiety attacks without understanding the cause.

People don't believe this observation because if they did believe it, the consequences would be too horrible to deal with. I seem to encounter a lot of things like that. It's just too hard to do all the things you would need to do to deal with the problem.

If it's really true that, as I've observed:

1. people's skin oils and sweat, and all other bodily fluids such as urine or breath vapor, excrete residues of the drugs they use, and if

2. the residues linger for years on surfaces that people have touched, without breaking down or becoming inactive chemicals

3. these residues go through the skin of other people, and if

4. very low dosages cause a reaction and withdrawal...

then the whole world is a huge nightmare mess that's impossible to clean up.

Oh well. But it is true. 'Convincing people that it's true' is a separate process. (Usually, I am more focused on the 'do something about it' process instead of the 'spend huge amounts of energy trying to convince people it's true' process.) I can demonstrate my ability to detect chemicals, if someone designs the experiment according to my instructions, so that I am being tested on things that I claim I am able to do, and not being tested on things that I do not claim I am able to do. For instance, someone could design a test where they simply waved a handkerchief in front of my face and told me to tell them whether it had a drug residue on it or not. That's not enough contact for me to find out. I wouldn't be sure. I have to touch the fabric or surface.

People who have 'disproven' the Feingold Diet did the same thing. Feingold Diet users DO NOT CLAIM that merely one single molecule of red food coloring triggers a reaction. Instead, this is what they claim: that the overall burden of chemicals in our food, the combination of all the food colorings, preservatives, etc, all add up together to overwhelm the body's ability to metabolize the chemicals, and when that happens for days or weeks or years at a time, then you get hyperactive children with lots of problems.

The experiments wrongly tested for extremely low levels of food colorings. They were trying to design a 'double-blind, placebo-controlled test' to make sure that 'the placebo effect' (and don't get me started talking about THE PLACEBO EFFECT FALLACIES because it makes me too angry!) wouldn't make the children start misbehaving. They gave cupcakes with a teeny, tiny little bit of food coloring in it, but they made sure that it was so little food coloring that you couldn't tell that the cupcake was a different color. Then they gave them a similar-looking cupcake without any food coloring in it. They made sure that it was such a small amount of food coloring, you couldn't see the difference in color. The experiment failed to show any connection between eating food colors, and getting hyper, because it was only ONE TINY DOSE, and Feingold parents know that children in the real world are eating huge doses of food coloring, every day, for weeks and for years, instead of just one tiny little dose, just once. There is a limited amount of the enzymes that metabolize the food colorings. You are fine UNTIL you've used up those enzymes, when you've exhausted the supply of enzymes in your body. After the enzymes are all used up, and you keep on eating more food coloring, you start having a bad reaction to it. But there's that buffer zone of safety where you can eat a little bit and not have a reaction, because your enzymes are still there metabolizing it.

By the way, why am I hypersensitive to tiny levels of particular chemicals?

There are reasons for chemical hypersensitivity. St. John's Wort causes long-lasting sensitivity to other chemicals, for instance. A few exposures to SJW and you'll be sensitive to other things for weeks. Some chemicals cause you to become hypersensitive to other chemicals or whole groups of chemicals. They do this by affecting the cytochrome pathways. They are able to shut down metabolic pathways so that you can't produce the enzymes you need to break down other chemicals. So if you are exposed to one chemical that shuts down several of your metabolic pathways, then you become sensitive to a large group of other chemicals. There are also drug interactions, which are similar to that.

St. John's Wort is an antidepressant. It might possibly be a monoamine oxidase reuptake inhibitor, but they're not sure, and it might have more than one pathway besides MAOI. It might also be SSRI. But whatever it is, it will cause you to be hypersensitive to OTHER antidepressants, and they always tell you to wait at least two weeks before you start taking a new drug after using some other antidepressant, including SJW.

Totally different subject now. The thing that I was excited about was because I finally wrote a comment to RDL about my experiencing 'multiple personalities.' It was just a comment on his blog, not an email.

I didn't want a parachute. I wanted wings.