eagledove9's blog

Where I've Been Blogging: Wordpress

2011-02-27T10:02:00.000-05:00

Just in case anyone finds their way here, I wanted to let everyone know that I've been using Wordpress for a while now. I am at http://retmeishka.wordpress.com. Heck, I might actually come back here sometime - now that I'm looking at it again, I see that it's lighter on my browser than Wordpress is. But anyway, that's where I've been.

Thank you for all your helpful information about Viagra!

2009-11-17T17:51:00.002-05:00

I haven't blogged in a long time because I left all my computer passwords in a cardboard box somewhere when I moved to my new apartment. I finally changed my passwords online so I could get back in. Now I'm seeing nothing but spam comments about Viagra.

However, back before I changed my password, I wasn't even getting notifications about spam-Viagra comments, and now I am.

Now that I've written a blog with Viagra in the title, I should get even more spam comments about Viagra.

Precarious Packing Positions?

2009-07-29T15:33:00.000-04:00

(that title doesn't really sound quite right. LOL)

Dad and I are getting along, so far. It was actually fun, both of us carrying the dishwasher down the steps on a dolly, in the rain, on slippery wooden steps. If I could have somehow videotaped this, I would have. (I may have confused 'fun' with 'terrifying.' It's not something I do every day.)

Then, I should have also videotaped myself standing on top of a shaky metal file cabinet a foot and a half wide, which was on top of a plastic foot locker, while I piled boxes and musical keyboards and other stuff on top of, and behind, other stacks of boxes, while Dad handed things up to me.

Or then again, there was me standing on top of the dishwasher, doing that same thing as before, piling things onto stacks, except the dishwasher started to roll away on its wheels while I was straddled with one foot on a nearly-empty box sticking out of one of the stacks, which was slowly crushing under my foot, with my other foot on the dishwasher. So I had to get Dad to catch the dishwasher and push it back, or I would have had to jump off and probably knocked a bunch of boxes over.

And of course it's pouring rain today! We get to go up and down the steps in the rain. I don't mind that too much, it's refreshing, not too hot outside.

So again, kind of stressful but also fun, and we're not arguing. We seem to understand each other. As long as I don't talk about any controversial subjects it won't be a problem.

Dad is thinking ahead about where we might put the last of my stuff if we absolutely can't fit it into the storage unit. I can keep some of it in my car, and he said that maybe Aunt Jean would let me temporarily put a few things there if I had to. And he also suggested that I might go to the homeless shelter if I absolutely had to, if I could not get in to the apartment. (I am having a problem which I won't get into right now, but I expect it to be resolved. But I might not get the apartment or it might be delayed.) A couple years ago I had asked Aunt Jean if I could stay at their place but they were not really comfortable with that, especially because both of them have serious health problems now. So I'm not going there. I'm not that worried about it yet.

Anyway, it really is fun to do work with somebody else instead of alone.

That's it for now.

My storage unit looks like a badly played game of Tetris.

2009-07-29T12:34:00.000-04:00

I used to play Tetris on Nintendo back in the 1990s. There were times when you would have a hole, a missing space, a few rows down, and you're trying really hard to get to it so that you can fix it, but every time you reach it, something goes wrong, and you add another piece that doesn't really fit and it only makes the situation worse, or it has a piece that juts outwards with another hole underneath it, which causes another bad row, and it piles up higher and higher because you can't make any rows disappear.

So my storage unit is like that. I have my bookshelves set up, but for some reason, didn't put anything ON them, which would have actually USED the shelves. Instead, I just piled things in front of them. After doing that for a bit, I decided to try putting a few things on the highest shelves, but not the lower ones, so it's in danger of falling forwards. The lower shelves are empty, but blocked behind a bunch of stuff. It's too exhausting to think about pulling everything out just to get to the lower bookshelves, so I am leaving it that way.

Then, I have the recliner. It has boxes piled up in its lap. But since the recliner is soft and squishy and not flat, the boxes are tilted, leaning at a slight angle. To fix this, I added a few boxes in between other stacks of boxes, up at a high place with nothing underneath them, boxes that are supported by nothing except the leaning stacks of boxes around them, just hanging in midair that way.

A lot of my boxes are almost empty, with only one or two lightweight objects in them. This is because I kept a few contaminated items that I wanted to keep separate from other items. So there are quite a few boxes that are full of air, which ought to have been compressed into less space if I could. But I am leaving them that way too.

I went there to move things around and make room for my dishwasher. That worked out fine, so I will be able to get the dishwasher in there today.

My dad drove up here anyway, because it turns out that my uncle Eugene in Bellefonte was having heart problems and thought he might die. I was shocked to hear this, because nobody mentioned it to me until after everyone else had already known about it for several days. However, I got to see him today and I will try to go visit them maybe later today after Dad and I get the dishwasher put away.

I used St. John's Wort yesterday to give myself the endurance I need to do unpleasant work. I was having days where I would get maybe one box of stuff packed, and then I couldn't bring myself to do any more work than that. The sjw worked well - I got a lot more boxes packed yesterday than any other days.

Anyway I thought it was funny how it reminded me of Tetris - playing Nintendo all the time, those were the days. (Nothing in my life reminds me of Super Mario Brothers right now, but I'll let you know if that happens. Maybe I'm a princess 'moving to another castle?')

OMG!!! THE UNIVERSE IS ENDING!!! RIGHT NOW!!! ALL LIFE AS WE KNOW IT WILL BE DESTROYED!!!

2009-07-27T16:05:00.001-04:00

My mom is freaking out about me trying to move out of my apartment. She said again that she is going to send Dad up here to 'help' me get out of the apartment. I am moving out very slowly because of recurring illnesses, chemical sensitivities, and fatigue, which makes it very hard to pack all my stuff into boxes and go up and down the steps a hundred times.

There are a few reasons why I don't want Dad to come up here and 'help.' Dad and Mom both believe that all of my herbal residue contamination is imaginary (and also the moldy air, and my chronic fatigue). So if Dad is packing things for me, he will throw contaminated objects randomly with other things that are not contaminated - unless I fight and argue, constantly, which I can already imagine. This means that sentimental, irreplaceable objects will be ruined, destroyed, and made permanently untouchable and unusable. I'm expecting also that there will be fighting over random things, lectures about what a failure I am and how I'm 34 years old and yet they're still helping me financially, and how I need to get my life together, blah blah blah.

Mom and Dad are co-signed on my lease with me. And I would never have wanted that. But over the past few years, it's been frequent job losses, unusual disasters, electronic harassment, and chronic illnesses, one after another, and my life has not been stable enough to earn enough income to pay my own rent for long periods of time. (My parents believe that all of these things are either imaginary, or else they're my fault.) I've been able to do it for brief periods, but not permanently.

It has been years since I've fought with them this much. I feel like I'm living with them again. I am actually yelling and raising my voice in an argument, which, again, I almost never need to do. I have been shouting at Mom on the phone telling her *NOT* to send Dad up here.

I tried explaining to her the reasons why the universe ISN'T going to collapse and destroy all life as we know it. But she believes that since their name is co-signed on the lease, it IS going to destroy the universe and all life as we know it.

I am not happy about this either, but I know for sure that the universe isn't ending, and that it will be okay. I can survive this even if it doesn't go perfectly. Mom is freaking out because I don't have all my belongings out of here yet. The worst thing that can happen with that is that 1. I will have to pile stuff on the porch, and 2. the carpet won't get cleaned in time. If the carpet wasn't ready, the new people might be briefly delayed getting in (oh no! I can see the dead bodies piling up now! I can hear the screaming! blood and guts everywhere!).

I can't move things into the new apartment, because it hasn't been settled yet. I wasn't getting enough hours at my job, and the new landlady was hesitant to let me move in, because it seems like I'm not making enough money. In reality, in the long term, I am either going to become a nomad and live in my car, an RV, or something similar, or else I am going to be living with housemates, or a group, or a spouse.

All these years, I have not married, because I was sure there would be a divorce, and if we didn't divorce, there would be physical and psychological abuse. So I refused to marry. I don't know why I expect physical and psychological abuse as being extremely likely to happen in my marriage, but it might be because my first 'real' boyfriend (somebody more than just a brief kiss or whatever) was... a little bit messed up... very unpredictable, and probably a victim of some of the same things that are causing so many problems in MY life right now.

I actually see two possible scenarios for my marriage. The first scenario: 1. I find the guy sexually attractive. The marriage relationship is psychologically abusive. Life is unstable. It ends with a divorce. This is a bad environment to try to raise children in. 2. A 'practical' marriage. I find the guy sexually and psychologically boring, or possibly even disgusting, repulsive, or loathsome. Not at all attractive. However, he is down-to-earth enough to earn money in a reliable way, and nonviolent enough that he doesn't abuse me or the children. For sexual, psychological, and mental excitement, I look outside the marriage. This is an infidelity or non-monogamous scenario. Again, I would rather not feel that I had to do that.

It's normal for people to have friends outside the marriage, and it's normal that spouses do not meet each other's every social need, and they have to go to other people to share their interests and their goals and their activities. A typical marriage might have a wife who rolls her eyes whenever the husband wants to go watch football or NASCAR racing on TV, and the husband rolls his eyes whenever the wife wants to go shopping at yard sales, or whatever wives do that annoys their husbands. (I don't relate to other women very well. I never have.) And it seems to be common for women to fantasize about other men, celebrities, movie stars, etc. who are 1. not their husband, 2. not interested in them, 3. not available, 4. not reliable or stable enough to marry, 5. drug users who are physically and psychologically dangerous, having fights and mood swings and unpredictable things (that describes my high school boyfriend).

So my imagined likely scenarios for the marriage are very negative, and I avoided it all this time.

I don't know where this fits in, but I also have to mention: I expect that, of course, my husband will not respect my knowledge, my intelligence, my competence, the things that I believe and the things that I want, and the goals I want to achieve. That would probably be true in both scenarios. In all of my life, nobody ever respected me or cared what I wanted or what I believed. (That's one of those fake sentences which is not true: those are somebody else's words, not mine. In reality, I can name a few people who HAVE respected me and cared what I wanted. But would you believe me if I told you that somebody is forcing me to write fake sentences, and that I need a physical shield that can block out electronic mind control attacks, and that somebody needs to do research to find out how the attacks are being done so that we will know what the shield needs to be made of, and also the sources of the attacks needs to be found so that the people doing them can be stopped? I would need a husband who can at least *tolerate* this, even though I would probably have to work on those projects with other people, not necessarily my husband.)

Fighting with Mom and Dad again is bringing all of this out. (So far, I have only talked on the phone to Mom. Dad and I don't talk much. He and I only get in fights if we live together in the same house.) I don't want to marry somebody only to find that they are just as disbelieving as Mom and Dad, calling me a hypochondriac, crazy, lazy, and all the other things that they think I am.

In my opinion, there isn't much reason to marry someone unless you are planning to have children. If you're not having children, then you can just have monogamous boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, which is what I have been doing all these years. People do it for 'tax reasons,' but that's just... I don't know. A stupid reason. There have to be better reasons to marry someone than that.

I forgot to mention something earlier. I read someplace the names of the generations. Mine is called Generation X, which most of us have heard of, but they also started calling it 'The Boomerang Generation.' I wrote that a few months ago in my blog somewhere, I vaguely remember. Boomerangs, because we move out, and then come back home because we can't afford to live on our own - the rent is too high, the job market is too unstable, businesses go bankrupt one after another after another to infinity, the property taxes are too high, the housing and land prices are too high, and even after going to college and getting several degrees, people still can't get a stable job without getting laid off after a year or two, because there are NO BUSINESSES that can profit in a collapsing economy.

I know I'm not the only person having these problems. I make myself feel better by remembering that people were writing about chronic health problems a long time ago, that some of the famous poets and authors were 'sickly,' although back then it was because of air pollution, tuberculosis, and things like that. I also know that the unstable economy is everywhere, and that lots of other people can't keep a job for long, and it's been that way for years now. And after reading my books for the past few years, I have some understanding of how and why the economy and the money system are being destroyed.

So I know that I am not alone; and I also know that this is nowhere near as bad of a disaster as a lot of other things I have experienced. My life is not in immediate danger. I am going to fight and argue with my family for the next few days, and maybe the next few weeks, but it is going to settle down, and I am going to continue doing the things that I have been trying to do.

I got a good fortune cookie a couple weeks ago. It said, 'Notice the dream that keeps coming back. It is your destiny.' There are lots of things that I have been thinking about for years now, and some things that I have been thinking about since childhood, things that I have wanted to do, things that I thought were important - the dreams that keep coming back. I am still going to try to do those things.

I am in my own little world, banging on the walls to see if anyone notices.

2009-07-18T12:33:00.000-04:00

I did something which I know I am not allowed to do, and nothing happened. Well, nothing happened YET. It seems like it ought to get some kind of response, but it didn't.

Oh, I could be wrong about the word 'lex.' I saw something somewhere that made me suspect that's what it was, but I'm not sure.

I didn't meet the 'it has to be insulting, degrading, or sexual' criteria. I think I'll just skip that criteria. I'm not really confortable, with an N, talking that way yet.

The previous post (two posts ago actually), which I don't think is visible, might show up in my google results. I wonder if it will show up in google results no matter which computer I use and no matter who I am? I'll just wait for google to find it.

Dear purplebarnswallow lex glow from peppermint, I assume my previous post didn't appear.

2009-07-18T12:17:00.000-04:00

I was expecting to hear total silence after posting it. Just wanted to see what would happen. This one probably won't go either.

Harry Potter - I saw it today and I still don't know what to say about it.

2009-07-15T18:39:00.001-04:00

I thought it was very good, and very intense, and I cried. It's better than I expected. It was well done as a movie, but I'll have to buy the DVD and watch it a few hundred times before I can really form an opinion about it. (just kidding.)

I felt cameraderie with the other people in the movie, all the people watching it. Everyone went there knowing what would happen and knowing that it was going to be painful. There were a lot of people there - it wasn't one of those times when you go to an empty theatre with only three or four people in it besides yourself. It was so full, I offered to move over so that I could give a woman and her son two seats that were beside each other.

Something funny accidentally happened in the beginning. I was the first person to walk into the theatre. It happened because I bought my ticket a little while in advance, maybe 45 minutes or so, and then I went off in my car and wandered around a little bit, listening to music, before I came back to the theatre. When I walked in, it was just about time for the movie to start. There was a big line of people sitting down outside the theatre. Apparently, the previous showing had just let out, and they were expected to wait a few minutes while the janitors cleaned it up.

So all these people were waiting in line. But, being socially clueless, I looked at this big line of people waiting outside the theatre, and instead of going to 'my place' in the very back of the line, I just looked at them, and then I walked directly into the theatre ahead of everybody. Oops. Suddenly a whole flood of people was following me, the entire line. I guess nobody had known the exact moment when the janitors were done cleaning and checking for anybody who might still be hanging out from the previous show, and nobody had told the line that they could go in, so they kept waiting even though the theatre was ready for them, until I got there and just walked right in.

I felt very important. LOL.

There was a lot of eye contact between me and the other people, while walking around, going to the bathroom, etc. Everyone felt like we were all in this together. This particular movie, if you haven't read the book, is a much more serious and traumatic movie than the previous ones.

I feel like Harry Potter fans are the type of people who understand me - I feel more in common with them than I do with people who don't know about it. The theme is of someone who just doesn't fit in in the regular world, but eventually meets another world of people who are like him.

I wouldn't have been a Harry Potter fan myself, except that my ex-boyfriend used to read those books to his daughter, and helped teach her how to read that way. So that's how I got into it.

Now I am a 'medium hardcore' fan. I don't have it all memorized as much as some people do though. But I am pretty hardcore because I almost believe that a lot of the ideas are literal truth, very close to reality, almost but not quite. I use a lot of their concepts when I talk about things, whenever I write, and I refer to incidents that happened in the movies and books as though they were real. (I haven't tried writing any fan fiction though, and probably won't.)

The new word I'm using to describe myself is 'thin-skinned', easily upset emotionally. That's not *really* true most of the time, just sometimes. Getting very involved in the movies and crying and being scared is something I've been doing a lot lately.

I still feel attached to the movie, like I didn't really get back to normal reality yet.

I was concerned that that particular theatre would give me problems, because their sound system, or something there, makes me get dizzy and sick - I think it is very deep bass vibrations from the speakers, infrasound or almost infrasound - I guess there is a range of frequencies that can affect people - it doesn't have to be all the way as low as infrasound. I didn't eat anything before I went there, and yeah, I did have problems several times with being affected by the dizziness and the sounds.

But there was another person who got upset, and it wasn't from something technical, it was from the traumatic scene of Dumbledore drinking the water near the end of the movie. During that scene, I just covered my eyes. And then this person a couple rows behind me started making gagging noises. I was afraid somebody would do that. I'm emetophobic, so when I go to the movies, I worry that there might be a scene that has vomiting, or something similar enough that it will make me feel sick. It was awful the first time I went to see The Chamber of Secrets, which shows Ron vomiting up slugs. I hadn't read the book yet and didn't know what to expect!

Okay, well... now I need to decide what I will do for the rest of the evening.

I'm getting tired of the disinformation system.

2009-07-12T08:16:00.000-04:00

There are times when I wish I could just conveniently send people an email and know that I'm going to get a reply. And if I can't do that, I wish I could rely on the internet to always look the same no matter who you are and no matter which computer you're using. And if I can't do that, I'd like to be sure that my telephone calls and answering machine messages are reaching their intended destination. And if I can't do that, it would be nice to be able to talk to someone in person without getting attacked by the electronic mind control system, or forced into a dissociative state or alternate personality, so that you forget whatever it was you said to the person, and can't understand why they're acting so strangely towards you later on.

I just get paranoid sometimes. So many things are really difficult, when they ought to be simple and easy to do.

oops, that's not quite right

2009-07-09T10:49:00.000-04:00

after rereading that page again, it was talking about a different one as being the 'all business' type: the sp/so. i reversed it.

obama: so/sx. bush: so/sp.

2009-07-09T10:21:00.000-04:00

http://www.ocean-moonshine.net/e142857369/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=42&MMN_position=80:80

that web page has a problem if you try just going to www.ocean-moonshine.net. you can't go to that top level page. i found that site when it was in my google search results for information about the enneagram and the instinctual subtypes.

instincts that ichazo and others have described and how they affect the enneagram type:

so = social
sx = sexual
sp = self-preservation

here is my current theory:
obama: so/sx. bush: so/sp.

obama seems 'accessible' and 'human.' he wrote poetry a long time ago and shows signs of 'passion' or 'soul.' people comment about his loving relationship with his wife, and how they still show passion and intimacy with each other.

bush was more dry, inaccessible. after he went crazy, after the world trade center attack, people hated him and described him as soulless, like there was nothing alive in there, no self-awareness, no feeling for unique individual human beings. this is the so/sp at its worst. it's like he saw a huge, faceless mass of meaningless people, and they all were potentially a threat, a danger, a crowd of unpredictable animals and monsters who might rebel at any moment, who needed to be spied on, and tortured, and interrogated, in order to make sure they wouldn't get out of control.

so/sps are not always like that, but if something bad is going on, they become the 'soulless politician' much more than the other type does.

the so/sx has a stronger connection with people's individual souls. the sx instinct is said to represent passion and mystical feelings in addition to sex, the passionate love of life and your soul mate (or mates plural).

so/sx is described as 'big brother/big sister' and 'best friend to many.' i see albus dumbledore as probably so/sx as well. he isn't 'dry and inaccessible' or 'seeming inhuman' when under stress. he still knows that he's dealing with real human beings.

i would like to see some healthy role models for the other type, the so/sp. because right now, i'm giving them a bad rap, but not all so/sps have to be bad. george bush was definitely the worst case scenario for that type.

i think ayn rand described a healthy so/sp type in some of her characterizations. she sometimes talked about the businessman who was 'all business' and who was criticized for that. she glorified that businessman. the enneagram type eight so/sp is described that way when they become the CEO, and they make a very competent CEO but people don't like the 'all business' attitude that they show.

so/sp is described as the 'respectable business person' or 'respected pillar of the community.' there is a real need for these people and they can be healthy, so don't just think of george bush at his worst when you think of this type. many respectable, competent business people are this type but they are all very human.

so i don't know for sure if obama is so/sx, but it's a theory that i'm considering for now. i'll keep thinking about it. it would explain why he 'feels more accesssible' and 'acts like one of the guys' more than george bush did. since i don't have television, i can't get an impression of his behavior visually, but i have seen a couple speeches, and i felt 'passion' and 'charisma' in those speeches, which represents the sexual instinct, instead of a dry, all-business approach. again, just a theory for now.

You know you have PMS when...

2009-07-06T15:01:00.000-04:00

...When you go outside and see one single yellowjacket dead inside your yellowjacket trap, and you burst into tears and uncontrollable sobbing for at least five minutes.

'I didn't think it was working,' I said, sobbing, and got the pair of scissors to cut the string that I had the trap hanging from, so I could take it down, open it up, and see if maybe the bee was still alive.

I put gloves on to make sure I didn't get yellowjacket pheromone on my hands. The trap has a cottonball inside it, with a chemical attractant that the bees can smell. But if you get it on you, .... that would be bad. So I wore gloves.

I opened it up and the little bee fell out into my hand. I touched it, hoping it would move, but it would not move, and I started crying again.

I was sure the trap just wasn't working. I had set it up while the yellowjacket nest was still very active, and they all just ignored it. The instructions said, don't set it up right next to a nest. They said it had to be at least twenty feet from a nest. I broke that rule, so maybe they ignore it if the real nest is nearby, and maybe that's why it didn't work.

But I had my landlord spray the nest, and that did get rid of the bees. I never saw any dead bees (or poisoned, struggling, still-alive bees) anywhere. I never saw anything. They just stopped going to the nest. So I just left the trap hanging up, thinking that it just wasn't doing anything at all.

I actually went outside to pick black raspberries. They are all along the pathway beside the duckpond. Since I am leaving this apartment, I won't be able to do that anymore, unless I deliberately come back here to visit. There is a parking space by the pond, and people do visit, and technically, it's university property. So I can go there if I want to. But still it will require me to drive my car to go here, when all these years (about 9 years - I moved here in 2000) I could just go out there and walk whenever I wanted to.

I was running back up the steps to get my camera, because I decided I would take pictures of the raspberries. On the way back in, that's when I saw the trapped bee and I started crying.

I don't like to kill things for no reason. I didn't need to kill the yellowjackets anymore. It's not the same as killing them and eating them, which is using them for a purpose. It's not the same as killing them to protect myself against accidentally getting stung since they put a nest directly under my door.

But grief-stricken sobbing is *probably* more of a reaction than I would normally do.

So, the bee trap has been disassembled and thrown away. They DO actually work. Just not very quickly, and not right next to an active nest.

I guess I will try again to go out and pick raspberries.

Prison inmates are using the internet right now

2009-07-06T04:44:00.000-04:00

someday, someone you talk to on the internet could actually be writing to you from inside of prison. 'someday' as in right now, anytime. i don't mean the distant future, i mean it is already happening. they are getting access to cell phones and other wireless devices and using them to read and write on the internet.

but someone inside a prison would have a more limited point of view than someone outside of it would have. they would have, maybe, a more pessimistic and negative spirit, a more hopeless attitude.

they might talk to you on a forum. they might be mysterious about who they are and where they are. they might refuse to answer detailed questions about themselves. they might insist on always remaining anonymous.

if you talk to them about 'doing' anything, like if you enjoy a conversation you're having with them, and you ask them if you could find a way to meet each other in person, they might be mysterious or evasive, and unable to say yes. you might not understand why they cannot meet with you. and you will wonder why it is that they refuse to do anything, but instead just have to talk about things in a sort of wishful, but helpless, way.

they would have all the time in the world to talk about things, but if you ask them to DO something, they will avoid you. if you confront them with too many questions you will get strange and unexpected answers from them.

if you don't know that you're talking to a prison inmate, you won't be able to understand their behavior and their attitudes. but if you can picture it, if you imagine that prison inmates are using cell phones and wireless devices to write on the internet, while still being in prison, then you understand why some people on the internet behave the way they do. it helps you understand why some anonymous people, blogging or writing on forums, might act mysterious or evasive, why they might refuse to do certain things, why they might be hard to reach. it is because they are literally writing from inside a prison, right now.

and they don't want to talk about it, because if they get caught, they could get their hidden cell phones taken away from them, which means they would have no access at all. so they will talk to you, but they will behave in a secretive, evasive way, and it will be hard to understand why they are acting that way.

Amish moving to Colorado? and, My browser cookies are just fine, thank you

2009-07-03T10:07:00.000-04:00

My cookies WERE on. I got a message today saying they weren't.

The Amish are moving to Colorado, and leaving Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, where the land prices have been increasing. I keep thinking of Galt's Gulch in Colorado and I also remember how much I loved Colorado when I visited it in 1989 for Odyssey of the Mind. Something about the weather and the air quality made me feel manically ecstatic, like the way you feel during a thunderstorm or in a cold front with blue skies and cumulus clouds.

I hope the Amish are not in an area that gets tornadoes. They're not used to tornadoes in Pennsylvania. Some parts of Colorado get them, in the flat areas.

belief clusters - different groups with a lot in common

2009-07-01T17:52:00.000-04:00

two silly things to mention first. in the previous blog, i said 'either i'm getting hacked, or google is messed up.' i meant 'inclusive OR.' i'm always getting hacked. it might be more annoying, intrusive, bothersome, or interfering than usual today. but with regard to this specific problem, either the hacking or google itself is more relevant as the cause.

second, i thought harry potter was today. it's not, it's july 15. first, i thought it was june 1, because i knew it was a summer month beginning with J. but it was the wrong J month. so i decided it must be july 1st. wrong again. i keep getting disappointed. it's ironic because i don't even expect the movie to be all that miraculous, just entertaining.

okay, about belief clusters. i 'invented' the idea of belief clusters recently, after seeing 'tag clusters' on flickr. i liked the tag clusters - they were pretty good at making tags more meaningful and more useful.

i was annoyed by some tag spammers whose tags were so general and all-inclusive that they seemed to have nothing to do with the pictures - for instance, someone was taking pictures of architecture and tagging it 'people' for dozens and dozens of photos that i had to scroll through (on dialup, waiting for all my search results to load), because architecture is something which is created by people, so it's vaguely connected. the tag was used in a very general, abstract way.

technically, EVERYTHING in the universe is connected to everything else, and therefore, i could take a picture of an apple, and tag it 'people,' because people grow and pick and sell apples; or i could take a picture of a black line on a white background and tag it 'faces,' because faces are where our eyes are located, and our eyes are the sensory organ used for seeing black lines on white backgrounds. you get the idea. no matter how irrelevant, you can argue that in some extremely distant, abstract way, the tag describes this photo.

tag clusters helped with that problem. you don't think of something as having only one meaningful tag. it will have a bunch of meaningful tags associated with it, which makes it more likely that this is what you're looking for. 'people,' 'children,' 'faces' clustered together might give you better results.

anyway, i thought of 'belief clusters.' after i thought of it, i looked it up, and this idea already exists. other people are talking about belief clusters.

i was thinking about this because i was wondering which religion, or which group of people, i would join. if i think of joining any kind of group, i notice that there are some beliefs i like, and other ones i don't. if a particular belief (or practice, behavior, etc) is important enough to me, i won't join that group if they don't have it or if they're doing it wrong.

i have noticed that, on the internet, there are belief clusters where certain groups of beliefs tend to be associated with each other. if you start reading a page about one particular belief, you might click on relevant links to similar, associated beliefs. for instance, if you read about homeschooling your children, you might also go to links about self-reliant homestead living, gun ownership rights, or links about the economic depression/recession.

but if you are reading a page about homeschooling, you're not likely to find links to other pages talking about how wonderful our education system is, or links about the importance of the teachers' union, or links asking for donations to your local school system. these things would seem contradictory.

but not necessarily, though. sometimes two beliefs seem to contradict, but the contradictory parts of it are viewed as unimportant, or not central, to the person holding the belief. this was written about by some of the other authors talking about belief clusters. i don't recall which web page it was on, but i wrote down the names of a couple authors, t.f. green and m. rokeach, who were doing some kind of research.

so i was imagining that a group would list its belief categories, and you could see if you have a lot in common with them, even if a few particular beliefs are different or missing. i have a lot in common with the environmentalists, except that i've been very influenced by author julian simon, so i disagree with them about a few important things. but with everything else, i'm similar to them.

sometimes our beliefs and attitudes are unconscious, but still important, and you can't always articulate or explain what the problem is. that happens when different cultures talk to each other. one person might talk slowly, the other quickly; one person might think it's okay to arrive an hour late for an appointment, while the other thinks that five minutes late is too late, and so on.

if you ask, 'why won't you join this group?' and find that some key belief is missing, is actively opposed, or is there but it's not quite right, you can learn how important that thing is, versus what someone might be willing to sacrifice or disagree about, if it's something unimportant or not central.

in order to accomplish some goals, you can work with people who differ with you on less important or less relevant beliefs. this is helpful, for instance, with small political parties that don't have much power, and have a few minor differences, but a lot in common. it's like an alliance.

i am thinking about these things because i would like to build an intentional community. conflicts are very important if large amounts of money are involved (like buying land), so an intentional community takes a lot of planning in advance, and clear communication to make sure everybody understands what they will be doing.

logging into google over and over for different pages

2009-07-01T13:56:00.001-04:00

something is wrong, i have to keep signing in to google over and over for each different page, the email, the library, blogger, and i've signed in more than once on the same page, blogger. either i'm being hacked or something is wrong with google today.

bees

2009-07-01T13:50:00.000-04:00

i had my landlord spray the bees. i was trying to use a bee trap and it wasn't working, and i don't have a lot of time to tweak it and figure out why it won't work. since he sprayed, i haven't seen any bees, but i don't know if some might still be deeper inside the nest. i can't see where they are going. i will still be cautious about it and i'm not sure if they will start swarming around again when i am busy dragging things across the step, like my dishwasher or something.

i didn't see lots of half-dead bees crawling around, and also, i haven't gotten extremely sick from the spray either. i might be a little bit sick from it, but it's not bad enough to be incapacitating. i just have to be energetic enough to move out of here.

Michael Jackson probably went crazy because of skin-bleaching chemicals.

2009-06-28T12:29:00.000-04:00

I never really liked Michael Jackson's music, even back in 1983 when I first heard it. But I'm still shocked that he died - he wasn't very old, only 50. It's strange when celebrities die and I actually know who they are. Most of the time, I have no idea who it is that the headlines are talking about. But Michael Jackson is a celebrity I remember.

I found out that he started wearing his one glove because he was developing vitiligo, the irregular loss of skin color, on his right hand. I never knew that until just today. Now I wonder what caused the vitiligo.

Supposedly, he started bleaching his skin to make the color change more evenly instead of irregularly. And the more I read about skin lighteners - and I don't know what brand name, or what type of skin lightener he used - the more I am convinced that he started going crazy because of the chemicals in the skin lighteners.

Some skin lighteners contain mercury. Again, I don't know if he used that kind. But mercury definitely makes people go crazy and become 'eccentric' in really extreme ways. There are other chemicals in those lighteners, not just mercury, that will affect your mind if you put this chemical all over your skin every day, or several times a week, or however often he had to do the skin bleaching.

Once again, I'm seeing ignorance about the fact that whatever touches your skin will go through the skin and affect all of your body and mind. People think that the skin is an impermeable, impenetrable barrier. It is not. It is more like a filter, blocking out some things, letting some things through. Larger molecules get blocked, smaller molecules go through, and some of it depends on whether they are water-soluble, oil-soluble, or not very soluble in either one.

Skin also excretes wastes and other chemicals from your body. So molecules are crossing the skin in both directions, going inwards and outwards.

I suspect that the body excretes pharmaceutical drugs, or partially metabolized fragments of the drugs, through the skin, and the drugs then contaminate the clothing. Sometimes, a partially metabolized drug is still active - it still behaves like a drug, sometimes being very similar to the original drug. I would have to do more research to find out what types of chemicals are excreted in sweat, or possibly in skin oils.

I read an article recently about how somebody had lead and arsenic poisoning because he had been picking morel mushrooms, for years, in apple orchards where lead-arsenate pesticides had been used long ago. The pesticides contaminated the soil.

They tested to find out whether the morel mushrooms contained lead or arsenic, and if I recall correctly, they found either very little, or none, in the mushrooms. So they were unable to explain why this person had lead and arsenic poisoning.

It's obvious to me that if you are crawling around on the ground, digging up mushrooms with your bare hands, touching soil against your skin, you are going to absorb the lead arsenate directly through the skin. It bothers me that people don't know this, and that they ALWAYS assume you have to EAT something in order to get poisoned. All you need to do is TOUCH something to get poisoned, especially when it's just a metal ion like lead arsenate. Those are small molecules, not large ones, and therefore they can go through the skin.

So I got the feeling, from reading this article, that everyone was confused about how he could be poisoned whenever the mushrooms contained very little lead arsenate.

I think that transdermal absorption of drugs, poisons, chemicals, and herbal oils is something very important for doctors and researchers to know about.

Jumping over a bees' nest to get in and out of my apartment

2009-06-26T13:31:00.000-04:00

Ever since I visited the rhododendrons at Black Moshannon, I've been having heart symptoms similar to what happened the last time I contaminated my house with herbs. I walked near those bushes, so I assume that the soil beneath the bushes had enough of the rhododendron poison on it to contaminate my shoes. I thought rhododendrons weren't very poisonous. I mentally categorized them as 'mildly' poisonous, especially because I've been around them in the past and didn't notice any problems, and because people plant them as decorative bushes. However, there are different varieties; and I'm more chemical sensitive than I used to be. Plus, people (stupidly) plant other extremely dangerous plants, like foxglove, as 'decorative flowers,' so rhododendrons could be the same way.

So... I decided today that I would try to use my 'Little Green' vacuum shampooer, intended for cleaning furniture, and shampoo out the foot well area of my car, where the gas pedal is. I figured that got contaminated when I stepped back into the car after the rhododendrons.

I dragged my long, orange extension cord out the door, and went down the steps to my car. I had to jiggle the extension cord around to undo some tangles, so it was banging and hitting the edge of the step below the door. There is a little metal rim which is hollow underneath. A minute after I started banging the cord around, bees started flying out from under the metal thing.

I shouted 'BWAH!' and ran down to the car, flailing my arms around. ('BWAH!' was the random noise that came out of my mouth. It wasn't really a word.) Then I shouted the s-word, the f-word, and the g.d.-word, then the f-word and the s-word a few more times, but the bees still didn't go away. I kept watching up there and saw them flying around. Soon they would fly down the steps and find me, standing next to my car, so I opened the car door and got inside and shut the door.

After waiting a few minutes, I didn't notice any bees flying around near my car. So I got out and did my rug shampooing project. Nothing bothered me, but I was really paranoid, and every time I saw a flying insect, or the slightest motion in my peripheral vision, I jumped and looked in all directions to see if a swarm of bees was around me.

They were yellowjackets. I got in a yellowjackets nest when I was a teenager, when my friend Christina and I were playing in the woods, getting ready to climb up a big tree, while barefoot. A nest was at the base of the tree, and we were standing in it. Christina said, 'I'm getting stung!' and I was confused. I thought maybe she was getting bitten by a spider, so I looked at her legs expecting to see a spider. But I saw these little things flying around, and then they were flying around me too.

So we ran home barefoot through the woods, through the sticker bushes, screaming. We felt no pain in our bare feet even on the stickers. We slapped each other anytime one of us saw a bee that the other one couldn't reach, and ran into the house smacking each other and ourselves, and screaming. I don't really remember what Mom said, but she helped us upstairs to get in the bathroom, take our clothes off, and look at all the stings, and check for any bees that might still be in the clothing.

Luckily neither of us were allergic to yellowjackets, so we only had itchy painful bumps all over, but we were mostly okay.

So I wasn't allergic to yellowjackets a long time ago, and I hope I'm still not allergic to them.

Well, so back to the present. I finished shampooing the carpet. I was using the furniture shampooer in a way it wasn't meant to be used. It was a dainty little machine meant for use on things that were relatively clean, like chairs and couches. I was using it on a car floor with chunks of soil, rock, and dry grass. (They usually say things like 'first remove gross filth and heavy soil,' which I did not do.) It kept clogging and I had to clean it out several times. I couldn't go upstairs to my apartment to use the water, so I used the creek, since I was only using plain water without any soap.

Then I had to go to the bathroom, and also, I was starting to get some skin contact with some of the various herbal drugs that had contaminated my car floor. It wasn't just rhododendron, it was also the old drugs, the more benign ones like St. John's Wort, which is a nuisance but not as life-threatening. So I was noticing symptoms, but nothing really severe. I decided to go out to Sheetz and use their bathroom and also buy a snack.

I thought I might go buy bee spray, but I didn't. I am reluctant to do that. There are a few reasons why I would rather not use a spray. First, even though I talk about how I am continuing to eat an omnivorous diet, which means that I'm willing to kill animals, I still don't enjoy the sight of something writhing in pain and agony for hours, even something like bees. The bees would get sick and they would be crawling around, being tortured, and I would have to go look for them and try to step on them to put them out of their misery. So that would be horrible and unpleasant. The other thing is that if I spray the doorstep, the spray will inevitably make me as sick as it makes the bees. I will then smell bug spray forever while I'm in my house. I have to do a lot of work this month, moving my stuff out, so I need a lot of physical energy, and getting sick with poisonous pesticides will be counterproductive. I also have to open that door to use the fan, although I could try putting it in a window - and I probably won't be keeping the door open much anymore now that the bees are upset and distrusting.

I'm going to find out whether they sell an ultrasonic bee deterrent.

So eventually, I had to get back into the house. I went to Sheetz, went to the bathroom, bought a snack and came home. I was now feeling my heart pounding (not because of the bees, but because of what was on the floor), and knew I needed to wash off the herbal contaminants, so I wanted to get inside and change clothes and take a shower. I went up the steps, saw a bee, and ran back down the steps and into my car again. If my heart was pounding before, it was pounding a lot now. I didn't want to have a heart attack because of being terrified by bees while I was on drugs.

I went back up the stairs, and shouted, 'ONE TWO THREE GO!!!' and opened the door, jumped inside, and SLAMMED the door shut behind me - over the extension cord, which was still plugged in.

After the door shut, I looked around to see if any bees had gone inside the open door, as it had been left open for about an hour now, since I couldn't go up there to shut it. There weren't any bees in the house.

So I unplugged the extension cord, and left it hanging where it was - I'll get it later. I took a shower, washed off the herbal drugs, and changed clothes, and felt much better, and my heart was no longer pounding. But now I'm sort of trapped in here, and I have nothing to do but blog, and look up 'ultrasonic bee deterrent' to find out whether maybe it's something they sell at Lowe's, or someplace else where I might buy it in town instead of ordering it online.

I was going through that door all this time, for weeks and weeks, and yes, several times recently I had seen a couple bees flying in and out of that little metal thing, but I had put it on my low priority list, because I didn't think I would do anything bad enough to disturb them.

I could light a candle next to it, but it would be uncomfortably close to the house, and I don't want to be lighting candles next to flammable objects and surfaces until AFTER I've moved all my stuff out - just kidding, I wouldn't do it even then. And yeah, I probably shouldn't even try to joke about that. And there is still one other person here in this house during the summer, besides me, maybe two people, although some of the other rooms are empty. It feels like everybody's gone, but there are still a few people living here. There's at least one car in the parking lot and I saw a girl earlier today (while I was sitting in my car looking up at the bees flying around my porch).

I could also maybe pour water over the metal thing, except that would require me to crouch above it for a few seconds, which I don't want to do. And the water would just splash through it and around it, without bothering the bees much.

So I haven't decided what to do yet. If I don't do something, then either the landlord, or the next tenants moving in, will have to do something, and surely, they will choose the most brutal and disgusting method available, the poison spray. I'm not going to tell the landlord about it unless I feel there is no other choice. I'd like to try to take care of it myself first.

Monday is my official day of rest. No coffee.

2009-06-09T08:53:00.000-04:00

(warning... some 'female problems' talk in this blog. menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, etc. so, watch out.)

I enforced the 'day of rest' rule yesterday. Officially, I'm supposed to withdraw from caffeine, cold turkey, every Monday. That started back during the time period when I was working three twelve-hour days in a row at McDonald's (while using Vivarin pill fragments as my caffeine source) and then taking four days off. On Monday, I was supposed to recover from a weekend of work.

I did it yesterday, but I had a splitting headache by mid-afternoon. And all I did was lie in bed, and I got more achy, restless, and uncomfortable as time went by. The rule says that I can drink a cup of coffee at midnight ('when the moment is not right') on Monday-Tuesday if I've made it through the whole day without coffee. But I didn't - I made it till this morning.

When I had the first cup of coffee, I could feel it actually working. Usually it seems like the coffee is hardly having any effect at all.

Coffee is a medicinal herb. It doesn't just contain caffeine. It contains many other chemicals and drugs that are somewhat less important, but still have effects.

I won't be drinking coffee while pregnant - I'll stop. That means that I will probably notice a lot of chronic fatigue, and might not accomplish as much - and that worries me. I can't accomplish very much while using coffee, either, but at least I don't stay in bed all day. Anytime I've had roommates (in college), housemates, or family (when I lived with my parents), people have always gotten angry at me for staying in bed all day. I've had fights and arguments over it, and have even been sprayed in the face with a spray bottle filled with water (yes, that was very rude - it was a college roommate who was angry because, lucky me, I had the 'privilege' of sleeping all day long, while she had to study and do real work). So I'm not sure how my future husband will react to my having chronic fatigue.

Unfortunately, coffee is one of the things associated with menstrual cramps. This is important to know, because I want to have a natural childbirth without drugs. It isn't supposed to be excruciatingly painful. Anything that increases the pain of uterine contractions will make natural childbirth difficult.

While I'm at it, I will mention that natural childbirth in a hospital IS agonizingly painful, but if you do it at home, it's much easier. This is because in the hospital, they still expect you to lie on your back while giving birth. You can say, 'Don't give me any drugs,' but then you're still giving birth in an unnatural position. There's not much point in going to the hospital if you plan on doing a natural childbirth. There might be some hospitals that allow the woman to stand up and give birth in the standing or crouching position, but not all of them. I could be wrong about that, but that's the impression I get from reading.

Hospitals are shockingly clueless about pregnancy. I still can't believe it, every time I read about all the myths, all the mistaken beliefs they have, all the unnecessary drugging and caesarean sections and surgeries and other harmful practices.

CPD, Cephalopelvic disproportion, means that the baby's head is too big to fit through the pelvis. I want to say this is a myth, but I should say instead: it could happen, but it's very rare, and people are using this as an excuse to give caesarean sections ALL THE TIME, instead of very rarely. They don't even bother letting the mother stand up to see whether she can comfortably give birth in a better position. Sometimes they give this diagnosis weeks before the birth, and plan a caesarean ahead of time, to prevent any problems. But, as I said, it's a very common diagnosis, when in reality it should hardly ever happen. So if anyone ever tells you that you have CPD and you must get a caesarean, you should google 'cpd myth' or 'cephalopelvic disproportion myth' (no quotes) and read about it.

The pelvis is not just a solid piece of bone. It has flexible joints that allow it to open wider during the birthing process so that the child is able to go through. But this cannot happen if the woman is lying on her back with her feet in the stirrups the way they have been doing it in the hospitals over the past century.

Well, that all had to do with drinking coffee. I'm thinking about what will happen in the future, when I will go months and months without any coffee, and wondering how my husband will respond to a wife who has chronic fatigue and spends a lot of time lying around not doing much of anything. I worry about that a lot - it's the familiar situation that I hear about, where the husband is angry because his wife sits at home watching soap operas all day, while he works and brings in the money. I'm worried about divorce. I want a stable family that won't be broken apart a couple years after the first child is born.

Moving out of this apartment... going someplace where it won't be moldy... hoping that I will get better, instead of going someplace that makes me even sicker... I'd sleep in a tent, if I could, if I knew someplace that would let me do it, somewhere close enough to still drive to work. I'm not sure what I will be doing. The most important thing is to avoid going someplace that's just as unhealthy as this place. I will still probably have chronic fatigue, or a tendency to be less active than other people, but there are things like mold which can make that much, much worse.

'why bother?' doesn't mean 'don't bother.'

2009-06-07T08:40:00.001-04:00

when i said 'why bother doing this or that,' in the previous blog, i didn't mean 'don't bother' or 'there's no reason to do that.' it wasn't meant that way.

i meant: those things aren't necessary if you're just literally acting out the whole book word-for-word. you could try to make people speak every single word of dialogue written in the book, without skipping or adding a single word. they could literally act out every single event that occurs in the book, without skipping anything or adding anything.

but instead, we add things, and we subtract things, to convey feelings, to make it more entertaining and interesting, to give it a special style, to make things understandable, and to make it finish within a certain time period instead of taking hours or days the way it would if you acted out every word of the book.

but you don't know how to notice those things, unless someone gives you a hint about what to pay attention to. you can pay attention to the lighting, the color, the movement of the camera, the ad-libbing of the actors, the location, the clothing, the music... there are so many variables.

so i don't mean 'don't bother adding any style.'

in my experiences with writing music, it took conscious effort to force myself to add style to the music, instead of letting it be 'just the notes.' if you just write down what notes you're playing, you haven't explained anything about HOW to play them. okay, another favorite book: william russo and jeffrey ainis, 'composing music.' it's a how-to book with exercises. i used that book and propellerheads reason to write bits of music. (no, i don't have anything finished enough to publish. my life has been too much of a mess lately to write music.)

anyway, while writing music, i had to force myself to add the emotional expression to the music. i had to ask, 'why bother?' it takes effort. it's not easy. it adds yet another step to the process. you might think it's already finished, and you don't need to do anything else. but you do. there is always something else that can be done with it. and then, you have to choose between infinite possible ways of doing things, and if you get stuck doing it one way, you have to decide to either follow through, or start over from the beginning and do it a different way. you get invested in making it one sort of style, and if you end up not liking it, it has to all be redone. it takes a lot of time and effort.

*i have to add this: people's voices and gestures convey nonverbal information beyond just the words that they say. listening to a person speak is like listening to a song. each word is played like a note. there is pitch and rhythm just as in music. this is important for understanding people's emotions and personalities. this is the reason why people are able to write and understand music.

'why bother?' because that's the whole point of watching a movie or listening to music. you want to feel something. you want to be entertained. you want to express something. but it takes effort.

harry potter movie - not long now

2009-06-07T08:14:00.001-04:00

why do i keep watching the harry potter movies, even though i actually think they're not really great in terms of 'great movies?' well, i wasn't expecting them or requiring them to be 'great movies.' i'm expecting something else from them instead. and it's hard to explain.

the prisoner of azkaban was done by a different director, or producer, or whatever it was, and i am not going to look it up right now, but he had a totally different style in his movie than all the other movies. and i liked that one the best in terms of a movie that you could appreciate on its own merits, without reading the books, without knowing who the characters are, without seeing any of the other movies. azkaban was more of a stand-alone movie.

i think every one should have been produced that way, as though you hadn't read the books or seen the other movies. but you can't waste too much time on explaining the background of who the characters are, either, in a short movie, so you wouldn't just assume that it all needed to be explained again, and explain it again in every single movie. so they can't be TOO stand-alone.

i watch the movies, not expecting 'greatness,' but because i've become familiar with the characters, and i like to see those people going around together doing things. i like to see it acted out. a movie won't ever be as detailed and thorough as the books are, but still it's fun to watch.

it's a colorful, comforting world. you're watching people going to a place you wish you could go to, doing something you wish you could be doing, hanging around with people you wish you could be hanging around with.

i'd like to go to school again, if it were a school that i approved of, that taught things the way i wish they were taught, a school that agreed with my beliefs. learning magic is a hands-on, role-playing, practice-oriented skill. you don't just sit there reading a book. you have to DO something. (unless it's with umbridge. and by the way, even though she's a 'bad' character, i thought she was one of the best actors. she seemed believable, understandable, and i could almost feel sorry for her and understand what she was trying to accomplish. she wasn't a flat character.)

and i always like to see the weasley family - i grew up in a smaller, more cold, reserved family, not a big family full of noisy people who expressed their feelings openly (i'm thinking of the article i read and blogged about recently, about intentional communities and different races and ethnic groups).

i don't know enough about making movies to put into words the things i notice. i can sort of explain it, a little bit. but there's movie jargon that i don't have. the camera angles, how you zoom in on someone, and that kind of thing, is done differently in azkaban (movie #3). for instance, the camera zooms in through a glass window several times, using special effects to make it look ripply as though you are floating through the glass. they didn't HAVE to do that. it was just a little added bit of style. you could have started out with the camera already there in the room with the person, and not bothered zooming in from afar at all.

why bother starting off far away, then zooming in on somebody through a glass window? why bother using the whomping willow to show what season of the year it is, to show the passage of time? (the BOOK didn't do that. why add something that wasn't in the book?) did the BOOK say, 'you can hear a clock ticking in the background?' why bother adding little touches of style? i don't make movies, so i don't have the words to describe this.

but i HAVE written music, and i played piano a long time ago, and flute, and i've attempted to play other instruments. i rented a violin, briefly, from someplace, to see if i could play it. i tried to play the guitar, but my fingers are too short, and it was very difficult. there are lots of instruments that are easier to play if you have long fingers.

anyway with writing or playing music, the music sounds totally different if you just ignore the little bits of expression added to the notes. you can play it louder or quieter, legato (smooth and connected) or staccato (short and separated). and there are infinity possible ways to vary the style. there are so many ways, i can't list them. making movies is like that.

there's no reason why this particular batch of harry potter movies has to be the one, final, ultimate manifestation of harry potter movies, and it will never happen again. there could be as many remakes as people want. i said the same thing about atlas shrugged. there shouldn't be just one-and-only-one final, ultimate version of a movie. especially if it's a movie based on books. that's why people argue so much, and get so worked up, about whether or not the movie interpretation is 'perfect.' it has to be 'perfect' the first time because they're thinking it will only be done once and never again.

there could be new harry potter movies in the future, with a totally different style and new actors, new music, new everything.

this has to do with copyright ownership, or movie rights, or whatever, and contracts, and how people get paid for making movies. so, it'll be a while before the big official moviemakers do a different version of harry potter. the only thing we can hope for is a 'fan fic' version, a homemade harry potter movie, just like we're hoping for someone to do a homemade atlas shrugged. (no, i'm not comparing harry potter to atlas shrugged. i've seen enough objectivist culture to know that they would be very offended by that idea.)

i'm imagining a really cheap, animated, 'south park' style version, for instance. really low tech. this is just an example. or anime. something drawn on a computer.

or 'home video with the neighbors' kind of thing, with people dressed up in cheap costumes, and bad acting. people running around in the backyard pretending that the trees are the forbidden forest, the house is hogwarts, the dog is a dragon, the pot boiling on the stove is a cauldron in snape's class. i can see it.

Flight of the Barnswallow - postponed

2009-06-03T12:42:00.000-04:00

I went to Tudek Park and saw the barnswallows flying back and forth over the football field. Barnswallows are very common around here, but I love them - they're my favorite bird. Their flight is amazing. They have narrow wings, and a v-shaped tail, and they can turn quickly to follow flying insects.

I was going to get them on videocamera. And I did get them, a couple times, but they were too far away, so you can see a fast-moving flying dot, and not much more than that. You can't see their color, or the shape, or how they move, or why it is that their way of flying is so different from other birds, or how lightweight and maneuverable they are. Just a black dot. My camera can't zoom in very well, and also, I had to turn my body constantly to keep the bird in sight. So that video didn't really work.

Apparently, this is becoming a Nature Videos series. I didn't really plan to make that, but that's what it is.

That meatball sub was just as disgusting as I thought it would be!

2009-06-03T12:20:00.001-04:00

How could I not have noticed that the package was rectangular instead of square?

I can't eat meatballs. I think they are some kind of pork sausage, and for some reason, pork sausage almost always nauseates me. After about three bites, I feel like I'm going to throw up. I like ground beef though, in hamburgers. And I like pork ribs. But pork sausage doesn't agree with me. I've had certain brands, like this one kind of certified-organic sausage, where I was able to eat it. But then, the next time I bought that brand, it nauseated me again, like usual.

So I was able to eat some of the sandwich, but I removed more than half of the meatballs, and then broke the remaining meatballs into smaller chunks, so there would be less meatball per bite. I tried to keep as much of the sauce as I could. I didn't finish the whole sandwich, so I put it in the fridge (after making sure the door was closed all the way).

If there was anything at all on the menu that would qualify as THE LAST THING ON EARTH that I would ever order, it was the meatball sub. I really mean it, I could imagine myself ordering almost every other item, except that.

Well, I still have the orange juice and the Hostess Ho-Hos left. Yes, I eat those sometimes, just not every day. I only eat them if I get one small package of them from the convenience store, because if I buy a whole big box of them at the grocery store, I will eat nothing but Twinkies/Ho-Hos/whatever all day, every day, until they're gone. Then I'm hyper and unable to focus.

I cannot have a whole big box of snack foods in the house without eating them constantly. So I pay a higher price per snack, paying for the luxury of artificial self-restraint, that once the snack is eaten, there aren't any more left to eat afterwards. Buying one item at a time, instead of a whole box, serves a purpose. Sure, it's cheaper and more efficient to buy a whole box, but I won't get the added value of self-restraint, that after it's gone, I won't continue to eat a dozen of them.

Well, time to calm down and get ready for work. I might be a little bit grouchy today. (I had a good laugh, though.)

The Last Straw: Bad Luck

2009-06-03T11:45:00.000-04:00

I was going to blog about all the bad luck I've had in the past couple days, but I was putting it off. The last straw was right now, when I went to Sheetz and ordered a sandwich. I got the sandwich, came home, opened it up, and found out it was a meatball sub instead of a steak ciabatta. I hadn't looked at it carefully enough - it was somebody else's order. I just grabbed it off the counter and walked out. I would never order just a plain meatball sub with sauce and parmesan. I always order big, complicated, elaborate sandwiches with just about every possible kind of vegetable and condiment and spices that they have. Maybe not every single one, but a whole bunch of things. I wouldn't get something that had no lettuce, tomatoes, or onions on it. When I saw that, I was like, yuck.

Before that, I got up this morning and found out that the refrigerator door had been stuck slightly open all night long, because there was a box pushed against the edge of the door, from when I had been walking around back there and carrying some stuff out to move to the storage unit. So all my food was lukewarm/lukecool, and I decided that it wasn't a good idea to eat it. I didn't have a lot in there, but the leftovers were going to be my breakfast this morning.

Yesterday afternoon, I was going to go on a quick adventure to check and see whether the snakes were still at the Official Penn State University Snake Zoo. I went a few days before, but none of the snakes were out. They were hiding somewhere. I met a girl who was visiting her boyfriend, who was in jail on a minor drug charge from going to a party in State College. So, she was the one having more bad luck than I was, that day. But I had bad luck not finding any snakes. Anyway, so I wanted to go again and look for them.

However, I did something stupid with my door, as I was about to leave. I walked outside for something, I forget what. I shut the door behind me. There was a plastic bag with clothing in it, which was hanging on the inner door handle. I had noticed a couple days ago that once, the bag had caused the door handle to turn a little bit, while locked, and when I moved the bag, it snapped back into place, and it had been neither locked nor unlocked, but somewhere in between. I didn't worry about it.

So yesterday, when I went back up to open the door, the key wouldn't open it. It would turn to the left, but not the right. I shook it and banged it with my fist and tried to snap the inner door handle back into place, because I knew exactly what was happening - it was the bag hanging on the door, and it had slightly turned the door handle. But I couldn't shake it enough to make it click into the right position.

My landlord was asleep, sitting in the back of his truck. This is his busiest time of year. I didn't want to disturb his nap. But I was lucky he was there. So I woke him up, and when he tried the door handle, he said it felt like somebody had taken apart the door handle, then put it back together wrong. I got angry immediately because I didn't do any such thing. I explained again that there was just a bag hanging on the inside of the door which had slightly pulled the doorknob the wrong way and messed up the lock. It was hard to describe.

He had to get a ladder, go up to the window, and cut open the screen. Fortunately, the window was open. He crawled through and opened the door from inside. I tried to demonstrate what the bag was doing when it hung on the door handle, but he was still skeptical and couldn't understand.

So he took a screwdriver, took apart the doorknob, and looked at it inside to make sure everything was all right. I knew there was nothing wrong inside the doorknob, it was just the stupid bag hanging on it which had twisted it the wrong way somehow. Finally he put it back together, after seeing that nothing was wrong, and I tried again (but couldn't) to demonstrate what was happening. So, he left, and I apologized several times.

After that, I finally drove back out to visit the Penn State Snake Zoo, but the gate was locked because it was too late in the evening. So I still didn't get to see the snakes.

The night before that, there was a horrible thunderstorm, and the lightning struck really, really, really close by, and I screamed. I guess that's good luck, not bad luck, because it didn't actually hit me.

Also, the day before that, I tried to talk to this one girl whose apartment I was going to look at, but we played phone tag, except it was one-way phone tag, where I tagged her, and she didn't tag me back. So I ended up not getting to go over there when we had planned to. So I don't know if I can get that apartment or not.

I am now going to go force myself to eat somebody else's meatball sub, even though it's yucky and boring and doesn't have any vegetables on it, and I would never order a meatball sub. I have to eat SOMETHING for lunch today.

napster memory

2009-05-30T14:18:00.000-04:00

i just had a sad, nostalgic flashback. i felt like i was on napster again. a friend sent me a bunch of photographs attached to an email, because she doesn't have a web page to put them on, and i had to download them all. i was looking at the downloads all going at once, for sue's pictures, all these progress bars going across at one time. that's how napster used to be.

i used to have a cable modem, and also, a whole bunch of napster songs, before i deleted them all whenever i formatted the hard drive thinking that i could get rid of the computer virus once and for all, and that it was a one-time thing that would never come back. i sacrificed all those songs because i didn't have any large storage for them, like a zip drive or cd burner. and i didn't have a second hard drive at the time either.

downloading music was ... very happy. that's been missing from my life, again. i went a very long time without music in my life. then i got the internet and napster and also mp3.com (which went bankrupt), where i discovered homemade electronic music. and also on the internet i discovered programs where i could write that kind of music myself. music that wasn't on the radio. i even found songs from tv commercials that i liked (i found 'always coca-cola,' that song, on napster).

watching progress bars was what it meant to use napster. being excited about when enough of the song would have loaded so that i could listen to most of it. the songs were great, i could choose exactly what i wanted instead of getting one big cd with a whole bunch of garbage and only one song i ever listened to. and i could listen easily to only the songs i liked the most. ... that has been gone for a while now. somehow, while i love soundclick, i haven't found as many great songs on it as i found on mp3.com - i don't know why. i think it's partly because of how hard it is to search for songs while using dialup, and i went to soundclick during the time period when i gave up cable/dsl and switched to dialup. i'm not sure i'm willing to pay for those, because they are extremely unreliable and always getting hacked, much worse than dialup. i remember we'd have 'internet storms' where the internet would be inaccessible for hours, and you'd call the cable company, and their automated answering system would have lists of regions where they already knew that the cable internet was down. this was a weekly, commonplace event, happening all the time.

downloading mp3s on dialup is not much fun. i have tried it occasionally. the slow-loading web pages don't help, either, with all their ads and graphics and clutter.

i haven't decided how to deal with the music-downloading addiction phenomenon. i am asking questions about what activities i would give up, in order to have things that i value more. and i've said that i don't intend to 'become amish,' but i do want to give up a lot of things that cost money and time, in order to have children and to have a real relationship with them, and with other people, and to have things that are more important in the long run. i don't want to be anti-music; but i need to find some way to deal with the music addiction problem. it's very commonplace for people to have thousands and thousands of songs and movies that they've downloaded - my brother did that, and he was still using old-fashioned cassettes back then, not downloading.

there has to be some limit on just how much time you spend downloading and listening to music, whenever you've chosen to have a family and real human beings in your life, and when money, and time, has to be spent carefully. i remember how much time i spent on that hobby back whenever i was collecting music, and it was a lot of time. as i'm planning for a family, i am becoming much more religious-minded and wondering about all the things that i might have to give up, or won't have the time or the money to do. but i've never intended to give up music. i'm just not sure what i will do with music, to have it in my life, to make sure that it's GOOD music (instead of just listening to the radio), and yet not to spend too much time on it when i have other things to do. it really was addictive, and the number of available songs is infinite.

How I Got Where I Am Now; Who Joins Communities

2009-05-28T21:01:00.000-04:00

Today I went to the park, and just rested in my car seat. I felt like taking a nap, but I wanted to see what would happen if I took a nap someplace else instead of in the still-moldy apartment. I've kept the windows open, and the air is much better than it was in the winter, but it's still not really healthy in here. I've been apartment hunting, but haven't made much progress yet. But at least I've started.

I didn't fall asleep, but I lay there meditating and thinking for a while. (The grammar people might get me for 'lay,' since I'm not sure how to use the past tense and all that. Did I lie down, or lay something down? In the past or the present? Oh well. Then the discussion will get into what exactly I mean by 'lay,' and it will end up in the gutter. After noticing that, the phrase 'laid off' became a problem too.) I actually felt much better after resting in the car even though I didn't fall asleep, since the air was fresher there.

While meditating, I was looking for my target audience. I had read an interesting article about communities at http://www.ic.org/pnp/culturediversity.php. There's a long way to go before I start a real permanent community - it's easier to start informal, temporary groups of people for a purpose, but people can easily leave whenever they want. But I still want to think now about what kind of permanent community (one that owns land) I would like to create. I value racial diversity, but from everything I've read about intentional communities, they usually attract educated, white, wealthy liberals, and not much else. There are reasons why. (By the way, I WON'T be sending my children to college. I'll talk about that later.)

That article talked about 'white people.' There are some negative stereotypes of white people. I agree with some of them. (I grew up in an all-white community, which had only one black man, by himself, in the whole neighborhood. My school was the same way - hundreds of white kids, and ONE black kid who was there for a year or two. I did not grow up with racial diversity.) There are reasons why 'white people' are the way they are. Lack of community is one reason. Other ethnic groups and immigrants tend to have larger, extended families that stay together. Caucasians in the USA tend to send children off to college, and they might never return to their original home. Then they start a small, nuclear family, with two kids, and no other relatives nearby, because they live in whatever place has offered them a job after college.

So I looked at the pattern today. People go through high school, then graduate. Some of them go away to college, but they all go to different colleges, not the same ones. They go to college because they believe that a college degree guarantees they will have job security forever, and will have a chance to become more wealthy, and to get more enjoyable jobs (like computer programming instead of floor-mopping). A few people stay home in the place where they grew up. They might get training at a vocational school, or they get a high school diploma, and get a job locally.

Some graduate from college, and then get a job either near the college, in the college, or some random place which might be far away, in yet another town where they've never lived. So, many people from high school leave and then scatter across the world. Some people stay, some people return to their home town, but not everybody.

I've decided that college doesn't guarantee job security in a collapsing economy where almost EVERYBODY gets laid off every couple years, or else they could only find jobs that were intended to be temporary from the beginning (this was named 'the gig economy' in an article I read). Businesses go bankrupt, new businesses start up, and then they go bankrupt too. College puts you tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars in debt. Then you are trying to pay off your debt, and also your new house, and your car, and then you get laid off - and maybe you've just started a family and had some kids. This is not a stable, secure lifestyle.

I am not quite in the 'stayed home' category, and I'm not in the 'college graduate' category. I went to college, but dropped out. I'm intelligent enough to succeed at school, but there were a few problems. I was chronically ill - I had sleep apnea and chronic fatigue even when I was younger, but I didn't have a name for it back then. I am food-sensitive and chemical-sensitive ADHD. And on top of that, I was probably being attacked back then, but didn't know it.

And I was disappointed with college - I felt as though they weren't teaching me anything useful, anything directly applicable to jobs. It would be all right to learn abstract theories, if the abstract theories were actually TRUE and ACCURATE, but it turns out that they were teaching me a lot of garbage there, too (economics, for instance, was all John Maynard Keynes, and nothing else, no Ludwig von Mises or any others advocating 'sound money.' Back then, I had not read a lot of the books I've read now, so I could only vaguely explain 'something seems wrong with this,' but I didn't know what. A lot of people feel that way in college, but they don't know how to describe it except 'this is nothing like the real world.')

So I ended up in State College because I needed a place to live after dropping out of college. I stayed at my brother's apartment for a while, since he had been going to Penn State, before he moved away. Then I went into grocery store and fast food jobs. Those jobs don't last forever either, and I've had problems keeping a job for a long time, usually because of illnesses.

I noticed that my friend Peter has almost exactly the same life pattern. He didn't grow up here. I think he was from New York originally, but I forget - I'd have to ask him which place he lived first, because he's lived a couple places. He also has a chronic illness, was disillusioned with school, dropped out, lived in several different places, and has had a hard time getting and keeping a job due to his illness.

Going to college seems to be the main reason why 'white people' don't stay together and get a sense of community. Some people do stay in their home towns, but lots of them leave. 'Nonwhite people' are also going to college and leaving their hometowns, but I am referring to the groups of immigrants and other people they talked about in that article, where other cultures tend to have extended families and they stay together. I can't explain it now, because it's starting to sound as though I'm saying that only white people go to college, and that's not what I'm saying. You'd have to read the article to get a better explanation. I'm thinking of places where a whole section of the city is some particular ethnic group, and they all know each other, and work together, and sell things locally, and perhaps speak a different language, and have interrelated families.

But it really is true that for some reason, only college-educated, wealthy white people seem to be interested in forming certain kinds of intentional communities, and I wanted to know why. And I agree with the criticisms of those communities. I'm anti-vegetarian, after thinking really carefully about it and researching it over a period of years - I actively oppose vegetarianism. (What I mean is, I don't go around arguing with vegetarians, but rather, I have a strong opinion about it, and I will REQUIRE an omnivorous diet as part of my lifestyle for me and my children.) Many of the nonwhite ethnic groups were not comfortable about switching to vegan/vegetarian diets to live in some of the ecovillages that require it. I also have read Julian Simon, and so I disagree with a lot of 'environmentalist' beliefs and practices. I am not all that interested in building my house out of recycled plastic, for instance. In fact, after what I've experienced with my white plastic dental fillings, I'd like to stay as far away from plastic as I can. Sometimes I kind of cringe uncomfortably, thinking of how some people are trying very hard to be environmentally moral and ethical, but I don't think they're doing anything good, they're just entertaining themselves - building houses out of recycled plastic is one of those things that seems to be good-intentioned but not useful or helpful.

It also occurred to me that I stopped celebrating Christmas. One complaint about Christmas, in 'The Trouble With Christmas,' was that other ethnic groups and other religions do not want to be surrounded by Christmas for a whole month and to be forced to join in and see it and hear it everywhere. Christmas is usually the 'one little thing' that people can't bear to give up. They just cannot bear to stop celebrating Christmas completely. They might cut back a little, or a lot, and not give hundreds of dollars of gifts, putting their credit cards into debt for the next several months - some people are able to reduce their Christmas spending, but don't want to stop altogether. So, that would be important if it were a spiritual or religious intentional community, and nonwhite, non-American ethnic groups were expected to celebrate holidays together with Christmas-celebrating Americans.

So I was looking at myself and why I don't fit in to this community - the existing local community, the 'everybody' community, this local place, State College PA. My beliefs and lifestyle are drastically different from those of almost everyone I know, but they are also drastically different from the beliefs of the people from my original community back home. So I don't have anyplace on earth where a whole lot of people living in one location all agree with my most important beliefs. (People will never agree about every detail, but they can agree about the most important things.) So I was thinking about how to find and communicate with like-minded people, and they will be people who don't feel connected with their home community, people who might have been college educated (but maybe not), people who are frustrated with voting, the media, the educational system, the money system, businesses... there are lots of things going wrong in modern culture.

If you want a feeling of control over your life, then you can build your own intentional community, or join an existing one, where you can be near people who agree with you, and you can participate in decisions that affect you locally. You won't have to get all worked up over a vote, only to find that your side loses again and again, with a 49%/51% close race. Or, your side wins, but nothing changes anyway. (Or, you could be voting for somebody who only gets 0.5% of the vote. Yippee.) We still can't do anything about national laws, like the income tax. But you can control local decisions and local community rules.

So I understand a little bit more about who tends to join intentional communities and why. If you want to attract particular target audiences, you have to offer them something they don't already have. They might give up something in exchange for living in an intentional community, but they gain something which is worth much more.

Talking to snakes

2009-05-21T19:16:00.001-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/user/eagledove9

I'm in the process of struggling to upload a few videos of Northern Water Snakes. I've never used YouTube before, so I'm still troubleshooting the technical problems. The videos are unedited and messy, and you get to see a lot of camera shaking as I run from place to place, and zoom in and out. I had to go someplace else to upload them, since I have dialup and it's really slow. They're not really labeled or titled yet either.

I didn't know for sure what kind of snakes they were, and at first thought they might be copperheads, because they have a superficial resemblance to them. But I looked them up, and they match the pictures of Northern Water Snakes. Those are non-poisonous, but their saliva contains an anticoagulant (if I recall) so you'll keep bleeding if you get bitten.

They live in the Fish and Boat Commission ponds. If you are on Route 220 going through State College, it's the Shiloh Road exit, where you get off to go to the Nittany Mall. Instead of going towards Sheetz and the mall, you go the opposite direction, out to the very end of the little road. You'll probably see some fishermen hanging around down there.

There's a path and a fenced area, and you can just walk along the path, and see some machinery and streams and stuff. It's a trout hatchery, I think, and you can see them down in the streams. Go past that to the ponds. There were quite a few snakes in there. I saw about six or seven. They were there last summer, too, so it seems to be their permanent home.

I was talking to the snake, and it actually started coming towards me. I got a little scared and backed off. Maybe someday I'll do another video where I let the snake get closer to the camera. Or I'll learn how to pick them up or something.

I wrote this before I wrote the previous post, but forgot to post it!

2009-05-12T12:52:00.000-04:00

Another thing, in my imaginary store: there will be no intercom blaring Muzak all day long. All the employees and customers will have the pleasure of listening to nothing but total silence for hours, and hours, and hours, while they work and shop.

I get music in my head all day long even when I am outside work.

After writing the post about a store where I have no 'prices ending in 9,' I got bombarded for hours with voices debating about my grammar and my prepositions. They want it to end WITH nine, not IN nine. And I sort of agree with that, but I was uncertain, and I chose 'in.' It seemed like 'ends with' felt more like an event or process occurring through time. Like, the process of cooking something ends with sitting down at the table and eating the meal. I am sure I've heard people saying 'ending in' to talk about words and letters. However, it does sound kind of weird and I agree, it probably sounds better as 'with.'

If you look at the abstract meanings of the prepositions, it gets confusing and arbitrary. It starts to seem like it doesn't really matter which preposition you use, because you can rationalize every possible choice. Do the numbers somehow 'merge into' the number nine at the end? Or does the number seem to end 'with, at the same time as, alongside' the number 9? Prepositions are very abstract unless you are talking about physical objects.

In West Virginia, you don't put things ON the floor, you put them IN the floor. And when I first moved down there, I used to make fun of that. It seems like you are embedding objects into the surface of the floor, like when you leave a footprint in fresh concrete. But you can also view it as 'in the area of the floor.' The floor is a square or rectangular area, and you put an object into that area. Or maybe it is IN the few inches of air space near the floor, and 'the floor' includes not just the flat surface but also some of the air above it.

So it's hard to argue about which prepositions are the right ones to use, because it gets so complicated. I decided that 'ends with nine' probably does sound better.

Anyway, the 'in MY store I would do THIS' is just a fantasy. I'm not actually planning to open a business right now. But I wish somebody else would do it. A store where nothing ends with nine, and there's no Muzak. And while we're at it... (list a dozen other things you wish this imaginary store/business would do.)

PROPELLERHEAD SOFTWARE NOW HAS AUDIO RECORDING!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

2009-05-12T12:44:00.001-04:00

http://www.propellerheads.se/products/record/index.cfm

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

there are no words to express this.

I tried using some other audio program and I hated it. I don't remember the name of the software. It was installed on one of my previous incarnations of Windows.

I love everything Propellerheads have made so far. Everyone has been waiting for an audio program made by them that will integrate with their other stuff. They originally made software that had synthesizers and equipment of all kinds, but not audio. What I mean is, you couldn't record yourself singing a song. You could just play the keyboards and modify the sounds. ... And that was wonderful, but everyone was demanding audio recording, for years, and years...

and they finally did it!

No price will end in 9 unless it matters!

2009-05-09T10:01:00.000-04:00

In my store, no price will ever end in '9' unless it is statistically significant. Nothing will be $0.99, or $0.49/lb. But if you can buy 100,000 of something in bulk, and the nine makes a big difference, it might sometimes end in 9, but it would be just as likely to end in any other number in such a scenario, not just 9.

Actually you wouldn't usually buy 100,000 of something. You'd probably buy a multiple of 12. Dozens are used in packaging.

Anyway, the numbers will be round numbers like $0.50, for courtesy to the customers.

Ending a number in 9 is supposed to fool you into thinking it costs less than it actually does. If it's $0.49, you remember the number $0.40. You're thinking it's somewhere in the forty cents range. Supposedly, fooling people into thinking stuff costs less must be extremely profitable for stores, because EVERYBODY does it. But I don't believe it's profitable. And customers will love it if you put up a big sign bragging about how you promise NEVER to end things with 9 unless that really is the natural result of your price calculations, and it's just as likely to end in some other number. Ending in a non-round number would only happen to items you buy in bulk, where small changes make a big difference in price.

People will then be able to do mental math and to estimate how much they are buying before they reach the checkout.

Also, if it were a regular store open to the public, and if I were obeying all the laws, then I'd be collecting sales tax. So I would pre-calculate the sales tax so that the result of price + tax = round number. This is not hard to do if you use algebra and set up a spreadsheet to do them all for you.

Customers would appreciate this courtesy so much. It is very annoying to customers that stores put a 9 on the end of all the prices and they can't do mental math easily.

If I had a choice between two stores, one of which charged $0.50 for something (while bragging openly 'We Promise Not To End In 9!', and the other charged $0.49, I would NOT go down the street to the store charging one penny less because it was a better deal! Wow, I'm saving a penny, but it's a huge annoying inconvenience to all my calculations, and the store thinks that they're 'fooling' me by charging one penny less, or they think they're underpricing their competitor.

It would matter if it was $999,000 versus $1,000,000. But other than that, it doesn't matter. It's just a stupid business practice and I wish people would wake up and stop doing it.

The story behind the previous post; the Harry Potter world

2009-05-08T22:44:00.000-04:00

I was working in the front section of the deli the other day. Two young guys came to the counter and asked for turkey and muenster cheese, which I sliced for them. (Now that I think about it, there was an unusual customer at the deli last year around this time, too, when some other stuff was going on. That's another story.)

These two guys both looked at me as though they already knew who I was. They both had a look of awe, excitement, attention, and a little bit of amusement, as though they were trying not to laugh, but they were also fascinated with me. I liked them. I looked at them, looked in their eyes.

I was imagining that they knew me by reading my blog and that I was like a celebrity to them. I think in reality my blog readers are just a few friends and family and random people now and then, because I'm not keeping track of the statistics, and I might be better off not knowing. I'm not making much of an effort to really advertise this blog.

I like to imagine that people know me and love everything about me, or, not necessarily 'love everything,' but agree with me about most of it and share a similar spirit with me.

This is the Harry Potter world fantasy. Harry Potter had a miserable, boring life with an abusive family who didn't understand him, who acted like they hated him, and a brother who bullied him. He always felt like an outsider, longing to someday meet his own kind of people.

When the other world finally invited him to join, he was surprised to find that everybody there already knew his name, and that he was famous, and that they had known about him all along. It's a feeling that somebody out there is supporting you.

A similar event happens in Atlas Shrugged when Ragnar Danneskjold gives Hank Rearden a bar of gold, and Hank finds out that he's been watching him all this time, and saving gold on his behalf, in some faraway hidden place, waiting for him until he is ready to join them.

Years ago when I started noticing the computer hacking incidents, I sometimes used that as a way to feel like somebody out there understood me, because they were that interested in what I was doing, and that fascinated with all of my activities. It wasn't like a 'fear' of being watched, but instead, a desire to be understood and valued by people. And it's also sometimes like feeling safe, like somebody is watching you and they wouldn't let anything happen to you. I don't mean that this is healthy or that what they were doing was okay; I just mean that when it's happening, it can seem like it fulfills certain needs or fantasies, the need to be understood and valued and protected.

So these two guys looked at me as though they already knew me. I don't know if they really did or not.

I know there are people out in the world who agree with me about important things and who share the same spirit I have.

To what sinister use did you put your sliced turkey and muenster cheese?

2009-05-08T02:24:00.000-04:00

Did you even eat it, or was it just a pretense?

This is one of those things where you just had to be there.

friends network

2009-05-03T13:33:00.001-04:00

i've been busy the past week or two, doing some car paperwork (updating my license, etc) and doing some more things that have to do with moving to a new apartment. i've also been talking on the phone to several people and emailing people. communicating with new (and old) friends is becoming a full time job. i keep forgetting who i've talked to and who i haven't, and i have all these little slips of paper with notes written on them. i keep warning everyone that it might take several weeks to respond to an email, just because it requires mental focus for me to write an email to someone i don't know very well. i am still suffering from 'yes man syndrome' - too many yeses to too many people. too many confusing new obligations and dates and times and names. i don't have a secretary.

i was thinking about delegating my friendships to other friends. maybe i could tell some of these people to talk amongst themselves instead of to me. i'm only halfway joking, the other half is serious. i was wondering how to network people at a distance: how do you tell someone, 'do exactly what i'm doing, but do it someplace else, and then network with me to share our results?' for instance how would i start a work-exchange group in another town, without actually meeting the people myself, or going there to see them? i would just have to describe the idea and encourage somebody else to care about it. somebody else would do their own group and customize it to their local area.

i don't have time to write much more - i have to go to work. i mean, the work where i get a paycheck.

finally I can get some photos moved onto the PC

2009-04-27T14:07:00.001-04:00

After some struggle I got my friend's zip drive working for the laptop, and I deleted some temporary files from the hard drive so that I had enough space. So, I was able to upload photos, and put some onto zip disks and I can now move them from laptop to PC without burning CDs. (I can't upload pictures directly to my PC - wrong Windows version. And I WON'T connect the laptop to the internet - I don't want viruses and stuff on it. So I move photos from the laptop to the PC.) I hate burning CDs because they screw up really frequently, and it's so unreliable and inconsistent. Anyway, there will gradually be more photos now. I will start by taking some boring pictures of trees and flowers, since it's springtime. I also took pictures of the mold on the shelf and in the ceiling.

The Green Wigs Ruckus

2009-04-25T12:37:00.001-04:00

By the way, people really are getting paid to cause a ruckus. There is a Lane Bryant store closing, and people are standing by the road on College Avenue wearing bright green wigs and holding signs and dancing around, or at least they were yesterday. I don't know if they're still out there. But they have an excuse.

Malinvestment

2009-04-25T12:26:00.001-04:00

This is part of the idea of scrip/IOUs, written records of a job done or a thing traded. If I have any mistakes in the logic behind this, at least I'm not controlling the money system of an entire country (or world) and making mistakes, and making it illegal for people to operate their own local money systems. So whatever mistakes I make, they will be small-scale and temporary (or imaginary, since I'm not even doing this yet). This is a work in progress.

This idea is kind of hard to explain and it's vague as of right now. So, 'suspend disbelief' and play along for a bit. As Edward de Bono would say, put on the green hat.

I imagine an informal IOU written on paper. Jane Smith swept the floor in Ann Jones' house. Ann says, 'Thanks for sweeping the floor,' and gives Jane the IOU saying 'Jane Smith swept floor at 100 Oak Street, for Ann Jones.' Jane Smith then has this piece of paper and can trade it for something.

She gives it to somebody to buy a couple of eggs for breakfast (or whatever). The recipient agrees: 'Floor sweeping is a valuable activity.' They agree that somebody somewhere really does need to have the floor swept. The egg seller calls Ann Jones on the phone and says, 'Did Jane Smith really sweep your floor?' She says, 'yes,' and cancels her own record of the floor sweeping.

But it has to be used by the egg seller again. The egg seller now has a piece of paper talking about a floor he didn't sweep. Somebody else did that. Jane Smith could give the egg person an IOU that says, 'eggs sold by John Taylor to Jane Smith.' (This is getting confusing.) John Taylor then takes that to someone and says, 'I want someone to wash my dishes for me. I really did sell these eggs to Jane Smith. Call her and find out.' So they do. They all agree: You did something useful, and we have a record of it. It really happened.

The idea is: keeping records of what was bought and sold, whether it's a product or service, and each person judges whether that was a valuable activity.

Again, with the green hat still on...

The eccentric neighbor, Zachary Ferguson, asks Jane Smith to stand in front of his house spinning in circles, running around, jumping up and down, singing and shouting and annoying everybody, for ten hours. For some reason, she agrees to do it. He then hands her the IOU: 'Jane Smith caused ten hours of ruckus for Zachary Ferguson.' Jane Smith has been 'paid' her fee for doing that. She now has this piece of paper with a record of having caused a ruckus.

But everyone knows Zach Ferguson around town. Nobody wants to take the piece of paper with his name on it. Zach is well known for wasting people's time and energy on silly activities, and not giving them anything valuable in return. Jane goes back to Zach and says, 'Nobody will take this IOU with your name on it. *YOU* have to give me something valuable for the time I spent causing a ruckus in front of your house.' Nothing useful was created anywhere by Zach Ferguson (I sure hope there aren't any real people out there with that name. Maybe I'll write another story where Zach gets to play the good guy.). He refuses to do anything helpful for Jane Smith, or give her anything in exchange.

Ann Jones, and Zach Smith, both asked somebody to do a job for them. But one person was viewed as more trustworthy and productive and the other person was known to be wasteful and unproductive in the things they did.

So this is partly the idea of 'good reputation.' But I'm focused on not just reputation, but whether the activity created something valuable or not. I agree that it has to do with someone's good reputation. But I want to distinguish this idea from 'reputation,' because it's a slightly different idea. I want to emphasize the idea of 'valuable activities' and not just 'good reputation.'

Here is the real world example. An entrepreneur borrows a million dollars to start a company. So all of his employees have enough money that their business can survive for a year or so, just goofing around, surfing the net while at work, playing nerf football in the office, and having parties. They take home their paychecks, and spend them on REAL, valuable products, like food. They make a pretense of doing some kind of work, but it's not a useful activity. Maybe an occasional customer buys their product or service. But not many people do. And those who do, are also using borrowed money, themselves. This isn't imaginary, it really happens. It's called 'malinvestment.' Spending money on businesses that are not doing anything useful, in the big scheme of things. Just because somebody was willing to lend money to you doesn't guarantee that you're actually producing something useful with that money you borrowed. This is how business is done in the real world.

Yet their paychecks are just as valuable as mine! A dollar in their paycheck will buy as much as a dollar in my paycheck.

They lend people money with no strings attached. You can SAY that your business is going to do whatever, but then, not actually do it, or not do it very well, or the marketplace doesn't want that product or service.

Somebody could have a great reputation and be trusted around town, but they can tell you to cause a ruckus in front of the house, and gradually, they'll waste their wealth and have nothing to show for it. (This is one of the times when I wish I could think clearly and not have my 'mental experiences.' One of my 'mental experiences' is that the thoughts and phrases and sentences seem to be 'canned' or premade, like things I've already read in books, or things other people have said, instead of my own ideas. I want to say a new idea in an original way, and instead I get the same stuff I've read other people writing in the past. I don't want to just repeat the same stuff in the same words that everybody else is saying.)

Ann Jones tells everybody to just cause a ruckus and have fun. Gradually, the IOUs come back to her and people are saying, 'Give us something valuable in return.' But nobody was tending the farm animals or sewing new clothes or picking the apples in the orchard. Nothing got done. So Ann Jones can't give them anything in return for all the stuff they did.

In the real world, a business might just declare bankruptcy. They can't pay anyone back for what was done. Defaulting, people not paying back. It can happen with credit cards, too. Millions of people everywhere getting something for nothing.

Precious metals are supposed to prevent that from happening, because you can't print a piece of gold or silver. However, it's possible to loan gold and silver. You can lend huge amounts of gold and silver and not get paid back. You can lend it to somebody to do something useless. If anybody anywhere is able to collect large amounts of gold and silver (using whatever methods, honest or dishonest), then they can freely lend it out again, quickly, with no strings attached, carelessly, to anyone. Sure, they'll lose all their gold and silver that way. But someone else will collect it again a few years from now, and do the same dumb thing again.

In the past few years, I've become so opposed to the idea of borrowing and lending AT ALL that I can hardly imagine a system that would work well and not cause malinvestment. But I'm still interested in Antal Fekete talking about Adam Smith's Real Bills of Exchange (I didn't read Adam Smith's version, I just read Fekete's description of it). That's very similar to what I'm talking about - somebody keeps a record of whether a valuable product or service actually was produced or done, and they get paid back for it whenever the customers buy the product or service. You give someone a bunch of apples and tell them to make apple pies. You wait until the apple pies are sold, and the money comes back to you. It's more complicated than that, and I don't have enough time today to write it all.

I was focused on the idea of 'the IOU is judged as valuable or not valuable by everyone who receives it.' At a glance, most ordinary people can judge whether the activity or product described is likely to be valuable. Within reason, you can tell at a glance, with regard to ordinary, non-technical products and services. The daily activites (produce food, cook food, live in a house, etc) are judged more easily than the very technical or obscure or esoteric activities (what Ludwig von Mises would call 'higher order economic goods.') It's hard to judge the value of 'My company is an advertiser who advertises the advertising services of other advertising companies.' ('Advertising' is another thing that is really wasteful nowadays.)

more later...

Cleaning the car - the work exchange

2009-04-21T14:31:00.000-04:00

Well, the first meeting of the work exchange community (total real members: two) happened today. It was a success. Diane understands the idea of 'I help you, you help me.' She helped to vacuum and shampoo the car, and afterwards, we talked about some work that I could help her with at her house. We are not formally counting the hours or the calories of energy expended in performing the labor. The bookkeeping is very casual right now.

The car floors aren't perfect, and we didn't get rid of all the contamination, but I feel better for having done a little bit of work on it. It's impossible to get rid of it when it's in the carpets. (To catch up on the story, the brief version: 2007, I handled medicinal herbs and seeds in my apartment; they contaminated some of my belongings with their essential oils; I started having reactions when I touched these oils and absorbed them through the skin; it's been an ongoing disaster over the past two years, as I found out that the oils remain active instead of biodegrading and becoming inactive. So I've been cleaning it up, but it doesn't come out of carpets. And several of the cleaning chemicals I used, like Borax, were so toxic that it made the situation much worse. Short version.)

I had someone else who I was TRYING to get into the 'I help you, you help me' concept, but he was operating in a slightly different paradigm, of 'I give you lots of gifts, and you give me sex' paradigm, which isn't what I'm trying to do at this time. I kept trying to pay him back in non-sexual ways and he kept refusing. As of right now, I still have in my possession the 'bunch of gifts,' and I am still deciding whether I will start giving things back to him, or pay him cash, and it hasn't been settled yet. He gave them to me during the winter, when I was on my deathbed and desperately needed help, and I don't necessarily want to give it all back, because a lot of it is useful, but I don't have a cash value estimate on it. (some computer equipment, an air filter, miscellaneous computer stuff.)

So, this is what would be called a mission-and-values conflict according to Diana Leafe Christian, or structural conflict, where people aren't trying to accomplish the same goals in a community. I'm a little annoyed about that today. I see it as community building and finding ways to make lasting improvements in our lives; he sees it as 'paying for a prostitute.' As a libertarian/anarchist, I don't have anything against prostitution (victimless crime), but there's a time and place for it, and I'm not working as a prostitute at this particular moment in my life. (In reality, he probably would describe it as 'traditional dating,' which is the same thing as paying for a prostitute. The guy buys stuff for the girl and she's expected to give sex in return. Usually they're horrified at the suggestion that it has any resemblance to prostitution.)

I can't imagine how anybody would NOT have a huge, complicated, impossibly long to-do list of unfinished projects and plans and chores and work that needs to be done and daily routines and wishes and dreams... I ask people what work they need to have done, I try to explain the idea, and the response I sometimes get is 'Duhhhhhhh....' The world is infinitely complicated. There are infinity tasks that need to be done. When one task is achieved, there are infinity more tasks beneath it. It is physically impossible NOT to have work that needs to be done. So again, I'm annoyed. (By the way, much of my annoyance is intensified because I'm reacting to the contamination in the carpets we were cleaning. I will probably be in a rotten mood for several hours.)

But, the car shampooing job went well. We had to figure out how to use the shampooer. The instructions aren't very detailed. When it starts up, the scrub brush starts pouring out foam, and you can't stop it. So you have to start scrubbing, ready or not, because the time starts counting down, and you only have a few minutes. On the first round, we were trying to figure out how to switch it to the vacuum, where you suction up the shampoo. The instructions do not say how to switch to the vacuum. I thought it would happen automatically after a certain number of minutes, but instead, the shampooer eventually just shut off. We did another round of it, and it turns out that you push the button next to the 'vacuum only' selection to get the vacuum. But I thought that that button only controlled it in the very beginning when you were putting quarters in. It doesn't, it still controls it while it's running.

So we got better at it, and I stood on one side of the car, and she stood on the other, and she handed the scrubber over to me when she was done, and we had to hurry the whole time to make sure we didn't run out of minutes, and the foam just kept pouring out, so you had to pass it really quickly over the gearshift and parking brake so they wouldn't get covered in foam. It was awkward, and fun, and we were laughing.

It was sunny outside, and we talked, and I vented my feelings about chemical sensitivity. She was sympathetic because she knew two different people who were chemical sensitive. I am not 'chemical sensitive' in the traditional way where you have a life-threatening asthma attack every time somebody with perfume walks into the room - nowhere near that. I just react to very specific things, including the low levels of herbal drugs and cleaning chemicals and mold in my house. My 'area of specialization' is the phenomenon of transdermally absorbed drugs and chemicals, and also, the problem of clothing and surface contamination. Those ideas are important and not very well known. For instance, stimulant drugs can contaminate clothing, go through the skin, remain in the laundry even after several washes, and cause weeks and weeks of persistent insomnia. I know this from firsthand experience, and this is important information. But I haven't found it mentioned in other websites, although it's hard to know what search terms to use to look for that.

I have a notepad, and I am writing down dates and times of things that I have planned and need to do. This is unfamiliar to me. It's very disorganized and informal - when I started writing it down, I got harassed by voices pushing me to be all perfectionistic about it, and set up some uber-technical system showing everybody's names and all the things we would be doing. But I know all about that from the past - it will waste time, if you try to make a complicated, perfectionistic system, when all you need is an informal scrawl. I am now thinking of the enneagram, that the Seven shouldn't disintegrate towards type One (perfectionistic) and should, instead, integrate towards Five (I read a little quote showing the spirit of the Five: 'Life is short - don't expect too much.' That isn't meant in a bitter, cynical way, but rather, it just means, don't overload yourself with infinity impossible things to do because you have to focus on doing whatever you are already involved in.)

Anyway, when I'm here at home, and I have to think about what time it is, and feel an obligation to do something for somebody at a particular hour, on some particular day, it's strange to feel that while I'm at home. That's a 'workplace feeling,' not a 'home feeling.' Right now, it's all just emailing or calling various people, meeting people, and getting to know them, and it's mostly in the future instead of actually happening right now.

I am learning as I go about what the rules will be, and how to express them. Being very annoyed about the 'I give you gifts, you give me sex' model of 'traditional dating,' I will have to set strong rules and boundaries saying, 'THAT IS *NOT* WHAT I'M DOING!' I am telling people from the beginning that it is Exchange Work For Work, and not Exchange Gifts For Sex. (Yes, the 'I'm annoyed' feeling just goes on and on. Very bad day for a variety of reasons, other than the successful job done on the car, which I am pleased about.)

Adolescent Myths; Community; Work Exchange Project

2009-04-20T11:55:00.000-04:00

When the overt attacks began in 2003, they spent many hours interrogating me about my adolescent fiction stories and myths. I used to draw cartoons, play out stories with toys, and write fiction. It was in the magic/fantasy genre. Fantasy stories, not sci-fi - it wasn't in the future, and it wasn't high-tech. This was witches-and-wizards type fantasy. Sometimes it also was present-time, with normal humans having unexpected adventures. A lot of it was psychological and had to do with dreams, paranormal, illusions and mental phenomena.

They were interested in my myths. Maybe I have been controlled for a long time, when it was covert, and my myths were influenced by them. Lately they've been talking about 'the prophecy.'

I created a planet called Darcon, which was inspired by Fantasia in the Neverending Story. Darcon, like Fantasia, was the place where all of my drawings, stories, and fantasies went. Even if my drawings accidentallly got lost or thrown in the trash, the characters would still live on Darcon.

Darcon was healthy until I was about 14 years old. Then, it was destroyed by a demon called Sloemaeyir and his four dragon-like, ghost-like creatures, the Zhants, named Emphth (Lightning), Kundt (Storm/Wind/Tornado - I'm not sure if this storm contained water, or it was only dry air - I would have to dig out the drawings and see whether I drew raindrops falling from the clouds or not), Sheltza (Fire), and Zorfth (Earth/Earthquake/Volcano). It was left a dry blackened desert, the entire planet.

That was also about the time when I started having more health problems, getting depressed, and withdrawing from some of the activities that I used to do, like piano lessons. I think it was connected with my getting braces, having teeth removed, and getting a cavity filled with silver-mercury-copper amalgam. I also started getting my hair permed, wearing makeup occasionally, and using acne treatments, so I was exposed to more chemicals than before. I can think of a lot of things that happened during that time that might have made me become sicker and more depressed.

I didn't finish writing the story, but, the myth said that four characters would appear on Darcon and travel across the black desert to meet each other and reawaken the world. I started writing about one of the characters, but didn't get to the others. They connected with each other through dreams and visions. There was a lot of suffering and torture on the journey. It usually involved not being able to tell the difference between illusions and reality, and it also involved being isolated from others.

Luke was a dog, a cartoon character who I drew in health class (and any other class, actually) in seventh grade. He was given his name by Chris, the guy who sat in front of me, who used to turn around and watch me drawing. One day Chris wrote the word 'Luke' above the dog, and I kept the name. Luke had a pet snake named Rover (and back then, I wasn't consciously thinking about phallic symbols, so he was nothing but a snake). I shared Luke with my best friend Rachael - she always got excited to see whatever new things he was doing, whatever adventures he and his friends were having. She read my stories as I wrote them.

Luke originally had a normal, happy life with the other dogs, who were sometimes doglike, and other times, anthropomorphic, or whatever the word is for humanlike. Sometimes they ran around on all fours and other times they stood on two legs, talked, and held objects in their hands with their fingers and opposable thumbs like people. They were like 'people with fur.' Apparently I loved fur and hair that much all the way back then. I wasn't aware that it would be described as a 'fetish' to want hair on people. It seemed normal to look at it that way: that humans had lost something wonderful, something that other animals still had. I never liked the 'humans lost their hair because we're more evolved and we're superior to animals' interpretation.

They interrogated me while I slept, and I felt someone speaking through me, telling them all of the answers, all of the childhood stories, all of the myths. They treated it as though it was my religion. But I remember there was a very negative feeling - someone was greedy, stealing all of it, something that was private and precious to me. I felt like nobody understood me, when I was young - nobody understood what was important to me, nobody understood my feelings or who I was. That's not really true - my brother understood me better than anybody else, and then after that, Rachael did. But still there's always some time whenever you feel as though your own feelings are in a different world from everybody else's. Whenever they stole it from me in the interrogations, it was my whole private, secret world being made into somebody else's tool of mind control. They were looking at it to find out what was important to me, so that they could use it to control me. That was, again, after I quit the Judith Swack therapy, when the overt attacks began.

Luke was sort of timeless and ageless. He lived in different phases of time. An example of this is, it's like Aeon Flux, who dies over and over again, and then is alive and well in the next episode. (I am uncomfortable with snuff fetishes, because of the problems that began with the guy in the chatroom in 2000. A snuff fetish was involved.) I shouldn't use Aeon Flux as an example. Lots of other cartoon characters do that same thing. Luke wasn't dying in every episode - that's not what I mean. But he lived in drastically different places and times that were disconnected from each other, and it would have been impossible to be in all of those places and times. And there was no explanation as to why he was sometimes in one place, sometimes in another place. (*Maybe they were thinking of Aeon Flux because I saw that movie a couple years ago, instead of the cartoon. In that movie, - spoilers.... they were having problems with infertility, and there were spy systems and things controlling everybody's lives and preventing them from having children.*)

In one of his phases, he had all of his gang of friends. In another phase, he was a homeless wanderer, playing his guitar as he traveled. In another phase, he was journeying across the black desert of Darcon, trying to remember where he came from, where he had been, and how he had gotten here.

Recently, they have been tying in this story with some events in my real life, which is why I said they were using it as a tool of mind control. In Luke's desert journey, he is separated from all of his friends and cannot communicate with them. They become taunting illusions that he cannot reach. No matter how hard he tries, every time he reaches out to them, they are only a mirage. Or it's only a dream, and he wakes up.

This has been connected with a real-world paranoia that I am having, about people trying to reach me in email, but being unable to get through. Or they cannot visit my blog, because when they look at the page, the page says it's gone. If they get a reply from me in email, it's a fake letter written by somebody impersonating me. And I might have actually emailed them, but my letter was intercepted, and my real letter doesn't get through, and a substitute letter or a censored version gets to them instead. If they read my address someplace and want to send me a letter through the post office, they actually read the wrong address, or wrote it down wrong, or somebody delivers it to the wrong place, and for whatever reason, it can't get through. The recipient is waiting to receive letters that never show up, and becomes more desperate to hear from people who never speak to him/her. 'They,' the voices, are sometimes portraying me as that unreachable person, and sometimes portraying the guy from work as that person. The theme is sadness, frustration, isolation, loneliness, desperation, and gradual breakdown and loss of sanity.

I hear voices where somebody blurts out a phone number quickly, but I can only catch part of it, and the rest is cut off. I've had voices trying to tell me their name and address. I used to try telling them what mine was, too. I hear voices telling me that somebody is going to commit suicide unless I can contact them right away and tell them it's okay and I believe them. Sometimes they tell me that they're trapped someplace, held captive, and they're forced to zap me, and forced to put voices in my head, and they try to resist, but they can't resist, and they can't escape.

I am going to talk on the phone to a real-world person today, in a little while. She is somebody who answered my Craigslist Cry For Help, with regards to my being sick and overwhelmed with the need to clean up the household contamination and do everything else at the same time. She is the first person who I will be working with in the real-world, labor-exchange agreement, where I help you, and you help me, doing ordinary physical chores and projects. It is this type of thing that will counteract the isolation, the frustration, the being separated from all of society, that I have suffered for years. I will meet people in order to work together with them.

This project is my responsibility. I am doing it because I saw, after the household contamination, that my life was slipping away, with disaster after disaster, and I realized: the disasters will never end. It will always be one more new problem, year after year. And being female, I have a limited time in which I can bear children. I did not want to lose that opportunity forever. I saw that I could not possibly fight against the disasters all by myself. Every time I almost recovered from a disaster, a new accident would happen. It would be an illness, or the wintertime problems which were probably mold-related, or an economic bubble that would cause job layoffs, and so on.

I spent many years thinking that soon, very soon, the future would be better than the past. I'd pay off my debts, I'd pay back my parents, I'd fix this or that health problem, I'd make things better in a lasting way, I'd get a better job if only I took some more classes (using borrowed money)... But the household contamination disaster was SO SEVERE and so overwhelming that it was the last straw.

They reminded me recently about Eek the Cat, who says 'It never hurts to help!' only seconds before he gets run over by a car or something. He always tries to help somebody, but it destroys him. They reminded me that one of the reasons why I wanted to get the herbal stimulant drugs was because I wanted to get enough energy to work lots and lots of hours, and earn lots of money, partly so that I could contribute to helping Peter, so that I could make his life easier.

And Peter reminded me of Alexander, my stray cat who had died recently. I felt as though he died because I was living in an apartment where I wasn't allowed to keep pets (since the landlord has rabbits outside and doesn't want them to get killed by dogs and cats). I had wanted to move to a place where I could keep Alexander with me, and I would have been able to observe him closely and make the decision to take him to the vet whenever he was dying. But I didn't move to a better apartment, because I was still floundering, trying to pay off debts, trying to keep a job without getting laid off or fired or quitting. Alex was at my ex-boyfriend Eric's house, and I used to go over there all the time to visit, but I wasn't there constantly. So when Alexander started throwing up, and couldn't keep any food or water down, we thought it might just be a temporary virus, and I decided to wait a couple days to see if he would get better. But then, he just got sicker, and he died. I feel like maybe, if he had been with me, I could have seen him and I would have known what to do, and I would have taken him to the vet. But I couldn't get a better place to live (where pets were allowed), because I was still trying to recover from all the disasters of my life.

So when Peter first showed up, right after Alex died, this was somebody else to take care of, and I wanted to try again. But the things that I did to make myself stronger - trying to grow herbal stimulant drugs - destroyed my life, and I was even LESS able to help.

'If only I do this one thing, then soon, the future will be better than the past.' That was always the theme. Try one more thing and it will be better. But everything I did, I was doing it by myself, and often it required or implied the borrowing of money.

It is not possible to do everything by yourself. I can't cite references, but 'studies have shown' that real-world social support networks are probably THE most important factor that determines how healthy a person is, physically and psychologically. I have read about intentional communities - the successful ones, not the ones that failed - and the people living there give and receive social support all the time with daily tasks, such as raising children and cooking food. Meals are healthier and cheaper and home-cooked. Disasters get fixed sooner. Unemployed people get financial support. I do not mean this in a Utopian way. I mean it in a realistic way, that life in community is not 'perfect,' but BETTER than the isolation in the mainstream world, with their single-family dwellings, 'nuclear families,' and single people living alone and not knowing their neighbors.

Well, in a little while, I will be talking on the phone. This wasn't entirely 'my' idea - it was partly 'their' idea, as I have been discussing it with 'voices' for a long time now. It's normal to be suspicious of 'things the voices tell you to do,' but sometimes, they encourage me to do things that I already mostly agree with, and this is one of those things. There is a lot of work to do, and this is only one small thing... but it is happening in the real world instead of just being talked about.

what is Jim Carrey's next movie?

2009-04-20T01:59:00.000-04:00

I am a little concerned that Jim Carrey's next movie is The Three Stooges. So far, my life has been sort of following his movies. I don't know what The Three Stooges is going to be about, so I don't know what I should expect to happen in my life. Supposedly, - no, I'm not even going to say that.

'eternal life' concept

2009-04-18T10:43:00.002-04:00

a thought went through my mind this morning, someone else's thought. i agreed with it. the idea was part of my secular religion concept. choose life, eternal life, in a secular or non-supernatural sense (secular isn't really the right word - atheistic, or 'natural' religion?), through having a large number of children, teaching them how to be beautiful and healthy, giving them a safe nurturing community, teaching them to also have many children, and passing on the beliefs and practices. your own life dies, but your children's children's lives go on, and your culture, and the ideas that matter to you. after you die, somebody else will still care about what you cared about, and will still try to accomplish the goals you were trying to accomplish. it won't be exactly the same, and everyone is unique, but you can keep a general spirit or general idea alive for many generations.

the high fertility group

2009-04-17T09:22:00.001-04:00

There are a bunch of other rules, but I don't have them as well organized or thought out, and they're also harder to do. Many of the rules are hard to do if you are living in the mainstream world, instead of living in an intentional community. Some of the rules apply to childbirth and childrearing, so they're not applicable to everybody. Most of them are for health reasons. There will also be rules about schooling, marriage, social skills, etc.

There are rules about what kinds of food to eat and what to avoid, rules about chemicals, including ordinary things we take for granted, like metal - I think that touching certain kinds of metal might be bad, because the metal goes through the skin and might affect the body. It's only a theory about metal - I'm interested in how it affects development of the fetus. Weston Price and his observations of the healthy jaws and teeth - instead of this small, underdeveloped jaw that I have, with the teeth that were crooked and got straightened out with braces, along with removing eight of my permanent teeth - that's the type of thing I'm interested in, and Weston Price made it sound like maybe, if I do the right things and avoid the wrong things, my children won't have that problem. Eyesight is also something he mentioned that might not be a problem in primitive cultures - eye problems might not be genetic, but instead, might be a deformity similar to the jaw deformities.

Also, no vaccines. No circumcision at any age, even if it is done with 'consent.' No plastic surgery on any part of the body. I'm still debating about surgery for obvious large deformities or things that cause functional problems, like being unable to eat - I think it should be okay to get surgery for that, but it would have to follow certain rules or guidelines. I don't know enough about that yet. No tooth removals - that rule is hard to follow in mainstream society, and it requires preventing problems in the next generation before they happen. That includes wisdom teeth. Deformities of the wisdom teeth should be prevented, instead of removing the teeth. No dental fillings. At all, of any kind. No braces, no metal or plastic in the mouth. No implants that can't be removed. Do not inject substances into the bloodstream, and that includes removing your own blood and then injecting it back (like when you donate plasma). I think something bad happens to the blood when it's taken out. Don't inject substances into the skin or muscles or anything else either. (People who already have tattoos aren't being excluded. This is only prevention, not exclusion.)

The surface contamination rules are not a big deal if you live in a location where you know that nobody has been handling medicinal herbs or other substances. This is very important for pregnancy and fertility. Women can become infertile if they touch certain chemicals that go through the skin, including 'natural' herbs, and prescription drugs. Men can become infertile (temporarily) that way too, probably, but I don't know enough about that, and it's less of a risk, because it would be easier to fix that - all you have to do is decontaminate the person, and they become fertile again. Whereas a pregnant woman could abort the baby if she is exposed to certain herbs, and that is a big loss. So avoiding transdermal herbs and chemicals is most important for a pregnant woman or for couples trying to conceive.

Rules about clothing are still being developed. I would have some part of the community be 'clothing optional' or nude, but they would still wear clothing when going out in public. I am wondering about the safety of using certain kinds of fabrics. I thought linen would be okay, but I touched linen and it caused breast pain (this was only because of hypersensitivity from the bisphenol-A dental fillings I have now). Linen is from flax, which is estrogenic. So linen might or might not be okay - it might have estrogenic effects. Other fabrics may contain chemicals that affect the development of babies.

Cosmetics are not permitted, and I am testing what happens when you don't use shampoo. There might be some other way to wash the hair without using the chemicals we want to avoid.

Breastfeeding is required for children. Bottle-feeding is forbidden. 'Wet nurses' should be available in the community. Don't use pacifiers. Children should be born at home. Women will crouch or squat or find a comfortable position to give birth in. The 'head too big to fit through the pelvis' problem is a myth. Nowadays, doctors are telling women to get cesaerean sections because they say the baby cannot fit through the bones of the pelvis. This is wrong. The pelvis has a joint and a ligament, and it can move and open up. But it only happens in the standing or squatting postion, and will not open up if the woman is lying on her back on a table while giving birth. All they have to do is allow the woman to stand up instead of lying on her back, and she will get into the position needed to open the joints of the pelvis to allow the baby through. And I can't believe that doctors are ignorant of this, but they are, it's really true. They would rather perform surgery, instead of giving the woman a chance to just stand up and get into a crouching position.

I also learned about something which is called 'attachment parenting.' They let the babies sleep in the same bed with them for instance. Breastfeeding can go on for a very long time, sometimes until about age five. Just breastfeed until the child stops on their own. The high-fertility group isn't trying to have as many babies as it's technically possible to do, using any means necessary. Instead, the babies will be somewhat spaced apart due to the contraceptive effect of breastfeeding. Attachment parenting means a longer period of breastfeeding among other things.

This is all for the high-fertility community. The 'mainstream' section of the community will have a much looser set of rules. The mainstream group is there for economic support, because the more people you have in your group, the more profitable and self-reliant your economy is. The mainstream group is a marketplace. The high-fertility group is more like a religion, a group of people who strictly follow certain rules, and teach those rules to their children.

I'm sure I will think of other rules for the high-fertility group, but that gives you a basic idea. As I said above, the rules aren't organized yet, and many of them are not applicable, or can't be done outside a community, or only apply to the next generation.

added a hair styling rule

2009-04-17T08:42:00.000-04:00

12. Center Part the hair - don't part on the side.

I edited the rules post and put that in there.

minor car accident

2009-04-16T21:32:00.000-04:00

i have to tell a story, and i know i've been blogging too much. but, a few months ago, i was waiting at a stoplight. a car pulled up behind me and stopped. then, he bumped my car from behind. my head jerked forward. i didn't understand what was happening. while i was still confused, my head jerked forward again. he bumped me like five or six times in a row.

a minute later, he got out of his car and walked up to my window. it's this amazingly gorgeous young guy. he told me that his car was stuck in gear and it wouldn't park, and he apologized. so we pulled over to a nearby parking lot to talk about what happened.

i got out, and he showed me how the button on the gearshift was stuck, and that caused it to keep trying to drive instead of parking. it took him a minute to understand what was happening, and that was why he had kept bumping me several times.

i was flustered and scared, wondering if i had whiplash (i didn't). he wrote down his name and phone number, and his insurance and some other numbers for me on a paper. i thanked him. we looked at the bumper - it was trivial and i wasn't going to make him pay to fix the tiny scratch that may or may not have been caused by him. his car was okay too. and he was all right. i should have given him my number, but i was too confused.

i looked down at his feet. he was wearing big plastic boots with buckles and clips and stuff on them and i figured out that he was on his way to tussey mountain to go skiing or snowboarding. (it was winter when this happened.)

well, what did i do? i gave him a hug. i felt like that paid me back for the car bumping. i still have his number, but i never called it yet.
i won't be asking him for dates, because he was using plural possessive pronouns - 'our' car, 'we' this, 'we' that, implying a girlfriend/wife. he could tell by my tone of voice and body language that i thought he was very attractive, and he was trying to (indirectly) warn me ahead of time that i shouldn't try to get a date. however, he is on my mental list of decent, friendly, attractive, interesting young guys who have some kind of connection with me.

in a way, people are more valuable to me than money.

social networking is my job

2009-04-16T20:15:00.000-04:00

this is more like a tweet and less like a blog.

i have an embarrassing sunburn on my face. there's no word to describe it. it isn't a 'farmer's tan,' or 'raccoon eyes,' but something else. maybe it's the 'weirdo's tan' or something. i was lying outside with my hair covering my eyes. hair is a very effective sunblock. but i didn't cover everything symmetrically, so i have a big round blotch of sunburn on my forehead, and then each cheek is slightly burned, but unevenly.

actually, it's not a tweet anymore, it's a blog. i am thinking about twitter, the concept behind it, and wondering how it is different from any other type of blogging or chatting. but i won't get into that right now. there ARE differences. edward de bono taught me that people tend to dismiss something new by saying 'oh, that's just like X, which already exists.' but there are always some subtle differences if you look for them.

i have internal conflicts because i can't pay my own rent right now - my parents are now paying it. i was too sick through all of winter, but technically, i'm not quite that life-or-death sick anymore, except i don't want to go back to work. i might get a second job on the weekends. but i am still overwhelmed, and yes, there is still a mold problem even with the windows open.

i am observing how my body feels, the sickness and the symptoms and the fatigue. there is still mold that i'm breathing.

anyway, i have been spending a lot more time sending and receiving emails. social networking is becoming more like a full-time job. this is the workgroup. it's only just beginning, and i have hardly done anything at all yet. people bartering labor for labor, aiming towards activities that require LESS money instead of more money.

and it's all still very informal, and unbalanced. i have one friend who hasn't really gotten the idea yet. he still thinks that he is supposed to do more for me than i am doing for him. i even attempted to pay for a meal whenever we went out to eat, and while i was counting out my cash, and also arguing with him about paying for it, he physically got up, walked away, and quickly paid for it at the counter before i was able to get up fast enough. i tried to pay for the meal because i was trying to repay him for several favors he had already done for me. he has installed some expensive computer equipment for free - he gave me two zip drives and a bunch of zip disks. (he bought the stuff cheaply, but still.) i haven't reached the 'prostitute' stage yet, and therefore, i don't want guys to give me lots of stuff in exchange for hanging out with them as platonic friends, which is what this guy and i are doing, and we haven't talked about the fact that i don't want to have a sexual relationship with him. he doesn't have to pay money in exchange for my platonic friendship. it is difficult to focus on what goals i am trying to achieve, and get other people to go along with them, and cooperate to do the same things i am trying to do. i'm not working in the same business model that he is.

i would like to reach out to more females, who will get the 'platonic' idea more easily, but i am already overwhelmed with just communicating and contacting the couple of people i am already starting with. some of this came from a dating website, and some of it came from a craigslist ad, and i would like to use myspace and maybe facebook (if i have the patience to wait three minutes for the pages to load - okay, that's only certain pages, and only if i've deleted my cache).

anyway, twitter would be something that i would look at for communicating brief messages like 'i reached the worksite and we've gotten started.' 'oh no, help, the serial killer is chasing me,' and so on. yes, that thought has crossed my mind. i am not going out and meeting people alone. my friend talked with me and he said he might be willing to go along with me to work meetings. (i have a feeling that 'the serial killer is chasing me' wasn't my own thought, but i agree, it's something that i am afraid of whenever i meet new people, so having someone with me would make me feel better. i really am actually scared of meeting serial killers or wackos. it's funny, but it's also not funny. i thought i should remove it but i've already written this paragraph.)

so... social networking, my full-time job, along with blogging.

asking 'what do you need?' what will make your life easier? what will improve your health? what will bring you a nutritious meal every day, at a low price? what will give you long-term security and a stable life? what important projects are you postponing? what difficult tasks are you ignoring because they're overwhelming and you can't bear to even look at them? what is on your to-do list?

it's modeled on what i read in diana leafe christian's books about intentional communities. it was also inspired by 'your money or your life,' which my dad gave me several years ago - WARNING! i totally disagree with something in that book now! he says you should invest in t-bills and try to earn interest. 'earning interest' doesn't exist, so, don't do that. but you can do everything else in the book. i still love the book, because the overall spirit is still true. it says: don't spend your money to buy more and more junk, but instead, save it to buy things that are really very important to you, such as: taking several months time off work, for instance. if you saved a few thousand dollars, you could take a couple months off work and still pay your bills. and while being off work, you could really enjoy life for real, and be well rested. that kind of thing. so that is also some of the inspiration behind the workgroup.

also, after all the years of reading austrian economics, and antal fekete, and anarchist beliefs, and with all that i know about money, i feel an intuitive sense that money doesn't really EXIST right now. i just have this feeling that there is no such thing as capital. i have a feeling that nobody, anywhere, can afford to waste money, and that people who think they have a lot of money right now really don't, or they soon won't in the future. and borrowing money is a very bad idea. (at the same time, i'd say that people in college might as well finish.) and i have a feeling that nothing is profitable, no startup businesses. and the property taxes are still very high from the real estate bubble/housing bubble - so if your business operates out of an 'office' instead of your own house, then you have huge expenses - and nothing is profitable enough to pay the rent and the taxes and all that on a storefront. (at least, where i live.) i don't know how to explain it, but i feel sure that it's important to avoid spending money on whatever tasks we do, and instead, find a way to do them informally with friends.

to do: acquire an auto mechanic. some person who can fix cars. that will be really helpful in a workgroup like this. cars are productive capital. they are one of the most commonly owned types of productive capital equipment that there is. same category as a machine in a factory - productive capital, whatever you use to produce something. you use cars to do work.

yeah, this was a blog, not a tweet.

Atlas Shrugged Movie Is Cursed. I want an amateur version instead.

2009-04-16T08:15:00.000-04:00

I have been reading about promises to make an Atlas Shrugged movie for years and years now. It's one thing after another, but there is always too much conflict over something, and it never gets made.

I would enjoy watching a homemade, backyard, low-budget, digital-videocamera version of the movie, with bad special effects and amateur actors. That wouldn't bother me. They might do a good job of it. If anybody ever hears about a made-in-my-garage version of Atlas Shrugged, I want to watch it. Even if it's a cartoon drawn on the computer or something. We have so much digital technology available to make homemade movies, there is no reason why amateurs can't make Atlas Shrugged and get it over with. In addition, once it's been made by one person, a thousand other people can all still try to make THEIR interpretations of it. Nothing stops people from making the movie again and again with a new style, new locations, new actors, and a new take overall.

An amateur version of Atlas Shrugged would be in the spirit of the movie anyway. Not made by big, corporate, government-owned media corporations, but instead, by ordinary people doing it because they want to.

Some people might say, it's getting bad enough out in the real world that you don't NEED to watch Atlas Shrugged in a movie, you can just look outside.

Paranoia Setting is too sensitive. Jumped to a wrong conclusion.

2009-04-14T14:35:00.000-04:00

The dating website guy is the same guy. He changed his profile name. I'm just a little jumpy right now. The other stuff really happened, though - the girl telling me that she didn't know someone named 'Becky,' and the other lady not getting my letters.

Qiwi Lisolet; Isolation; Overt Tampering; Social Support

2009-04-14T12:37:00.001-04:00

I feel like Qiwi Lisolet in Vernor Vinge's book A Deepness In The Sky. I was looking for enneagram type seven role models in books.

I have to apologize for my trial-and-error method of identifying my enneagram type. Psychological self-observation has been impossible ever since the voices began: I can't look at myself and ask, 'Why do you do X?' anymore, because the voices give me false answers to that question, and fill my head with garbage instead of genuine, original self-observations. The word 'Why?' was dropped from my vocabulary. Psychology is a taboo subject. So I can't even figure out which enneagram type I am, and get an honest answer about it.

Personality types are part of the mind control system. They affect how you make decisions, what you care about, what motivates you, what you say 'yes' or 'no' to. So, I've been prevented from understanding my own psychology for a while now.

Vernor Vinge, and Qiwi Lisolet, is where I first learned the word 'scrip,' and some of my concept is based on that book. I found out later that scrip is a real word, not just a word that Vernor Vinge made up. It means, pieces of paper with IOUs on them, or homemade paper money, or alternative currency of any kind. That 'fiction' book is pretty close to the literal truth, except that I assume that all of the events going on are caused by humans, not aliens. (It turned out later that 'aliens' was one of the harassing secret messages that I didn't know I was saying.) FSK (http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/) often says that the news channels are actually comedies, and the fiction stories are actually the news - and I laugh, but I agree.

The email interference has been OVERT. Usually, in the past, they were secretive in their harassment. This new problem has been broad-daylight email screwups. 'Hey! We're messing with your email!' type of thing. In the past, the things that they did were unprovable. They demonstrated to me, one thing after another, that they were able to spy on this or that. I would have a conversation out loud with someone, in my house, and then receive email advertisements for things I had talked about. The one incident I remember was 'plastic bags.' I needed plastic bags for something and was having a big conversation about it in my apartment. I then went to my email and found spam advertisements for plastic bags. That type of thing was going on in the early years of the harassment.

So I went online and was trying to find countermeasures for conventional surveillance. I thought somebody put a bug in my apartment. I thought somebody was physically entering my apartment when I was gone. So I bought an $800 device to check for bugs, but I didn't find anything. Instead I just got random noises now and then and was unable to interpret them. I didn't buy any more devices or countermeasures because my whole life got smashed out from under me again and again: layoffs, job losses, chronic fatigue, various disasters, getting evicted, contamination, environmental illnesses - so I couldn't afford to even try getting any more equipment and doing any forensic research, testing, countermeasures, or information gathering of any kind.

Anyway, back then, the email harassment was covert and secretive. They made sure that I would look like a lunatic if I tried to explain that I got spam advertisements for plastic bags after I talked about plastic bags out loud in my apartment. (People can listen through telephones, but they can also listen from a distance away using other methods, and I was unable to finish my research about it.) But now, the overt email tampering makes it so that I can actually go up to a real person and say 'Our emails didn't reach each other,' and that person agrees with me.

Being AGREED WITH is very important. For a targeted individual, being agreed with is a lifesaving thing. When people disagree with your interpretation, when they say you're crazy, when they can't even imagine that the universe you live in is real, it totally isolates you from the whole world, which is what happened to me over the past decade as I went through one disaster after another while simultaneously being harassed.

(I am afraid to use the word 'lifesaving' in a sentence, because if you even MENTION anything having to do with life or death, or use the 's-word' in a sentence, people can use it as an excuse to throw you in the mental hospital. Even if you use the word in a NEGATIVE way, saying 'I am so far from the s-word, that I am not even in the same zip code as the s-word,' you still used the s-word in a sentence, and they'll lock you up. I will mention here that I have long-term plans and hopes, social support, family support, financial support, and real-world friends. My life is not in danger. I would say, 'I am a POSITIVE BENEFIT to myself and others.' So that is my act of CMA for today.)

Oh, I remember what set off this rant. I went to the dating website again and found an email, and the sender of the email was someone I had never spoken to before. However, he mentioned things that I had been talking about with this other guy previously, as though it were him, but just using a different name. That set off my 'Rant About Overt Email Manipulation' which got me writing this blog. The OVERT phenomena have been making it very easy and obvious to observe, instead of the secretive, 'not-sure-if-it's-real-or-not' style of attacks that were going on in the past. This is a different style, some hacker jumping up and down shouting 'IT'S REAL!'

There was another phenomenon that was going on over the past few months. It is in the 'paranoia' category of possible things to worry about. The theme is always sadness, loneliness, isolation, missed connections, people you were trying to reach but couldn't. I would get a spontaneous impulse to go on a long car trip. Long car trips to random places, then back home again, just to get out of the house and see the scenery and have something to do. But while driving, I would hear voices in my head. They would tell me that somebody was calling my house at that moment, and I wasn't answering the phone. They would tell me that somebody stopped by to visit, and I wasn't there. They would say this person tried again and again to contact me, but every time, I was gone, or I didn't answer the phone. As I said, sadness, isolation, missed connections, separation and loss from people you care about. It always made me worry because I knew that technically, it WAS possible to cause those types of events to occur.

I always want to tell that one person I was trying to reach: I am still here even if something is interfering with our communication, or if you don't trust me, or you think I'm a compulsive liar, or this whole thing is all just a big joke to humiliate you. It isn't. It's all real. :(

That's why I am looking at long-term plans for dealing with it, protecting ourselves, communicating in less-hackable ways, and building social support systems that are less corrupted, more honest, more trusting. This is why I love learning about intentional communities. I want to have children, and I want those children to grow up knowing the truth, but at the same time, they must feel safe, supported, and protected, knowing they can trust the people around them. I don't want my children to feel terrified and vulnerable in a crazy world where people do horrible things to each other. I want them to know that yes, horrible things are happening, but we are together and we are honest about it and we can talk about it.

Not just my children, but also my friends and fellow sufferers.

Email Tampering?

2009-04-14T11:36:00.000-04:00

My email-related paranoia has been pretty bad the last couple days. I sent an email to a girl who I used to work with at Uni-Mart. I hadn't emailed her in years, but I saw her recently when I was out getting something to eat. So I emailed her to check if the address was still working.

I got a reply from her saying something along the lines of 'thanks for saying hello but I don't recall working with anyone named Becky.'

Becky? My email is set so that my name shows the sender as Nicole Binns. I clearly wrote the name 'Nicole' at the bottom of the email.

I wanted to contact her again because she and her boyfriend/husband are fellow 'conspiracy theorists,' and I wanted to continue networking with them.

I also got a couple emails with the guy I was trying to reach over the past month, but then got cut off again, and there are no more replies. I knew that was going to happen. As I said before, I was very grateful for the communication, even if the content of the message was negative. I wanted to communicate about what needs to be done, and set official boundaries, and I wanted to understand why he is behaving as though something is very wrong whenever I see him.

I get phone calls from automated recordings, and I wonder if real people are trying to call me, hearing the answering machine, and then getting rerouted someplace else whenever they try to record a message, and the message I hear comes from the telemarketing companies. The phone system is corrupted/hacked, not just by the government, but by other hackers as well. Anything that involves computers is hackable. And they found out that the government was spying on these big internet servers, and I forget the details - there was some story about a tech guy who helped build a little 'secret room' where the networking cables went, and they had something in there that was listening to ALL of the internet traffic that went through. This was a year or two ago that the news story came out, I forget when.

Cell phones are hackable too. They run on software, and I have had things that seem like viruses and other problems on my cell phone, and bizarre phenomena. I have read about cell phone hacking. My phone no longer lets me send text messages, but I can sometimes receive text messages. I don't bother using it much for anything except long-distance calls or calls when I'm driving on a long trip somewhere.

I've heard stories that other TIs experience physical mail problems too. If the post office uses any computers to route anything, it could be hackable, but I don't know how it works. If it's important enough, people can just 'hack' the postal workers themselves, especially the ones who are using psychiatric drugs, because they are easier to control. Some person might think, 'I'm putting this letter into Slot S for Fred Smith,' but then, their hand automatically goes towards Slot J for Sally Jones instead. That might sound ridiculous or oversimplified, but that is how humans can be tricked into making simple mistakes that will screw things up. Since I've experienced external manipulation, I'm pretty sure this can be done.

The new mail delivery is going to be as cheap as we can make it. It's going to be some ordinary person driving a car to the next town, and dropping off their letters at some central pickup location, for the other people in the network to go pick up themselves - the real-world, face-to-face, in-person group of people who know each other and want to exchange mail. These are people who can walk up to you and say, 'I was expecting to get a letter, and I didn't receive it. What happened?' And then real, trustworthy, familiar people can go and find out. You don't have to go explaining to the postal service that you suspect their computers were hacked or that you think some postal employee got controlled like a puppet and was forced to misroute your letters.

That's assuming there will be a large enough number of people involved. I've been meeting real-world people, but it's very slow, because each new person has to get acquainted slowly, and I can't go meeting and getting to know thirty new people every day. It's overwhelming. I tried using a dating website, but the number of new emails is so much that I cannot even answer them.

(I have been thinking of writing a blog about 'the perceived shortage of women.' You don't have to be beautiful or interesting. You can be downright weird, scary, or blatantly ugly, and yet, merely being female, you will receive dozens of emails if you go to a dating site. I am going to change my profile so that it has a more goal-oriented message, as in, 'We have to do XYZ together, so fill out this form and we will schedule an interview.') 'The Perceived Shortage of Women' is also a blog about polyamory/polyfidelity, because polyamory helps with the shortages of any scarce type of person, no matter what is scarce about them, whether it is their physical appearance, something in their personality, or anything at all.

I could not quite accept polyamory as an official belief system, for a while, until Diana Leafe Christian mentioned it at the very end of Finding Community. She said that polyamory/polyfidelity tends to occur in intentional communities and it's something you should be prepared for, so you know whether or not this community is right for you. Now I've been reading more about polyamory - it doesn't necessarily mean that you go out and have sex with a different person every night. It can mean that several people marry each other and all of them help raise the children, instead of having only one husband who has to pay ALL of the bills, and when he gets laid off from his job, the entire world collapses. Since there WILL be more layoffs, this situation is going to happen again and again as the economic bubbles destroy our society (over the next few decades). Polyamory looks like a much more secure way to raise a family.

(Polyamory is a general, catch-all term. Polyfidelity is a little more specific. I'm only learning about this recently, so I'm not sure which term to use. I was always going this direction anyway, because several of my significant relationships have been with married men. But it wasn't 'Official Policy' until recently.)

I love the song 'Hey There Delilah,' and apparently everybody else loves that song too, because it's very popular. I heard it on the radio whenever I was in a tender mood and I felt like crying. It was the sound of devoted love in his voice - the sound was real and sincere. So I looked it up on the internet and found out that Delilah is a real person, and he was trying to get with her, but she said 'I already have a boyfriend.' It made me angry that somebody got rejected based on the excuse that she can't possibly have more than one boyfriend at a time. This was right after I had started reading about polyamory.

Anyway, as for the email tampering, my name isn't Becky, and I didn't mention anyone named Becky in the letter I wrote to her. I don't even know if people can find my blog, or if it conveniently disappears whenever someone wants to read it. And I had given someone a handwritten note, but somehow that didn't help either. And of course they had to slip a 'secret message' into the note, which was NOT my intention, because until recently, I never really knew that numbers had secret sexual meanings, except for the number 69, so the number I wrote was accidental, and I started hearing voices talking about it afterwards. That number happened to be the real number of emails at the time when that note was written. It was not intentional. I don't like all this secret-crypto garbage - I like to communicate openly. I'm not interested in secret symbols and hidden meanings - to me that seems deceptive and dishonest. I am going to point to the Myers-Briggs type again and remind everyone that I am an ISTP, a literal-minded type, not a secret-symbol type.

cecil the groundhog and the weather-related injury

2009-04-14T11:23:00.000-04:00

i need to warn everybody that in the next day or so, i probably will visit my pot of st. john's wort and stand next to it and inhale. (that's my extremely low dosage method, which my blog readers have read about many times by now.) that means there might be more incidents of 'saying what the voices tell me to say.' i have a lot of stuff that needs to get done in the house and in my life in general.

chronic illness is much more of a problem for me than the mental phenomena, the voices, the attacks, etc. chronic illness is the reason why i can't get up early in the morning and just run outside and start doing things and interact socially, do more work, do projects, etc.

on a day like today, when it's raining, my 'weather sensitivity' is acting up. i learned about weather sensitivity a few years ago and of course, it's one of the dozen different sensitivities that i have. it means that every time it rains, i feel like my body has been repeatedly run over by a truck, or a train, or a steamroller, or some other large vehicle, all night long. however, for some reason, my old ski injuries aren't bothering me today. that seems to happen when it snows, not when it rains.

speaking of the skiing injuries, which i have talked about before, i should mention the groundhog injuries, because it's kind of a similar story.

when i was in college, i used to eat meals at the dining hall and sometimes would bring an apple core outside with me afterwards, or some other piece of fruit. we weren't supposed to bring food out of the dining hall, but fruits were an exception. i was feeding the leftover apple core to a groundhog.

my roommate named him 'cecil,' because she misheard what i was saying when i told her about the groundhog. i forget what i said, but it sounded like cecil. i think i said something like 'he's a little groundhog' and it sounded like 'cecil the groundhog.'

cecil lived in a little white pvc pipe that opened out onto a hillside by the road. i put my apple core on the edge of the pipe, and a while later, it would be gone. every once in a while i would see him crawling in and out of there. to get to his pipe, i had to walk down a pretty steep hill. (as you have probably guessed, the 'pretty steep hill' plays an important part in this story.)

in the mid 1990s, i forget which year, there were several massive ice storms that covered the area with freezing rain. i was in shepherdstown, wv, which is close to the borders of pennsylvania, maryland, and virginia. the whole area got hit very badly. every inch of every object was covered with ice. it was beautiful. and you absolutely could not take a step outside without falling.

well, i decided that feeding cecil my apple core was important enough to try to do it after the ice storm. now you know why the 'pretty steep hill' is part of the story. i started down the hill towards cecil's pvc pipe, took one step, fell on my ass, and slid straight down the hill on the ice, barely missing a couple of trees, and stopped about a foot from the road. i think i tried to throw the apple core into the pvc pipe on the way down, but that might be something i added to embellish the memory to make it more entertaining. the apple core slid to the bottom of the hill with me.

i could not get back up the hill. i tried. i would have needed a rope. i had to walk all the way around, using the flattest pathways, because all steep hills were impossible. so even though my dorm was right above me, i ended up walking about a quarter of a mile to get home.

when i got home i found out that the entire backside of my leg was black and blue. it was not just one small bruise. this was an area about ten inches long. there were cuts and bruises on my hands and arms as well, but the back of the leg was the worst.

the hardest part was trying to explain to my friends how i had fallen and why i was trying to climb down the steep hill even though it was covered with ice. 'not having any common sense' was the consensus as to why i had done that.

so i might be in pain today from weather sensitivity, but it's a good time to remember other weather-related injuries.

Natural Hair Growth Rules

2009-04-13T15:06:00.001-04:00

Rules Apply To:
Both genders
All races
All ages, from infants to elderly
All hair types and textures, from straight to curly to coily/wooly
All baldness patterns and degrees of hair thickness, from very bald to full head of hair

***

General Rule:
Do nothing.

***

Specific Rules (in no particular order):
Head Hair
1. Do not cut head hair. Let it grow to its ultimate, fullest length, until it grows no longer. This length is determined by genetics, ethnic group, individual variations, and other factors.

2. Do not trim split ends. Do not use 'twist and trim' methods designed for very long hair.

3. Start now from where you are. Do not make hair 'perfect' before you start growing it. As hairs fall out at the roots, the altered hairs (permed, colored, straightened, badly damaged, etc) will gradually thin out and be replaced by new hair.

4. Do not perm, straighten, or color the hair. Do not alter it.

5. Dreadlocks: This rule is not yet settled, due to lack of knowledge about this hair type. Some coily textures form dreadlocks naturally, and this is accepted and valued. Avoid 'high-maintenance' dreadlocks that have to be permed and treated artificially. If dreadlocks are low-maintenance and if they form naturally they are okay. More information is needed about how they form and how they grow over time. Also, dreadlocks do not have a finite length, but instead will grow forever, and this could be a problem.

6. Combing and brushing is optional. However, certain methods of combing and brushing will badly damage the hair. Never 'tease' hair by backcombing. Start detangling the ends first, then work out the tangles up above them. Do not yank out knots. A wide-toothed comb or pick is recommended. Brushes are not recommended because they can damage the ends, but some people may be able to use them without causing damage.

7. Tapering: Accept the tapering of the ends of the hair as hair approaches its fullest length. Tapering to a thin point is normal and does not mean hair is 'breaking off.' Tapering does not result from split ends or hair breakage, but instead is a natural growth pattern. Do not use 'twist and trim' to remove split ends throughout the tapered area. All split end trimming causes significant loss of hair length, no matter how little is removed.

8. Different Lengths and Layers: Do not cut hair to make it all the same length before growing it long. Instead, start from where you are, and leave the long hair long. Grow bangs, or other short areas, and let them merge in gradually on their own. Do not 'cut the mullet' but instead keep the long hair and grow the rest of it, letting it gradually catch up.

9. Braids, buns, and other hair restraint methods are permitted, and it is very helpful to learn how to do them. Hair restraints must not cause permanent damage. Cornrow braids must be loose and gentle, not pulling, because pulling hair at the roots causes permanent root damage and hair will not ever grow back as thick as it was before. When long hair is very thick and heavy, it might help to put the bun directly on top of the head where its weight is supported, or it can be divided into separate parts to reduce the weight of each area. Dreadlocks: I do not have experience with tying or restraining dreadlocks, and need more information.

10. Do not use hair sprays, gel, grease, mousse, or other cosmetics on the hair. Some chemicals, such as hair spray, may cause permanent damage to both the hair and the root. I am currently testing and observing what happens when you do not use shampoo or conditioner (on a thin, straight, greasy, Caucasian hair type); this rule is not yet settled as to what types of washing are okay.

11. Gray or White Hair: Do not color the hair even if it is becoming white with age. Do not try to color some of your hair while leaving some of it gray, but instead, let all of it be whatever color it is. Gray hair is a positive, not a negative. Looking your age, looking as old as you are, is a good thing.

12. Center part. Do not part hair on the side. Afro textured hair may not part, because it is standing up off the head. If it cannot part, that is okay, but keep it center-oriented instead of side-oriented, when you brush, braid, or tie it up in any way.

***

Baldness and Thinning
1. Balding long hair on men is normal and attractive. Do not 'embrace baldness' by shaving off all of the hair. Baldness is not a reason to avoid growing long hair. Baldness is an even stronger reason to grow the rest of the hair and the beard long. Baldness does not exclude people from using the option of growing long hair. Balding men are expected to follow all of the hair growth rules.

2. Balding afro-textured hair should also be long, but I lack experience with this hair pattern and need to find out more information.

3. Baldness with dreadlocks is a pattern that I have no experience with. It should be acceptable, but there might be problems while the hair is falling out, because the ends of the locks will still be thicker and heavier than the lock near the roots. It might possibly pull too hard on the roots during this stage, which could damage them. I need more information about this.

***

Facial Hair
1. Do not shave, wax, or trim the beard or mustache on any part of the face. Do not shave off some parts of the beard while growing other parts long. If you already have a partial beard, start growing now from where you are - do not cut some of the beard off to make it all the same length. Partial beards or short beards are better than nothing at all. Some ethnic groups do not grow beards.

2. Grow beard to its fullest length until it grows no longer. Do not keep the beard at some particular length. Do not trim the edges to make them neat and tidy, but instead, allow the edges to become ragged as they will.

3. Beards may be braided, pinned up, or twisted into some kind of 'bun' just like head hair, when they need to be kept out of the way, or for modesty.

4. Do not remove female facial hair. Most female facial hair is thin and short. Female facial hair is not necessarily a symptom of illness. Full beards on women are more rare and therefore this rule is not yet settled due to lack of information. I personally welcome and accept this hair pattern on women as yet another wonderful variation. It is hardly ever seen and would take getting used to, but I am committed to accepting this. However, I understand that this would not be accepted in the workplace at most jobs.

5. Eyebrows: Do not pluck any parts of the eyebrows at all. Do not shave or trim them. Do not thin them. Do not remove individual hairs. Do not make them symmetrical if they are somewhat different on each side. Do not use electrolysis or any other method of permanent hair removal. Do not remove eyebrow hair growing over the bridge of the nose. The 'unibrow' or 'monobrow' is another wonderful variation in hair patterns, on both men and women. While all methods of hair removal are forbidden, some methods are worse than others: Plucking eyebrows causes permanent hair loss. The roots become scarred and damaged, and the hair never grows back as it was before the plucking, but instead grows back sparse and irregular. All methods of waxing or plucking cause permanent root damage and scarring.

6. Eyelashes: Not usually a problem, but, do not alter them, curl them, or trim them. Do not use mascara or other eye makeup.

7. Isolated Hairs: Do not remove isolated, individual hairs merely because they are separated from other thick areas of hair.

***

Body Hair
1. Do not shave or remove any body hair, at all, regardless of whether you are male or female.

2. Variations - Too Much, Too Little: All patterns and variations are valued and accepted. Keep all of the hair, regardless of where it is located. Having hair on some particular body area is not better or worse than having it on some other body area. Do not make an exception for hair located on an 'unusual' or 'abnormal' area. There is no such thing as 'too much hair,' or 'too little hair,' on either women or men, on any part of the body. No area of hair is better or worse than any other.

***

email problem DOES seem to be real

2009-04-11T22:31:00.000-04:00

Somebody IS interfering with my email. I confirmed it with a person who's still willing to speak to me, unlike some people, who for whatever reason, won't communicate with me at all (except to give some kind of evasive non-explanation that tells me nothing). My co-worker and I both spoke to each other and she told me that she had sent me an email (which I did not receive), and she said she had NOT received the one I sent her. One theory on the 'evasive non-explanation' that I got from someone is that he has some belief that I am evil incarnate, or something, and refuses to look at anything that the real person is saying to him.

When the household contamination problem is solved, my moods will be predictable and consistent. Whenever I accidentally touch transdermal medicinal herbs that trigger drug effects, and I can't avoid those incidents, it causes unexpected mood changes.

The overhead intercom is still doing the same 'subliminal messages' whispers that it's been doing for months. I don't know the technical method being used to do that. It happens on the commercials, during the music. I don't know if the modulation used to create the voice is something that is only audible to me, or if it's actually 'out there' in a way that could be heard by a microphone able to hear high-frequency sound. I'm guessing it might be something modulated in such a way that only I can hear it and it couldn't be picked up by a microphone. They're doing that on my computer's dialup modem, too, and no, it is not amusing, it is a crime.

The Chinese Drywall Disaster

2009-04-11T12:58:00.000-04:00

I don't have enough time to write about this, but here is another big problem: Drywall made in China has some kind of chemical in it that puts out fumes and is making houses unlivable, especially in certain parts of the country, mostly the Southeast USA. I'd like to write about the reasons why poor quality building materials are being used, why things are scarce, why they don't make 'em like they used to, and all that. It'll have to be some other day. I don't have that type of drywall in this house, though.

Avoiding Fear, Pain, Loss, and Guilt

2009-04-10T13:08:00.000-04:00

Whenever I first started to learn that the electronic mind control system was real, it made everything seem hopeless and I could not imagine continuing to live in a world like that. However, I picked a few belief systems and books and authors that made me feel safe, secure, and optimistic in spite of these unbearable experiences, and I clung to those books and I still do. A lot of them are mentioned on my myspace page.

And every day, I am aware that I do not have my freedom. I cannot think a thought in silence. I can't use my brain the way I want to. I get urges to do things that I would not have otherwise done. I still choose life, and I found belief systems that made me feel like there were still reasons to live and hope for the future.

However, whenever you are still finding out something you don't want to know, seeing something you don't want to see, then your response is to try to survive however you can. You chose to ignore me and avoid me. I don't know what is going to happen in the future between us, but even if you are avoiding me, I still would like to know what's going on in your life and hear from you once in a while, because I am not rejecting *you*. You are trying to protect yourself and if I were you I would probably be doing the same thing. You are afraid that something terrible will happen and I can only guess about various possibilities that you could be afraid of. And I accept who you are and I am not trying to hurt you, but it's true that I cannot control the things that 'the voices' say and do, and that is not my fault.

I changed my mind about a lot of things over the past ten years. If you think of me ten years from now, you are still welcome in my life. If you think of me sooner than that and want to talk, I am still here.

2009-04-10T11:35:00.000-04:00

I saw this on www.nostate.com and I liked it:

http://freeandunashamed.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/a-declaration-of-separation/

Enneagram Type Seven

2009-04-10T10:14:00.000-04:00

I'm tired of changing my enneagram type every few years. First they decided I was a Nine. Then they decided, no, I'm not a Nine, I just have chronic fatigue, which is why I appear to be 'lazy.' So then they decided that I'm actually a Six. But now they're thinking I'm a Seven.

I like the enneagram, but it's a trial-and-error process figuring out what you are. And I'm not one of the people who says 'Therefore, all personality type systems are bullshit.' Just because it's difficult to use them or understand them doesn't mean that they have no useful information or useful observations about personalities. People CAN be categorized. Their personalities seem to be stable over time, and people are different from each other, but categorically similar.

While reading Choke, I had to ask what enneagram type Chuck Palahniuk or his characters are. It's an unhealthy Seven, doing hyperactive, random, addictive things in order to get some excitement out of life. My 'prescription' for an unhealthy Seven is the same as my prescription for everybody else.

And I have to quote Judith Swack even though I associate her with the onset of the psychotronic attacks and I've never been sure if she was responsible for it. But the name of her treatment is 'Healing From The Body Level Up,' and I take that same approach, although I am not doing anything like what she does in her therapy. I'm more interested in things like nutrition and detoxification from chemicals that cause environmental illness. Elimination diets like the Feingold Diet, the Failsafe Diet, wheat-free and dairy-free diets, and so on, will calm down hyperactive people, and I know this from my own experiences.

So in that way I use a similar approach, that no matter what's wrong, I start by assuming there are physical health problems that are the first thing to work on. I don't like 'talk therapy.' (However, that doesn't mean that talking is useless, it just means that my own experience with 'talk therapy' never solved the problem that I had chronic fatigue, chronic pain and illnesses, and food sensitivities, and I was being physically attacked by criminals as well, and those were the main reasons why I couldn't get my life together.) That's the first thing that goes through my mind whenever I read a story like that where somebody seems to have a chaotic life and a lot of problems.

I was told that my writing style resembled Palahniuk, and when I read that book, I saw a lot of things that I talk about, like herbs, and medical problems. I remember back when I wasn't yet on the semi-Feingold diet that I am on now, my informal diet where I avoid the worst foods most of the time (cereal, milk, etc), and I was extremely hyperactive in college and I did a lot of bizarre and impulsive things, but I couldn't actually focus and complete a task.

This is on a slightly different topic, but, there are things people say about Libertarians (or sometimes, Objectivists). One of the things people joke about is, a Libertarian won't even call the fire department when the house is burning down. I used to call myself a Libertarian before I called myself an anarchist (and an anarchist is even more extreme than a Libertarian in that way). Someone had said to me recently that I should call the health department because the landlord wasn't doing anything about the mold in my apartment (although, he did a couple things to try to fix it), and my response was that I didn't want to escalate the conflict to a higher level. I don't go calling authorities on people unless there is some desperate emergency. I prefer talking things out and getting mediators and acting as though there is no government. I assume, as an anarchist, that I should always ask the question, what would I do if there were no government? How would I resolve conflicts with people? Not just about the mold, but also about other things people have done.

I'm going to try to have children of my own, but I also like to read about adoption. I have learned a lot about relationships by reading about adoption, especially because adopted children tend to have more problems than children raised in one household all their lives. I am usually friends with people who have problems, because I don't feel understood by people whose lives are all together and going great. Whenever you 'adopt' an adult as a friend, it's similar to adopting a child because you didn't raise that person, you didn't teach them what they know, and their beliefs and values may be totally different from your own, they might do things that you hate, they might do things that you totally disagree with, and you somehow have to accept that this is something you have no control over. Granted, there are limits to who you choose to 'adopt' because there still has to be something useful or valuable in the relationship at some level. You don't associate with people who are absolutely worthless to you or hostile to you in every possible way.

Well, 'they' have been asking me to assume, what if you adopted somebody who had problems or criminal behavior and you still had to be a parent to somebody in spite of that. This applies to adult relationships too, not just adoptions. However, thinking of it as an 'adoption' helps remind me that when you choose a friend, you choose a long-term relationship, a long-term bond with somebody who is a human being, a real and imperfect person. You don't just bond with people and then drop them the next day, on a whim.

Every living person has a set of parents (unless they were conceived in a test tube using artificial genes that didn't come from a human). Every person needs whatever it is that parents provide. So reading about adoption made me wonder, what is it that parents are supposed to do for their children? What role do they play? If you could choose your parents, what kind of parents would you choose, assuming that there really is a *need* for the role parents play? What do you have control over, and what can you not control? What good things can you do for your children that will help them through all of their lives? There really are better and worse ways to be a parent. All of those things apply to ordinary relationships with people too: what roles do you play, and what good can people do for each other in their relationships.

So, bonding with a friend isn't literally an adoption and it isn't literally a parent-child relationship, but again, I've been reading about adoptions and it reminds me of that. Adult relationships have some of the same issues, for instance, accepting that somebody is a real person even though they do something that you hate.
And yes, I am going on with my life, and I will still be here, although I do have to move to another apartment, but as far as I know, I'm staying in the area. Right now, unfortunately, the household herbal contamination is still the biggest problem in my life, and it's impossible to convince other people that it's real. The herbal contamination is actually an even *worse* problem than the psychotronic attacks, for me. It has to be fixed before I can do anything else.

2009-04-09T08:48:00.000-04:00

I know that the last post I wrote is a sensitive subject right now, so I wanted to mention that I talked about it for the purpose of expressing sympathy, and sadness that such a thing would happen, and also, to mention my own mental rules and advice that I have used all along to protect myself.

However, it seems that the world is extra-paranoid after an event like that happens in the news. And it's very hard to argue against paranoia when it's directed at me. Sometimes people get scary ideas in their heads and no matter how calmly and rationally you try to communicate with them, they continue to mis-perceive you.

Other times, a person communicates with you, even though they are afraid to talk to you, for their own reasons. Direct communication is the thing that I appreciate so much for resolving conflicts. I appreciate it and I am grateful, to people who have communicated with me.

******

And yes, meanwhile, my own life is going on, and I have things to do. I'm cleaning my house today to prepare it so the landlord can show it at 3:00 PM today. And I am picking up Peter from dialysis at 3:15; he is expecting me to be there, and I look forward to seeing him and getting to spend a few minutes in the car with him, since I don't get to see him often enough. (I never did get the chance to tell the story of what happened when I drove him to Altoona to get his surgery. I'll have to save that one for another day.)

The other positive thing going on in my life is: learning how to use Craigslist. It's wonderful to know that you can just put an ad someplace, asking for something, and a random person out there will respond. And real people are actually answering. Not merely to chat, but to get things done in the real world. This is an empowering feeling. I have actually met real people who are willing to help me out in the real world, in addition to a relatively new friend who I met as a customer shopping where I work - he's the person who's helping me clean the house today. Meeting real people who support you when your life is a mess - that's a great thing. That is another thing that I am grateful for.

So in spite of today being a bad day in a lot of ways, I won't be alone while I'm cleaning the house, I'll have a friend there with me who's helping out. I don't have everything that I need at this time in my life, however I am looking forward to continuing to meet more people willing to get to know me and work with me.

Jiverly Wong, full text

2009-04-08T08:06:00.000-04:00

I read the full text of Jiverly Wong's letter. He says 'undercover cop', while English-speaking TIs call them perps: perpetrators of the attacks.

I usually look for the full text of a letter when something like this happens. I also try to read the full text of letters sent by Osama bin Laden and others, and the transcripts of their speeches when they are available. The excerpts in the news articles always leave out the important parts.

It turns out that this guy was experiencing electronic harassment, stalking, and surveillance. They were making him hear music all the time (I get that too) and making him vomit (I get that, but they haven't actually made me vomit, they just make me get reflux or they make me almost throw up but not quite. They used to do it more frequently, and aren't doing it as much anymore.).

I haven't experienced the problem of somebody doing something with chemicals that make it so you can't breathe, but another TI mentioned that in her blog just before the blog suddenly started asking for a password (electronicabuse.wordpress.com) in order to be viewed. She too said something about being made unable to breathe. I don't know how to interpret this, because there are other things that can cause that to happen, and people who are being attacked will also have problems that resemble attacks, but aren't. In other words, when bad things happen, you always have to distinguish between 'naturally occurring' accidents and problems, versus attacks. I've got bad air in my apartment but I don't view it as an attack. So, I don't know what it was that they were experiencing.

There is something that happens to victims of these attacks. It starts to feel like everybody, everywhere, is one of 'them.' You don't know who they are, you don't know who is attacking you. Random people on the streets do strange things to you, or say things about you. That's another thing that I haven't had happen as much as some other bloggers that I've read. (Every once in a while I decide to do a search for mind-control- or harassment-related blogs, and there are lots of them out there. Each one's experiences and interpretations are unique, but they have a lot in common.)

I always want to tell them that it isn't everybody. Some of the people who say things are 'puppets' being forced to talk and they don't understand what they themselves are saying. I have had it happen to me. I have said things to people, but not understood the meaning of it or the significance of it until later. When it happened to me, it felt like my mind went blank and I couldn't think of anything to say, and then I felt very anxious, like I HAD to say something instead of being silent, so I blurted out the sentence that I was hearing in my head. Immediately after I said it, I saw the person's face - he looked humiliated - and I knew right away that I was being forced to insult someone, and I hadn't intended to. He never really trusted me again after that, and he tried to be friendly, but he always seemed more timid or (ugh, I hate this word) 'submissive' after that, which is something that I did NOT want to make him do. This is someone I don't see very often and I never apologized for what I said to him. He was always still friendly, but there was this feeling that he had been hurt and he didn't know if I would say something unexpectedly like that again.

So one of the most important things I can tell people is that ANYBODY can be forced to say something or do something to you. They can say things which have specific meanings that only you can interpret; they can tell you details of information that are secret things nobody else knows; and they don't even know that they are saying something important or insulting to you.

I don't know what made Jiverly Wong snap right at this particular moment, after all this time of being attacked. But his letter made it sound like he wanted to shoot some of 'them' before he died, so he shot a bunch of random strangers. This was a mistake and he retaliated against the wrong people, innocent people instead of 'them.'

I made rules for myself to follow: I assume everybody is innocent, no matter what they say and do, because I don't know the 'origin' or 'source' of their actions. I also assume that even if I knew who the attackers were, I would not retaliate. I assume that even if I'm sure that I know, I could still be wrong, or there could still be more information that I had to understand and interpret.

Jiverly Wong's experiences were typical, based on what I've seen on the websites I've looked at.

Here is the full text of his letter.

I am Jiverly Wong Shooting the people.

The first I want to say sorry I know a little English. I hope you understand all of this. Of course you need to know why I shooting? Because undercover cop gave me a lot of ass during eighteen years I got seven years and eight month delivery to grocery in the California came back New York on the August 2007.

Let talk about when I live in California. Such as…cop used 24 hours the technique of ultramodern and camera for burn the chemical in my house. For switch the channel time…For adjust the fan. For made me unbreathable. For made me vomit. For connect the music into my ear.

Undercover cop usual coined some nasty was not true about me and spread a rumour to the receiver and some people know me conduce toward many people predudiced and selfish to me…cop made me lost my job…cop put me became poor.

Let talk about when I live at the 28 Baker St. 2nd Floor, Johnson City, New York 13790. It terrible when I live there such as…cop wait until midnight when I off the light and went to the bed. Cop unlock my door and came in take a sit in my room ((cop did it thirteen time on the year 1994 )) on the thirteen time had three time touch me when I sleeping. One time stolen 20 dollar in my wallet. One time used electric gun shoot at the behind my neck. (That time I did not know English)

Please continue second page thank you.

[second page]

From 1990 to 1995 New York undercover cop try to get a car accident with me. Such as when I driving on the highway and on the street undercover cop sunddenly brake the car stop immediately at the of front my car…cop did it 32 time like that during 1990 to 1995 but I never hit the car.

Many time from 1990 to 1997 at the day time…cop exploit unknown English and went to my house knock the door for harass and domineer. Of course during that time cop coined something was not true about me and spread a rumour nasty like the California cop.

From August 2007 until now cop gave me not to much ass only one time cop leave a massage in my voice mail and said (( come back your country )) after five minute I send a text massage to them I said I will call the police and they send it back to me they said they are the police.

Dear New Ten Now. Right now I still get unemploment benefit of the company Shop Vac Endicott. New York State Department of Labor was cheat and unpaid from December 1st 2008 to December 28th 2008 I already claim weekly benefit from that date.

Any way I can not accepted my poor life. Before I cut my poor life I must oneself get a judge job for make an impartial with undercover cop by at least two people with me go to return to the dust of earth.

Already impartial now..cop bring about this shooting. cop must responsible. And you have a nice day.

the work ad

2009-04-07T10:07:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I did say yes to the person whose husband worked at Raytheon. I just had to flame them in my blog on a day when I was deathly sick. But I've decided that not all employees of military corporations are evil. I will just feel a little more paranoid than usual.

2009-04-05T23:18:00.000-04:00

yes, i'm really sick today - i'll get better. i'm in a bad mood and still can't really eat food very well.

asymmetric threats

2009-04-05T23:04:00.000-04:00

http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/psds2/

let me give an example:

"Countering today’s asymmetric threats, which can occur at any time and place..."

i can't even read that whole sentence without getting angry. 'asymmetric???' asymmetric! as in, one group of people has printing presses and infinite power, which they use to destroy the lives of helpless, ignorant people with no money and no idea what's going on... yeah, that's 'asymmetric.' one group has all the power, the other group has nothing whatsoever, i'd call that asymmetric. i can't even read sentences like that. what the hell is the word 'asymmetric' SUPPOSED to mean in a sentence like that? asymmetric, as in, we go over to iraq and kill a bunch of civilians, who, once again, can't fight back? yeah, that's pretty asymmetric too. i see lots of asymmetric things going on in the world today. many of them are being done by the very same government that claims to be my protector. and they're being done to the very people who are supposedly being protected. 'hey! i'm protecting you! that's why i'm spying on your window 24 hours a day!' when the systems exist, a sociopath will always 'hack' them somehow and use them to do things other than just 'protect.' even if there really was somebody who sincerely and innocently wanted to use the military systems to just 'protect' the citizens of the usa, some other government employee will just use his knowledge/privileges to use the system for petty, personal reasons - even if SOME of the government employees really imagine that the system exists for some honest, legitimate purpose. spying on our own civilians.

learned helplessness

2009-04-05T22:24:00.000-04:00

i was reading something and got interrupted - there has been another 'persona' talking to me all day long and they wanted me to write something.

what if fighting back was easier than we originally thought it was? what if they weren't satellites, but just something like balloons or blimps? but learned helplessness taught us never to fight back.

i had information overload and was getting traumatized and had to stop reading. it happened because... well, i have put an ad on craigslist talking about my concept of a sort of labor barter/volunteer work exchange. actually, the ad doesn't tell the whole concept, because the concept is actually larger and much more elaborate than i said in the ad. it's actually the vision of a huge off-the-books scrip/IOU grey market labor system. but i am starting with a very benign and innocent version... but in the thinking and planning i have been fantasizing about the larger grey market labor system.

how do you perform labor in a world without money, without gold, without capital, without land, without machines? i'm starting in a semi-rural area, a small town, with surrounding farms that can produce food directly. (this is all in anticipation of economic collapse, but also, the ever-worsening poverty - including my own personal poverty, not just nationwide/worldwide. the poverty gets worse slowly and surely... not all of a sudden. although, yes, lots of people have been laid off, which is pretty sudden to them.)

(wow... this is starting to sound like incoherent babbling. like i said, information overload, and too much stuff to say at one time.)

anyway, somebody answered the ad - a couple different people emailed me with questions - i answered them, but didn't get any replies to my replies - i don't know how many of my emails are being blocked, or whether those people just didn't re-reply. but the one person who re-replied was someone whose husband works for raytheon. as a person who lives every day with harassing high-tech surveillance and constant unwanted communication and remote influencing, i don't feel very trusting of places like raytheon.

so i looked on the internet and started reading about them, and it started to 'trigger' me, as they say, as in triggering memories or feelings of being traumatized.

(this reminds me, i had recently gone on a 'spontaneous' road trip, out to get something to eat for breakfast, and obeyed an impulse to drive my car to a particular gas station, and sit there to eat, and then decided to go from there to a particular road where i was going to look for the address of an intentional community that i was reading about... and i went down a nearby road to connect to where i had to go, and i 'just happened' to see somebody who looked a lot like someone i knew, working outdoors. it was plausible because i knew this person did that kind of work sometimes. but i won't say any details about this. i started crying when i saw him - or the guy who looked just like him.)

i have spent the past few years thinking about alternative designs for flying machines, because i've always wanted to fly, ever since childhood. it turns out that the military is already using some of the flying machine designs that i was thinking about - they're real. that's the page where i started triggering. i was thinking of objects sitting up in the sky and shooting lightning bolts down at us every day. i was thinking of things that might have had some more 'benign' intention behind them, but were taken over by the sociopaths and other malicious people for petty harassment of ordinary people. (there is no such thing as a 'benign' intention in this kind of situation, though.)

lightning bolt images have made me very angry sometimes. there was a picture of a gauntlet, a fist, clutching a lightning bolt. this image makes me very angry. it's a military symbol. like someone thinks they're zeus, a god, who throws lightning at whoever he wants to. i can't even explain why the image is so evil. it's arrogant. 'i am a god.'

some of the nightmares i've had show images of lightning bolts striking the cities. i saw the image from afar, and i knew that the lightning bolts were hitting people who were being harassed and attacked. 'eastern lightning' is the name of a religious cult/mafia gang in china that has been doing horrible things, and some of the descriptions sounded like electronic attack phenomena.

so that's what i started thinking of when i imagined blimps. they don't have to be satellites. satellites are hopelessly far away. what if they were closer? what if they weren't so far away after all?

sometimes, if you have learned helplessness, it actually seems scary when something happens that makes you feel LESS helpless. like what if you COULD know the identity of your attackers, for sure? what if you could prove it? what if you really could shoot down the weapons that have been shooting at you for years?

i usually have reasons for avoiding those lines of thought. 'civil disobedience' is the approach that i am taking, which means NOT shooting at things, especially when you don't have any information about them. gathering information would happen first, and it would be slow and cautious, because it's easy to jump to conclusions. people misinterpret things, jump to conclusions, blame innocent people, blaming the puppets for instance, people who don't know or don't control what they say and do. i know i've experienced it, being made to say things that i would not have said.

i had someone interrogating me last night, one of the voices, and calling it a 'background check' because of the person who had answered my craigslist ad. ever since then, all day long, i have felt the presence of another person, with different moods, attitudes, and emotions that are not my own. he was asking me how i fight the paranoia, the feelings that it could be anybody and you don't know who it is. when you don't know who your enemies are.

anyway the craigslist ad did get a couple responses, but i have yet to find out whether my email is reliable. i answered some of those responses, but, like i said, didn't get any re-replies. also, i had mailed my co-worker asking her if her finger was okay whenever she cut it really badly at work; i mentioned it to her and she said, 'did i get your email???' very puzzled, as though she hadn't gotten it. but the one re-reply that got through was the raytheon person.

(however, it still might be possible that the one guy has been ignoring my emails, but i would want to know 'why' he was ignoring them. i still don't want to assume that he didn't GET the emails, or that i didn't get his. i still have to talk about this with him, if he is willing to talk about it.)

anyway... this blog is going to seem very jumbled and incoherent. i don't think it was really my own emotion, but somebody else's.

paradigms and beliefs

2009-04-05T12:15:00.001-04:00

i'm thinking more about why i didn't believe in mold fumes for so long, when i have had bad air in here for at least three winters now. why was it that several different sources - people i knew, and articles on the internet - mentioned mold as part of indoor air pollution - and i didn't believe it?

this is the same as a doctor who doesn't believe in using some kind of alternative medicine procedure, and they want to use fda-approved drugs instead. or whatever mainstream medical treatment. they just cannot believe in the alternative viewpoint, and they will deny it and deny it for a very long time.

i guess it's partly because i had an incorrect image of how it worked. i imagined mold could only be an indoor air pollutant if it was being blown through ventilation shafts. and nobody had described exactly what it looked like, felt like, or where it was located. maybe i had to see it written as a story: 'i opened the cabinet door, and nearly puked and passed out.' stumbling, fumbling, and mumbling: that's the phrase to describe what it does to me. i trip over things, i drop whatever object i'm holding, and i have trouble talking. the mold wasn't in a vent. it was just sitting there, a big splotch on a wooden shelf. air shouldn't blow through there - but it does - because there are holes where the pipes go into the wall, and the walls are cracked and drafty.

but i'm still wondering, why don't people believe something that somebody tells them? partly because i had to experience it myself. i also was influenced by hearing voices in my head talking about it for several weeks while 'we' were trying to figure out what was going on with the fumes. during all the 'talking' about the subject, sometimes the mold theory was mentioned. it was like having discussions with other people.

there is the phenomenon of 'discredited person,' somebody you just don't believe, in general, no matter what they say. i can be viewed that way because i claim that i hear voices in my head, and therefore, everything i say must be crazy and wrong. so it seems like i would never do that to somebody else - i would never discredit them as 'not knowing anything' in a general way, because everyone else looks at me that way.

however, i can think of the people who told me about mold, and i had conflicts with those people that led me to discredit them. one was my ex-boyfriend, who mentioned mold to me several times. because of the fighting and the problems in our relationship (some of it having to do with controversial things like 'hearing voices'), i was less inclined to believe information or advice he gave me. another person was the mcdonald's store manager, who turned out to be a thief, who was stealing credit card numbers or something - i didn't get the details - who eventually got fired. the store manager had said he cleaned out the moldy sink, and it 'went in one ear and out the other' because i had no respect for him and didn't believe anything he said. but that one particular thing, he was right about - it probably was caused by the moldy sink.

when i finally changed my mind about this, it was after reading information that came from a 'trusted source,' a female who has similar chemical sensitivities and similar mind control experiences to my own. if somebody has similar experiences, i'm more likely to believe them. (by the way, doctors are noticing that chemical sensitivity seems to happen more often to females. there are theories about why that is. it isn't because 'women are all crazy.' they think it might be because women have two X chromosomes, maybe, and the gene that makes you vulnerable to chemicals could be something on the X chromosome. that's only one theory.)

i think about doctors and how stubborn and closed-minded they are, and how frustrating it is when i'm sure that i'm knowledgeable about something, but people i care about don't believe me. i can't convince my dad to buy physical gold and silver, for instance. he wants to keep all his investments in the 'imaginary world' of paper and computers and banks. we disagree about this and he probably won't change his mind until it's too late. i am the 'discredited source,' the crazy daughter who hears voices and has chronic illnesses, and therefore nothing i say could possibly be true.

doctors believe other doctors, and they believe their official authority figures like the fda, but they don't believe their patients, and they don't believe anecdotes, or people blogging on the internet. i'm saying, i'm guilty of doing exactly that same thing, but in reverse. i went for years not believing something, because i had some kind of conflict/disrespect involved with the particular people who were telling me about mold over and over again.

anyway, i'm interested in the phenomenon of 'people changing their minds about something' or 'new beliefs' and 'new interpretations.' a paradigm shift. i had one. it's important to know how to make those happen.

also, it teaches me to be patient with people who disagree with me. maybe, a few years in the future, they'll change their minds. it takes lots and lots of incidents and people telling you something, over years and years, to finally change your beliefs. i read about this in the world of advertising. there are these little popular sayings, and i don't have time to go look it up, but they try to teach you that an advertisement will be ignored the first time, then briefly glanced at the second time, etc, and how they will laugh at it, make fun of it, etc, but after seeing it twenty times, they finally agree with it.

sick day, mold, laptop is full, no photos

2009-04-05T10:44:00.000-04:00

i am having an 'i got run over by a train' day. i was sick at my stomach - again - all night long and now i have to go to work. all i've had this morning is a cup of coffee.

a lot of things in my life are falling apart, while at the same time, a lot of other things seem to be coming together in a way. i am going to be leaving this apartment, and yet, now i understand why i have had sick winters for the past several years, including the years when i lived in the apartment above this one.

i heard about mold, years ago, but for some reason, i always believed my problems were caused by something else. i didn't know that mold would actually put out huge amounts of fumes that would fill an entire apartment. it doesn't usually put out that much, except when the wind blows over it. and it turns out that this house is drafty, and wind blows through the cracks in the building, through the areas in the walls, the ceilings, and the holes where the water pipes go into the walls, and the mold is in all of those places.

i have some photos of the mold, but i haven't done anything with my photos for a long time, because it's a hassle. i have to burn them onto a CD and then get them off that cd onto my desktop computer. this is because i have windows 98, and the camera won't upload to that. it won't install the software there. so i have to use my laptop, which is deliberately kept away from the internet, forever, so that it won't get viruses and hackers. (it has windows xp. that is enough of a virus in and of itself. that laptop is the slowest, most crap-filled computer that i have ever owned.)

now the laptop's hard drive is full, and i have to figure out why. i think it might be full because i have turned on the thing where you can recover the way the whole hard drive used to be set up, if there's a problem, so it has this historical record of all the old programs and settings and all that. so anyway, i was trying to upload a test video that i made with my camera, just a little thirty-second thing, and it wouldn't upload because the hard drive was full.

i found out that you can make pictures from videos, but you have to do it on the camera itself, because i haven't found anyplace in the software where you can do it. so i wanted to use that to get pictures of myself. instead of setting the camera to automatically take a photo, while you rush to get into the right place in front of the camera, you can just put it on video (it has to be the large size, not the small size video, or it won't let you make pictures), and then choose the frames that you like. however, it doesn't catch motion very well. motion is blurry in each frame. still, it works pretty well.

but all of this has been almost impossible to do because of being sick while i'm in this apartment. now that i know what's making me sick, i feel optimistic because i can finally get away from it. it's something beyond my control - it's up in the ceiling, where the leaking water rotted out under the sink upstairs. (that's what i took pictures of, which got me started on that subject.) every time we have windy days, like the last couple days, this apartment fills with fumes. all the times when this has happened, i was sure it was my fault, like i had mixed cleaning chemicals or something.

the incident at mcdonald's i'm sure now was mold too. there was a sink in the back where we did dishes. attached to it was another sink which was always covered up, but the water always dripped into there, and it was clogged or something, because it didn't drain out. so it got filled with mold and slime, and they periodically opened the lid over the sink and cleaned it.

for a few weeks in december 2007, we were ALL getting sick during the overnight shift, and opening the windows. it wasn't just me. we had the same symptoms: tripping and falling, collapsing, weakness, feeling like we couldn't breathe, not being able to think, a sensation in your head where your brain feels numb and stupid and you can't do anything.

on the day when we all got so sick that it was intolerable, the fumes were strongest back by that sink. but we theorized, eventually, that somebody had mixed bleach and ammonia together, and that was what caused it. i could not imagine that mold would put out so much fumes. it really filled the whole building from one small moldy sink. the fumes were so strong and so toxic that even small amounts were making EVERYONE sick, not just 'chemical sensitive nicole.'

however, whenever the store manager reassured me that it was all cleaned up, he, and everyone else, was still talking about it as though it was bleach/ammonia, not mold. they cleaned out that moldy sink, he told me. nobody really insisted that it had been mold, and i might have found it hard to believe if they had. i still don't know why it's hard for me to believe that mold can make THAT MUCH fumes. however, now that i remember how it felt, it felt exactly like the sensation i have when the mold is in my apartment.

i had to leave mcdonald's, because the mold was still in the air even after they had cleaned the sink out. it lingers a long time. and i tried to communicate with them, but they wouldn't call me back. but i wasn't the only person who got very sick.

after all these years, i finally believed it this year. there was always a moldy smell from under the sink, but it didn't usually make me sick. it just smelled horrible.

i found out that if i didn't use the sink, it wouldn't drip, and the moldy smell got better. i tested it this winter during the disaster of not being able to sleep in this apartment. i didn't use the sink for several weeks. the mold smell went away. then i used the dishwasher. suddenly the smell came back.

then the day after i used that dishwasher, i opened the cabinet under the sink, and the moldy smell hit me, and suddenly i was so sick i almost collapsed and almost threw up. then i had the stumbling/uncoordination, where i can't control how my feet are walking, and i can't tell where my limbs are in 3D space, so i bump into things. so i started tripping and falling, and the same thing had happened at mcdonald's. loss of coordination, and weakness. that was when i finally believed that mold could do that.

it was helped because i also read about mold on someone else's blog, one of the other gangstalking targets (http://ongangstalking.blogspot.com/), and she said something about how mold gets worse if it's freezing and thawing. i had noticed that the mold was worst on the days when it was bitter cold, and it seemed to happen every winter, for the last few years. that helped me to start observing the mold and noticing what it did in response to weather and temperature. it got worst when it was bitter freezing cold, or humid, or breezy and drafty and the wind was blowing through the walls of the house.

it was opening that cabinet door that completely convinced me.

2009-04-04T04:15:00.000-04:00

I wish that I could express my feelings without being forced to say evil puppet things. I do not say those things voluntarily.

My long-term plan is 1. to build a shield, or locate a place that is already somewhat shielded - I am wondering if caves work for that, and 2. to get, or build, forensic equipment to find the sources of the attacks and to understand how the system works.

All of it has been based on real feelings, all this time, but the particular words, phrases, and topics that I've talked about have been forced, and probably designed to cause distrust and to destroy my reputation.

I always felt a desire for friendship, a sense of cameraderie or what I might call brotherhood, a physical attraction, protectiveness towards and from this person, enjoyment of his company, and gratitude for every conversation we've had. It is frustrating that I can't express feelings in the normal way by being with him, talking with him and learning about him.

Drugs, Contamination, Transdermal Effects, Vitamins

2009-03-30T14:37:00.000-04:00

Well, I had a Frappucino and some apple juice, and it's staying down, so it looks like I will have to go in to work today. (I haven't vomited since... I don't know, maybe 2002? But I get stomach viruses, and I stop eating as soon as I notice the symptoms. I am severely emetophobic. I think emetophobia might be associated with apnea, which I also have. When I was a little kid, I projectile-vomited, and it terrified me because I couldn't breathe. The Weston Price website said that apnea is part of a cluster of problems having to do with the mouth, jaw, and throat being the wrong size and shape, part of the developmental abnormalities that he studied. Maybe if you have a small throat that tends to get closed or blocked easily, it's more likely you'll get phobic about vomiting. Who knows.)

My experiences with synthetic vitamins were awful, and I very quickly stopped using them. This was part of the things I was doing in the past few years to try to get better, deal with the chronic fatigue, etc. For a while I was trying over-the-counter vitamin pills and herbal pills.

I ended up growing my own St. John's Wort, because the pills were very inconsistent. They differed from batch to batch, and from brand name to brand name. You are getting a completely different chemical from one brand to the next, and it might be oxidized, or not, etc.

(From growing herbs, I learned all the obscure and esoteric information that I know now: Assume all live herbs are transdermal - able to go through skin - and the essential oils are volatile, and they contaminate surfaces, and they never biodegrade, so the contamination lasts forever. This is also true if you are smoking cigarettes inside the house: all 'smoked' surfaces will be covered with active nicotine, which will go through the skin and cause you, and everybody else in the house, including nonsmokers, to experience high blood pressure. The only way to cure the transdermally-induced high blood pressure is for everybody to leave the house and wear all new clothing that has never touched tobacco or smoke.)

(On another note, I've also learned that prescription drugs go through the skin, too. And they are excreted in sweat, which contaminates clothing and surfaces, and will re-trigger drug effects, side effects, and withdrawal symptoms every time you put on the contaminated clothing, or if you touch objects that have been in places where people are handling prescription drugs - even just a piece of paper. I once visited somebody who used prescription drugs, and when I came home, my clothing triggered drug effects every time I wore it, merely because I was hugging and touching that person. Contamination phenomena and transdermal phenomena seem to be very obscure - I never found anybody else on the internet, except myself, who knows about this, in all my research. What I mean is, nobody else on the internet has written about how growing and handling herbs (and seeds) indoors - and even handling prescription drugs - is the dumbest thing you can possibly do, and it will contaminate all of your belongings. A lot of them know that some herbs are transdermal, but they never emphasized that it will contaminate everything. If you handle them, it should be in an isolated area. And even prescription meds - I think that having one prescription drug user in the house affects the whole family. And I think doctors are inadvertently 'using' a small amount of every drug that crosses their desks, every drug that touches their hands, even still inside the bottles and wrappers - and have all the effects, side effects, and withdrawals. These are all obscure and unusual theories, and I wish more people were writing about this on the net.)

(Conclusion: To do an effective drug withdrawal/detox, you must leave the area where the drugs were handled, and stay somewhere else, like a hotel, wearing fresh clothing that you just purchased, and avoid carrying any belongings with you that have been in that house. Otherwise, you experience spontaneous incidents of transdermal drug effects, or possibly hand-to-mouth ingestion of the drug, months after stopping. I think that might explain why I experienced Prozac effects many months after I quit using it. I was touching some contaminated clothing or a surface. I could not figure out where it was coming from, but the symptoms were definitely real and obvious, and I decided somebody must be force-drugging me while I slept, or putting the drugs into my water in the fridge. And that led to the incident of writing letters to that guy, and ending up in the mental hospital, and getting convicted of harassment. It might have been just contamination, now that I know what I know.)

As for the vitamins, I had bad side effects from them.

First, I remember I tried Vitamin B6 pills because I read that they could help with insomnia. I was cautious, and I broke up the pill into tiny pieces, and ate only a fragment. But shortly afterwards, my arms were shaking and trembling. Tremors are one of the things that tell me I've been exposed to some kind of poison or pesticide. I trembled with B6, so I never used it again.

Synthetic vitamin B6 is extremely dangerous. In the past, doctors were prescribing huge doses of B6 to help women with menstrual cramps. In fact, I still read that they are recommending it today, even after all that happened. They found that when you take huge doses of synthetic B6, it causes permanent, irreversible nerve damage.

In fact, I knew a woman, back when I lived on Vairo Boulevard, at the apartment building. She had uncontrollable shaking in her hands, and she had a speech impediment. She told me that it was the result of using megadoses of B6 for menstrual cramps years ago. She never healed - it was irreversible. She used to be normal before using the vitamin.

Another anecdote where I knew nothing at all about what happened, but I had my own suspicions: a young, healthy guy had some kind of a tumor, I think on his thyroid, and I suspect he might have been using some kind of nutrient supplements or something (that includes those vitamin bars, you know, the ones that taste and feel like you're eating a bar of clay?). This was someone I knew and I think he might have been using vitamins because he was doing some kind of sports training like weight lifting, though I don't remember for sure what it was that he did. I think some of those supplements can screw up the thyroid.

I had the arm tremors after eating those 'clay' bars too.

The other really weird thing was what happened when I took a fish oil pill and a synthetic vitamin E pill. That was a disaster bordering on life-threatening. I could have had a mini-stroke because of that, and I think actually I did have one. The morning after I took those two pills, my whole body was covered in bruises all over the skin. And one whole side of my body was weak. When I walked, I stumbled on the weak leg. There was probably bleeding inside the brain, but it wasn't bad enough to kill me. For some reason, one or the other of those pills caused spontaneous bleeding and bruising, or else prevented clotting. I never touched either of those pills again.

gotta go to work for real now...

Synthetic Caffeine (Vivarin), Generic Ibuprofen

2009-03-30T12:41:00.000-04:00

By the way, the first thing that convinced me that synthetic drugs might be different from the drugs in the original plants that inspired them, was when I used to use Vivarin. Something about Vivarin is so much stronger than ordinary caffeine, and so different, that even though the label says 'This contains as much caffeine as two cups of coffee,' it feels to me more like seventeen cups of coffee. I drink large amounts of coffee sometimes, and no matter how much I drink, it has no resemblance to the way I feel when I use Vivarin. Back when I was using Vivarin, I used to shatter the pill into tiny fragments, and eat only a fragment at a time.

(I don't use Vivarin anymore at all. It caused terrible drug interactions and side effects during the ephedra contamination incident, where I got several different herbal oils on many of my belongings. As in, life-threatening problems. I was using it partly because I have chronic fatigue. The chronic fatigue was partly caused by St. John's Wort, which causes sleepiness, but also, it was environmental illness caused by something in this house - the mold, which has been here for several years now. For a long time, I knew about black mold, but it was only in the past few months that I started to think mold might be causing my health problems. I didn't believe it was able to put so much of a fume into the air. So anyway, the tiredness from the mold is one reason I was using Vivarin.)

I also notice that I can't use the name brand ibuprofen pills - I wake up with my arms trembling the next morning - I get the shakes. The name brand version also gives me a really weird feeling in my head. But I can tolerate the generic version of ibuprofen. There is something different about those two pills, but I don't know what it is.

It could be reagents in excess, or it could be isomers. Isomers are different versions of the same molecule, sometimes a mirror image of a molecule that does something different when it gets in the body. I don't know what causes it with ibuprofen.

Reagent In Excess Contaminating Synthetic Vitamins?

2009-03-30T12:13:00.001-04:00

Okay, Blogger isn't that bad, really. It doesn't suck. I wouldn't normally say blogger sucks - that's not the kind of thing I say.

"So vitamin A may be synthesized from acetone, and vitamin C from keto acid. " (http://www.madehow.com/Volume-3/Vitamin.html)

have you ever heard of a 'limiting reagent' in chemistry class?

when you mix chemicals together, ONE of the chemicals will get completely used up. that is the limiting reagent.

in the chemical reaction, the chemicals bond with each other in a certain ratio, like two hydrogen molecules for every one oxygen molecule.

but since you can't count out the EXACT number of molecules you need, there will always be a few unreacted molecules of something left over. you won't ever start with exactly 200 hydrogen molecules for every 100 oxygen molecules. you'd more likely have 250 hydrogens and 103 oxygens, or something. in that case, all the oxygens would get used up, and there would be hydrogen left over.

i've been reading about the hazards of synthetic vitamins. a lot of the arguments talk about things that i think are IRRELEVANT. they argue about whether or not the digestive system is able to absorb artificial vitamins as well as it can absorb natural ones. i don't care if you can absorb them or not. i want to know what they do to you AFTER THEY GET ABSORBED. i also want to know if they're identical to natural ones, and also, i want to know if synthetic vitamins DON'T HAVE anything new and different that shouldn't be there. such as... unused chemical reagents.

if you have a complex chemical reaction with a whole bunch of different reagents, not just two (like hydrogen and oxygen), then you might use up the limiting reagent, and then have six or seven things left, which might partially combine with each other to form new compounds which then contaminate the final result. or you might have some original reagents that haven't reacted at all. (okay, i found it: it's called the 'reagent in excess.')

so if artificial vitamin A is synthesized from acetone, you could be eating leftover acetone when you eat synthetic vitamin A. vitamin A is said to be one of the more dangerous synthetic vitamins. now, i don't know if acetone would evaporate - i seem to recall that it's volatile and it becomes a gas or vapor - i don't know enough about it to be sure if it could remain in the final product. but even if it wasn't acetone, there could still be SOMETHING left, and you won't know what it is.

the MOST DANGEROUS reagent ought to be the limiting reagent. the safest reagents ought to become the remaining contaminants. you also have to check that they're not reacting with each other to form something you don't want.

but i wouldn't bother with that - i would just argue that you should avoid synthetic vitamins.

i wish i could find the article that i read which said that nasal allergies - sneezing, runny nose - were triggered by using synthetic vitamins. i used to eat breakfast cereal, and i don't anymore. the cereals are all full of synthetic vitamins. i recently (within the past two years or so) bought a box of breakfast cereal and ate it over a couple of weeks, and immediately i started having a runny nose and sneezing and allergies. they went away right after i finished the box of breakfast cereal.

i've also been reading that synthetic vitamins are associated with autism. i don't know the details: for instance, a healthy adult isn't going to suddenly become autistic by using them, but maybe a pregnant mother increases the chance of having an autistic child if she is using synthetic vitamins.

this is part of the 'placebo effect is a myth' blog that i haven't written yet, but... superstitious beliefs are necessary and helpful. it's okay to have some superstitious beliefs. why do i say that? because superstitions are a 'work in progress' as people struggle to understand a phenomenon they observe. you see something, you don't know HOW it happens, and you try to do something about it.

if you notice that you vaccinated your child, the child developed a high fever afterwards and was screaming for three days, and never spoke another word to you again, and developed lifelong autism, you can't explain HOW the vaccine caused the autism. and a thousand articles proving that 'thimerosal has nothing to do with autism' are useless to you, because you still saw that SOMETHING HAPPENED when you vaccinated your child. maybe it wasn't the thimerosal, maybe it was something else.

if you see something happen, and it seems to be caused by one thing, you don't always know the exact details of what caused it. maybe you cured a wart on your hand by going out in the woods, and saying a prayer while the moon was full. so you do that again, and it cures another wart, and you start telling everybody this is a good wart cure.

but it turns out that actually, the place where you sat in the woods is full of some herb that cures warts, and you didn't know that you were sitting in a field of this medicinal plant and it's the reason. you can effectively cure warts by going there, but it has nothing to do with the moon or the prayer, and yet, you can still cure the wart by doing those (harmless but irrelevant) actions over and over again, as long as you do it exactly the same way you did it the first time, in the same location. if a superstition is harmless, don't worry about it. sometimes it's connected with a real cure, but just misinterpreted somehow.

vaccines, and synthetic vitamins, might be like that. i don't know the exact details of HOW they harm the body, but a lot of people are observing that they do. if you can't explain how it works, then people accuse you of falling for the placebo effect.

but what else was the cause of this problem... you vaccinated your child, and he/she never functioned normally again afterwards? starting right in that moment? functioning perfectly well up until that day, and then afterwards, obviously sick and autistic?

(sorry, i'm in a bad mood: i've been sick all night and couldn't eat anything. this is why i'm obsessed with nutrition and sickness right now.)

anyway, ALL 'SCIENTIFIC' OBSERVATIONS begin with one person using their eyes and their senses to observe and experience something - even if it's the 'scientist' reading the numbers on an electronic screen after testing something. he still has to trust his eyes to read the numbers correctly, and still has to trust his brain to interpret them.

so why are the scientist's eyes better than my own? if i see something, why is MY observation 'the placebo effect?' i see that something makes me sick - that's a 'scientific test.' i do the 'test' (eat the particular food in question, such as fruit juice) and i notice that after a day of drinking a bunch of fruit juice, i can't sleep well, i can't sit still, i can't relax. (that happened when i drank a whole bunch of serving-size boxes of lemonade that all had 100% vitamin C in them. i had insomnia for several days, and i also got a rash all over my whole body. i think it was a vitamin C overdose that one time.)

couldn't i say that the scientist experienced 'the placebo effect' whenever his eyes read the numbers on the scientific instrument that he was using? he only BELIEVED he was reading those numbers. in fact, it could have been a 'group delusion,' where a whole room full of scientists mistakenly believed they were reading a particular number on their scientific instruments being used to do some test.

the placebo effect is a myth. i still want to write about it sometime.

i have to get ready for work today and this is supposed to be my day off, and i haven't eaten anything, and i am in a very bad mood.

Blogger is giving me some crap about the number of characters in my labels

2009-03-30T11:45:00.003-04:00

i don't remember that ever happening before. i tried to put tags on that blog and it wanted me to stop at 200 characters. i posted it, then had to edit a typo, and when i re-posted it, it gave me that message again, even though i had fixed the labels the first time. so i had to re-fix the number of characters in the labels.

wordpress doesn't care how many tags you put on.

grr.

Donating Plasma Might Permanently Damage Your Digestive System

2009-03-30T11:36:00.001-04:00

I was reading about how vaccinations can lead to permanent infections in the gastrointestinal tract. These infections were shown to be the same strain of viruses that were in the vaccines. The body could not fight off the 'weakened' or 'killed' viruses in the vaccines, and instead, the viruses were alive and well, but ended up permanently infecting the intestines and negatively affecting how people absorb food, for a very long time, possibly the rest of their lives.

Well, while reading, I remembered something that was similar to this, but not the same. When I sold plasma, many years ago... (oh my gosh, I just remembered something else. Holy crap.)

I lived in a house with several roommates. I learned about selling plasma when one of my roommates told me he was doing it. (I am still in shock from what I just remembered. This is very, very serious.) I decided that I would try selling plasma too.

Well, I stopped doing it after an incident where they had trouble putting the needle into the right place because of my 'small veins,' and they injected the blood cells into the muscle of my arm instead of the vein. But I was glad that I stopped, because I realized I was having health problems while donating the plasma.

First, I had the ordinary and well-known problem of dizziness and faintness. I almost passed out when I went to work one day. But I also began having severe sensations of burning in my stomach, and was becoming nauseated and sick every day. I had never had stomach ulcers before, but this felt like stomach ulcers.

When I stopped donating plasma, the 'ulcers' feeling went away and the nausea did too.

Here is the thing I suddenly remembered while typing this blog. I remembered that my roommate, the one who sold his plasma, ALSO HAD severe stomach problems. He was a very picky eater, and he told me that he would vomit if he ate meat, and he became a vegetarian. I don't know how long he had been having that problem, and I'm very tempted to say that it was caused by donating plasma. However, he might have been that way before he ever donated. I didn't think to ask him about it, because back then, I didn't have this theory, and it wasn't important to me.

I don't know HOW you damage your stomach by donating plasma. It could be that you weaken your immune system, causing the stomach to become more vulnerable to infections with helicobacter pylori. Or it could do this in some other indirect way, maybe by reducing the amount of acid in your stomach. In my experience, every time I've taken an antacid pill, I quickly developed sensations of sharp, burning pain in my stomach afterwards, as though I was getting an ulcer. You should never try to reduce the amount of acid in your stomach, because acid protects you against infection with helicobacter pylori.

So again, I don't know how it happened, but I think I had stomach ulcers while donating plasma, and I remembered that my roommate also had severe and unusual intolerance to certain foods, and would vomit immediately after eating them. He told me it was meat. A year or two after donating plasma, that was when I developed the extremely severe and long-lasting digestive problem that made me unable to eat because I felt like I would vomit. It was mostly with fatty foods, or foods that had been cooked and reheated, or held on heat for too long.

I'm starting to think that any procedure that injects anything into your bloodstream is potentially able to cause long-term damage, and for some reason, it seems to target the digestive system. I could change my interpretation later on when I learn more. So, this includes all intravenous procedures: reinjection of blood cells and saline solution after plasma donation, dialysis, vaccinations, and all other intravenous injections of anything, including plain saline solution or sugars.

I would like to know more about this so that I can interpret it more clearly.

I told her(2) that she(1) told me that he said...

2009-03-28T14:13:00.000-04:00

I am asking a second person to help with the note delivery.

There is this feeling of nostalgic, idealized fantasy around this 'lost' person. When you meet someone, barely get to know them (in reality) at all, and then suddenly lose them, you get this image of what kind of person they were, and have feelings about stuff connected to them. But it's all based on vague impressions and fantasy. I remember I've had this happen before. Everything about the lost person seems more important and nothing is taken for granted. (Of course, I do have some limited, but real, info from the disappearing blog.)

I don't read this author anymore, but, when I was in high school, I picked up a book by Ann Tyler, called Breathing Lessons. I ended up reading all of her books. They make me feel depressed nowadays and I haven't read them in a very long time. The books make me feel like 'Everything is hopeless, and there's no escape, so you'd better just settle down and get used to it.'

But I wrote a research paper in high school about how she had a 'lost character' in almost every one of her books, with almost no exceptions. It was somebody who disappeared early on in the story before you got to know them. It affected all of the characters and shaped the whole plot of the story. So if you read Ann Tyler, you know that some very important character will disappear early in the book, or else they already did before the book began, and it affects everything, and the characters feel this loss.

The lost character gets this idealized fantasy and feeling of nostalgia where everything about the lost person seems wonderful, amazing, and important. In day to day life, people don't get exaggerated quite that much when you get to know them and see them all the time. It's kind of like saying we 'take people for granted' in real relationships. But, it's possible to have real relationships with people, get to know them, see them all the time, but still not end up taking them for granted. I don't want people to think that all relationships end up inevitably having somebody take someone for granted, because it doesn't have to be that way.

I'm able to tolerate watching sports on TV, and I actually am getting into it (that's on the rare occasions when I am near a TV and somebody else has it on sports), because of this person, and I never did that before. I think to myself, so-and-so would have liked this, so I'll pay attention. I was always anti-sports (unless it was a sport that I had done myself, or could imagine myself doing, like ice skating, dancing, or skiing... actually, maybe I don't mind sports that much after all). I mean other sports that I didn't watch in the past. Maybe I wasn't into team sports, and I just liked solitary things done by only one person.

Well, anyway, the handwritten note delivery system is getting a new helper, or at least, I've asked and am waiting for her to reply.

today

2009-03-26T21:02:00.000-04:00

i started reading choke, at barnes & noble, because it was actually there this time. when i went looking for it before, that book was missing. i looked at one of the other ones instead, invisible monsters, and i didn't like it because i couldn't stand the characters and couldn't get into it. but i was okay with choke and i read the first couple chapters before i left. it was more mellow than invisible monsters. after i get used to his writing style and get to 'trust' him i could probably go back and read invisible monsters some time in the future. i was enjoying choke. i just didn't stay to read the entire book. (when the air was so bad that i couldn't stay in my apartment two years ago, i spent a LOT of time at b&n, and i read the entire lemony snicket series of unfortunate events books.)

i went to b&n because i had to get out of the house, because it was a bad air day. (i didn't intend that pun until after it was written.) i told joe that the air was bad again, and he decided to fix it immediately. he actually came in and broke apart the shelf with a pair of plier-like things. the wood was weak and soft because it was just particle board. i took a photograph of the mold. he argued that 'the mold was from a long time ago' and it was 'all dried out by now.' i have argued that i've actually SEEN water dripping down onto the mold, recently, and i've seen the mold covered in a pool of water, and that's how it was when i opened the cabinet and nearly puked/passed out from the fumes and the smell.

he also removed a ceiling tile. the irony of the ceiling tile problem is: it didn't even occur to me that the ceiling tile could be moldy; but actually, that ceiling tile was stained brown because there is a sink above it, and a couple years ago, i used to live in that apartment above, and i complained to the landlord that the sink was leaking underneath, up in THAT apartment, and it was staining the wood in the cabinet with mold the same way this one was! but when i complained, he didn't do anything about it. he put some kind of wallpaper-like covering over top of it, instead of removing and replacing the wood. at least, that's what i remember. i would have to go look and see if my memory's correct, i think he put down a sheet of wallpaper or something. i could be mistaken. but i remember, he wasn't willing to remove it.

and now that i'm down below, i saw that it leaked through the floor and into the ceiling tile of this apartment - but it was recent, because the tile was fine when i first moved in. i noticed the stain appeared later on, and i never paid any attention to it, and wasn't thinking 'gee, that could be moldy too.' but HE thought of it, and he removed and replaced the ceiling tile. so i took a photo of that ceiling. he removed the tile, but the ceiling/floor above is still rotten and has cracks and a hole through it from above where the water soaked through from that sink. so i'm somewhat concerned that the actual floor, the big cracked area, might still be moldy, in a way that is huge and impossible and expensive to repair.

so i'm assuming that this is why he wants me to get out: he says that for whatever reason, everybody else can tolerate this, but i'm the only one who can't. he doesn't want to have to fix something so big and expensive, because yeah, it goes all the way through the floor above, and it is a really bad bunch of cracks and holes from water, and it HAS to be moldy.

and i wasn't even the one living in that apartment when the sink leaked badly enough to go all the way through the floor and into my ceiling. it was other people who made that sink leak THAT badly. so i can't say 'i did something wrong that made it leak.' i was thinking, maybe it's because i used a portable dishwasher, but, like i said, the ceiling tile got stained like that AFTER i was living DOWN HERE for a while, and it was other people living in the place above me. when i lived above, i had seen it staining the inside of the cabinet - just like the one in my kitchen now - but it hadn't gone all the way through, and when i moved down here, the ceiling tile was still white and wasn't all stained.

it bothers me when people give me a long list of every mistake and every misinterpretation i've ever made, long after i've changed my mind about that thing. joe listed every disaster that i've ever had while i lived here, and the conclusion was: you're crazy, something's wrong with you, you imagine problems that aren't there, and i can't deal with this anymore. meanwhile, a lot of the stuff he listed, i've long since changed my mind about. i no longer interpret some of the things the way he described them, because he still remembers my old interpretations, whereas i've learned a lot more since then.

the one example was that i complained to him, when i lived upstairs, that the downstairs guy was turning on the hot water every time i took a shower. i forgot all about that until he mentioned it. that was BEFORE i started getting attacked with radio frequency weapons. i had never HEARD of such things, had never read of such things, and i wasn't going around on the internet reading everyone else's experiences and 'getting ideas' about 'what could possibly happen.' it was all new and unexpected to me. i really was getting in the shower and then a minute later, i would hear the sound of the water running in the other apartment below, and feel the water pressure drop, and i would lose my hot water. i would actually hear the sound of it. i recognized the difference between a normal shower, versus a shower where somebody else starts running the water while you're in there, because i can hear the sound and feel the pressure drop. and it would drop A LOT, because that place had low pressure to begin with. as in, it was a major big deal if somebody messed around with the water pressure while i was in there, because it would come out as barely a trickle.

and i was trying to complain about it, and this was happening at the same time that the person was sending me emails with photographs of other women who looked exactly like me.

anyway, joe brought that up again, mentioning that 'i remember dan, he was a really nice guy, he would never do anything like that.' (turning on the water while i was in the shower.) well, there's where joe still remembers my OLD interpretation, and doesn't know that i've changed my mind since then. i used to believe that maybe dan was doing something maliciously, on purpose, to harass me, and that was my old interpretation. but i've decided that maybe dan really was a 'nice guy,' and he simply DIDN'T KNOW WHAT HE WAS DOING.

there are two ways this can happen: 1. somebody completely blanks out and goes unconscious, and is forced to do something which they have no memory of later on - it's completely forgotten - that's only 'theoretical' to me because i don't know if i experience that (and if i did, how would i know?), or 2. somebody remains awake, is aware of what they're doing, remembers it, but has some rationale for why they had to turn the water on at that particular moment, and thinks it was a normal thing to do, and of course, wasn't intending to cause harassment, and wasn't intending to mess up my shower and take all the water away, and is sincerely innocent, because they were forced to do it.

for whatever reason, i'm not inclined to believe that people are being paid money to harass other people - i think the majority of them are puppets, and only a few are getting paid. yes, i could be wrong about that, but that is how i usually interpret things. i have to mention that i've read other people's blogs and they experience a lot more harassment than i do involving people who do things which are openly hostile and visible, such as walking past you, staring directly in your eyes in a threatening way, bumping into you, walking all the way across an empty street to get right next to you and bump you whenever there's plenty of room, etc. that stuff hasn't happened to me.

(although, in the beginning, i had people driving their cars into the oncoming lane straight towards me on a two-lane no-passing zone road, several times. and another TI mentioned that he himself had been forced to lose control of his driving and go the wrong way on a one-way street directly into traffic. it sounds too awful to believe, but i believe it. and while that hasn't happened to me - and i don't want it to happen - i do recall that i was 'getting lost' really badly, going the exact opposite of where i wanted to go, and not just once, but over and over and over again, in spite of my looking at a map, and i felt confused and disoriented, and when i tried looking at the map, i got zapped really badly and my attention shifted every time i looked at it. so yeah, i think that people are forced to lose control and to go into the opposing lane of traffic, without intending to.)

but i usually interpret my own harassment as 'puppets' because i found out that you can control people without implanting any chips in them. chips aren't needed. so if you can control a person remotely, with no implants, then you can control any random person at any time, a normal person who doesn't call themselves a 'targeted individual' or doesn't interpret themselves as being under 'mind control.' and i've experienced the puppet phenomenon myself. i've said cruel and insulting things to people that "I" would never have chosen to say, on 'random impulse,' and then regretted it immediately when i saw the look on their face, and i could see that it was an out-of-character thing for me to say. or i've told people things about themselves, as though i knew 'secret information' about them, when in fact i had no understanding of the significance of what i was saying, or how they would hear it, or what it would mean to them - it's usually rationalized as 'i was just joking' or 'i was talking about something else, not that.' and the comments usually have a certain theme or style to them which is consistent and recognizable.

well, anyway... the landlord brought up the old interpretation: 'dan was a malicious guy deliberately turning on the water so that i had no water pressure upstairs,' and then explaining how ridiculous that was. and i've changed my mind about that since then, but he hasn't kept up with all the things i've gradually learned and reinterpreted and the things i've experienced. and he was using that example to argue that all of my beliefs and experiences were wrong and insane and impossible.

then he suggested that i call my mom and discuss it with her. i did, later on. her advice was that i should see a psychiatrist and do trial-and-error with some other new drugs that i haven't tried before. i tried prozac and decided never to use psychiatric prescription drugs ever again. i'm using one of the most well-known herbal antidepressants, st. john's wort, that everybody descibes as 'very mild' and 'well tolerated by most people,' yet i still have to use a very miniscule dosage of that, or i have problems. and i can get that FOR FREE instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a prescription. i paid a trivial amount of money to buy the seeds to grow in my pot; and then, later on, i learned to identify the wild-growing varieties, which i can find pretty easily now. the only argument that i have AGAINST sjw is that it has some unwanted side effects: it changes the way your body metabolizes other chemicals, and it can cause you to sleep too much. (usually, when that happens, i wake up feeling refreshed and glad to have slept a lot.)

i talked with mom a long time and she was using the phrase 'chemical imbalance' to describe what's wrong with my delusional brain. you have a chemical imbalance that causes you to believe stuff is happening, when it isn't really happening. when i hear the phrase 'chemical imbalance' i have to just change those words into meaningless noise. we have meaningless words, 'bzzzt bzzzt.' you have a bzzt bzzzt in your brain that causes you to bzzzt bzzzt. it's like Mad Libs. fill in the blank with any noun/verb you want. you have a zebra in your brain that causes you to ballet dance. the words 'chemical imbalance' don't mean anything.

i grew up with a dad who was a radiologist, and a mom who used to be a nurse. (yes, they met while they were in medical school.) my mom worked in a mental hospital for a while. so she knows all about those phrases and concepts like 'delusional' and 'chemical imbalance.' and they believe in 'the placebo effect.' (i've kept promising that someday i was going to write a blog about how the entire IDEA of 'the placebo effect' is totally wrong, a superstition, and i haven't gotten around to writing it. the placebo effect belief system is almost completely wrong all the way to the core - it doesn't exist. there is no such thing as the placebo effect. there IS something that happens in reality, but it's totally different - it's a completely different phenomenon - than the way that people USUALLY use that phrase. usually it means, 'you're experiencing the placebo effect; therefore, all you need to do is talk yourself out of it, convince yourself it's not real, and the problem will magically go away! yippee! you're cured of your hypochondria!' if only it were that easy. i can't start talking about it, or i'll write that really long paragraph in parentheses, and i won't know how to end the parentheses and start a new paragraph so it will be readable, and i'll have to write multiple paragraphs with a new set of parentheses around them. it's a whole huge subject of its own.)

anyway, she threw all of the typical things at me, the stuff that i can go read on the 'official government-sanctioned websites' about 'delusions.' you have to get them on the right medications, which may take some trial and error, and it's hard work, and it won't happen overnight, blah blah, but eventually with the right medications, you can be cured. (and, please note, we were merely discussing the rather mundane problem of 'something in the house is making me sick.' we weren't even discussing anything all that controversial! i wasn't talking about 'hearing voices' or anything else which is usually considered delusional. yet just because i insisted 'something is making me sick,' she decided i was delusional, that i had 'convinced myself' that this or that was making me sick, when it really wasn't. so, i guess she believes nothing is wrong with me at all, and that if only i talked myself out of it, i could magically convince myself to leap out of bed, healthy and full of energy, able to do whatever i want, if only i can out-argue my 'delusional belief system' by using logic.)

it was inevitable: she also had to bring up the 'you're reading stuff on the internet instead of reading reliable sources' argument. i told her that yes, i DO get my information from the internet, and i'm PROUD of that. i told her that i get anecdotes from other people who experience similar things to what i'm experiencing. i told her that i also go to 'official' websites where scientific studies have been done, and the studies directly contradict each other and can't agree on things. one official scientific study says one thing, and another official scientific study says the exact opposite, and they're both on the same official, scientific websites. (vaccines don't cause autism VERSUS vaccines DO cause autism.)

i go to a lot of different websites for my research, and i've been using the internet for research for quite a few years now, and it helped me think of theories and possibilities far beyond anything that a doctor would tell you. doctors don't even bother to ask you 'what are you eating?' whenever you go to them complaining that your stomach is so sick that you can't swallow anything and you're starving to death for six months. (that happened to me in 1999 when the chronic illnesses began. NOBODY bothered to ask: what are you eating? not one! i went to a couple different doctors telling them i had a stomach problem! NOT ONE of them made me write a list of everything i was eating and drinking! i eventually started the feingold diet, and removed a few things i had been eating, and my stomach got much better very quickly, without drugs - without Prilosec. Prilosec was the first response to 'i have a stomach problem...' 'okay, try some prilosec.')

i told her that i might have been more open to the idea of prescription drugs, except that the very first one i ever tried was prozac, and it was so horrible that i went and read about psychiatric drugs afterwards, and i learned that yes, they cause impotence/anorgasmia, and yes, they cause suicide and homicide, and shooting into groups of strangers at the mall or at a school, and jumping out of a moving car, and the voices in your head get CLEARER instead of going away! when i was on prozac, i could clearly hear every word the voices were saying! usually, i hear static and noise, like a badly tuned radio, and the voices are quiet, like the volume is turned down low. on prozac, the volume was turned up and the tuning was perfect. the voices had perfect audio quality when i was on prozac. so i am not going to believe anybody who tells me that drugs will make the voices and the delusions get cured. and nobody is going to convince me that the drugs are 'safe' if only you 'find the right one' at the 'right dosage' after some 'trial and error.' after what i experienced, i hear the phrase 'trial and error' and i think, 'yeah, you can change the dosage of the drugs AFTER they go into the mall and shoot ten people and then shoot themselves. that's trial and error.'

in health class, back in school, we learned about illegal drugs. we were warned about drugs like PCP, for instance. they said that PCP was so horrible, it made people think they could fly, and they would jump out of windows thinking they wouldn't get hurt. and it made them extremely strong, so that when they fought and struggled, they could hurt people really badly. my experience of prozac was about like that. i knew immediately that it was very dangerous and very wrong, and i had enough common sense to stop using it. but some people lose control too quickly, and they don't even get the chance to say, 'gee, something's wrong with me, it must be this drug!' they don't get enough of a chance to realize that, and by then, it's too late, they've gone out and killed a bunch of people. i haven't ever used PCP, and i haven't used all the different types of legal, prescription, psychiatric drugs that exist, but i would say that they do something similar to PCP, which is illegal. they make you feel so strong, and so numb, that you have no fear, and you don't care about anything or anybody, and you have no emotions, and nothing matters to you, but at the same time, you have endless energy and can do whatever you want, and also, you're so uncomfortable that you can't sit still, and you have to do something. they call that 'akathisia,' if i'm spelling that correctly.

so i am not going to play around with the 'trial and error' method of finding out which drug doesn't make me anorgasmic and which drug doesn't make me go out and kill people. if i do trial and error with anything, i don't mind the process of using trial and error to figure out which environmental chemicals are making me sick, or which foods are better or worse for me. that type of trial and error is much safer.

(today, at barnes & noble, something made me happy. there was a highly visible book, displayed on the shelf with other books about ADHD and autism, and i forget what the name was, i think it was called 'healthy eating for autism' or 'eating right with autism' or something, it was a white book with a boy on the front, and some fruits and vegetables below him - it was relatively non-technical sounding. i picked it up, just out of curiosity, and it turned out that i thought it was a really great book, and i agreed with it. it was very well-written and the doctor mentioned all of the things that i just described, where NOBODY asks you the question 'what are you eating?' and doesn't connect anything to nutrition or foods at all - it's unthinkable to imagine that foods can affect what your brain is doing.)

i talked to her about something which i've been thinking lately. actually, i've known about this for a long time. the idea is: lots and lots of people experience chronic fatigue, except that usually, they don't have the words to describe it, and they don't call it 'chronic fatigue.' or 'chemical sensitivity.' they think that they way they feel is normal. i said, this is what's going on whenever somebody sits in front of the television for ten hours a day. somebody else might look at them, and say 'you watch too much tv. that's bad for you. you have TV addiction!' they might think the person is addicted to watching tv. well, maybe you can be addicted to it, i agree, to some extent. but when somebody is watching ten hours a day, and doing nothing but that, THEY *PROBABLY* HAVE CHRONIC FATIGUE. they just don't know the words to describe it. whenever you feel healthy, alert, and energetic, you get a natural desire to do something else besides sit on a couch all day long. if you sit on the couch all day long, it's probably because you're physically sick, but you don't know it.

i said this also applies to extreme alcoholics. everyone thinks that the alcohol is causing that person's health problems. but when somebody is a severe alcoholic, and all they do is drink alcohol, all day every day, and they don't even eat food, they just get all their calories from alcohol, and they sit around at home all day sleeping or passed out - everyone will look at them and blame the alcohol for it, and not go any further than that. however, if that person STOPPED using the alcohol, they would notice, 'gee, without alcohol, i feel tired and miserable ALL THE TIME. i must be... addicted to alcohol!' but no, they have a chronic illness of some kind. something causing chronic fatigue, or constant pain, or chronic stomach sickness. it's a pain and discomfort that they are trying to treat by using alcohol. the alcohol makes them feel better, because SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THEIR HEALTH TO BEGIN WITH. nobody goes that far into the troubleshooting. i'm not referring to social drinkers and i'm not saying that everybody who drinks alcohol has a chronic illness. i'm referring to the people who are obviously severe alcoholics, and drink all day every day, alone, at home, and aren't even eating much food.

so i was telling her: other people have chronic illnesses too, and it's something vague that they don't know how to describe. other 'normal' people don't use the words 'chronic fatigue' and 'chemical sensitivity' to describe what they're experiencing. they don't diagnose it at all, and many of them don't even realize that it isn't normal to sit for ten hours a day in front of the tv set. so i was trying to explain to her that it isn't unusual or rare or extreme what i am experiencing. it's just that people either don't talk about it, or don't use the same words.

well... that was the day. nothing got decided for sure yet... the under-sink shelf got ripped out and i took a couple photographs.

i don't necessarily WANT to stay in this apartment forever - in fact, i want to go someplace better in the long run, and i am gradually forming plans and thinking of my preferences. but buying a piece of land is a huge decision and i am not hurrying. it may be a very long time before i choose a place and own it myself, permanently, or join a community if that's what i decide to do. i am not staying here forever, but also, it's not easy to just move out of here right this instant, especially when i'm sick and everything takes forever to do. so the decision hasn't been settled... and if i do move out, i will have to live in another temporary type of place, some other apartment. and i'm concerned that the environmental illness could be just as bad in the new place, and i don't know what to expect. i'm going to assume that yes, i have to leave, but i'm not actually DOING anything about it just yet. and i'll see if i feel better with the moldy shelf removed, and the ceiling tile.

Betta goes to new home

2009-03-26T13:31:00.000-04:00

The fish went to his new caretaker today. I went out a little before 1:00 to meet her at the place we had planned, a little convenience store. I recognized her car right away as I pulled up, and I made eye contact with her and smiled.

I had put him back into the original container that Peter had given to me. It was the small plastic container with a hole in the top, the kind they're in when you buy them at the store. When I poured him into it, he was scared and he started swimming quickly around in circles with agitation. It seemed like he could see his reflection faintly in the plastic edges and he wasn't sure if it was another fish. Plus, he was being moved and sloshed around.

I started crying and I said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" again and again. But I can't be the one to keep him, because I really don't want a betta fish, or any fish at all, unless I can keep them someplace where they are almost self-reliant, like an outdoor pool where cold-tolerant fish could eat insects that landed in the water. Not tropical fish that would die in a few minutes from the Pennsylvania winter. (Hmm, question, how do fish get oxygen whenever their ponds freeze over? I guess ponds usually have some streams flowing into them, so certain areas would have fresh water that was always moving.)

So I set his bowl on top of my dumpster-salvaged cardboard boxes, and grabbed it every time I stopped at a stop light, because it slid forward and almost hit the dashboard. He had to be traumatized by yet another car trip, with all the noise and vibrating and splashing around. It's kind of funny and sad at the same time.

When I got out of the car, she got out of her car, and we said hi and I showed him to her. She looked at him and we talked about how his fins had some kind of fin rot or fungus. She said she was going to Petco to find out what kind of medicine they might recommend. I told her that I trusted her judgment, and she could do whatever she thought was appropriate to treat him. I gave her my frozen brine shrimp.

I mentioned to her, actually twice, that I had started crying whenever I was getting him ready to leave. This was something instinctive and automatic that I did, unconsciously, without thinking. I noticed her reactions when I said I had been crying. Was she thinking, "Oh please. You can't be crying over a fish."? I wanted to make sure that she was sympathetic enough to understand that the fish is a living creature with feelings, and we don't just carelessly give them away to someone without a thought about their welfare. Was she going to be callous to the fish and just dump it from one bowl to another without worrying that it could get hurt? Would she just put it into another really small betta vase and not bother to feed it or clean the bowl? Would she do a "Finding Nemo" Darla impression and shake it around and say "WAKE UP FISHY! WAKE UP!!!"

So I decided that she was relatively understanding, although there was a small amount of "ridiculous to cry over a fish," just a tiny bit, that I wasn't sure of. She was calm and behaved normally - I could tell there probably wouldn't be any "WAKE UP FISHYYYY!" incidents. Nothing that bad.

So, I wasn't looking for perfection - I decided this would be good enough, and I gave him away.

I think that she might not do every single thing that I wish someone would do, but at the same time, he will have a clean bowl and he will be fed and kept warm.

She said she'd email me in a month or so to let me know how he's doing, if his fins are getting better, if he's still alive, etc. If she forgets, I could email her. But I do feel better, because now he's being taken care of by somebody who actually WANTS a betta fish.

Very long and negative blog... Mind control, SJW, other unpleasant subjects

2009-03-25T21:06:00.000-04:00

Well, this is going to be a very long entry. I know it's not easy to read the very long entries, and they're something I put up mainly to make myself feel better. People can just skim through and get a general idea. I write because I am soothed by the activity of typing on a computer. That's different from when I'm writing intentionally for some purpose or for some particular audience.

Yesterday afternoon I visited my outdoor pot of St. John's Wort - it was actually AFTER I wrote all the blog entries earlier in the day. The plant was brown and dried out, but I was able to inhale a small amount by just breathing near it. I have found that I'm able to get a useful dosage from very small amounts of the vapor that the plant emits.

I felt that it was necessary to use it because I have to deal with something bad that is going on. It makes me more able to focus mentally and more able to do certain kinds of work, anything challenging or unusual or non-routine. But it turns me into a puppet, so that I write word-for-word things that I am being forced to say.

The thing going on is that my landlord doesn't want me to renew my lease, because of how I had to have the windows open in the middle of winter. He told me that he is tired of having one disaster after another, every year, having to do with me, and it's always something new and unexpected. He wants my lease to just expire, but he's not just evicting me right this instant. So the lease expires in July, I think it is, but also, I have to get the apartment ready to show to people much earlier than that.

I found out a couple weeks ago that there is mold on a wooden shelf under the sink, and whenever I use the sink at all, the mold somehow gets wet and starts to smell. And yes, it is BLACK mold. So I ended up showing it to my landlord and we tried to figure out how the water was dripping onto the mold. It might be preventable, based on what we saw. However, he's not convinced that just getting rid of the moldy shelf will be enough to prevent another unforeseen disaster of some kind, and he is sick of dealing with my disasters.

I had seen that after I used the dishwasher, the water had leaked down onto the mold, and gotten it 'activated' again and it smelled awful. And I opened up that cabinet door, and the moldy smell came out, and I almost threw up and almost passed out. I was then stumbling and uncoordinated, could not walk straight, and almost fell. It is extremely toxic and it makes me so sick that I'm convinced that is what was affecting me all winter. It gets really bad in the winter because the windows are closed. In the summer, if it happens, the windows are open and I don't notice it as badly, although I'm still affected by it.

So I still have a couple days to discuss this with my landlord and decide whether or not I insist on renewing my lease. I think removing the moldy shelf will help, along with putting something waterproof down in there so that further dripping won't create moldy wood. However, I can't reassure him that there will be no disaster of any kind next winter. The disasters are unpredictable.

Well, that is what's going on with the landlord and my apartment.

Whenever I use sjw, I describe it as making me into a 'puppet.' That means that I feel as though I lose almost all control of what I say, and I say (or write) whatever they are forcing me to say. In phone conversations, I just don't HAVE anything to say, and I don't enjoy phone conversations. But they force me to fill in the blank spaces with something, so I will say things that I think are pointless small talk.

I don't talk about these phenomena much while I am off sjw. My mental phenomena aren't understood or experienced by ANYONE I know, except other online bloggers who talk about the same subject. But when I am on sjw the puppet phenomenon is so noticeable that I have to write about it and, if I can, apologize for not being myself.

I already know what my family and most of my friends think about the voices phenomena. They interpret the voices as being a symptom of an illness or psychological problem. I know a couple other people who interpret the voices (and other attacks) as being something psychic, paranormal, or supernatural, where the voices are caused by spirits, or wherever psychic voices come from, and I experience them because I'm psychic. Whereas I interpret them as being the result of a living, external, human attacker using a weapon or system on me - and I don't know the technical details of the system being used to do it.

A couple reasons why I usually don't talk about it. It's true, I experience voices, and various kinds of attacks, EVERY DAY without exception. But I only talk about it sometimes. I don't want friends and family to worry about me, to be anxious that something is wrong. I don't want them to feel helpless - there's nothing they can do about it. It hurts them to hear about a bad thing that they can't fix, over and over again, something awful that won't go away.

I don't like having to argue and explain about something that I already know is true. It's the feeling that arguing isn't getting anything useful done. I already know what needs to be done: I need to find safe locations and/or build a shield that works. I trust my own observations, and I trust the technical information that I have read, and I know that these attacks are, as I said, a living human (or several) using something technological. It gets irritating and frustrating to try to argue with people who cannot be convinced of it.

Also, I worry because it is extremely traumatic whenever you finally conclude that electronic mind reading and mind control is real and that it's happening to everyone every day. I survived that traumatic experience, but I really don't WANT to successfully convince my friends and family to agree with me! I don't want them going through the same thing I went through whenever I accepted that interpretation. I don't have any recommendations for what to DO about it, because I've wanted to work on designing and building effective shields, for a long time now, and I can't do it because of the chaos of my life, the constant illnesses and disasters, the job losses, etc. So I don't have any suggestions for how people can protect themselves whenever they accept that the attacks are technological.

So I usually avoid upsetting people, and upsetting myself in an argument about a subject where 1. I doubt that the other person in the discussion will ever change their mind and agree with me, and 2. IT WOULD BE A BAD THING IF THEY DID! I don't WANT to force other people to experience what I experience, and in a way I'm HAPPY if they continue to disagree with me. It means they're not experiencing it!

Also, there was a piece of advice that I followed from a book that I read years ago. I used to try meditating, and I was reading a book called 'How To Meditate' by Lawrence Leshan. I gave up on meditating - I started noticing that I would experience a painful electrical shock sensation over my whole body at the stroke of ten minutes, if I assigned myself to meditate for ten minutes. In other words I couldn't just freely meditate for longer than I had planned, or try something else afterwards, but instead got a painful zap that awakened me suddenly. And nowadays, I can meditate for about three seconds before getting the electrical shock, and/or a voice in my head. So I no longer try to meditate unless I am very sick and in conflict with the voices and I have to meditate in order to endure the passage of time while I try to sleep. This is usually if I get an accidental drug exposure from the contamination in the house (one of the other subjects that I don't argue about with people anymore).

Well, this book said that if you start meditating, you might start to have more frequent 'psychic' experiences. These are incidents where you accurately think of a piece of secret information that you couldn't know, or accurately predict something that does, in fact, happen. Or other psychic phenomena. The author said that he advised his students to NOT brag about being psychic, and not brag about the incidents when they happened ("I'm more psychic than you are" "I predicted you would say that") because it became competitive, and competing to be the 'most psychic person' was a distraction from the real purpose of meditating, which was self-knowledge and self-improvement. People would get a sense of superiority from being psychic and knowing more things than other people knew. He advised his students, instead, to just accept those incidents when they happened. You see it, you can't help noticing 'Hey, I heard the phrase "orange shoes", and fifteen seconds later, a guy wearing bright orange shoes walked in the room!' You can't help noticing those things when they happen, but he said to just accept it, and ignore it if you can, and don't brag or boast about how psychic you are, and how you have a 'power' that other people don't have.

And also, I avoid telling every detail of what I experience every day, because then the person attacking me says, 'Hey! I'm famous!' and does something else to get attention.

I don't experience these phenomena as a 'power.' That was something that I argued through in the beginning, in the early years, when it was most difficult and I was adjusting to it. I can't CHOOSE what information I would like to look at! For instance, of course, I attempted to 'psychically remote view' information that would answer the question: At the physical level, of atoms and molecules and electromagnetic phenomena and all that, HOW DO PSYCHIC EVENTS HAPPEN? Of course, I wasn't able to get that answer in detail. I got a lot of stuff that I disagreed with, though. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get psychic answers to the questions that I really wanted to know. So I decided that the word 'power' does not describe psychic phenomena. You get whatever 'the voices' decide to give you. You don't get to go out and search for whatever you want to know.

I also saw (on the internet, reading the web pages of fellow sufferers) that sometimes people who experience electronic attacks still do interpret themselves as having psychic power, in addition to being the target of electronic attacks. I had a couple things happen in that interpretation. First, it felt to me like an illusion of power. You feel powerless, so you convince yourself that there's at least SOMETHING you can do about being attacked. The other thing that happened to me personally was that I would get artificial images and fantasies where I attacked a person psychically, who was EXCITED about the fact that I attacked them. They found it either hilarious or exciting, and they encouraged me to think about attacking them, and then would give me dreams at night about how I was attacking them. It seemed like a false illusion of power when in fact you can't do anything, and it seemed like a way of entertaining them, and of course, it didn't get any results. The desired result was that if you psychically attacked them, they would die or get scared away, permanently, and never do anything to you again. That never worked! They were always there again the next day.

So I liked the interpretation that it was electronic. The material that I read about electronic weapons DID attempt to describe in detail how it works. It seemed like that was the right direction for me to go, the interpretation that felt right, because it focused on answering questions about how stuff happens at the molecular level. That's what I wanted to know about. If it's God, if it's supernatural, if it's psychic, if it's paranormal, if it's ghosts and spirits, I STILL want to answer the question: how does it work? And the only way to answer that was to read the technology-oriented material. And if you understand the physical phenomena of how it works, that's the most direct way to know what to do about it. (There are other aspects of the problem, the forensic work of finding out WHO is attacking you, where the attacks come from, why they're doing it, etc, and that involves understanding criminal psychology in addition to just knowing the technical information.)

And, strangely enough, my best-loved piece of software of all time - it's underpriced, they should charge $1000 instead of the $400 or $500 that they actually charge. This software, Propellerheads Reason, a music-writing software - I found it by accident in the early part of this decade, somewhere like 2001 or so. You get to fiddle with knobs and dials, and listen to how it changes the sound, on a simulated electronic synthesizer. Because of my experience playing with Reason, I can actually understand the meaning of words like 'modulator' and 'carrier' whenever I read them in the technical-engineering descriptions of how it works when somebody puts voices in your head. I can almost imagine how two different waves add up to a new wave that sounds like a voice. So Reason - something I love - actually helped me to understand something I hate.

The other 'psychic power' argument says that if you obey the voices, follow their suggestions, you'll benefit from it. They tell you things you need to know. Therefore it's a 'power.' I was angered by that idea right away. Obedience is power? What if you don't WANT to do what the voices tell you? What if you really, really want to do something different, but the voices tell you to do something else? And if you go against them, bad things will happen to you? That doesn't seem like power to me. The power to do what somebody tells you to do! Sure, there are lots of situations where, if you obey what someone tells you to do, you'll get material rewards. That doesn't mean you have 'power' because you are doing what somebody tells you to do.

Plus, whenever the attacks really became noticeable, in 2003, it wasn't at all pleasant or helpful. Occasionally they told me secret pieces of information that I couldn't have known, which would later turn out to be true. But most of the time, it was nightmares about handling fecal material, or having somebody zap me and try to make me throw up, or zapping me awake at 3:00 AM, or hearing voices that said disgusting things or meaningless nonsense that I couldn't understand. Those weren't pleasant or helpful experiences, so I disagreed about any 'psychic power' interpretations from the very beginning. It definitely wasn't a power. If it WAS 'psychic,' it was a curse, not a power.

But in order to FIX the problem, I wanted to understand the atomic/molecular/physical details of HOW IT HAPPENS. I read some occasional things about what happens if somebody has an evil spirit and needs to get rid of it - in fact, Judith Swack's treatment took that approach - I still, to this day, don't know for sure whether Judith Swack was involved in the events that began to happen at that time. But part of her therapy was an attempt to chase away evil spirits by using prayers and verbal statements. At the time she was treating me, I actually DIDN'T HAVE the phenomena which started up AFTER she treated me. I was only having problems with computer hackers back then, not voices - or rather, I wasn't consciously aware of the voices, and they didn't do extremely destructive/torturing/abusive things like they did later on. So anyway it wasn't good enough to just try to chase away evil spirits using prayers/chants etc. I wanted to understand 'What IS an evil spirit then? What is it made of? What devices can record and observe it? How does an evil spirit WORK, at the level of "one molecule bumps into another molecule"?'

Judith Swack said a couple of suspicious things during our phone therapy when this began. I was trying to explain to her that somebody was hacking my computer and harassing me. I'm not sure if this had happened yet, but around that time, somebody was also spying on my window, and then sending me emails with pictures of a similar-looking woman, standing in the same position, doing the same thing I was doing, but it wasn't an actual picture of me. So I was trying to explain this to Judith Swack.

Her reaction was unusual. She acted like she knew right away that this was something significant, but she didn't talk to me about it. She got excited and said something like 'So you're one of them? But you're able to communicate a lot more clearly than most of them!' She was very excited, because I had good, clear communication skills. She said that most of the time, they weren't able to communicate what they were experiencing, very well. 'They' were a category of people, implied by Judith, but I didn't know what category, or what significance it was to her. Anybody who fits into the category of 'Somebody is spying on/harassing me,' but isn't healthy enough to communicate clearly about it.

After that, she attempted to use techniques to get me to 'reveal my secret,' especially if it was a family secret, a secret where my life might be threatened if I revealed it. But I wasn't hiding anything. I'm guessing that the 'secret' she wanted me to reveal was that she wanted me to admit that my family 'knew about' electronic mind control and was actually using the devices, with conscious knowledge. Since that wasn't true, I wasn't hiding any secrets and we didn't get anywhere trying to use techniques to get me to reveal them. I revealed a couple of irrelevant things, attempted to reveal whatever I could, but those things, to me, weren't necessarily secrets, or things that somebody might kill me for if I told about them. They were just various unpleasant things from my life history.

By the way, I wrote about this some time ago, last year, and I have noticed that I do feel different without the metallic dental filling. Back then I had more of a bitter, cynical anger, more often, because the dental filling made me feel sick - I don't think it's ONLY the mercury, I am sure that the COPPER in the filling is bad for you too. Everything I have read about metallic copper convinced me of that. Everything I've experienced - touching wet copper pennies with my hand, or the time when I pinned my hair up using copper hairpins while my hair was wet - showed me that copper makes me feel really, really sick and strange and unable to think clearly. Copper is pretty safe when it's dry, but when it's wet, it will go through the skin, and if it's in your mouth, you're swallowing it all the time. Anyway, I remember how I was writing about these 'mental phenomena' last year and I had more of a tendency to feel bitter and angry while writing. Although, that problem hasn't completely gone away - I still write with lots of endless, bitter anger whenever I feel sick for any reason at all.

(And yes, I'm still having a problem with the resin composite fillings that I have now, but that is another story. I intend to remove the plastic fillings, and replace them with nothing, leaving empty cavities, before I get pregnant. The plastic fillings have given me chronic breast pain - exactly the same type of breast pain I had while I was using a plastic retainer in my mouth after my braces were taken off, when I was a teenager. It's gotten less severe over time, but it is still there. So I don't want it affecting the future pregnancy. Every time you see a news article about the dangers of plastics and the dangers of bisphenol-A, it seems to be taboo to mention that the WORST OFFENDER in this category is PLASTIC DENTAL FILLINGS, which are never even MENTIONED in the articles! They mention things like plastic bottles that we drink out of, but those are NOWHERE NEAR as harmful as plastic dental fillings which cannot be removed from your mouth.)

(There is a taboo on the subject of plastic dental fillings being bad for you, because, as I noticed, there are no safe alternatives at all. Every type of filling is dangerous, and you're best off just not using any dental fillings at all, unless they are a temporary material like wax. I read that wax could possibly be used, but I think it would probably hold germs underneath it, and I haven't tried it. Anyway, there's a taboo on resin composite fillings, because nobody knows what to do about them. It would mean that every filling, of every kind, no matter what kind, had to be removed. I include porcelain fillings as bad, too, because they are glued down, and the glue is bad for you. The porcelain material itself might be okay. They used to use ivory, and ivory would be okay, but I don't know how it was glued in place. And there are limits on what you can do in a situation where someone's whole mouth full of teeth is all falling apart, every single tooth, which does happen - that person would simply lose all of their teeth and have nothing left. Anyway the point of mentioning this subject is that I feel differently than I did back then, last summer, partly because the metal dental filling is gone from my mouth - I feel that my mood towards other people has changed a lot. There are other reasons, too - reaching out to try to make more friends has been helpful, and learning about community.)

I had to look over this long entry again. Psychic power, Judith Swack, dental fillings, community, electronic devices, what's happening at the molecular level... What else was I going to talk about?

Maybe I could post it, and if I wanted to write more, it could be a separate post.

Oh, one thing I wanted to mention. I kept promising that I was going to give a note to somebody. Last weekend was three extremely bad days in a row. We were extremely busy because of a sale that was going on and I had to make more pizzas than usual, and it also just seemed busier than usual for whatever reasons. All three days I was very stressed out and rushed.

I saw the person who I would have given the note to, but she was there only briefly, and I felt too rushed/stressed/preoccupied to calm down and get the courage to go approach her, because this problem is painful and humiliating, and I don't know her very well, so it takes a lot of courage and resolve to go up to her, even though I told her ahead of time that I was going to give her this note.

Also, I still have a very negative feeling about the whole thing, which is that I don't know the truth of what he is doing and experiencing, or why. I would not have chosen of my own free will to waste my time writing letters to a person who stopped answering - that was DEFINITELY a forced phenomenon which went on for many months and months and months. I would wake up in the morning, hypnotized, with some thought in my mind that I was supposed to try to tell him, and would write a letter to him, only to be ignored. I do not waste time with people who refuse to answer my letters - IN THE REAL WORLD. I did that because I was being forced to do it. However, I need to know whether somebody really is interfering with my email, because technically, it is easy for a malicious person to do that. If somebody prevented either my letters, or his letters, from reaching the recipient, I need to know that, because then either he or I were getting our feelings hurt, thinking the other person wasn't answering, when in fact they were. I need to know if he was voluntarily refusing to answer (in which case, I don't waste my time with him) or whether the emails were being interfered with. However, this little problem: HE KNOWS that I won't waste my time with him if I know for sure that he's VOLUNTARILY ignoring the letters, on purpose, in order to hurt me. (That's not the only interpretation. There are other reasons why someone can become unable to talk or is too afraid to confront someone.)

Whenever I get into this type of thought pattern, it's the "I know that he knows that I know that he knows..." thought pattern, called 'second guessing,' where you make decisions based on assumptions about the other person and what knowledge they have, and then you might start to do something, but change your mind about it, etc - I don't like to think that way. I usually bypass that whole thought process whenever it starts to happen. I lose patience with it. It is a duty or obligation that I have, where if I said that I am going to give a letter, then I have to. And yes, I do still hear voices telling me things about him. And yes, I am still being influenced by them. But I agree with them whenever they try to influence me to do what I said I would do, regardless of how I interpret the situation.

I had a sort of decision about this whole thing: even if he sadistically ignores people to make them suffer, and laughs at them while he reads their emails, and I'm not the only person he's doing it to, and there are dozens of other people who are unknowingly doing the same thing, trying to reach him while he deliberately ignores them - which was what the other guy was doing when this happened the first time, in 2000, and I was, again, forced to continue writing emails to him - even if that whole interpretation were true, it wouldn't matter. (To make a long story short, I eventually had a third party go look at that guy's emails and prove that yes, he was receiving them and ignoring them on purpose. He had actually bragged to me, in chat, that he deliberately ignored a woman who had insulted him once, and he acted smug about it, like 'ha ha, I got her.' I am not going to tell that story right now of what happened when I got somebody to go look at his emails. It is a very unpleasant incident and I am not proud of it.) I still know that many of my letters were forced: it's not my fault that I continued writing letters to him. And that is still in the area of technical/physical phenomena... which leads to the same final conclusion: In order to solve it, I need to understand the technical phenomena and protect myself using technological methods such as effective shielding, along with social support and forensic work.

I can remember certain things that he (the more recent guy who I met last year) wrote in the 'disappearing blog' that made it sound like maybe he had experienced incidents of trying to reach people (through email or something) and they hadn't acknowledged that he had said anything. But again, I am not going to just try to interpret something that happened, using my limited information, when the result is the same: I have to solve it at the technical level, and also, at the level of obligation/duty to do what I said I would do, which is deliver the handwritten note even though it is very difficult. I still have to take the same actions regardless of how I interpret his motives, his behavior, whether it was voluntary or forced, whether he's a 'puppet/victim/fellow sufferer' versus a 'consciously knowing voluntary attacker who hurts and attacks people of his own free will and is fully responsible for his own actions.' Or whether I can argue that some other interpretation is true, that he does this because of a psychological/personality disorder, or some other similar problem.

Two reasons why this blog is so long today: 1. I took sjw yesterday, and 2. I've had a stomach virus all night long and most of the day, so I haven't eaten, and have no energy, and all I can do to entertain myself is sit here writing.

I saw a movie yesterday. The decision to go see that movie was a puppet incident. I don't usually go out to the movie theater and randomly pick a movie I haven't heard of and go see it. I don't have TV, and also, I have dialup internet, so I never see movie previews or movie trailers. I would have to just read movie reviews, and I don't bother doing that - I don't go to many movies.

So I 'randomly' went out in my car, and 'ended up' at the movie theater. I didn't know what to watch. So I watched the one that said it had been nominated for a bunch of academy awards. It turns out that this movie was relevant to understanding my own situation and understanding people based on the personality type system, the enneagram.

There are a few personality types who do really, really horrible things in certain situations. If they have been abused or abandoned as children, if they become physically ill, if anything really bad goes wrong in their lives, if a couple other things happen, then these particular personality types are the ones who become sadistic psychopaths and sociopaths, people who deliberately hurt other people without feeling remorse, without understanding the other person's point of view at all. Everybody hurts other people in small ways, or tells white lies sometimes, or gets sick and gets in a bad mood, but there are categories of people who end up telling major lies, all of the time, and doing extremely terrible things deliberately to cause suffering, such as physical torture, murder, or physical enslavement of other people - and not just once or twice, not just occasionally, but often, and again and again, especially if something stressful happens in their life. If they're healthy, they don't do that. Again, it's linked to child abuse, illness, severe misfortune, and some other things.

If you are a normal, healthy person, and somebody tries to explain to you, 'So-and-so did this small, petty, bizarre thing to me deliberately,' they think that you're crazy, because nobody would ever do such a thing. If you are healthy, you can't imagine that other people are sadistically abusive and do small, petty, insane things to somebody. You can't imagine that those people really exist. For instance, somebody deliberately moves and hides an important piece of paperwork that was on your desk in the office. You complain about it, but everybody says that you were just absent-minded or disorganized and it's your fault that you lost it. But you know you didn't lose it. That was happening to somebody at a place where I worked, State of the Art, Inc., in 2001-2003 (if I recall the dates, I'm not sure) which is a 'government-supported business,' so to speak, involved with military and radio frequency weapons - and I didn't know that whenever I got hired there - so I strongly suspect employees of State of the Art as being connected with the phenomena that I experience. That's one theory, anyway. It began after I left there. And they are involved in 'radio frequency applications,' and they're military. I was hired there as a temporary office worker, doing filing and data entry, and the computer hacking/harassment was happening while I worked there. So there was another lady in the office who was viewed as mentally unstable and strange, an 'unreliable source,' where if she loudly complained that somebody was stealing files off her desk and hiding them, everybody said she was just crazy and it was her own fault. I think she was right, I think she was telling the truth, I think she was interpreting correctly. So again, that makes me suspect employees (or former employees) of SOTA as 'consciously aware perpetrators' (instead of puppets or fellow sufferers), people who are in control of their own actions and are NOT being remotely forced as a 'puppet,' people who actually own, operate, and understand the equipment and systems used for the purpose of hurting and controlling other people, and they consciously know they're doing it, and do it voluntarily because they want to, because they believe it's okay to do that.

In this movie, one of the main characters happened to be one of the personality types that becomes psychopathically murderous. The movie was all about one of the people who she hurt very, very badly (emotionally). During the movie, he tried to understand her, struggled to understand her motives, her point of view, why she did what she did. And it was one of the rare occasions when psychopaths were actually caught and put on trial and questioned about their motives for murdering other people. (Usually, they don't commit broad-daylight murder, and they don't get caught, and it doesn't happen on the huge scale that it happened in this movie, which was from a historical time period... in Germany... in the 1940s.)

The reason for her behavior was because she had a humiliating secret, something she was so ashamed of that she felt if anybody knew about it, she would be seen as utterly worthless, laughable, a completely rejected human being, 'scum of the earth.' She kept hiding that secret throughout the movie and it was one of the motives for why she did what she did. And there REALLY IS a personality type who behaves that way.

The part that I identified with was 'somebody disappears and doesn't tell you why they left or where they're going or what happened.' Only in the movie, she didn't do it deliberately to hurt him, but rather, she was callous to any suffering that she caused, and it was more focused on how she had to keep hiding her secret. She wasn't necessarily hurting him in order to be sadistic and cause pain deliberately, because she cared about him. And I was identifying with his point of view, because I know how it feels when somebody suddenly stops answering, and avoids you, and refuses to speak to you, in any way, about anything, when originally they seemed to be at least a friend. It goes beyond merely being too busy to call someone back. It is total, all-encompassing avoidance and refusal to communicate. (Assuming that email was working properly, and he has the ability to respond if he chooses to.) In the movie, she thought that hiding her secret was more important than being honest with the guy and telling him the reasons why she felt like she had to leave. She didn't tell him the stress of what she was experiencing, or talk about any alternatives for how she would deal with the problem.

Our country doesn't have quite the extreme level of broad-daylight murder that happened in 1940s Germany - WITHIN the country itself, AMONG the citizens of the country. The murders and imprisonment are still happening, in other countries, with Iraq and Guantanamo and other places, but we don't have the 'concentration camp next door' phenomenon, unless you count the prisons - but again, prisons are not openly murdering millions of people, and they still allow family to visit, at least for some of the prisoners. So prisons aren't at that level either. And the actual murders, the bombing of cities, is happening in other countries, where ordinary citizens of the USA can't do anything about it.

('Bombing the cities' is a military strategy that I simply will never, never understand at all. As in, what good it could possibly do, for anybody, anywhere. I just cannot imagine anything, ANYTHING the slightest bit useful about bombing a city, killing civilians, destroying churches and grocery stores, streets, houses, etc. The people being killed are ordinary civilians who have no connections whatsoever to any fighting. It would be like bombing State College PA because the United States is causing the value of the dollar to collapse. It makes no sense and does nothing useful for anyone, and has no connection to solving the problem. This is why I understood what he was saying, when a journalist recently wrote a blog from North Korea, describing how the citizens were glad to be outdoors in the warm spring weather, during the forced vote where they unanimously voted to re-elect Kim Jong Il again. People complained that he seemed to be saying it was all okay, and that Korea was a nice place to live, etc, and he said something like, 'No, I was just trying to show that these people are human, not evil monsters, and they are still living their daily lives.' The commenter responded, 'Nobody ever SAID they were all evil monsters.' But I know what he means: if you 'bomb the cities,' you don't mind killing all the civilians, because everybody in that country is insane/evil monster etc, so killing civilians doesn't matter. People can just say, 'Oh, everybody in North Korea is crazy. They're not like us, they're different. It's okay to just kill them all indiscriminately.')

The people in the movie were enabled to be as murderous as they were, because the whole country, and the government, was openly advocating it and supporting it. They could not have done anything at such a huge scale all by themselves.

In this country, when people are psychopathic or sociopathic, they still have to be secretive about it, and they cannot openly murder huge numbers of people at once. They are doing something terrible, but it is not at that magnitude.

I didn't actually 'LIKE' the movie. But I understood it and thought it was a good movie. I was so engrossed in the movie that I could not bear to walk out whenever I had to go to the bathroom really, really badly, LOL, and I waited as long as I could, then I dashed out and came back as quickly as possible, and I missed an important moment in the movie - I came back, and they were in a courtroom, and I was like 'Whoa! What happened? Why are we in a courtroom?' So I got very involved in the movie. It wasn't one that I'm going to buy on videotape and watch it a hundred times like I have done with my other movies. It gave me a very bad feeling and I went home and watched another, more cheerful, movie at home. But even though it was an awful feeling, the movie was excellent. There really IS no 'happy ending' that can be made from the subject of 1940s Germany, unless you change it to a fantasy of something that didn't actually happen, an imaginary happy ending that wasn't real. And it's not easy to do something like that to something so terrible.

Well, I did say this was a long blog post.

I am still going to give my note to this person. If he reads my blog, he already knows that it is merely a note asking about the emails. And that really is what it is. It has to be done because I said it would be done. And I had a terrible three days last week, and saw the one girl only briefly and didn't ever feel that I could go give it to her. But I have to assume the worst: this is a disinformation war. In this disinformation war, I don't know whether he receives my emails or if I receive his. I don't know if he is able to get on a computer and read my blog, or whether some hacker has made it impossible for him to get to the web page. I simply don't know what to assume. I am taking this as an obligation or duty that I have to communicate about this to him so that he at least has a CHANCE to understand: I didn't receive letters from you, and I was sending letters to you. Meanwhile, he will eventually graduate and will probably go to some other city to live in, I assume, although I don't know, and I will get used to his absence, while at the same time, wishing him the best, even though I don't understand him or what he did. There are different interpretations, some of them more forgivable than others ('somebody was threatening to kill me/you/someone else,' etc), but I don't know which interpretations are correct. And I did not, and do not, have control over the forced urges to write emails to him, and *I DON'T WANT* to write emails to somebody who refuses to answer. That is harmful and hurtful to me, and it is a waste of my life.

Zombie Cover-up

2009-03-24T13:48:00.000-04:00

WARNING!

Road signs warning of 'zombies ahead' are, in fact, accurate. The government doesn't want you to know! So they are changing all of the zombie warnings to other things that are less frightening, like 'Bridge Under Construction' or something. This is censorship!

So if you have passed any signs that warn of zombies ahead, remember where those signs were located, because they might be gone by tomorrow. Knowing where the zombies are is very important for your survival.

I should guess the weight of the rock at the Bicycle Shop.

2009-03-24T13:02:00.000-04:00

I saw that as I was driving by the other day, and then I saw it again just now when they had an ad on Facebook.

How to guess the weight of the rock:

1. Take a photo, or use your photographic memory, to get an image of the rock's colors and patterns. Then go to somewhere on the net, some geology site, and look at photos of rock types. Try to identify what type of rock it probably is (quartz, etc). Then look up the DENSITY of that type of rock. This won't be exact, but it will be a general idea. You would have to use the same UNITS OF MEASUREMENT that were used in the density given to you. I don't know what those would be.

2. I haven't been close enough to get a good look at the rock's shape. However, it looks like it's a nice, neat, regular, geometric shape. That makes everything much easier. It isn't just a random lumpy rock.

It's almost a rectangle on one face, and some kind of triangle on another face. I think the other face is a rectangle too. You want to find the rock's VOLUME. Finding the volume of a regular, neat-and-tidy, geometric shape is something you can do using relatively simple math. (I say 'relatively simple' because I haven't actually tried to do it, and it might be one of those things where if I tried it, I'd discover that I forgot about a bunch of important things that would make it actually a hassle.)

Find the area of each face of the rock.

Rectangular Faces: Measure the length and width of the rectangle. Multiply the length times the width.

Semi-Triangular Face: The top face, that the bike is sitting on, is sort of triangular. I haven't gotten close enough to really see. It might be rounded, almost like the arc of a circle. That looks like the hardest one to find the area of.

You'd have to find some 'name' to call that shape. Is it a triangle? What type of triangle? It isn't an equilateral triangle, and it isn't an isosceles triangle. It might possibly be 'scalene' (a 'none of the above' type of triangle). Looking at the picture I see that it might even have four sides, not three, so it might be a quadrilateral. I'm looking at a web page now, http://www.mathleague.com/help/geometry/polygons.htm, and reading the names, because it's been a couple decades since I took geometry class. (Almost that long. Wow. Was I fifteen? Sixteen?)

So, after you've figured out what name to call it, you look up the formula for the area of that shape. I vaguely remember how to find the areas of strange shapes, but I can't really explain it. It's something that I sort of figure out as I go, because some secret part of my brain knows what to do, but can't put it into words. (It's one of those right-brained things.)

Well, the general idea is 'Multiply everything together.' I mean, multiply the areas of all those sides that you found. However, actually, that's wrong... Don't do that. I don't know how many sides it has, and it isn't really rectangular. You could do it if it were only a rectangle.

You might have to do something more complicated. You might have to subtract the shape from an imaginary shape. Like, an imaginary rectangular solid object. I don't know for sure.

The details are unimportant!

Maybe I should just go try to do it.

No, no, no. Multiply the "weird side's" area times the rock's height. That's all. Find the area of the strange shaped face that the bike is sitting on (the triangle-like or quadrilateral thing), then multiply that area times the rock's height. The top and bottom surfaces of the rock are flat, not angled, so it's okay to do that. It could potentially be really complicated, but it isn't. Nothing is angled. Everything goes straight down, and everything is flat, from what I've seen of the rock. (I should go look.)

3. After getting the volume, and also having the suspected density of the suspected type of rock it is, you can find the weight. Fill in the variables in the density equation. It's something like Density=Weight/Volume.

I used to enjoy geometry class.

MySpace won't link to Blogger. Readable URLs.

2009-03-24T12:14:00.002-04:00

While working on changing the URL of my blog, I went to MySpace to update the link that I have there. I found out that (for who knows how long) the MySpace page won't let you click any links to Blogger. It gives some message about how this links to a page distributing viruses, or phishing your password, or something. Both of my links to Blogger pages weren't working.

I used to work at a place where I had to print web pages, all day long. (And I got paid a lot more money than I get paid now to run around doing real work!) I found out that it's a real nuisance to print a web page with links on it if the links don't explicitly say what the URL is. For instance, a link that just says "Click Here!" doesn't tell you what the URL is, whenever you see it on a page that you printed out on paper. You just see "Click Here!" and have no idea what it is.

So I got in the habit of making sure that you can read the URL, or highlight it and copy-paste it, as well as click on it. This is a nuisance if the URL says "http://somewhere.com/?=q34980adfskcxjhv087ASD4w5da873240198423rkjdsvcxoiuydfsa98/09" (you get the idea). But I don't have any links like that.

Anyway, I'm glad that I did that. If anybody tried to go to that URL by clicking at MySpace, it might have been months and months without me even knowing that the link wasn't working. So at least they would have had some chance to say, "Well, I'll just copy this URL into the browser."

The reason why the link is able to "not work" is because MySpace changes all of your links so that they point to a page that says "Warning! You are about to leave MySpace," etc. Then you can click the link again for real, and go there. Well, for whatever reason, all of the ones for Blogger get changed to the "This is an evil website!" warning page instead of the page that lets you continue on to the real link.

Well, that worked, but is the RSS feed still there?

2009-03-23T23:50:00.000-04:00

Well, that was suspiciously easy. I didn't have to 'move over all the old stuff to the new URL' as I had thought. It just changed the URL. However, I don't know anything about what the RSS feed might be doing!

I am going to try changing this blog URL

2009-03-23T23:45:00.000-04:00

I am going to try changing my blog URL to just eagledove9.blogspot.com (if it's available). Then I'm going to try moving everything from here to that new URL.

Originally, I had never blogged anywhere except MySpace, so when I started blogging here, it was just a 'test' because I could choose what kind of background color, font size, etc that I wanted, and I wasn't sure what I would use or whether it would be permanent. But I'm sick of the long, awkward URL.

So if anybody is getting an RSS feed, they would have to come back to the new URL, I think, and start up the feed again. I don't really know for sure.

The Note Again

2009-03-20T13:35:00.000-04:00

Spring Break is over. So I rewrote the note and will try again to hand it to someone, when I get an opportunity, and when there aren't a lot of people around. It still says the same thing, asking whether emails were sent/received, but it is now more neutral in tone. I was sick when I wrote the first draft.

There are too many questions to ask, and things to say, in a brief note, so I didn't ask any of the other questions, like whether the blog really was deleted. (I noticed it gave me a different message the last time I tried to look at it, and it sounded like it had been un-deleted, then it disappeared again.)

Obama Special Olympics Bowling - Puppet Incident

2009-03-20T10:58:00.000-04:00

I just saw a news article mentioning Obama, who accidentally blurted out a joke about his not-so-good bowling ability. He compared his bowling to the Special Olympics. Immediately afterwards, he made a public apology.

This is a typical 'puppet' incident of being forced/urged to blurt out something cruel, insulting, and thoughtless, especially something that makes fun of somebody. Handicapped people, people in wheelchairs, and mentally disabled people are one of the typical targets or 'sources of humor' in these incidents.

The incident discredits Obama, ruins his good reputation, makes him look like a jerk, makes him look like a shallow person, when in fact, he is a strong person with high self-esteem who is considerate and empathic to others and himself.

In this situation, Obama is the 'highest-ranking' person in the country. It seems like a great opportunity to make him look bad, to make fun of him, to make him seem 'down on himself,' and also to make him look like a shallow jerk. They usually aim to humiliate and discredit high-ranking, high self-esteem people, or talented people, or intelligent people.

These blurt-out incidents happen during casual conversations. Somebody gave him the idea that it was funny that he wasn't good at bowling. In reality, Obama himself would be self-accepting: you accept your own faults and weaknesses, and it's no big deal.

Another signal that it's a puppet incident is that he was highly conscious of people's uncomfortable reactions to the 'joke.' He immediately apologized afterwards. The article said that his 'joke' hadn't even been aired on TV yet whenever he apologized.

That is my theory. I will continue watching Obama and interpreting his behavior. I feel convinced that he is not the type of person who would naturally make a comment like that of his own free will.

Box hunt ends in disaster. Termite nest hunt ends in disaster. Dumpster dive compromise: successful.

2009-03-18T17:42:00.001-04:00

Well, it was an interesting day, but not very productive. Early in the day I wrote a list of things I wanted to try to get done. There were about 11 items on the list. After running around all afternoon, I was able to cross off item #1 - and actually, it was only one part of several things that were involved in #1. Item #1 was: get some cardboard boxes to put my clothing into, and stack them up taped together with packaging tape, like drawers, and put my clothes into them.

Why would I need to do that? Because I threw away huge amounts of clothing when I destroyed it all in the 2007 contamination incident. I have only bought a couple of new things at Goodwill, and sometimes, I end up throwing those away too, although not very often, now that I know what NOT to do when the clothing becomes toxic. Anyway, I also threw away the plastic drawers from Wal-Mart that I used to have. If you got a spot of ephedrine on your clothing, then washed it together with a whole bunch of laundry, only to find that the entire batch was now covered with ephedrine, and then, it also got into the drawers where you put your clothing, you'd go nuts and throw everything away too. But that was a long story and I already blogged about it ages ago. It's probably back on my myspace blog before I started blogging here.

So I have been keeping clothes in trash bags and cardboard boxes. But I don't have enough cardboard boxes, and they aren't organized. I have things mixed together and I can't find what i need very easily. So I want it to look more like the drawers used to be: types of clothing are sorted into separate drawers. Right now, I have multiple boxes with garbage bags in them, and every garbage bag is a mystery - it might have socks, pants, underwear, or shirts in it, and you have to go digging. I don't have a lot of clothes now, but what little I have is a disorganized mess.

They have to be cardboard boxes, because I don't want to throw away another bunch of plastic drawers again, if I have any more problems. I want everything to be disposable for now. The carpet is the only MAJOR area that I was unable to clean, along with the trunk of my car, and occasionally, I get small outbreaks of contamination even now. This is a little-known, obscure subject: medicinal herbs, producing oils, which can contaminate nearby surfaces through direct contact, falling-off dried leaves, and also, possibly through the settling of volatile vapors. And the oils DO NOT BIODEGRADE OVER TIME. They remain active, although the oxidized forms might be slightly different than they were originally - but they're still 'medicinal.' And they are all transdermal, going directly through the skin - yet another obscure topic that it seems nobody else knows about. I grew a whole bunch of different (legal) medicinal herbs, or rather, handled them briefly before throwing them all in the garbage. So there are a variety of different drug effects that happen when I touch the contamination: pounding heart, pupil dilation, tachycardia, bradycardia, insomnia, hypersomnia, increased alertness, fatigue, antidepressant effects, lowered blood pressure, elevated blood pressure. Some of the drugs do the exact opposite of what the other drugs do. A lot of things that I don't want happening by accident.

Well, a customer was asking about apple boxes the other day, and I saw that apple boxes are sturdy and they have lids. I decided I wanted some of those. But I don't like going in to my workplace on my days off, because it's embarrassing to talk to all the people I know. 'What are you doing?' 'Well, I have to get apple boxes.' 'Why do you need apple boxes?' (Long story, don't ask, you won't believe me anyway.) So I made phone calls to other stores around town asking them if they had any apple boxes. Finally I found someone who did and was willing to give them to me.

So after troubling this person for a few minutes to get my boxes and load them into my cart, and expressing my gratitude for his taking the time out to help me, giving me something for free, out of courtesy - I had to throw them all in the garbage. After handling the apple boxes and driving home, I was hit with severe fatigue, and muscle weakness in both arms. I felt nauseated and wanted to sleep. I washed my hands thoroughly, and within a couple minutes after washing, felt much better. There was a tingling, tickling feeling in my hands. My arms continued to feel weak, but gradually improved over the next half hour or so. My throat and lungs also felt tickly and like I wanted to cough, every time I opened the boxes or moved them around and got close to them, if I inhaled near them.

I decided this has to be pesticides associated with the apples. Maybe not put directly on the apples, but around them and near them, and in the boxes. Pesticides are one of the worst chemicals that have ever made me sick: I was incapacitated for months because I put flea powder on the carpet when I lived in another apartment. Finally I vacuumed and shampooed the carpet and I got better very quickly. Total, overwhelming exhaustion and constant pain was the result of pesticides. It also causes involuntary trembling and shaking, usually the morning after being exposed to them, when you wake up in the morning and you notice your arms are shaking.

I forced myself to throw away the boxes, after all that trouble. I didn't want to do an 'out of the frying pan, into the fire' situation, of trying to find a place to put my clothes, only to trigger yet another contamination incident, this time with pesticides.

I decided to just go to a fast food place and ask for boxes. I had an idea in my head, which was that the boxes had to be whole and not broken down, not flattened. So I went to Long John Silver's and asked them for boxes. They had only just flattened them and taken them to the dumpster minutes before. I know how it is, that's something you do as soon as business slows down. So I left and I was discouraged.

'Discouraged' is a good word to use. I didn't realize it before, but it's dis-couraged. Your courage is gone. I felt a lack of courage. I was anxious and afraid to do something differently. I drove my car past LJS's dumpster, and saw the boxes all stacked up in there, but felt too embarrassed to just stop the car, get out, and collect them out of the dumpster. They were flattened, and I had this 'rule' in my mind, that the boxes must not be flattened. It was some weird rationale, saying that they would be stronger and sturdier if they were whole and had the original glue still holding them together. If I used flattened boxes, I would have to re-fold them and tape everything together and it would be less sturdy.

So I drove away, discouraged, exhausted, and I started questioning my rules. Rule: It's embarrassing, and forbidden, and you might get in trouble, if you go grab stuff out of the dumpster in broad daylight. Rule: Boxes must be whole and un-crushed, in order to be sturdy and to have the original box glue intact. But I was sick of trying and failing, and getting discouraged, and getting tired, and having so much time go by as I ran around all afternoon.

I broke both of those rules. Okay, flattened boxes. Okay, broad daylight dumpster diving. I drove to a McDonald's, where I felt comfortable and familiar, because I used to work for McDonald's (but not that particular one). So I grabbed a bunch of flattened boxes, while the people drove by on all the roads around me, and the cars went through the drive-thru, and everyone could see me, but I said, oh well. I need boxes badly enough.

Maybe I should go buy my own glue and glue the boxes myself... but yeah, that would probably be a bad idea, considering that glue usually gives off fumes, even the 'nontoxic' stuff probably. I'll just use tape. And it's a hassle to go out shopping for glue, when it seems trivial, and the tape is good enough.

Well, I forgot the other adventure, because it was actually unrelated, an intermission between several of those trips. It was after I washed my hands of the pesticides. I felt sick and exhausted, and wanted to just take a quiet walk outside by the pond. (And no, this 'ends in disaster,' as the title said, but it's not what you think. No termites were involved!)

So at the edge of the woods, I saw a fallen log, and wondered if I could find termites in it. I decided that termites and earthworms both seemed like good candidates for edible insect farming. I am not going to just go eat a bunch of bugs right this instant. If I ate anything, it might be just one, and then I'd wait and see if it caused any problems. I know I ate one of those little pillbugs, whatever they're called, that are gray and they roll up in a ball, when I was a teenager. It was bitter tasting, but I survived. I also might have eaten boll weevils that one time when they got in the raisin bran at my parents' house, before we noticed they were in there. (We all laughed later on because Granddaddy was visiting, and he ate the raisin bran every day for breakfast, and never said anything, and nobody ever really knew for sure if the boll weevils were in his cereal or not. By the time we noticed, it was too late. I'm sure my mom would remember that incident if I mentioned it to her. My brother might remember.) Eating bugs usually won't kill you, but I would want to make sure first.

Termites are eaten in other countries, but they are a different variety of termite, probably, not necessarily the same kind we have here. They contain fat, which is useful, because finding foods that contain healthy kinds of fat is not easy. If you think about a vegetable garden, if you imagine eating those types of foods - tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, squash, etc - it's all a bunch of extremely low-fat food. Those are the typical vegetable-garden foods, and it's not enough to give you a complete diet. And if you walk through the woods, and look at the trees and weeds and other plants, you don't see much high-calorie or high-fat food. So for self-reliance, or survival in an emergency (when your airplane crashes in the jungle, etc, etc), high-fat insects are important to know about. And termites are soft, whereas ants look hard and crunchy, LOL - I've never eaten ants and I don't like the idea of it. But I can imagine tolerating termites. (I don't think I've ever even had chocolate-covered ants or anything like that either.)

Well, I investigated the fallen log. It did have the tunnels filled with dirt crumbs, just like what I saw in the pictures of termite-infested wood. But there weren't any termites in the outer layers. I moved the log around and pulled off pieces of it. So as I was ripping apart this log's bark, I lost my balance a little bit and fell slightly sideways, and my hair dangled into a weed branch covered with burrs. The branch broke off and my hair immediately wrapped and tangled around and around it, as I moved and pulled away. The more I tried to remove the branch, the more the burrs tangled into knots with the hair. So I had to abandon the unsuccessful termite hunt, and spent about ten minutes removing burrs from my hair. I had to scrape them out by pinching the burrs between my fingernails. That bothered me, because the ends of my hair are already damaged, and I didn't want to rip and shred them any more. Discouraged again, I went home. But then I continued on the eventually-successful box hunt.

So after hours of random trips and running around and pulling burrs out of my hair, I did get at least a pile of flattened McDonald's boxes which I will put my clothing into. I haven't even begun the other ten items on my list.

(2. email betta: i have to respond to people's replies to my ad for the betta. 3. email 'suitors.' i have to reply to emails on the *cough* dating website, don't ask. i will blog about this subject eventually. 4. job hunt 5. defrost fridge - it still is stuck around 45 degrees according to that thermometer, but hasn't gotten any worse. 6. vinyl bed cover. the futon got contaminated during transport in the back of my trunk, so I am keeping it covered in vinyl. 7. ask for help again. (needs no explanation). 8. wash laundry. 9. call doctors. that is a frustrating project involving something peter needs to have done. 10. driver's license photo: i paid for the new license months ago, but never got the new photo made and the new license printed out. when i went there, the photo system was 'down' for no reason, and they said it might be down for a couple hours. so i just left. caution, if you ever go get a new driver's license photo made, they said that the system being down is actually a routine occurrence that happens ALL THE TIME and lasts for several hours each time. 11. buy sandals and shorts. i am going to get a second pair of sandals, and i will also start wearing shorts again, which i haven't done in years - the last time i routinely wore shorts was in college, in the early 90's. wearing shorts is a big deal. it will either be shorts or a dress, but the basic idea is that my ankles will be visible. this can only be done on days when i feel strong and able to endure the looks of shock, disgust, amazement, etc. or just, people looking at all, even without hostility - just being looked at. some days, i am not in the mood to be looked at over and over. but it's time to do this again.)

None of that stuff has gotten done yet.

Why do I talk about things like vegetarianism versus omnivorous diets?

2009-03-18T10:10:00.000-04:00

This is because in the long run, I am planning to have my own house, possibly within an intentional community. I would like to live in - at least, try to live in - a homesteading community that emphasizes self-reliance and produces a lot of its own food.

So I try to be very blunt and harsh about the reality of what I will be doing if I produce my own food by hunting or farming or with livestock. (Livestock is the hardest thing for me to imagine. You raise an animal, feed it, take care of it for a few years, and then slaughter it - I'm not sure whether I can really get used to that.) I don't want to be fooling myself or anyone else about the reality of it. It really is scary, unpleasant, and traumatic to think of, when you grew up in a suburb and ate meat from the grocery store.

I intend to start with something that is usually considered easy: insects. Those are somewhere between the organisms we call 'germs' and the organisms we call 'animals.' Almost everyone can tolerate the idea of killing insects at least once in a while. So I intend to learn how to use insects in the diet as a supplemental form of meat. It's done in other cultures, it's done by some kinds of apes, it's done by lots of other animals. So I think it will be useful in a self-reliant homestead.

So that's why I worry about the subject of whether or not I can really accept this, what I will be doing on a farm or homestead or while hunting.

(And usually if I write a blog about it, it means I'm thinking about food because I haven't eaten anything yet today.)