Rango, persona, wanderlust, the residue reaction and the 'car pool,' prosody, goosebumps, calling out to someone somewhere

11:42 PM 3/14/11

I just saw the movie 'Rango.' Eric recommended it to me and he was right, I loved it. It has a happy ending. I got very involved in it and was laughing and crying through the whole thing. I'm pretty sure I was seeing an IEI-SLE duality. (By the way, ignore whatever I wrote about JK Rowling the other day - it's wrong.) But I don't really feel like writing about Rango. Water metaphors, birth and death, truth and lies, chasing a false goal and forgetting your true goal, the hunt for the source - it was a movie full of meanings and I would have to watch it again to see them all.

That explains why, earlier today, I was thinking about 'the shortage of land,' and how we could 'drill for magma' to make new land. I was picturing magma drills going deep underground and lava fountains like oil wells. I recognized that this was 'not my idea,' so I wondered what it was all about. I didn't know what Rango was about - I had never heard of the movie until Eric told me about it. (I had always thought that it was possible to increase the land surface area by creating small hills instead of flat land, and then planting crops that tolerate partial shade on the sides of the hills. Same volume of land, greater surface area. So I wasn't thinking of drilling for magma. (But I *had* thought before of dumping toxic waste into volcanoes and hoping it would be destroyed.) None of it matters anyway because we still have to go out and live on the oceans.)

There is a battle with RDL. It isn't something that we have said out loud. It is a battle of ideas. And I was reading one of the hidden treasures on socionics.us - I had said that there were all these links to random pages and I didn't see a top-level navigation, except maybe the site map, but I'm not absolutely sure whether the site map contains links to every single page - I haven't checked yet. I could clear my history, click all the links, and then go around looking for links that were still blue and hadn't turned purple.

Anyway, I was reading a page about the persona and the nature, and how your persona (as he is defining it) is everything you've learned in your lifetime, where you were born, the circumstances of your life. This persona can be something that conflicts with your nature. Instead of forcing yourself to fit the persona, you should look for ways to express your true nature.

There is something I like about RDL. He didn't become a psychotherapist yet. He might be one someday, but he isn't yet. Instead, he went looking for things that made him happy. He didn't sit there listening to miserable people with impossible-to-solve problems, people who would probably continue to live in misery because their problems were too deep to easily fix, people who would leave without resolution.

I've tried various types of psychotherapy myself and always left it. I've looked for other ways to fix things. Then I became aware that I was a victim of a crime and that this crime explained a lot of the problems that I was having, so that changed how I saw my power to solve the problems. Some (not all) of the problems did not come from within. (Many of the problems have physical causes and would be better solved by treating the physical illness - low-level constant pain, for instance, causes 'psychological' symptoms and behaviors, but they are the result of pain, not psychology.) If RDL was a therapist, he would be interacting with people who had unsolvable problems that they had no control over which resulted from things that weren't their fault, people who also had physical illnesses and chemical sensitivities and other things (which I have found out about during this time). That would be a frustrating and depressing job. He didn't go into that.

Instead, when he talks to people, he talks to them on a hike, people he doesn't know, people he just met, healthy people doing something they love, in a beautiful healthy place with fresh air. They have a limited, structured, temporary time to be together, not just a brief minute or two, but not forever either. He can experience temporary relationships and then disconnect from them eventually, but it's also one-on-one interaction instead of a group.

He went looking for someplace that would be the best place for him to live. I'm still wondering whether he wants to keep traveling 'as such,' and I think he probably does, so I am wondering how to make my peace with that. He doesn't like to be tied down. I think about things like, what do you do with the children, do you take them with you and repeatedly disconnect them from their social groups, which can cause a lot of pain, or do you have one person stay home with the children while the father travels and periodically returns home, and you can possibly have a lover or a second husband during the time when he is gone (that's if you WANT to be with someone else). I'm thinking about the fishermen's wives and polyandry and remembering my Celtic/Welsh ancestry and how they went on fishing trips (I don't know if the Celts/Welsh did that, but I know vaguely that they 'lived on an island' and so probably went fishing - as you can see, this is vague). Or, does the husband 'settle down' but not be happy because he can't travel anymore and he loves traveling. It wouldn't be so bad if you found an ideal place to live and you had your intentional community there. But still, 'traveling as such' would still be a desire.

And by the way, I can mention my drug residue incident which has been going on the last couple days. It was a major exposure to St. John's Wort and it happened because somehow - I don't quite know how - a bunch of melting snow seeped into my car under the driver's seat. I don't know if it got through a seal that wasn't all the way sealed, or where it came from, but a couple days ago, I got in the car and there was a huge pool of water under my seat. It was a LOT. It was like someone had dumped a couple of gallons of water in there. I had never seen this before. I was only aware that the driver's side window had a tiny, tiny little leak, and that wasn't enough to explain this. ('They' have called it 'the car pool.')

Anyway, that caused me to get my feet wet several times while driving, until I was able to go vacuum the water out, which I did today at the car wash. The fabric of the floor has footprints of St. John's Wort from my previous apartment - one of the 'rules' is that my feet must never touch the floor without shoes on, or I will have a reaction. Getting a bunch of water sloshed into my shoes was causing a reaction the last couple days.

It did a few things - it caused mood swings, increased sexuality, lots of goosebumps and laughing and crying (for instance, the 'mere thought' of some of the things I was reading recently was repeatedly giving me goosebumps, like pushing a button, and every time I thought of it, I got goosebumps - I was reading about 'introverted intuition' and water metaphors and your place in the timeline and birth and death and things that can't be explained because they have no words - and I remembered having that feeling long ago, when I was able to feel, and it gave me goosebumps, as I know it's still in there, and I will be able to feel it again when I am free).

And it made me write some obsessive email to RDL asking about some tiny, miniscule, esoteric piece of information that I didn't understand on his website - when actually, the answer might be that it isn't meant to be taken 'mathematically' - it might be just a vague description of the 'entire relationship' instead of a specific, mechanical, mathematical thing going on with the functions. However, there is a lot of technical, mathematical stuff with the functions elsewhere (each function has a particular position in the model, which is drawn in boxes, and each set of boxes has a label beside it), so I believed that this (the 'asymmetrical relationships') probably was 'mathematical' in spirit too. Having the intense mental focus is one of the side effects of the residue, and it always happens when I have an incident.

The email had a 'subtext' of an 'asymmetric relationship,' a one-sided relationship, but that wasn't intentional and that wasn't why I was writing it, not consciously, not on purpose. It also felt cold and formal, and it felt like crying. But I had just been laughing hysterically because I found another easter egg on the socionics.us website: the links to the blog. I mistakenly believed that those links just led to the socionist.blogspot.com blog, so I never bothered to click them. That's not where they go. It's a plain HTML blog on the socionics.us site, and I clicked one and went looking at it.

I was laughing because he did this sixteen panel photo with ridiculous faces representing each one of the types. When I first saw it, I took it seriously for a second and was thinking to myself that he had actually correlated each face with the 'overall mood' of a particular type, and so I was looking at the picture, and putting my mouse over it and clicking, to try and find the description of each face to see which type it represented, to see whether I agreed that this face really represented that type. But there was no description. I totally believed for a second that this picture meant something and that it was a real, serious representation of the moods of each of the types. But he was just fooling around and I laughed and laughed for a minute.

Speaking of goosebumps (I was rereading this), and music, I was thinking the other day that music is language. I mean melody. Not with words. The prosody of your voice, the up and down pitches of it, are the melody. We are designed to understand this melody without any words in it. We feel the feelings of the melody. Sometimes the melody gives us goosebumps. It was reminding me of intuition. A person who didn't know language would hear the melody. They might hear a monotone, or a wide range of pitches with skip intervals.

I have written before about 'baby music.' There is a typical, recognizable noise that babies make, and I've heard recordings of this noise - it's 'pleasant surprise' or 'delight' (I'm sure somebody could pinpoint the exact emotion better than I can). They go 'AHH-ahh,' high pitch to lower pitch, and it has a melody and a musical interval. This melody still exists in adults when they say 'thank you.' I heard it on the radio the other day, because there is a particular radio commercial where they say 'We want people to keep saying, "Thank you!"' It's a commercial for the radio station itself. It's a recording of a lady saying 'thank you' with pleasant surprise in her voice. That is the same baby melody.

I wonder how the blog changes after he met his wife. There was a 'news' section on his personal site and it talked about things going on over the past few years, and when he met his wife and married her. When you're alone and writing, you write differently. When you have a partner and you're writing, it's not the same as it was before. I write as a way of calling out to someone out there to see me, but if I find someone, it won't be necessary for that, not in quite the same way. But I will still need something that my husband can't provide, because nobody is perfect and nobody can provide for every single social need you could ever have. So I will still write and call out to somebody somewhere to understand.

Probably I will not meet RDL himself in particular in the real world - it will be a 'blog comments only' type of relationship. But I am still asking the questions, what do you do with a family if you want to travel frequently or move around? And now I'm wondering about RDL's family background. What happened to him growing up? What about his past love relationships? Where did his family live, and did they ever move anywhere? What kinds of things did he do when he was young, and did he write anything?

When I disconnect from the internet, I still have things to do.