This is a huge, long, rambling, manic, disorganized blog about a bunch of different things. My 'book-length monologue,' just like in the old days. That's what happens when I drink two large 24-ounce cups of coffee after having gone several months without any at all. And it's also what happens when I have access to the internet at home.
Why did I decide to drink coffee again? It was a hard decision and I'm not happy about it. I am having an attack of fatigue, and it's hard to troubleshoot. However, I have a theory about something that might have caused some of my attacks in the past.
I was talking about wanting to eat the fish in the streams. So I went reading about fish and about how some of them contain industrial and agricultural chemicals, such as pesticides, that have washed into the streams. I already know that I react very badly to pesticides. After reading about PCBs and other chemicals that are often in the water, I decided that some of my previous attacks of severe fatigue might have been triggered by swallowing water while swimming at places like Whipple Dam. My very severe attack of fatigue that occurred in 1999 coincided with several things: swimming at Whipple Dam frequently with Eric and his daughter; going to Harrisburg with Eric and visiting some of his friends and relatives and eating at a Chinese restaurant, where his daughter got sick; and the airplanes or helicopters or whatever spraying the gypsy moth spray that was supposedly safe for human exposure (but which I do not believe is safe). I suspected that the severe attack of fatigue and inability to eat food for several months might have been caused by either parasites, chemicals, or the gypsy moth spray's bacteria that is supposed to disrupt the digestive systems of the gypsy moths. My new additional theory is that the sickness might have been caused by accidentally swallowing water that contained PCBs and other chemicals at Whipple Dam.
I have been thinking about this subject a lot because a co-worker is having a problem very similar to mine. She is just like me - she seems to be a SLI personality type, she is small and skinny and has an underdeveloped facial bone structure, and she has several chronic illnesses, including Crohn's Disease (which I don't have, thank goodness). I've been asking her what's she's done recently, in her lifestyle, that is different from things she did in the past. One thing she was doing was testing a filter that is in the neck of a water bottle that she bought. The filter is right below the spout of the bottle. She tried water from different sources, including the hose, to see if it tasted different after being filtered. I haven't asked her this question yet, but I am wondering if she is testing any water from streams or ponds. Those filters don't work very well, which is why I don't drink filtered tap water. If she had a false sense of security, she might have tried drinking really bad water through the filter. I've researched water filters and I no longer trust them. I've sometimes had symptoms that continued even after filtering my water, although it does improve the water slightly. So I never drink tap water, I only drink bottled water, because they usually have more high-tech filtering methods where the bottled water comes from.
So the other day when I was at Millbrook Marsh, I deliberately drank a mouthful of water out of the creek. I used to drink the stream water in West Virginia. We were more isolated there, and we did not have agricultural runoff, as there were very few farms in the area. So we did not have pesticides and fertilizer in the water. Anyway, I've been watching my symptoms for the past couple days. I've been occasionally having unexplained liver symptoms after going to Fisherman's Paradise. Pardon the grossness, but, it causes me to have unusually pale colored stools when I go to the bathroom. I had that symptom back when the extremely severe illness was going on in 1999. I had that symptom again after drinking the creek water.
A couple days is not long enough to develop a parasitic infection, according to what I've read. I thought it was parasites, like liver flukes. But it happens very quickly after exposure to the water, and liver flukes supposedly start causing symptoms after they've been growing in your body for several months. Also, it fades away after a couple days and goes back to normal. According to what I've read, that seems more like an exposure to PCBs or some other toxic chemical that temporarily interferes with liver functioning.
So that is my new theory. I've been having other symptoms, such as severe fatigue, weakness, and reduced appetite. That matches the low-level PCB exposure symptoms. The people working directly with PCB in the factories are the ones who have severe symptoms such as chloracne. People who encounter the chemical in the streams will have milder symptoms. However, some animals are having symptoms that I would not describe as 'mild,' such as, for instance, hermaphroditic polar bears who are born with both male and female genitalia. I would say that's caused by 'a chemical which might or might not be PCBs.' I agree that it could be any chemical and that it would have to be proven that it was PCBs in particular causing that.
So I am temporarily drinking coffee again after having quit it for several months. I predicted that the coffee would cause me to start writing huge, long blogs again. Here I am doing that. I also have a wireless internet connection at home, thanks to the generosity of my neighbor, and so I am using it. So I am having two addictions at once. I fell of the wagon of 'no coffee' and 'no internet at home.' This is temporary.
Because of drinking coffee, I have regained my fast reaction times while driving a car. I had to make a left turn out of an intersection where I could not see one side very well. That intersection always makes me anxious. But after drinking coffee, I felt as though I could quickly glance both directions and make the turn and feel that I could respond quickly if a car was coming. I noticed the slower response time whenever I quit drinking coffee several months ago. It definitely makes me feel less safe while driving a car. I take fewer risks and feel less confident about making turns.
I was frustrated because I could only force myself to do a tiny bit of packing each day. I was taking long walks, hoping to wake myself up and make myself feel better. It helped, but not enough. The walks themselves were exhausting me. I enjoy walking and was happy to do it, but it still didn't make me feel well enough to do some packing and organizing. The time is going by quickly, and I only have one week left until I leave, and there still is a list of things I need to do. Also, I keep having reactions to the drug residues that I am touching and handling while I pack my belongings and go into the storage unit. And this is happening at the worst possible time, when I only have a few more days to do the work.
The coffee makes me feel happy, optimistic, and cheerful. My body pain is greatly reduced. All of my muscles and joints and everything are usually in a constant, low level of pain, and it's worse when I'm having a fatigue attack. It makes it very hard to do any work when I feel that way. Coffee definitely reduces pain. However, coffee and caffeine pills, such as Vivarin, are not the same. Coffee contains a large number of unknown chemicals that are not present in caffeine pills, and also, the caffeine itself might have a different chemical structure than the caffeine in the pills. I always noticed that pills did not make me feel as happy and optimistic and cheerful as coffee did. The pills also cause me to have more of the unpleasant, negative side effects, such as upset stomach and trembling.
I've chosen a life without coffee. I will not drink it while I'm pregnant. There are costs to living a life without coffee while also suffering from chronic illnesses and fatigue. Without coffee, my intelligence is lower. My reaction times are slower. I am less happy and less optimistic and less willing to do work. But I am choosing that life for a reason. One reason is to avoid depleting my body's minerals and other nutrients during pregnancy, and to avoid affecting the baby in any way. Another reason is so that I am more aware of the reality of my chronic illnesses. I can see the outbreaks of illness more clearly, as they are not masked by the coffee that gives me a fake feeling of being able to function. I can focus more on troubleshooting the real illness that causes me to drink coffee in the first place.
Also, I've always felt that a drug-free me is 'the real me.' I have a 'potential' in my body which is very different when I am off drugs. The potential is lower, and different. But some other manifestations of my potential are actually greater when I am drug free.
In some ways, I am calmer and more focused when I'm not drinking coffee. I can tolerate listening to slower, calmer music on the radio, such as choir music on the Christian station. I actually love a lot of choir music and Christian music, but I have to imagine that I don't understand what the words are saying. Sometimes it's written in a different language and so I can't be annoyed by the words. But when I'm drinking coffee, I quickly lose patience with slow music, and I want fast, energetic music.
I'm thinking about what they said on wikisocion about music that reflected each of the various functions, and I agreed about their descriptions of 'introverted sensing' and 'extraverted logic' styles of music: major and minor chords, and a tempo of 'walking speed.' But they didn't describe another thing that I want from music. The desire to be energized and exhilarated wasn't described in either Si or Te. I have this desire to be chilled, to get goosebumps, to be excited and surprised, to get the urge to dance, to move, to express the music. Maybe that's under the 'extraverted ethics' section. But it's not just about feelings. It's about feeling strong and wanting to do something. It could be part of extraverted sensing, except it isn't a 'big and powerful' 'loud noises' kind of thing like they described. In fact, the feeling is disturbed and disrupted by noises that are too loud and powerful, such as big bass drums. It is sometimes triggered by sounds and changes that are quiet and subtle. Other times the feeling is triggered in a variety of ways that I can't recall offhand.
Last night I went to the dollar theatre again and watched 'Rio' for the second time. I actually liked a lot of music in that movie, and I characterized the movie as being mostly from the Alpha quadra. I enjoyed the movie a lot. They did something in one of the songs, 'Tell The World' or something - I'd have to look it up to see if that was the right name. First, they played the chorus of the song at a lower pitch. 'She's the one, she's the one, I'll say it loud...' etc. If I had my way, I might have removed the words 'I'll say it loud, I'll say it proud,' and just let it stand alone with 'She's the one, she's the one... (silence).' Anyway, in the first iteration of that chorus, 'She's the one' was sung at a lower pitch. But the second time they sung the chorus, 'She's the one' had moved up a skip interval, perhaps a fifth, but I'm not sure if it was a fifth, it might have been a fourth. I don't have perfect pitch. I would have to try it out on my keyboard to be sure, and I've packed my keyboard in a box today, thanks to drinking coffee and being energized enough to pack things. When they moved it up a skip interval higher, it surprised me. To make a song surprising and emotionally moving, you must do the same thing you did before, with a slight change in it, so that it's not exactly what you expected. It conveyed this emotion: 'You didn't believe me the first time. You didn't take me seriously enough. You didn't think I meant it when I said "She's the one." But I DO mean it. I insist. I say it with greater intensity at a higher pitch than I did before to emphasize it.' This mimics the prosody of speech. When you emphasize something with greater emotion, you raise the pitch of your speech. When someone didn't hear you the first time, you raise the volume and the pitch so that they can hear you. It conveys emotional intensity and importance. So many songs that I hear are written in intolerably boring monotones, where they never change the chords and never change the pitch of anything.
I wish I could explain this to them. I would give them a copy of William Russo's book 'Composing Music - A New Approach,' which I am fanatical about, but this book will drive you crazy if you don't like introverted logic, because introverted logic is EVERYWHERE in the explanations of how you change the notes and structure the music. There are a lot of musicians who write music without ever using music theory. They just play the guitar and write random things that sound good. I've tried writing music by just playing things and hearing what sounds good, and I feel extremely limited that way, because you can't utilize all the possible combinations of notes unless you are consciously and deliberately controlling the notes and understanding their relationships with each other. It gives you so much more variety when you write notes consciously instead of automatically. When you write notes automatically, you have a tendency to write familiar things that you've already done before, and all your music sounds the same. But if you grasp the theory and the logic, you can deliberately vary the notes in ways that do not happen automatically.
Now that I know more about the SLI's functions, I would explain this as being the result of four-dimensional Lex, introverted logic, as my demonstrative function. I can use Lex very strongly, but I just don't usually verbalize it and I don't worship it and I place greater importance on Profiteor (Te - forgive me, but I'm going through a phase of wanting to use Gulenko's names) most of the time, even though my P is weaker than my L. It's interesting to me that the element in the creative function is actually weaker (3D) than the element in the demonstrative function (4D). This is described on the 'dimensionality of functions' page and also on the page about functions in general. It might actually make sense to call people by the names of their strongest functions, the base function and the demonstrative function, instead of calling them by their base function and creative function. So I would be SiTi instead of SiTe. But I won't worry about that - it's arbitrary. It's just another way of arranging information. That would also make my dear dual NeFe, which is strange. I wonder how four-dimensional Fe manifests in him? Perhaps it means that they pay close attention to other people's emotions and are strongly aware of them, no matter how subtle they might be, but they normally suppress their own emotional expression? I'd like to read Gulenko's descriptions of the dimensionality of the functions. This information is extremely interesting and intriguing to me. I've wondered exactly what they're talking about when they describe the 'time' dimension, changes over time. Some of my insights into this have come from 'hearing voices,' actually - they gave me a couple examples and demonstrations that they said illustrated the phenomenon of a function that can see something changing over time.
I knew the coffee would make me go nuts for a while. Not only that, but it set up a craving for more coffee. I went and bought a large cup, not a small, not decaf, but a large cup of 'real' coffee. After drinking it casually without any ill effects, as though I'm already used to it, as though I've just been drinking coffee all this time, I had a craving for another large cup of coffee shortly afterwards, and went out and got one. I predicted that it would make me want to spend the whole day blogging. Wow, my prediction was right.
However, I got a bunch of things packed, and as soon as I've finished writing, I'm going to go and get more work done. I've cleared off the tables in my bedroom. All the computer stuff and electronic things are in boxes and ready to go into storage. The judgment calls (Do I need to use this now, or can it be put in storage?) are getting harder. That's yet another reason why the caffeine will help. I don't get as distressed about having to make a decision.
I heard another song recently on the radio that I wanted to talk about. It was 'St. Elmo's Fire.' This song exhilarated me.
I learned how to spell the word 'exhilarate' because that was the word that caused me to lose in the regional spelling bee when I was in elementary school. I spelled it 'exhillerate.' My mom was in the audience when this happened, and she said that she thought I would lose it on 'exh' - she thought that I wouldn't know it had an H - and so when I correctly spelled it with an H, she thought the worst was over, and she thought that I would spell it correctly. But actually, the H is one of the most 'interesting and unusual' letters in the word Exhilarate, partly because the H is silent and you don't really pronounce it, and parly because it's close to the beginning, and it's easier to remember something if it's in the beginning, but if something is in the middle, it's hard to remember. It might actually be easier to remember how to spell weird words with letters that are silent and unpronounced, simply because of their weirdness. So I remembered the H. I forgot all the 'boring' letters afterwards, and I tried to make it the same shape as the word 'exaggerate.' I modeled it after that word. So I gave it two L's followed by an E. Back before all of the things happened that reduced my mental ability, I used to be a perfect speller and had perfect grammar. My grammatical ability got worse when I was in my early and mid teens. Actually, this is not entirely true, as I see some grammar mistakes in my old third-grade diary. I believe that my decline in mental ability was caused by: 1. getting orthodontic braces 2. getting some permanent teeth removed 3. wearing a plastic retainer 4. exposure to chemicals such as hair spray in my adolescence 5. exposure to pesticides in the house 6. poor nutrition 7. other/unknown.
In later years, I learned that having a very high IQ and high potential is less important than having a 'rational' personality type. 'Rational' types, in my opinion, are better able to complete college course work and get a degree. You have to get things done on time in a scheduled, organized manner, and even if you're a complete moron, you can still do better than a genius in college, if all you do is TRY to complete your assignments and you turn in something rather than nothing. I hardly ever did my work when I was in college, due to severe hyperactivity, and I also believe that I was being electronically harassed at that time, too, because I remember noticing things during that time period that match the symptoms I have now which I now know are caused by electronic weapon attacks. Anyway, I learned that 'merely turning something in' will get you a better grade than turning in nothing at all and getting a zero, which is what I usually did. I had a pattern of not doing any of the daily assignments, but then studying intensely and deeply understanding and integrating the knowledge, at a completely different time than the rest of the class, and getting the highest grade in the class when I took the tests, for instance, in Calculus Class, where I got a 5, the highest possible score, on the Advanced Placement Test - except in those classes that required pure memorization without comprehension, such as history, which required me to memorize names and dates without understanding any 'concepts.' I hated history! I hated the entire spirit of it. You had to merely memorize a long list of seemingly random, disconnected, unpredictable events that happened, without deeply understanding the causes of them. Government did this, government did that, intervention was required, we couldn't have done it without government, government is our hero, government is wonderful, we had to kill a bunch of people, there was no other option, thank goodness we killed all those evil people who disagreed with us or else we'd all be speaking German and Japanese today, blah blah blah, I can't stand it, I'm going to go insane. That would be described as a 'feeling of malaise' from using my Id functions in socionics! Se and Ti: follow these rules, and kill people because we said so, and the world requires us to constantly watch over it and intervene in every little thing, because the free market will NEVER take care of it. Until I read about libertarianism, I had no words to explain why history class was so unbearable for me. The most historic events in history are also the most horribly offensive worst-case manifestations of the disvalued functions. I always felt as though the 'why' explanations they gave us were extremely biased and shallow - why exactly did we need to intervene and pass a law and kill people in order to accomplish some goal? Why exactly was that goal so life-or-death important that we HAD to force people to do it? But I couldn't have explained all that until I became a libertarian.
I was originally writing about St. Elmo's Fire. I first heard that song when I was in third grade, shortly after we moved to West Virginia. I loved the song so much that my brother bought it for me on a record for my birthday. I learned, for the first time, that the songs on the 'B' side of a record usually suck! There is the 'B-side songs' phenomenon that people have described, where you buy a record because you like all the really good songs that are on the A-side, but the other songs aren't any good, and they're all on the back. This record was only a single, and I don't even remember the name of the song that was on the back. Am I remembering correctly when I imagine that my record player was able to automatically flip over the record to the other side? Did record players really do that? There would have to be a robotic arm that grabbed the record and flipped it over. I know that they did that inside of jukeboxes, but did ordinary record players do it? Maybe what I'm remembering is a record player that would automatically lift up and go back to the beginning after it reached the end of the record.
St. Elmo's Fire made me feel excited and exhilarated. It energized me. It made me feel strong and hopeful, like I needed to do some huge, great thing, but I didn't know what. This manic feeling would often frustrate me in later years, and I developed defense mechanisms to cope with it - I gradually learned that I shouldn't try to start any projects at all, rather than starting a hundred different random projects that I would never finish - but unfortunately, as a result... I never start anything at all!!! I often felt this intense manic desire to do something huge, but I was also powerless, attention-deficit, lacking guidance, and unable to complete goals, and so the manic energy would often be wasted as I would try to start some project and fail to complete it, and then waste more resources on some other new project a short time afterwards. I would often do random things like borrowing a violin from the music store and spending a couple of days half-heartedly trying to learn how to play the violin without taking lessons, and then giving it up. Playing the violin or the cello is on my long-term to-do list, that to-do list that I will complete if I become invincible and immortal and I don't have to worry about running out of years in my life. If that ever happens, then I will learn to play string instruments.
My mom had a guitar, and in the old days, she used to play it once in a while, back when we were all happier, back when we lived in Greensburg PA, back when we still went to the beach and the boardwalk and Mom-Mom's house, back when Mom painted and sewed and knitted, back when Mom and Dad used to go to the neighbors' house to play Bridge, a mysterious card game that I never learned to play, while leaving us with a babysitter who we loved, Eve - I still remember her name - when I see photos of her now, I realize that she was an ugly, pimply teenager with braces, but when I saw her back then, I adored her and I thought she was the most beautiful and amazing woman in the world, and I wanted to be like her! (I did, actually, become an ugly pimply teenager with braces.) I liked Eve because she gave me hugs, if I recall correctly. I liked people who were able to express love and affection through touch, because I was shy and didn't know how to touch people easily. Eve was kind and gentle. She would let me snuggle against her while we sat on the couch watching TV - there is a photo of us sitting like that, if I recall.
Back then, Mom played guitar, and we sometimes sang John Denver songs.
I am able to play the piano. I took piano lessons when I was a child, but I quit them during the bad time period when I was becoming sick and depressed and losing my abilities. As an adult, I briefly played the piano again when my roommates had one at the Whitehall Road house, where I lived in 1998 or so. And as an adult, I finally understood that the - what are they called? The dynamics? Whatever. The dynamic marks really matter, things like crescendo and decrescendo, stress marks, and other things that tell you how to play the notes. The expression marks. You don't just play the notes all at the same volume. It matters how hard you press the keys, how fast, how slow, and it matters how you change from moment to moment. As an adult I understood that much better than I did in childhood. I had listened to many songs, and had a lot of cassette tapes by then, and I had heard what a difference it makes when you play something with, or without, expression.
I had attempted to describe, in my journals and notebooks, and in my own head, the reasons why I liked or disliked particular songs. I had struggled to verbalize the characteristics of my ideal music. I had struggled to explain why a lot of music frustrated me and failed to express what I wanted it to express. I had become aware of 'skip intervals,' but didn't know what they were called - I only knew that it triggered powerful emotions if you jumped from one note up to a higher note, but not in a random or chaotic way, not too often, but only after having stayed at a low level for a while, which causes you to become bored and to expect that it will continue to stay at that low level, and then you're surprised and excited when it jumps upwards. Good music is a mixture of boring, predictable familiarity, interspersed with unexpected changes, but not too much chaotic random change.
Musical 'words' exist, little phrases of notes that stick together and stay together and occur repeatedly, and when you play them again with a slight change, it's like somebody speaking a word with a different emotion behind it. This is literal, not metaphorical - it directly resembles what is going on whenever we speak language. All of our words are literally musical notes. When you raise your voice up a skip interval, it expresses something like a leap of intuition, or a change in the idea, so that new possibilities open, something hopeful and good, a world opening up.
I'm almost finished writing this - I will soon be ready to get back to work again. Anyway I was saying that I wanted to play the violin. I tried playing guitar, briefly, and I gave up on it because I have unusually short fingers. It is hard to reach around the stem of the guitar and press down on the strings with short fingers. I have wondered whether this would affect my ability to play the violin. I also very much love the cello, as it vibrates my rib cage, it vibrates deeply inside me, (and no, I realize everyone's imagining 'using a vibrator' or something right now, but it's not like that) and I would love to play the cello too, but if my fingers are too short then I would be limited the same way I was with the guitar. So I might have to play a smaller instrument. I forget which one is the smallest. Is the viola smaller or larger? There might be a type of violin that children play - I've seen little kids playing the violin. It might be a 'fiddle.' I forget whether fiddles are different from violins, or whether it's the same instrument played differently. So that's on the list of things I would do if I weren't worried about paying the bills, if I were immortal, if I were safe and healthy and happy.
In St. Elmo's Fire, there is a trumpet playing a series of notes in the background. Electronic synthesizers have a hard time mimicking the trumpet. In fact, they have a hard time mimicking all acoustic instruments. I don't believe in writing too much electronic music without ever translating it back into acoustic instruments. I like the idea of temporarily using the computer to write a song, so that I can make a rough draft and get an idea how it will sound, but then eventually, I would write the song for real physical instruments, and I would ask the players to tell me whether it was physically possible to play those notes in that way, or whether I needed to alter the notes so that they were playable. If I had my way, I'd record the songs using analog instead of digital, so that they would have the best quality of sound. I would also hire people to sing for me, but I cannot write words - that is my great weakness. I have never been able to write good poetry or words for music. However, I can write glossolalia, just like 'Cocteau Twins,' as she seems to sing in glossolalia or inaudible mumbling mixed with a few real words here and there. My music would strongly resemble Cocteau Twins. 'Carolyn's Fingers' was one of the songs that my brother shared with me, long ago, and we all agreed that it was a great song. I remember Rachael's sister Lindsay also agreed that the song was great. It has chord changes and arpeggios. I know what these things are called, now, and I know how to write them. I can write songs as great as Carolyn's Fingers. Even better, actually. I know that I can. They can be longer, deeper, more complex, and more subtle. But I can't write words. Someday, perhaps I will collaborate with a kindred spirit, perhaps someone of the SEI personality type, someone who is able to write emotionally expressive words, or perhaps even an ESE type, someone who would agree with me about the chords and the melody but who would have great strength in their ability to express emotions in words, while I would have great strength in the technical structure of the music. Collaboration created the song 'When I Ruled The World,' or 'Viva la Vida,' which is from the one-hit-wonder band that never wrote any other songs that I liked - and I know this because I bought their CD and didn't like anything else on it. If I could collaborate with other songwriters, we would write amazingly great songs that could express feelings that I myself cannot express alone.
'Just once in your life... a man has his time... and my time is NOW... I'm coming alive.' St. Elmo's Fire - those words gave me this manic energy and a desire to do something big. I was a child, and I had no idea what I wanted to accomplish, or how to accomplish it. I did not have skills or knowledge. I did not have money or power. I only had an intense desire to do something big. I was struggling to express it, struggling to create something. I tried and failed many times to start projects and to create something. I tried to decide what exactly I wanted to create, what purpose I wanted to achieve. My manic feelings frustrated me, all these years.
Without caffeine, the mania is greatly subdued. I'm not sure what triggered mania when I was a child, before I drank coffee, but I strongly suspect that drinking tea triggered it, because I did occasionally drink tea back then. I've had manic euphoria from drinking tea, camellia sinensis, ordinary iced tea or hot tea, but that euphoria doesn't always happen, and tea tends to make me very sick at my stomach, and it causes constipation, and it gives me 'tonsil stones,' tonsilloliths, which are very disgusting and I won't describe them, and you can google them if you want to know what they are. It makes me angry that some people get their tonsils permanently removed because of tonsilloliths, which are a trivial problem that can be easily solved with troubleshooting. You NEED your tonsils. But oh well. I recently realized that the 'interventionist approach' to medicine is related to extraverted sensing, Factor, whereas the non-interventionist approach is related to introverted sensing, sensus. With sensus, you usually assume that the body will, by default, do the right thing on its own.
But with mainstream medicine, they use extraverted sensing, where they assume that the body is helpless, weak, and defective, and it always requires extreme interventions in order to function properly, so they chop off your essential organs without worrying about the long-term consequences to your entire body, and they give you toxic drugs to force you to feel better instantly, while telling you that you should just 'ignore' the horrible side effects - a sure sign that introverted sensing is their 'ignore function' or a disvalued function. The body must constantly be forced to obey your will, and extreme and harsh interventions are required, so you must chop off your internal organs, extract your teeth, drill holes in your cavities and fill them with poisonous metals and plastics, remove your appendix, remove your gallbladder, have babies by Caesarian section, use drugs to induce labor if you're having vaginal childbirth, remove your tonsils, use extremely toxic artificial hormones to replace hormones lost during menopause, only to have to remove the breasts that will get cancer caused by the toxic synthetic hormone pills, use toxic contraceptives to prevent pregnancy, and so on. I could list a thousand examples of the methods that I hate in mainstream medicine, and the heart of it all is the 'extraverted sensing' approach: USE FORCE! Make the body obey your will! Right now! Ignore the pain! Ignore the side effects! Ignore the vomiting! Ignore the poisoning! Ignore the overdoses! Ignore the fainting and passing out! Ignore the preventable cancer! Ignore the dizziness! Ignore the impotence and anorgasmia! Ignore the drug-induced murders and suicides! It isn't important! All those side effects are trivial, and only WIMPS worry about them. This culture is associated with groups of people who disvalue introverted sensing.
When mainstream medicine is guided by introverted sensing's rules and priorities, then troubleshooting becomes more important than intervening and using force. What activity is causing the health problem? Our approach is to stop doing activities that are harmful to the body, instead of continuing to do harmful things and then using force to stop the body from suffering the harmful effects of our activities.
An example: You eat bad foods that cause you to get diarrhea, gas, or constipation. The mainstream approach is: continue to eat whatever foods you want, and then take an over-the-counter pill to treat the symptoms of gas, diarrhea, heartburn, constipation, nausea, or whatever. Drink some Pepto-Bismol. (If I recall correctly, I don't think I've ever used Pepto-Bismol in my entire life, and if all goes well, I never will!) You must FORCE your body to submit, to endure the harmful things you're doing to it. You must force it to obey you. Digestive system, I COMMAND YOU to digest this bad food! You WILL digest it, you WILL put up with it, and you will NOT complain about it by giving me these unpleasant symptoms! You will shut up and do your job! That is the mainstream approach. Force the body to obey and force it to shut up. It was only recently that I became able to describe how my approach is different from the mainstream medicine approach.
By the way, 'natural herbs' and 'herbal medicine' are just as bad as prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs. They are just another way of controlling the body with force. Alternative medicine, vitamin pills, nutraceuticals, and other supplements are almost always dangerous and have side effects, although they sometimes purport to be trying to help the body in a natural way. People assume you have to 'do something' in order to make the body function properly, and as such, it is an interventionist approach that uses force.
Granted, we must always 'do something' in order to survive - we have to eat! And I am not sure where to define the boundaries of 'using force to control the body' versus 'doing natural behaviors that our bodies are designed to do.'
The introverted sensing approach values an explanation of what is causing a health problem. We value things like what I'm reading in the book by Ramiel Nagel, where he says that phytic acid in grains causes cavities, and actually, the phytic acid is WORSE in whole grains than it is in grains that have had the bran and germ removed. (I need to go back to the16types forum so that I can update my thread about Weston Price, because I was saying that whole grains were better than white flour. Ramiel Nagel added on to the things that Weston Price believed, because we have learned more about grains than we knew back then.) Ramiel Nagel says that even if you soak and sprout your grains, even if you 'sour' them (and I don't know how to do that) as Weston Price wrote, you still haven't removed all of the phytic acid. This is interesting, as it answers the question 'Why would Rick get cavities while eating a mostly sugar-free Mediterranean diet?' Rick wrote a blog about his experience of getting a cavity filled in Ukraine. He shouldn't be getting any cavities at all.
He eats buckwheat while hiking. I read that buckwheat is a good choice among grains, as it's a 'pseudo-grain,' if I recall correctly, but yet, they said that it still contains some phytic acid, just not as much as the other grains have. He might be getting cavities because of eating buckwheat, and soaking the grains might not be sufficient to remove enough phytic acid. However, it might not just be the buckwheat that causes the cavities, it might also be all the other 'dry food' that can be easily stored at room temperature, because he eats that kind of food for months at a time while hiking, although he eats fruits and vegetables and perishable foods for short periods of time when he reaches a town. Do I have the answer about what kinds of foods you should eat while hiking? Yes, I do have an answer, but it's an answer that will inconvenience everyone: It's probably a good idea to go hiking with a herd of cows or yaks or sheep or something, the way nomadic tribes do, and you drink their milk, and their blood (which is described in the Weston Price books). Or you hunt and forage while hiking, which can be dangerous, because you need to learn how to avoid poisonous plants, and also you need to avoid parasites, and if you read about 'which plants are edible' on the internet, they will tell you a lot of dangerously incorrect or incomplete information, such as 'milkweed is edible,' which I believe is dangerously wrong. They say you can eat the roots of milkweed, but I believe you should not try to eat any part of that plant at all, not the roots, not the stems, not the leaves, not any part of it. There was a story of a guy who wrote a book called 'Stalking The Wild Asparagus,' or something like that, and that guy died at a shockingly young age from a heart attack, and I personally believe that he might have been eating poisonous plants that cause heart attacks, such as milkweed, while he was foraging. Or he might have been exposed to some other poisons. Eating plants doesn't guarantee you a long and healthy life free of heart attacks.
Anyway, if you read on the internet about foraging, you are likely to get dangerously wrong information, and you will have to test it and troubleshoot it yourself by using 'the universal edibility test,' which is described on various websites and I won't look for them right now. So I can't advise hikers that they ought to learn how to forage in all the locations where they are hiking, as they must learn about all the local flora in that area, and mistakes can be deadly. As of right now, I don't have any good advice, and I'm still learning. Eating earthworms is probably safe, but I haven't tried it yet. I will, though! I think everyone needs to know how to safely eat bugs. This is a potentially huge and under-utilized food source, and it is almost infinitely plentiful, and it doesn't require thousands of acres of land.
Nutrition is very complicated, and it can be frustrating when you go a long time believing that you're doing something right, only to find that it's exactly the wrong thing, and you have to do the opposite - only to find that 'the opposite' is also the wrong thing to do! That's what I've been learning about. There are so many rules, and you have to prevent them from contradicting each other. You shouldn't eat whole grains, but you also shouldn't eat too much 'white flour' or processed grains either, and in fact, you might be better off not eating any grains at all - but there are dangers to eating too much protein, because I've read that if you eat too much protein, it can cause calcium loss from the body. So you can't eat too much grain, but you also can't eat too much meat, and according to the Feingold Diet, bad things can happen if you eat too many fruits and vegetables! And don't get me started on all the complexities of how to properly choose which types of fat you should eat!
Not only that, but based on my own observations, the 'Weston Price Diet' is lacking the details about what exactly happens when you eat saturated fat, and it fails to explain why some people can eat it, while other people get the symptoms that are associated with saturated fat in 'mainstream medicine.' Mainstream science tells us that saturated fat is bad. Weston Price devotees say saturated fat is good. Barker's Hypothesis tells us that the small, thin, deformed people, such as myself, are at greater risk of heart disease, which matches my own experiences of having severe heart problems after handling herbal drugs that affect the heart, and observing undesirable heart symptoms after eating all-natural, hormone-free, grass-fed, raw Swiss Cheese made from Amish milk - it made my heart pound for a while after I ate only a few bites of cheese. According to the Weston Price devotees, that type of cheese ought to have been good for me. I am not going to just 'give up' and say that the Weston Price people are entirely wrong. Instead I say that I must 'keep the baby and throw out the bathwater,' and I am determined to find out which is the baby, and which is the bathwater. I know for sure that part of the 'baby' is the idea that 'the body is deformed by malnutrition and poisoning before conception and during prenatal and early postnatal life, and many common deformities are NOT caused by DNA,' for instance, crooked teeth.
Small, skinny people probably have small, narrow arteries, whereas large people have large, fully formed arteries. When I used to have blood drawn at the doctor's office or when I was donating plasma, they always complained that I had 'narrow veins' that were extremely hard to find. Narrow arteries are probably a manifestation of the Weston Price / David Barker deformities. So it is not as simple as merely telling people that all of mainstream science is wrong about saturated fat, and saturated fat is good for you. Saturated fat is good for people who have properly formed arteries. Saturated fat is bad for people who have deformed, narrow arteries. This is my theory. It might not only be the narrowness of the arteries causing the problem, but it might also be some other factor that determines whether or not saturated fat is good for you. This is only one example of conflicting rules from different sources, both of which might be correct under different circumstances.
Anyway, as an adult, I have more skills, knowledge, independence, money, and power than I did as a child. I am physically and mentally capable of setting goals and achieving them, although it still isn't easy for me to do that, especially when I am choosing to live without drugs, and when I am still being attacked by electronic weapons.
Oh, speaking of which, I was reading a web page about geophysical electrophonics, http://home.pacific.net.au/~ddcsk1/gelphonx.htm , which I believe is the same technology that causes the external banging, clicking, and snapping noises that harassment victims experience. Somebody is using this to make weapons that can move and push objects around, to make the surfaces of objects slip and slide against each other, to make loud noises or small noises on objects around the victim, or on any objects anywhere at all - perhaps even deep underground - you might even be able to cause earthquakes if you could get strong enough signals aimed at a place where the tectonic plates intersect. It would have to be a strong signal to penetrate that deeply underground.
Anyway, I believe that a lot of my harassment is based on the same principles as geophysical electrophonics. Someday, when I have time, I will once again attempt to convince and persuade people that this is real, and I will attempt to explain how it's done, and I will argue through all of their objections ('Nobody would do that,' 'Why would anybody waste their time stalking and harassing YOU?' 'How do you know that you're not just imagining it?' 'Couldn't you just be "psychic?" etc.). And I would like to get some people to help me reverse engineer the weapons, and also to purchase the weapons that already exist and are available for sale over the internet, so that I can demonstrate that it is real.
But I would need a purpose - why do I want to convince these people? What kind of help do I want to receive from them? Do I want to motivate them to become activists who educate the public about this phenomenon? Do I want to motivate them to persuade politicians and voters and other people to write laws about this? Do I want to motivate them to become human rights advocates who talk about electronic weapons? People won't believe that harassment technology is 'important' until and unless it's being used against them and people they love - and no, by the way, I am NOT saying that this is a legitimate method of forcing people to pay attention to it and care about it! It's just as important as every other evil phenomenon in the world, such as murder, and kidnapping, and torture, and child molesting, and every other evil phenomenon that exists in the world. Electronic weapons are just another evil thing amongst all the various evil things that exist. I myself wouldn't care about it at all, or pay attention to it at all, except that it's used to torture me every day of my life, and I can't escape from it, as the murderers follow me everywhere I go. That is the only reason why I care about it at all. However, you can argue that electronic weapons have a larger impact on the world than small-scale individual crimes do. You can attack and control huge groups of people at once, without their knowing that they're being attacked, and in that respect, it's different from individual crimes such as murder and rape and anything else. And if people are using it to move tectonic plates or control the weather, then they can cause large-scale disasters and kill thousands of people. In other words, it's IMPORTANT.
Apparently, 'they' want me to demonstrate this and persuade 'good people' and 'trustworthy people,' innocent people with good ethics and good intentions, to believe that it exists and to talk about it. People will argue about whether it's strategically a good idea to 'keep it secret' versus 'open everything up and tell everybody.' If we keep it secret, that means that a small number of people 'in the know' will have power over everybody else. If we 'tell everyone,' that means that a lot of small-scale crimes will occur as every random malicious person starts using the technology for trivial harassment and mundane crimes, the 'You insulted my ego, so I'll destroy your entire life' type of attitude, or 'You rejected me sexually, so I'll spy on you through the walls of your house and look through your clothing and watch you having sex with your boyfriend,' and blah blah, all that trivial stupid petty annoying stuff - malaise, irritation, and boredom - an indication of my 'ignore function' in socionics - there is nothing on earth more annoying and petty than the behavior of people who want to use extraverted sensing, physical force, to harass, torture, get revenge, spy on, and control people - nothing on earth is more boring and annoying than that. And, like it or not, I am constantly being attacked by that very thing, and I have no choice, except to respond to it somehow, by finding a way to protect myself, to ignore it as much as possible, to keep on living, to build a shield, to talk about it even though it's the last thing on earth that I desire to talk about or think about, even though so many things are more important to me than that, to go someplace where the effects are less severe or the attackers are less malicious and destructive, and so on. I have to do something, whether I like it or not. That is my life and that is my misfortune. I would have lived a very different life if I could have chosen to. Anyway, the strategy that 'we' have chosen is: reveal everything to everyone, as much as possible, and destroy the secrecy, even though this leads to chaos and small-scale individual criminal activity. Otherwise, the few will have power over the many, as they do right now.
I should finish this and get back to work. I've gotten a lot done today because of the caffeine, but, as expected, it also caused me to go completely nuts and write a huge, long, crazy blog for hours and hours and hours. And I will have to quit coffee again and go into withdrawal. But I will be able to get my stuff moved out before the deadline, in spite of my chronic fatigue attacks.
Oh my gosh, I have FINALLY decided that this blog is finished, after having reread it several times and added a lot of paragraphs and tangents in between other paragraphs and tangents.
As I was writing this, 'the voices' made a joke. They said 'Harry Potter, anyone?' as an invitation for me to go see the movie again. I have already lost count of how many times I have seen it. It's either three times or four times. I love to see it with a big crowd of people. It is one of the few times that I feel connected with strangers. One time, I sat next to a guy who occasionally mimicked the snake-like head movements that the actors do in the movie whenever they are connected with Voldemort. He did a perfect imitation of that movement, and he cracked his neck the way you crack your knuckles. The message that I got from this behavior is that he wanted to be seen by other people, to be valued, to be special. He wanted someone to understand that he is a special and important person instead of just another boring and meaningless face in the crowd. And I regretted that I myself could not connect with him and that I could not value him the way he needed to be valued, and I could not use his skills and abilities and his specialness, nor could I connect with and use all the other people in the crowd, even though I knew that every person was special and important. It is regrettable that people have a desire to be seen and valued, they desire to be important, they desire to have a mission to fulfill, but it is hard for them to find other people who are able to see their value and bring it out. I know exactly how that feels.
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