Walk through Bellefonte; Waffle Shop; dreadlock hairstyle fails badly

I woke up this morning to the sound of someone laughing hilariously in my dream. I tried to figure out what was funny, and I think it was because in the previous post I described putting my hair in pigtails like Pippi Longstocking. Well, unfortunately that hairstyle was a fail. It looked like it worked, but it ended up pulling too hard on the hair in a different area on top of my head, instead of pulling too much on the sides. It actually pulled really badly and it hurt later on.

I might have been able to pull off a Pippi Longstocking look. I never saw those movies so I don't know what personality type she was.

I'm sick this morning. I got sicker and sicker throughout the day yesterday after eating the "Angry Whopper" at Burger King. I normally don't eat the large meat sandwiches, the thick ones. I only eat the thin ones. I don't know if it doesnt cook well enough inside the thick ones, or whether maybe they just sit in the cabinet too long because they aren't as popular, but for whatever reason, I've always gotten slightly sick from the larger burgers and not the small ones. Not badly. It tends to happen at BK and also McD.

The Indian lady from another store is temporarily at our store. Yesterday she told us what some of our names sound like in her language. One person's name means "bucket," another one is "pimple," and when I asked her what my name sounded like, she had to think really hard - apparently my name doesn't sound exactly like anything, so it was a stretch - but finally she said it sounded like "paint." Several days ago, another employee had done a perfect imitation of her name, spoken in her accent, and it sounded just like another word, which I myself hadn't noticed until he said it that way, and I laughed. I didn't quite have the heart to tell her that her name sounds like "bullshit." (Baljeet.)

There's someone who reminds me of myself and who might be a SLI, but I'm not sure. She is more outgoing than I am, and also, young, pretty, healthy, and nice. I can't help liking her, but also I can't be friends with her. She might not be a SLI, but she has a blank facial expression and is socially slightly out of place, just a tiny bit. She isn't a blatant nonconformist and antisocial like I am, so she still somewhat fits in, and everyone likes her. Her method of cooking at home sounds just like mine: she tries weird random experiments without following any instructions, and sometimes they're a disaster, and sometimes they're great.

I even like her boyfriend, but I'm not sure if he's a dual. He might be a mirage relation. (I think some websites called it "illusionary.") Whatever he was, I was attracted to him too, and whenever he was around I would talk to him excitedly in a voice much louder than my usual voice. I liked him from the first instant that I saw him, when I didn't know who he was and hadn't spoken with him before.

When she is around, I feel that my social/sexual status is much lower. There are other pretty girls there, but she is the only one whose personality seems to resemble mine, so she feels like a competitor. There was another suspected SLI but she's not working here anymore, and I didn't get the same feeling of competition with her anyway.

So anyway this person is back again and it will be pretty obvious who she is. When she is here, I feel much older, sicker, uglier, and more bitter and negative and cynical. I feel lower in status and less important. I have to remind myself that I still exist and I am of value as a person, and think of things that make me feel better. I had something I used to think of, but I forget what it was. It doesn't help if you tell yourself something like "I'll always be better than her" or things like that. You know that's it not true. Whatever you say, it has to be true.

This wouldn't be a problem if I had my own friends and social circle. I would know that I was loved and accepted somewhere. But instead I have chosen total isolation. I used to tell myself that I had my own niche and it was different from the competitor's niche. I had a way of seeing it that made me feel better. All that matters is my own happiness, and I still have to do all the things I have to do.

I'm writing on my iPod at home after waking up. I tend to do this a lot more if I'm sick or having a drug reaction. The reason for disconnecting from the net wasn't to permanently stop me from blogging. It just prevents me from spending a HUGE amount of time online doing things like obsessing over Rick (and whoever the next crush will be). I am still able to spend a while blogging on my iPod, typing much more slowly.

I'm going to struggle once again to find a hairstyle that I can tolerate. It's odd how when your hair is growing long, you don't notice it's long until all of a sudden it's bothering you a lot. My dreadlocks are growing very slowly, but I've had them for two and a half years now, and all of a sudden they are becoming difficult to deal with. It's because the mature locks, at the roots, are at a length where they reach the ponytail holder at the back of the neck. Before, the only thing in a ponytail or braid was the loose hair at the ends. Now the mature locks themselves are long enough to get braided, and they are thick and stiff and don't bend easily like loose hair. And this problem of pulling too hard on the roots is a major problem that I cannot ignore, because of traction alopecia. So I will keep working on it, but I might have very messy hair for a while until I solve the problem.

Tomorrow I will clean up more of the house and throw out some stuff that's been sitting in plastic bags in the bathroom.

I was reading an article on kitco.com about how a new rule will allow gold to be used as collateral for loans to governments. Then they listed a bunch of countries and showed how much gold each one had. The USA has probably almost the most gold in the world, but I didn't see how much gold China has. This is the reason why people trust the dollar and why the USA can borrow and print so much money, and also the reason why we can build war machines and take them to foreign countries and kill people with them. If the USA were broken into smaller pieces, and if none of the small pieces had so much gold, then we would be much less able to make war. But I don't know how to break apart the USA.

Utah made a rule explicitly allowing people to use gold and silve coins as money if they want to. It's nice that they are allowing it. There was a raid on the Liberty Dollar people a few years ago, and they took a lot of the coins from them. I forget the rationale they had for that. The gold and silver coins are worth much more than the official spot price of the metals. If silver is $36 an ounce, a one ounce silver coin is still worth more than just $36. This is hard to explain. But the idea was that supposedly the Liberty Dollars weren't allowed to be used as money, or something, and they were encouraging people to spend them. I would be reluctant to spend them unless their value was greatly increased, like maybe to $100 an ounce or more. "Reluctance to spend" is an important piece of information which is contained in precious metals. Precious metal coins carry information. If you have a coin, it implies that you gave away something of value, or that you stole the coin (which takes effort, skill, and risk), or that you mined it from the ground (which again is costly). Printed money doesn't imply those things.

Gold is behind the dollar, but only for other governments, not for private citizens. People trust the US debt because they know the government's gold is collateral if all else fails. However, private citizens cannot get gold as payment for the money they lend to the government. Only if you are a foreign country, and you've lent money to the USA, can you expect that gold might possibly pay you back if all else fails.

What does it mean to "buy someone's debt?"

A bond, for instance, is a piece of paper, and it is a debt. Someone gives you "cash" and they get this piece of paper in return. You just bought a piece of paper from someone. That paper says that they will repay you someday.

You can buy a bunch of different bonds from different countries. Then you can try to sell all these bonds to someone and say "Greece owes me money, so I'm gonna be rich someday." And they say, "Greece probably won't be able to pay you back. I'm not buying any of your bonds from Greece." You're hoping that someday they will all pay you back, but their money might be worthless if it has too much inflation. They might also just default and not pay people at all.

So the new rule says that if all else fails, countries can repay other countries with gold.

I still didn't explain in detail what it means to "buy someone's debt." I'd rather write that on a keyboard, not an iPod. It requires a lot of thinking. I'd look it up and read things to get an idea how to explain it. It's a confusing concept to imagine "buying someone's debt."

Other countries could make it illegal to use or save dollars. They could demand that if the USA wants to buy any of their exports, the USA must give them gold instead of paper. That would graually make the USA have less and less gold, unless they stopped buying from foreign countries, and started producing things themselves. However, other countries don't want to just make the US stop buying everything completely. But they want something of value in exchange for their products. Everyone implicitly imagines that the "gold used as collateral" rule will apply to "everyone except the USA." Everyone knows it's only referring to those "poor" countries whose promises to pay are no longer trusted.

Why? Because no one can enforce any rule against the US, except China. Only China by itself can demand that the US pay them in gold. Other countries don't have a strong enough military by themselves to threaten the US. They would have to group together against the US. (I won't say "against us" because I do not include myself as part of the US military. I would actually prefer to call the US government "them," but that would be too confusing. I am not connected to the government or the military, and I do not want to say "us" or "we" when I refer to them.)

There might be others besides China, but China is the first one I think of. They can survive without the US buying their products. It would be sort of interesting to watch China draining the US supply of gold. I would watch it in a bitter way. I know what it would mean. It would be a historically huge event and a major change in world power. If only the US would stop invading other countries and killing people, this wouldn't be necessary. If only they would leave others alone, but no, they cannot. They could keep their gold and do what they want to their own money supply. But they insist on continuing to invade all of the vulnerable and unstable countries in the middle east and Africa.

I'm a little sick and hesitant to eat, but I'm going to the Waffle Shop this morning. This could be either a great idea or a terrible idea.

Some guys at work were talking about sucking dicks. Then they said "What would Nicole think?" as in "You should be ashamed of yourself for talking about this in front of her." I answered them by saying "...You don't want to know what I would think." I was tempted to tell the truth, which was that I was enjoying the discussion, but I'm already creepy enough as it is.

Then again, I also like people who don't talk about those things, too. I like different people in different ways for different reasons. Now I am learning to recognize which functions people are using when they talk and joke around. I know why I'm not able to joke around with them when they playfully insult each other - that is my biggest weakness, not being able to play along with a group of people bantering. They make me laugh, and a lot of it is funny to me, but I can't think of those things myself. I have other strengths that are less visible.

Let my vacation come soon. If it isn't on the schedule for next week, I will ask about it. I only need it to happen before July 29th, but actually, if it could be sooner, that would help. As always, I put higher priority on survival than I do on relationships. There is always a reason to postpone the relationships even longer due to worries about money or the apartment or my job or drug residues or whatever. I don't want to postpone it forever.

Yes, I am still noticing the particular person who I've been paying attention to lately, but now that I'm not having such a reaction to my uniform, it doesn't put me into the blatantly sexual mode that I was in before, so I can interact with him more calmly.

I went to the waffle shop and I'm waiting to order. This is definitely a bad idea. I'm very hungry and sick at the same time and it will be a miracle if I can eat more than two bites without puking. I don't know if I have a virus or food poisoning, but it started yesterday and it's still bad. I've been craving real eggs and that's why I'm here.

I had a hard time finding a place to park, so I parked along the street. It is generally known that the parking meters are not enforced in Bellefonte. Nobody ever puts coins in them. They're everywhere, but I always see them blinking "expired" even when cars are there, so I just do the same thing everybody else is doing.

I wasn't able to eat while I was in the restaurant, but shortly after I left, I was able to finish most of the food in my take out box. I wanted more eggs - two wasn't enough. I definitely have an egg craving right now. I used to buy deviled (the autocorrect thinks I'm trying to say "reviled" eggs, but I don't hate them, I love them!) eggs at Lyken's, but they stopped selling them. Reviled eggs? Yuck!

I took a short walk through Bellefonte. For some reason, old crumbling buildings are more interesting than clean perfect new ones. Little birds landed in the gravel and walked around. Swallows circled overhead - not the barnswallows with the v-shaped tails, but the other ones. A group of apartments in a brick building were hidden in a dark nook behind some trees and a parking lot, with steps going up the outside of the building, in between some other buildings. I looked in a door and saw a gym that I never knew was there, with people walking on treadmills. I don't normally walk in Bellefonte but I usually like it when I do. I'm refusing to bond with Bellefonte too.

I have to work today, but I'm looking to a future where I can work much fewer hours. That is all I want. Then I can learn and study and have adventures again. I might be able to bond with people and have real friends.