Wednesday, April 6, 2011

death and respect

12:29 PM 4/6/11

They gave me a dream about RDL. It was one of those sweet and comfortable dreams that you don't want to wake up from. I was petting him like a cat, and actually now that I think about it, he WAS a cat. He was lying down because he was sick from drinking alcohol and felt like he was going to throw up. Then we were riding in the car somewhere and his wife was in the car and I was sitting in the back seat with him even though she was there in the front seat, and I was sitting on one side of the seat while he was lying down, except spatially it didn't make sense because there wouldn't have been room on the seat when he was lying down. Then later we were walking and I was back in West Virginia. His wife was starting to get annoyed with me and I decided to leave, and that was when I woke up.

It was actually one of the fake dreams that 'they' give me and it was inspired by something horrible that happened. I was driving out to get some coffee last night, and I saw that somebody before me had hit a cat on the road. I'm glad I wasn't the one who hit it. As soon as I saw it I started crying and howling loudly and saying 'noooo! nooooo! noo!!'

So I pulled over at the gas station, which was where I was going anyway, and then walked the little way back up the road to the cat. I picked it up off the road and I said 'you can't be sleeping here, this is not a good place for cats to sleep,' and I carried it off to the side of the road so that it would not get hit and destroyed by more cars driving by. It had no collar, so it might have been a stray. But it was so very soft. I miss having cats. I won't get cats whenever I am still dealing with drug residues, as I don't feel my house is safe enough for them to walk around in. But I thought I should put it where someone might be able to find it, so it was next to someone's front yard. I just didn't want it to get destroyed by more cars driving by.

After handling the cat, I felt like throwing up. This did not feel like an emotional reaction, as, actually, my emotions had not been as intense as they could have been. I have sometimes cried so hard I felt like I would throw up, but last night was not one of those times, I just cried a little bit and then stopped. So the feeling of sickness was caused by the body itself. I know about bone marrow vapors and I know about the vapors emitted by spilled blood. Those both cause you to feel like vomiting. Sometimes those vapors can make you pass out. I went into the gas station bathroom and I washed my hands, running them under the water and wiping them, for a couple of minutes, just rinsing and rinsing and rinsing.

After washing my hands thoroughly, I didn't feel like throwing up anymore. That didn't make sense with the 'breathing vapors' theory. I hadn't believed that something was actually going through the skin of my hands. I had merely been afraid that I would eat something later on and would get something in my mouth from the cat while handling the food. The only way that I could have gotten vapors was if they were vaporizing from off my hands, and technically, that could be possible. I don't know. I only know that it worked and that I no longer felt like vomiting after I washed my hands.

Later that night, when they woke me up, they urged me to send another email to RDL. This time I asked him some things having to do with death.

I think the dream mentioned alcohol because I don't drink at all, formally and officially, as I have sworn not to. And I have seen that RDL wrote about drinking as something which is a normal part of the social life where he is, something which is hard to avoid if you are a non-drinker visiting the country, and he told a story in which he himself was drinking socially with some people, so I know that he does.

The dream meant that he understands that I am 'petting him' now by paying attention to him specifically. I had originally asked him something which could be summarized as, 'How can I find someone just like you, but not you?' That's not what I said, and I didn't use those exact words. I asked about expatriates and made it sound like I was interested in them, and yes, actually, I do tend to feel a bond with foreign people who are living here, although it's hard for me to talk to them if they have a thick accent, and if they have a thick accent, I can't relax while I'm listening to them, because it's a constant struggle to interpret what they're saying.

That happens with Nam, the overnight lady at McDonald's, who is from Korea and who has such a thick accent that when she gets upset and starts yelling at everyone, all you can hear is 'AABA BAAB BABA AABBAB BABAB,' just extremely fast babbling with lots of loud, nasal vowel sounds. We all sort of make fun of her and love her at the same time, but in reality, she feels disrespected and is frustrated that no one listens to her.

She feels close to me because, for a while, I was working on overnight, and we always worked together, although we worked in our own separate areas, and I always cleaned the lobby and took orders on headset, and she always cleaned the kitchen and made the food. If we tried to work in the same space, it was stressful, because she had a particular set-in-stone way of doing things, and I disagreed with the necessity of some of those methods, and if I did things differently she would insist that I do it the other way. But we were fine if we stayed out of each other's space. (Some kind of socionics relationship going on there.)

There is the social instinct that I'm thinking of, after reading 'info from the underground' about Ichazo's instinctual subtypes, and I had been thinking about expatriates and how the social instinct fits in with that. Your social status automatically changes when you move to another place, and it can sometimes be raised much higher. RDL wrote that in some of his blogs too.

That also happened in, and I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I read these, but, the Twilight book series. I had heard some people I knew talking about Twilight and so I decided to watch one of the movies. It was mediocre and I wasn't all that into it, but I watched the other two movies too, and then I read one or two of the books, but abandoned the third one, as I really just wasn't getting into it much at all. But there was something in there about how Bella had been of a low social status at her original school, and then when she moved to Forks, she suddenly had a higher social status and was viewed as someone interesting and attractive.

I felt a sense of having a different social status when my family moved to West Virginia, except it was a frustrating and negative experience, because I felt like I was smarter than the teacher, who could not spell, and I would correct her spelling errors while she was writing on the chalkboard. I felt like I was smarter than most of the people around me when I moved to WV.

Here in State College it's not quite like that. The people around me are relatively healthier than I am physically, and the 'Weston Price deformities' are less common and less severe. The WP deformities affect your social status. I know that my mind is smarter than a lot of the people around me, but my actual ability to function and achieve goals is much lower than theirs. I'm surrounded by people who are less intelligent, but better able to survive and get what they want in life than I can. (Again, almost that exact description was one of the socionics relationships - you feel as though they're stupider than you are, but somehow, they are more successful, and it seems unfair.) So I am of a medium low status here in the State College area... although I have contempt for the people who I view as 'upper middle class' here, as they are the lawn-mowing, football-watching group who are clueless about everything that matters to me.

And there are people who are of a lower status than I am, but often, at work, I tend to be sympathetic and kind to those people, and I am viewed as being one of them, the people that everyone else is annoyed by and complains about. There are several people in this category. There are at least, let's see, four that I can think of, four females who are inferior and who annoy everyone else (this doesn't include Nam - she's in a different category), but I tend to be more socially sympathetic to them than the other people are. Two of them are suspected LSE's (I might change my mind on that), and the other two are definitely feelers, not thinkers, both of them very emotional.

It's frustrating to be a female LSE at the bottom of the social status when you automatically blurt out commands to other people who respond with contempt and annoyance. They both do that. One of them does it more forcefully and more frequently than the other one. The other one does it more politely, like 'Can you put another basket of fries down for me?' I myself almost never tell someone else to do something for me, no matter how far away I am standing, no matter if I have to run all the way around a bunch of obstacles to go use a piece of equipment that they themselves are standing right next to, like, the cooler, and I want to get something from the cooler, and someone else is there next to it but I won't say, 'Can you get me something out of the cooler?' I will just silently rush over there at high speed, get it myself, and then rush back to whatever I was doing. So it's clearly something different from me when there are girls who automatically command you to get something for them when you're standing next to it.

I facebook creeped the more polite of the two LSE girls. I saw that she was a friend of a friend. I don't have her on facebook myself but I saw her on someone else's page. So I looked at her photos. In her photos, I saw hints of a beautiful spirit that I myself could relate to, though it was distorted by her not being able to write or spell very well. (They call her 'stupid' among other things.) I liked all of her pictures. She took pictures of some outdoor scenes and flowers and various things.

She had also taken pictures of the 'turbans,' and I looked, and it was a picture of some faraway hills, and I looked more closely, and I could see that it was the windmills of Altoona. When I drive by the windmills, I get very excited and I love to watch them slowly, slowly turning. They are huge and beautiful and powerful. She took a picture of them. She misspelled 'turbines.' I looked again at another picture of the 'turbans,' an up close picture, and I wondered how she had found the pathway to get close to them, because I myself had wondered about finding the pathway up to the top of the mountains to go close to the windmills. I don't know how to get there. She took some photos from right underneath them. They are amazing and awesome and terrifying in a quiet way. 'Sublime' might be the word, as I looked up that word a few years ago to see what it means. There is something fascinating about a huge, slowly moving piece of machinery. I'm sure there are people who would respond with concern about things like bats and birds flying into them and getting killed, though.

So I saw some of her spirit in her photos. I hope she finds someone who loves her and appreciates that spirit.

Treating people with respect is very important to me. I can't always do it. Respect has to do with social status. Sometimes I am able to give people a special gift of treating them with more respect than they are used to, as most other people are disrespectful to them.

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