lots of quantity, not much quality

12:09 PM 11/6/10

I'm trying to wake up and get ready for work. I took a little bit of St. John's Wort last night just before bed, and I also took a little bit this morning when 'they' woke me up at 7:00 or so. I open up the pills, pour out the herb, and eat a little finger-dab of it, so that I don't get too much. But I had enough this morning that it made me sleepy and I haven't wanted to get up out of bed. So I'm using Vivarin.

I don't like using all these drugs. But I have fallen so badly that I can't help myself. There is so much to do that I can't do. I don't like it when the drugs change my personality. I *do* like it that they make me able to do tasks and projects that I normally don't have enough energy to do, like work on my computer. And also, the one project that has been blocking all of my life - the storage unit full of contaminated belongings.

I haven't been writing about Curtis much now. 'They' have been talking to me about him. They 'try,' quote unquote, to make me go and look for him and try to deliver a letter. But I know they're not really trying. Whenever they decide to force me to do it, they will. They won't have to 'try' and 'fail' to make me go do it.

They've been saying stuff in my head to make me think that he misses me and he wants to see me. They reminded me about the time when he gave me a raw green bean to taste, and it was wonderful. It tasted and smelled like the garden that my parents had when I was a kid. They made it sound like he would give me something like that again, something small and special. But the two times when I've seen him, I've been having a panic attack, and couldn't stay long enough to have a conversation.

In a way, the drug makes me need him less. Again, this reminds me of Edward the vampire in Twilight. The hungrier he is, the harder it is for him to be near Bella. I have had exactly the same thing happen. Whenever I am hungry, literally and physically hungry, when I feel needy in any way at all, it's very scary for me to be near Curtis (or I should say, 'it WAS scary,' in the past tense, back when we worked together). I felt so needy, it made me want to hug him, and I'm guessing it's an instinctive need to nurse, to breastfeed. You know that it isn't socially acceptable to do that, so you get very scared because you really, really want to. But you don't consciously remember that that's what you want. You just know you want to touch someone, but something bad would happen if you did. But the drugs make me more numb and less needy, and that used to make it easier to be close to him without fear. The less I needed him, the closer I was to him. And often, if I would get something to eat, I would calm down enough that I could then go talk to him.

I don't know what 'they,' the voices, will force me to do with him in the long run. Will they keep trying to make me maintain a relationship with him, even though he isn't my neighbor, and he isn't my co-worker, and I haven't been invited to go see him in the outside world - after I got the email from him that said he didn't want us to hang out together? I don't know what 'they' are going to make me do.

Also, I don't know *when* they will make me deliver my letter to him. I have one, and it's ready to go. I tried and failed, once, last week, but only once. I didn't try again. I worked on a couple of other things that required me to get up early in the morning, like making a phone call about my car that still needs to get its bumper fixed. It's like I can only do one small project per day, and if I have some other project or task to do, then I can't do the project of stalking Curtis.

I was looking for something on Flickr.com the other day. I don't recall how it started. But I ended up re-discovering the existence of the safety settings on the search results filtering. I forget what it's called. Safe, moderate, or restricted. I was on SafeSearch. So I changed it to 'restricted,' and then started looking at naked pictures and everything on Flickr.

I remember what I was doing. 'They' wanted me to take naked pictures of myself, and I wanted to find out how to put them on Flickr. They won't be on eagledove9, because that's the one my parents are looking at. I wanted to find out if there were any rules that forbid you to put naked pictures on Flickr. You can do it, but you have to label them 'restricted' so that people won't see them in the safe search.

Anyway I found pictures labeled 'thin' (as in, skinny) and 'boy' or 'youth' or something like that, so I ended up looking at pictures of skinny teenage boys. Apparently other people feel the same way that I feel about them. Some of these pictures were also labeled 'emo,' and those were the teenage boys with long hair. So then I saw other tags associated with 'emo,' and I saw the word 'scene queens,' and I didn't know what it meant, so I started reading about scene queens. I thought it meant gay men, but no, it's referring to females. The 'scene' is the social, cultural group of people who like a particular kind of music, in this case, emo. It was showing pictures of how they dress and how they style their hair and what kind of makeup they wear.

A 'scene queen' is a girl who becomes very popular in this subculture. I was looking at them and they seem to be the Sx/So instinctual stacking (Oscar Ichazo). Some of them were vegetarians. I found out that human skulls can be a symbol of vegetarianism. I've been wondering about human skulls. Human skulls are all over the clothing and jewelry. I started noticing them because Curtis has skull jewelry and pictures on his clothes. It occurred to me that I should be horrified by people worshipping human skulls, but I loved everything Curtis did, and wanted to understand it, so I became curious about who is using images of skulls, and why. He isn't a vegetarian, so it means something different with him. He likes symbolic images, like roses, and blood, and skulls, things that are in the goth or emo culture. I saw it on his MySpace page and, again, in his clothing and jewelry and his car.

Anyway, why were human skulls associated with vegetarians? Some of the 'scene queens,' like Kiki Kannibal, are vegetarians. They believe that killing and eating an animal is the same as killing and eating a fellow human. They twist this belief in a way that says humans are evil, and killing humans is better than killing animals. It's a feeling of hatred for the human race. And I know if you asked them, they wouldn't say this, and they wouldn't admit it, and they would probably call themselves peaceful, and they would probably be anti-war. But I still get the 'hatred of human beings' idea from them. The hatred of self.

Years ago I wondered whether I would become a vegetarian. I decided not to. That decision was strengthened when I read about the Weston Price studies. But that's not the only reason. I decided that if I judged humans to be doing a bad thing when they ate animals, then I should also judge tigers, and sharks, because they are predators too. Why are tigers and sharks forgiven for eating animals? Well, duh, it's because they're 'unconscious,' and they have no control of themselves! But... wait... you're saying they're unconscious? But didn't you just say they were conscious, and equal to humans? Didn't you just say it was wrong to kill animals, because animals are humanlike, and they're conscious, and they have feelings?

So are they conscious, or not? Well, they don't have free will, or self-control. They can't make choices. Really? I disagree. If you raise an animal in a cage, and then release it into the wild, it will struggle and have great difficulty surviving. It has to LEARN how to hunt for food and survive in the wild, and it learns it when its parents, and its tribe, TEACHES it how to hunt and survive. Animals have to learn to survive just like humans do. A few things happen automatically without learning, but not everything. And humans, also, can do a few things automatically without learning them, too. We have instincts. So animals have to learn how to survive. They don't operate automatically just by instinct. They aren't unconscious. They have to make choices. They have to learn. They make mistakes just like humans do. Their lives aren't robotic, or automatic, or perfect and flawless and without mistakes. Animal lives don't happen automatically. They are complex. Like humans, animals have to learn, and make mistakes, and make choices. So in some way, they have free will, too.

So the tigers and sharks are eating their prey, but we forgive them. And they have free will. They are responsible for their actions. ('Fish are friends, not food!' from Finding Nemo.) But we forgive them. We can argue that we're more COMPLICATED than they are. Maybe their lives are simpler.

Darn it, I don't have time to explain all of this, because I have to get ready for work. I wanted to write it out, but it's a mess. And I'm writing a lot because I'm on drugs.

Anyway, the point was, I decided not to become a vegetarian. I decided that it was against my nature, because I decided that humans are a semi-carnivorous species, an omnivore. The other apes are, too. Bonobos and chimps eat meat. I don't remember if gorillas do. I think they eat a little bit. It's my nature to be carnivorous, so I forgive myself, the same way I forgive the tigers and sharks for being carnivores. It's a self-acceptance thing. I decided that humans ARE NOT 'different from' or 'better than' other animals. We are more complicated in some ways, and we can build objects that last a long time, and we can write words on paper that survive after our death, and we don't see that happening with the animals very much... but then, we're not looking hard enough. When we look hard enough, we see language in animals, and other forms of culture. If only I had time to write, I'd complain about the contempt and the superiority, the attitudes of the 'scientists' who study animals and think that they're different from humans.

Vegetarians say that animals are different from humans, but also, the same as humans. Animals are different than we are - helpless, weak, automatic, programmed, unable to make choices, not responsible for their actions. But at the same time, animals are the same as humans: they have feelings, they get hurt, we shouldn't eat them because it hurts when they get killed, their lives matter.

(Note, when I say 'vegetarians say' something, it doesn't mean that ALL vegetarians explain it the same way. I am writing this, but remembering that my brother is a vegetarian, too.)

Bonobos are using language in the wild. They make noises, but we can't imitate them, because their mouth and throat is different from ours, and the noises are too high-pitched and complicated in a way that we can't do it. They're not just making random noises. They're talking. I don't know why this idea bothers people so much.

Well, anyway, so I saw lots of human skulls on some of the vegetarian web pages. It's connected to the idea that killing animals is the same as killing humans, and maybe, that it's better to kill humans than it is to kill animals, because humans are inherently more evil than the other animals are. I think we should forgive ourselves the way we forgive the other animals.

I wish I could keep writing all day. My writing quality isn't that great right now. Lots of quantity, not much quality. I feel like sitting and typing because that's something I enjoy doing. It's just a satisfying thing to do. But I have to go to work.

I saw 'He's Just Not That Into You.' It seemed appropriate.

3:08 PM 7/6/10

I rented 'He's Just Not That Into You.' I was curious about that movie ever since I first heard of it, because I saw that it had something about people not returning phone calls and that kind of thing. I'd like to do a remake of this movie with a different concept, a conspiracy theory, where the people who are passionately in love with each other are prevented from communicating because an evil agency is out to destroy all love relationships and prevent people from meeting each other. The evil agency sabotages their electronic communications, while the in-person communications seem to say the opposite of whatever was said online.

Why would the evil agency want to sabotage love relationships? Maybe because people become stronger when they fall in love, and they can accomplish things they couldn't accomplish alone. They make their beliefs and ideas stronger. It might upset the status quo or change society or threaten the government if intellectuals and radicals and other 'dangerous' people fall in love.

Then again, the opposite might happen. A radical might calm down and focus on their family, instead of following the 'script' that someone has planned for them. It's your DUTY to change society, and if you get married and have kids, you'll worry about mundane things instead of doing your duty and following the script. You're SUPPOSED to be a radical, and your personal happiness doesn't matter.

'He's Just Not That Into You' - I liked it. I won't buy it and watch it a hundred times and memorize it, but I liked it enough for a rented movie that I watched once. I was confused through most of the movie because two of the main character guys looked alike enough that I thought it was the same guy. They both had black hair. The guy who didn't want to get married, who had a boat, and who was dating whats-her-name from 'Friends' for seven years, I got him confused with the 'alpha male' bartender guy who also had black hair. I don't remember any of their names and I can't remember the actors' names either, so I'm not much help on that. Near the end of the movie, like 3/4 of the way through, I finally figured out that they were two separate guys.

I liked the moment when the ... darn, I wish I could remember their names now. There's a 'cute' girl, the short-haired one, who's always confused and asking for advice about whether someone's going to call her back or not, and she's calling the bartender guy on the phone all the time - that one. I liked the moment when the happy-hour guy said 'The only thing "happy" about this hour is YOU,' and he took her phone number and then said 'I look forward to hearing from you,' and she actually stood up, and asked him to clarify whether he wanted her to call him, or whether he was going to call her. And she persisted until it became more and more clear that he didn't want to call and didn't want her to call him either.

I know how that feels, when you persistently ask someone to tell you the truth and be clear about it and get it over with. I want to hear the whole truth and I want to face it, even if it's painful. That doesn't mean that I 'want to be hurt' or that I'm a masochist. It means I want the truth, both good and bad, so that I can make realistic decisions and move on if I have to. It means I want to stop investing my energy in someone if they're not interested, so I need to *KNOW* if they're not interested, even if they're afraid of hurting my feelings. This obviously was relevant because of all the Curtis 'drama' going on right now.

(I never, ever would have even TRIED to contact him, or written him notes, or gotten his number and texted him. 'They' urged me to do those things that I would not have done on my own. I would have just enjoyed his company at work, and let him go, and grieved at his absence whenever he inevitably got fired or quit his job, because I already knew he would be impossible to contact and unable to communicate.)

I liked 'You're my exception' at the end. That was a good moment.

I already returned the movie, and I didn't watch it again. Usually I get a lot more depth out of movies, because I watch them several times and notice things I didn't see the first time. But I didn't do that, so it's only a shallow impression. The movie was good enough to not be a waste of money. I've seen movies that were awful, and this wasn't awful. It was okay.

I have to complain, of course, that all of the people were 'mainstream' and there weren't any 'weird' people anywhere in the movie. Hardly any weirdness anywhere to be found. The closest thing to a 'weird' person was the Wiccan who sat next to the 'Friends' lady at the wedding, or wherever that was, and started talking about the Wiccan religion. But that makes 'weird' people look bad. I don't like movies that make weird people look bad. It was the 'someone talking endlessly about a subject you're not at all interested in' phenomenon. This was a movie about normal people, and you have to be able to identify with normal people. I see them, I can see that they're sad or they're hurt or they're worried, these women in the movie, and I can feel sorry for them a little bit, but I also have this feeling that they wouldn't ever understand me or understand any of my problems - they could never relate to me. They would give me an 'ick' look if I ever tried to talk to them or tell them about the world that I live in. So I couldn't really feel emotionally involved in their problems as much as I would want to, watching a movie. If I watch movies about weird people who don't fit in, I feel more like I can relate to those people and they would like me in return. But these were all normal people who wouldn't like me.

Harry Potter's world is full of weird people who don't fit in, and they have to go to another secret community to find people like themselves. But even in the HP world there are weirder-than-usual people who don't fit in. So I always liked Luna Lovegood.

I don't remember if I blogged about this or not, but I also noticed that Kreacher the house-elf has some things in common with me. He mutters and mumbles mean, hateful, abusive 'bile' because he thinks no one can hear him. I've done that before. I used to do exactly that whenever I was writing to 'the hackers' by typing things and hoping that the keylogger would record what I typed. (A keylogger is a computer program that records every key you type, even if the letters don't appear on the screen and aren't saved in a word processing file. So it can collect passwords and other things you type.) I used to type things directed at whoever was reading the keystrokes. I typed hateful things to the hackers and they would respond by messing with the computer. I only do that if it seems like a real person can't hear me. But if I can see a real person responding to me, and showing hurt feelings, and giving me a real response, then I never, ever say hateful things to them. Not unless it happens by accident, like when I accidentally said 'Oh my God' when I saw Curtis with a cigar, because I had never seen him smoking one before, and it probably humiliated him, and I didn't mean to do that. Anyway that is how I could relate to Kreacher the house-elf.

I'm not sure what signals I use to decide that certain people are 'normal' and they wouldn't understand me. This is a social class thing, I think. In West Virginia, a lot of people have facial deformities, exactly as Weston Price described. People with facial deformities, the weak jaw and all that, are more likely to be in 'my class,' even if their beliefs are normal and mainstream. They're more likely to be nice to me and tolerant of me. They're more likely to be poorer and rural.

In Bellefonte, the people here are permanent residents, and I see a lot of semi-poor, semi-rural people, and everyone is a lot friendlier to strangers. You can be friendly to strangers if everyone around you is a permanent resident. In State College, however, you can't be friendly to strangers or make eye contact with strangers, because you'll never see them again. Most of State College's population is temporary. There are a huge number of college students, hotel guests, parents of students, people attending football games and other events, and other temporary visitors. If you make eye contact with strangers, you invest your feelings in someone who will disappear and hurt you. So as we walk around the grocery store and other public places, we don't make much eye contact with anyone. But in Bellefonte, total strangers will walk up to you and smile and start up a conversation, because they know we're all permanent residents and we're likely to bump into each other at this same store or restaurant next week.

These permanent residents of Bellefonte are more likely to be uglier, fatter, or have the facial deformities, and also 'bad' hairstyles. There are more long-haired men here, and a few women with very long hair like my own, hip-length hair, which I am always happy to see. These people are all friendlier to me. They don't necessarily UNDERSTAND me very well, and they might not be able to have an interesting conversation with me, or a 'deep' conversation. But they won't say 'ick.'

The college students in State College are less likely to have facial deformities, or they are less severe. They come from wealthier families, which means their parents probably had better nutrition while pregnant. They are more likely to give the 'ick' response to anyone who looks weird, non-mainstream, or has unusual grooming practices, dreadlocks, not wearing makeup, etc. They all have hair that ends at the upper mid-back or shorter, and almost never even reaches waist length. ('Waist' and 'hip': The waist is at the belly button level. Hip is 'butt' level, at the top of the legs. I say that, because in the past, I used the word 'waist' to describe the entire region of the body between the belly button and the thighs, so 'waist' and 'hip' were mostly the same thing. It just meant 'the lower middle region of the body.') For some unknown reason, they believe that hair can be 'too long.' It would seem that there would be an occasional person who, by random chance, would just decide to grow very long hip-length hair for the heck of it, but it never happens; therefore, there is some kind of 'rule' against it.

I could spend a lot of time writing about what I think those rules are, but I might not do that in this blog. I could write a separate blog some other time.

Anyway, the college students at PSU are more like the characters in 'Not That Into You.' They all look alike. And it's hard for me to have a conversation with them. (I wouldn't mind people all looking alike - in fact, the religious order requires everyone to follow the grooming rules - but they're looking alike in a way that I myself prefer, a look that I find attractive and beautiful for both sexes.)

About 'convincing people to believe.' Convincing the mainstream people that mind control is real, for instance. Or convincing them that in general, government intervention is harmful. Or convincing them that mainstream medicine is very dangerous and you shouldn't take all the drugs that the doctors will offer you. ('Healthy Normal' people don't need as many drugs as the unhealthy people do. They don't suffer from chronic fatigue as often and they don't catch every cold virus that goes around every week. So they're a lot older whenever they finally discover that mainstream medicine wants to give you lots and lots of dangerous drugs and can't really solve a lot of your problems.)

It's hard to convince 'healthy normal' people that something bad is going on in the world. The world that they see is a comfortable world that gives them everything they need, in general. They have problems, but they don't usually see those problems as being caused by a huge system in society, such as 'the government itself' and things like that. Problems are just individual, random events, something surprising and unusual.

Why would we want to convince them? Because there are a lot of projects that require money and knowledge from lots of people, for instance, building shields that work and that are affordable, so that electronic harassment victims can sleep at night and think their thoughts. And other projects like tracking down the attackers and stopping them. Or cleaning up drug residue contamination: I'm not the only one who has this, I'm just one of the few people who's aware of it, and if anybody else ever tried to clean up THEIR houses, they would see that it is an enormous, expensive, emotionally devastating disaster. It's so expensive, you can't even imagine how expensive it is, if you've got drug contamination on lots of nice, special, unique, heirloom furniture and antiques and things like that, things you can't just throw in the trash. Anyway I was saying we'd want to convince the 'healthy normal' people about things because we need help from them. This is the 'ultimate resource' concept: people are able to help you by sharing their knowledge and their resources and their labor. ('The Ultimate Resource' is a book by Julian Simon.) Expensive, difficult projects that require money and knowledge can be done if groups of people work together, but are almost impossible for one person to do alone.

(Today's focus is 'The Social Instinct,' as you can see. How do people benefit from being part of a group? How do people fit into a group?)

I'm looking at dating websites again. It is physically painful to imagine meeting a new person and starting all over again. Not only that, but now I am more aware than I ever was, long ago, that I really do like guys 'the skinnier the better.' Most of the men that I ever see are large, fully grown men. And they have short hair. I can look at fully grown men if they have long hair and beards - there's some texture, something soft that I can touch. You have to have something to pet with your hands, the same way you pet animals. Why would you want a bare-skinned dog or cat, so that you could stroke its bare skin? I like dogs and cats to have soft fur to touch. The same is true of humans. I run my fingers through and over a man's hair the same way I pet an animal. So even if a man has a body type that I don't like as much, he at least has a chance if he has long hair and a beard, because I can pet his hair. And I can look at it. It's more interesting than bare nothingness. It's SOMETHING instead of nothing. Hair has a texture and a sparkle and movement. It has multi-colors that shine in the sunlight. The people on the dating websites don't even have that.

There are some long-haired guys, but I am being prevented from going to them. There is this inhibition stopping me. It is partly because 'they' connected me with Curtis, bonded me with him, so that I am reluctant to go after any other guys until I know for sure that Curtis says 'no' and doesn't want to be with me at all, except as a 'temporary workplace friend,' a co-worker who doesn't matter very much, who will disappear whenever he quits or gets fired, and who will never speak to him again and it won't even matter. I'm assuming that that is what he thinks I am. That's how he sees me. For whatever reason, he wants to call me flattering names and occasionally show sexual interest, especially when I'm on the right drugs and I'm in 'aphrodisiac friendly' mode. But I can't get replies from any method of communication that I've used.

I'm not as pretty as his ex-girlfriend, his wife, for all practical purposes, since he's paying her child support. I feel like he's stepping down or something by being with me - I'm not as good as the one he was with before. She is very young, younger than he is. And she looks like Kira the Gelfling from 'The Dark Crystal.' That's the first thing I thought when I saw her for the first time.

I actually liked her. She worked at Weis very briefly. Then she had a random accident, and it was a terrible accident. Her son Caden knocked her tooth out by hitting her in the face with a toy - I assume by accident. (In other words I hope he wasn't hitting her because he was angry or something.) She had fragile, cavity-filled teeth, because she got pregnant as a very young teenager, around 14, I think, maybe 13, right at the time when your body is going through a growth spurt. So your own body is growing a lot at that time, and then it has to give minerals to the baby's body, too, so it takes all the minerals out of your bones and teeth, unless you are eating... you guessed it, the Weston Price diet. That is what happened to her. She then went to the dentist, and the dentist recommended... that she have all of her teeth removed and replaced with dentures or fake teeth. So she did. Curtis told me this story and I actually cried out loud, for real, because all of that is preventable if only people have enough money to buy healthy food. I don't know if she removed ALL her teeth. But she removed several. It's enough that she has a look, this puckered look to her mouth, when her mouth is closed. They weren't able to get her new teeth. So she took time off work because of this, and then they said they didn't want her to come back, unless she could get new teeth, because she was dealing with the public, as a cashier, and she would have to talk and smile to them. That made me angry. This is what Curtis told me.

The same thing is talked about in the Weston Price book. The natives all had healthy teeth, until and unless they started eating the white man's sugar and flour and white bread and jelly and canned foods. Then they got cavities immediately and had children with mild to severe facial deformities, narrow hips, and other deformities.  They talked about how it was considered 'normal' for most people to have all of their teeth removed and replaced with dentures.

If you believe that 'white teeth are better than yellow teeth,' think about what white teeth really are.  If your teeth are perfectly white, that means they're fake, probably porcelain or dentures.  I knew a lady who had porcelain teeth, and they were all perfectly blue-white, 'perfect' by the 'white teeth are better' standard.  Ivory yellow teeth are REAL teeth.  It means you haven't lost all your teeth and had them replaced with fake ones.  I've learned to appreciate the natural color of teeth the same way I've learned to appreciate other type of  'natural grooming,' like gray hair.  I LIKE real, imperfect, ivory-yellow teeth.  Now that I know about it, I've learned to actively dislike fake white teeth.  I'm not joking - sometimes I get 'voices' telling me they think I'm being sarcastic, but I'm not.

(Note, every time I mention Weston Price, 'they' want me to remind people about eating bone marrow. Weston Price, and the WP website, and Sally Fallon, and other authors in this movement, along with many people on the internet, and even people I've spoken to, have all claimed that you can eat bone marrow, and it's good for you. I tried eating it, and it triggered the vomit reflex within a few minutes after eating it, and I also almost passed out and had horrible feelings that lasted for hours - actually for a whole day. For whatever reason, it wasn't edible. It can cause severe food poisoning and possibly even death. I don't know why some people claim they can eat it. There might be a different way of cooking it, perhaps cooking it at a very high temperature for a very long time, or something. I don't know. But I have to always give this warning that those books and websites talk about eating parts of the animals and organs that we don't usually eat, and if you try anything unfamiliar, it could be very dangerous, especially organs and glands that produce hormones. This is something that I want to test and troubleshoot, but I won't be doing it alone! I need to clarify WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENS when you eat the various organs and parts of the body of different animals and seafood. I know some of them are deadly, like certain parts of the puffer fish. So I must give a warning whenever I recommend the WP diet.)

That all came from talking about C's ex-girlfriend and her teeth. That was why she left Weis and isn't working there anymore. I only saw her a couple times, and I looked into her eyes, and I liked her right away. I can see why he loved her and why he'll never be 'neutral' towards her. She's always going to be part of his life.

I should post this - it's rambling a lot. I can write all afternoon because that's the easiest thing for me to do, but it doesn't mean that my writing quality is the best. This is my mediocre writing quality.

Oh - quick note. It was Vince who got his hair cut. He had slightly long very curly hair and he cut a couple inches off of it. I was watching to see how long he would grow it. He reached a difficult stage where it was starting to hang down over his eyes, and of course, it was long enough that I loved his hair, which is always when they cut it. That was the 'haircut complaint' that I was supposed to write about several days ago. He didn't shave it off completely though. I wish I could show people how to get through the 'transition stage', and I wish it was acceptable for guys to wear hair barrettes and other things that would make it easier for them to clip their hair back out of the way without cutting it, so it doesn't hang in their face during the difficult stage. Hair barrettes are about the only thing I can think of that would work with the medium-length hair that's still too short to put in a braid or ponytail. But oh well.

Milk

I've been drinking coffee again, even though I quit it on Monday. Some other things are still contaminated, and I had hypersomnia again and I slept all day Tuesday - I think I already mentioned that. I got new Goodwill clothes and when I wear them I feel so much more comfortable - no more drugs on my skin. Anyway, to reduce the amount of coffee I'm drinking, I've been getting a small cup of coffee and filling it most of the way up with half-and-half. Today it was about 3/4 cream and 1/4 coffee (plus sugar).

I've noticed before that milk has hormones that affect my own hormones, and now that I've been drinking this coffee with lots of cream in it, I'm noticing it again. I usually don't drink milk anymore. I used to, but in 1999 or whenever I got really sick for a long time, I had to stop drinking milk because it was making my upset stomach much worse, and I never started drinking it again, except a little bit here and there, or in ice cream.

Theories about why I seem to get a dose of hormones from milk:

1. Leftover synthetic bovine growth hormone. I was told (by Ken, a guy who used to work on a dairy farm and knows other dairy farmers) that they're not allowed to use bovine growth hormone anymore, and they supposedly stopped using it. Maybe some people are still using it, secretly, or maybe there is leftover bovine growth hormone in the pipes and tubes that the milk goes through when it comes from the automatic milker. I saw automatic milkers, and I saw the pipes, and the pipes are disgusting and full of old, clotted milk that never gets rinsed out. It could have leftover hormones in it. (Some farms are cleaner than others. I visited two different farms, and they were drastically different from each other in their way of being organized and how they were run. The whole style was different. You might visit a nice, clean farm, and not believe how disgusting the automatic milkers can be, because you might have seen only a farm where they keep the equipment clean. But they're not all that way.)

2. Holstein cows have lots of hormones anyway, because they were bred to have a large pituitary gland that causes them to have large udders and produce a lot of milk.

3. None of the above - something else is giving milk a hormone-like effect.

What would be the ideal milk that I would like to buy?

1. raw, not pasteurized

2. milked into a non-metallic pail, instead of being milked into an automatic milker and then going through the disgusting pipes and tubes, full of germs and mold and fungus and slime. Pail must be nonmetallic because I suspect that it's not good for food to get metal dissolved in it. (I don't want it to be plastic either. I'm not sure what it should be made of. I like glass or ceramic, but that seems inconvenient, and with my luck, I would discover that ceramic is toxic, too. This is an "I don't know, YOU think of something" situation. The free market will take care of it.)

3. milk from a non-Holstein cow. I read once, somewhere, in some forgotten place, that there used to be a cow called a 'scrub cow', which was a basic, generic, inferior type of cow, sort of like an alley cat is just a generic type of cat. I don't know if I really understood correctly, but I had the impression that this was a kind of non-breed cow. Anyway, that's the type of cow I'd use, some cow that didn't have anything special about it. I guess all domesticated cows will have some kind of 'breed,' but maybe, I would want any kind of breed that wasn't made for milking. That would mean it had fewer hormones, and more nutrient-dense milk. Weston Price pointed out that the Holstein Cows (or maybe it was that other book, Nourishing Traditions, that talked about this) can produce a lot of milk, but they can only put a little bit of nutrients in it, so it has a low nutrient density. Another cow breed produces less milk, but the milk is better quality.

4. nothing but pasture-fed. No grain at all fed to the cows, just grass and whatever other plants they eat. No hormones, no antibiotics, no drugs, no vaccines, nothing given to the cows. 'Organic,' no pesticides, no fertilizers. I wouldn't mind certain kinds of fertilizers if they were organic.

5. not homogenized.

6. absolutely NO VITAMINS added to the milk. Synthetic vitamin D causes the symptoms of vitamin D deficiency. In other words, the more synthetic vitamin D you use, the more you show symptoms of not getting enough vitamin D, which causes you to start using MORE vitamin D because you think you're not getting enough. Synthetic vitamin D is bad for you. Synthetic vitamin A is also bad for you. Both of them are added to milk.

7. no powdered milk added. Reduced-fat milk supposedly has some powdered milk added to it, and powdered milk contains oxidized cholesterol. Oxidized cholesterol is bad for you. Also, the powdered milk contains some preservatives and other chemicals - I read that in the Feingold Diet informational materials somewhere.

8. milk is whole, nothing taken out of it at all. Not reduced-fat, not skim.

That's all I can think of for now. I'll probably think of a few more criteria after publishing this blog.

gratitude for my housekeeper

My house-helper guy got out of the hospital and he was able to come over to help me today. I found out that he, too, was having chest pains. But he was having them before, starting sometime last year.

With me, it coincided with the snowfall. I have a bizarre theory. I think that humid, warm air rises from the local mountains, which are covered with rhododendrons, and then it brings rhododendron poison with it up into the clouds that become snow, which then falls down and poisons large numbers of people at the same time. This is only one bizarre theory as to why people might have heart attacks during snowstorms and wintertime. It could be tested - you could look for extremely low levels of grayanotoxin in snow.

There are all sorts of theories as to why people have more heart attacks in the wintertime. Weston Price talked about the winter heart attacks too, and he said it coincided with the cow's milk having the lowest level of vitamins in it, during the time when the cows weren't able to graze on grass and they were stuck in their stalls eating hay and grain instead. So he thought that poorer nutrition, lower quality milk, left people more vulnerable to things like heart attacks. So, everybody has their theory for wintertime heart attacks. I don't really agree with his theory, and I doubt that many people would agree with my theory, either.

Anyway, my housekeeper helped me clean out the fridge. We used Pine-Sol, on his recommendation. I had a mask over my face so I could breathe. I have fear attacks when I smell the bone marrow adrenaline (or whatever hormone - it might be erythropoietin or some other hormone, if I've spelled that correctly).

All of my 'precancerous' areas got irritated by the bone marrow. My 'benign' basal cell carcinomas, on my cheeks and nose, all got irritated and they have been red and itchy for days. My breasts are hurting again, the same way they did after I got the bisphenol-A plastic dental fillings. I don't know if it was a hormone that irritated the precancerous areas, or whether it was caused by bone marrow stem cells.

(The last one is a HUGE pdf file, so I put a link to a short summary page above it. I didn't read these, I only glanced quickly at them.)

Carcinogenesis Driven by Bone Marrow-Derived Stem Cells

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11081634

MMP-9 Supplied by Bone Marrow–Derived Cells Contributes to Skin Carcinogenesis

I thought of cancer because I started hearing voices telling me that bone marrow was a 'potent carcinogen.' Sometimes the voices lie, and sometimes they tell me the truth, so I am always skeptical. So I looked it up to see if there was anything on google about bone marrow being carcinogenic. And indeed I am feeling all these little painful spots in areas where I've had 'precancerous' areas in the past, or hormone-sensitive areas, or whatever.

If bone marrow really is carcinogenic, it would explain why Asians have a lot of stomach cancer. I'd read about that several times in the past, and then I read it again in Nourishing Traditions. I don't recall what her theory was about why they had lots of stomach cancer. But they do use bone marrow as part of 'Traditional Chinese Medicine'. So that could be another theory.

While my housekeeper was inside cleaning out the fridge, I went out to my car to get some cardboard out of the trunk. I met a neighbor, who saw me wearing gloves and with my face mask pulled down hanging around my neck. I was embarrassed and felt that I needed to explain why I had a face mask and gloves on, so I told her I was having an allergic reaction to something ('allergic reaction' is the phrase that I use whenever I need to make a long story short) and I told her I was chemical sensitive and had a bad reaction to something I cooked. She asked what it was, and I said, once again feeling weird, that I had tried to cook bone marrow. She said (surprise surprise) she'd eaten it before and hadn't had any problem. It seems like everyone's eaten bone marrow without any problems, except me.

So she talked with me about where to buy better quality local meat, which actually was something I had wanted to know anyway. She told me about a little store in Millheim which I think I remember seeing while driving my car and exploring. I think it was Nittany Valley Meats, or something - it sounded familiar. She said that the meats from there tasted better and were better quality than the grocery store meats.

Anyway, I haven't really tested the fridge yet, but it's been mostly cleaned out. I don't trust it, and I will probably need to clean it again. But it's better than it was.

I also had some stuff in the sink, because I was trying to skim off the foam off the top of the broth I was trying to make, and I poured the little spoonfuls of foam into the sink, and so it sat there vaporizing fumes and making a disgusting, revolting smell that made me sick. He cleaned out the sink too.

I can do the cleaning up much better if somebody is with me and I'm not alone. I had a reaction, I felt the fear attack, but I wasn't worried that I would die by myself with nobody to call the ambulance.

There aren't as many 'evil spirits' in my apartment as there were. I like the idea of explaining evil spirits that way: real, physical hormone vapors rising from dead bodies and bones, hormones that fill you with fear and terror, that only some people react to, people who are hypersensitive to those things, while other people are mostly immune.

When I dropped him off, I had already paid him and thanked him several times, and then I also shook his hand. I am very, very grateful for the help.

recovering

WP summary

recovering

going to doctor

universal edibility test

It's been 24 hours since I ate the marrow and had the reaction to it. I haven't tried eating solid food, but I have been drinking sugar water. I don't have any juice or anything in the house, but I needed some kind of energy so that I wouldn't be starving, so I just scooped ordinary sugar into a cup of water. I tried coffee this afternoon and had no problems. I actually didn't react this badly the first time I tried it months ago, when I ate the tiny piece raw - I felt better soon enough to eat more food that same day. Maybe I ate more marrow this time. Also, it's harder to digest when it's cooked (according to various things I've read about raw meat versus cooked meat, raw being faster and easier to digest) so it would be in there longer.

More comments about troubleshooting the diet:

1. This book is still relatively new, and in that way, it is kind of a 'fad,' even though it's actually a study of primitive diets that have existed for thousands of years. It's new to us in the modern USA and we don't know enough details about it yet. The Weston Price Foundation was started in 1999, which means that his book was sitting around for a couple of decades and nobody really knew it existed, but all of a sudden, it's been made more popular and people are becoming aware of it. I found out about it by picking up a leaflet at a natural foods store.

2. Other people are writing books that are associated with the WP book, but weren't actually written by him. There's a cookbook called Nourishing Traditions, which I am reading, and that's one of the books that talks about bone marrow and bone broth. As more people are getting into this movement, there will be conflicts between the things they say, and it won't all be totally consistent.

3. There is a real need for something like this, which makes people get very excited about the book, and I feel that way too. But you can jump into something new and not know how dangerous it can be. For instance, they're talking about eating raw meat. This is something that people really do, but you have to be extremely careful and you have to know what you're doing. You don't just go buy some raw chicken off the shelf at the grocery store and eat it raw. I don't know enough about this yet to even think about trying it. I just don't want people to think they can rush out and do something without knowing how, especially after my own experience with the soup bones.

4. The Universal Edibility Test: There is a description that I found once on a wilderness survival website. It talked about how to try out a new, unfamiliar plant if you were in the wilderness and had to eat something. In that test, it even says you should begin by simply touching the plant against your skin. He says to look for an external skin reaction, though - you'd be expecting to see something like a poison ivy rash - but even so, that would still be a good thing to do, because you'd have a chance to feel symptoms from transdermal poisoning. He might not have known about transdermal absorption of plant poisons, but that test still looks like a really good thing to know how to do.

However, some molecules are too large to go through the skin. The soup bones probably won't cause a bad reaction if you only touch them. I handled them with bare hands and didn't feel anything. You can also try inhaling it - there is a vapor that rises off the broth that I cooked, and that vapor is full of fear and adrenaline, a bad feeling. If you don't react to something you put on your skin, and if you're not sure that the vapor from it is bad, the next thing to do is just try the tiniest amount possible, and wait several minutes for a reaction. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's a tiny dot the size of the period at the end of the sentence. It has to be an extremely small amount.

5. I'm assuming that all internal organs are medicinal and can't just be eaten casually as food. Now, I'm also going to be cautious about all bones and other body parts as well - for instance, I was thinking of trying to make a broth or stock using crayfish, but now I'm not sure if I'll be able to eat that either. I am going to be cautious about everything new that I haven't tried before. Anyway, the bodies of animals produce hormones which are actually used in mainstream medicine, or they used to be in the past - you can get insulin for diabetics from the pancreas of a pig, for instance. So if you just went out and casually ate some pancreas, you might have a life-threatening insulin poisoning attack with extremely low blood sugar, the same way a diabetic does if they do a large dose of insulin. This will cause you to lose energy, pass out, go into convulsions, and you will need an ambulance. (I've seen this happen several times with my diabetic friend.) They then have to give you a shot with some kind of sugar in it - I think it's dextrose but I'm not sure - that doesn't really sound right. I don't think it's glucose, though. So that could happen if you just casually tried to eat pancreas as a 'food' instead of a medicine, in a large amount, without knowing what to expect. But even so, various sources say that some people eat pancreas as a 'food' in other parts of the world.

6. What's the general overall idea of the Weston Price book that I am using as guidance or a 'vision?' It's a couple of things. The most important idea is that facial deformities and crooked, misplaced teeth are NOT hereditary. They're a deformity caused by an unknown something in the modern lifestyle. It might be the diet, or it might be poisons, or it might be something else, but whatever it is, it doesn't happen in primitive societies.

I didn't know this, and nobody else knew it either. Nobody ever tried to explain why my teeth all grew in the wrong place and I had lots of teeth removed and got braces when I was a child. Nobody tried to explain why my jaw and mouth are unusually small - you can see it really clearly in a photo that I put on my MySpace page, where I took a picture of my head from an angle up above, outdoors by the woods, when I first got my camera. Nobody knew that this small jaw was something preventable. That's the main idea: you can prevent these things somehow.

The other main idea is something which lots of other mainstream writers are already saying: it's good to eat lots of seafood. The healthiest cultures he found were eating seafood.

But the non-mainstream or counter-mainstream idea is, if you can't eat seafood, then supposedly, you would benefit from eating more meat, more fat, and more internal organs of the animal, although we'd have to find out how to eat them safely and which ones will cause the fewest 'medicinal' experiences. This is just a general idea and all the details need worked out. Eating more animal fat, not less, is the idea that goes against mainstream beliefs, and avoiding vegetable oils.

I myself won't be using cod liver oil. It goes rancid too easily and will probably go rancid even if you try very hard to take precautions. Also, a few years ago, when I started trying over-the-counter alternative herbal medicine pills (I don't use pills anymore, but I tried them for a while), I also tried some nutrient supplements. One day, I tried a fish oil pill along with a vitamin E pill. The next day, my skin was covered in bruises, and one side of my body was weak as though I had had a stroke. I was walking with a limp on the weak leg. The symptoms were temporary and they disappeared quickly, but I never took another fish oil pill or vitamin E pill ever again.

Anyway, even if people disagree about the details of how to use WP's information, or the details of the particular diets we choose, the overall ideas will still be there.

7. Weston Price might have gotten hoaxed a couple of times by some of the people he talked to. Margaret Mead got hoaxed by the primitive culture she studied. They told her that they didn't know that sex caused pregnancy, so they just had sex as much as they wanted without worrying about it. They told her lots of other things as a joke and she took it all seriously and wrote a big, famous book about it, which made lots of people believe, for a long time, that primitive cultures are full of really stupid, ignorant people who need to be 'saved' by the superior knowledge of the modern world.

However, most of what WP wrote was about the foods he actually saw people eating. I was thinking he might have gotten hoaxed, or lied to, by the one guy who said they prevented scurvy by eating the adrenal glands of the moose. The adrenal glands produce adrenaline, the fight-or-flight hormone, which would make you terrified and full of fear and energy and it would cause a lot of other bad things to happen if you just went and ate a bunch of it. So this just sounds too unbelievable, based on my own experiences of what happens when you eat hormone-producing parts of the body. But I think the majority of the things he wrote came from people who were telling the truth, especially since he watched them eating these foods.

***

I made an appointment to go see a doctor about my strange chest pains. I have to make an appointment just to 'play along' with the expected things to do for my employer. They wanted me to get a doctor's excuse. (Not at McD, but Weis. At McD, your schedule is a lot more flexible and it's much easier for them to cover your shift with somebody else if you're gone. At Weis, we don't have enough people right now, so it is a big deal if I'm gone. So McD didn't react as badly when I said I needed to drastically cut my hours because of a strange heart problem.) I see the doctor as somebody potentially dangerous who is more likely to make my situation much worse, so I am going to be on my guard.

***

I have to mention something else I thought of. I've written about how there is a need to build shielded boxes and shielded rooms that will block out sonic and electromagnetic attacks. This is relevant to the topic of 'unexpected dangers from doing something new.' I've read about how some places are covered with copper sheet metal to protect against electromagnetic interference. My dad visited the satellite dish in Greenbank, West Virginia, where they study outer space, and it's all shielded with copper.

This is one of those unknown dangers where you try to fix one problem, and you cause another problem. Touching and handling copper will probably cause copper poisoning. It goes through the skin like many of the herbs and drugs that I have experiences. I've touched wet copper pennies and tried to use copper hairpins on wet hair, and had bad reactions to it. Large amounts of copper metal will give you strange feelings in your head and you become unable to think properly. It can cause convulsions and vomiting and other symptoms. I can imagine people going out and buying copper sheet metal and trying to build their own shields with it, only to have unexplained problems after handling copper for a few weeks and touching it all the time.

I have a Google Book where I read something about using copper as ayurvedic medicine: Ṣoḍaśāṅgahr̥dayam: essentials of ayurveda
By Priya Vrat Sharma. In that book it mentions "The eight defects of copper." They are: loss of consciousness, giddiness, burning sensation, sweating, nausea, vomiting, anorexia, and restlessness. I experienced those things (a little bit) by touching and handling wet copper.

***

I just saw a black person in the library and this suddenly reminded me of a 'Politically Incorrect Warning' that I have to give about the Weston Price book.  I love the book for showing lots of beautiful pictures of healthy people of all races.  However, in one part of the book, he has a picture of a chimpanzee next to some pictures of black people with facial deformities and he said that there was a resemblance between them.  He also described some African babies running around on all fours as 'behaving like chimpanzees,' or something like that.

When you're visiting Africa, the place where most of the great apes live, when you think about how closely related we are to them, then of course you look at them and see similarities between them and us.  But it will be offensive that he only made the comparisons with some black people in Africa, and not ALL people with facial deformities.

***

I like the Aquatic Apes theory.  There is a theory that humans developed long ago by living a partially aquatic lifestyle where they spent a lot of time in either the ocean or large lake areas, hunting and gathering seafood.  This makes us similar to other mammals that lost their body hair, such as the hippopotamus, the whales, dolphins, and some types of seals or walruses - I know some seals still have fur but not all of them do.

I should disconnect now - there's some stuff I still have to do today and I'm starting to feel better.  It's actually a good thing that I can't get online at home, and have to use the limited-time login at the library.

Troubleshooting Weston Price: Bone marrow and fish eggs

(*6/21/11 Edit: This is one of my most popular posts, and it's very useful information that a lot of people are looking for.  However, most of the people looking for this are not looking for pages about electronic harassment - they just want to find out about the dangers and difficulties of using the Weston Price diet.  I actually want to write more about this in the future, because it's very important, but I have been busy and haven't had time lately, because it's actually a rather large project that I have in mind.  So if you read this, just ignore the descriptions of my experiences of electronic harassment - hearing voices, and the feeling of being controlled as a 'puppet' - because it is not connected to my observations and experiences of eating bone marrow and caviar.*)

(*Since the time when I wrote this, I have come to suspect that the fish eggs were hard to eat because they might contain 'amines.'  Amines are a category of chemicals.  They often occur in meats, especially meats that are not fresh.  Histamine is one type of amine, and it can cause you to experience the symptoms of an allergic reaction, such as feeling the need to vomit.  Amines might have caused some of my experiences that I wrote about here, but then again, I do not know what causes it, and it could be many things.  I still suspect it is a hormone of some kind.  The same thing happens to me when I smell blood, for instance, if a person has had an accident, or if I drive by a deer that has been killed on the road - I feel like I am going to faint.  Blood comes from bone marrow, so there is a connection between them, and whatever chemical it is in blood that causes people to faint, it is also in bone marrow.  So the vomit-inducing chemicals might be amines, or they might be something else entirely.*)

I can't talk without being controlled, and they are trying to write every single word that I say for me. So, this is not my blog post - it's someone else's. Other personas are in here.

I am trying new things to learn how to use the Weston Price diet. It's not really one diet, it's just a collection of observations about how primitive cultures ate, and so it's actually a wide variety of different diets.

Weston Price gave a general, overall view, but he did not explain lots of details, and he also did not give warnings or dangers. I would like to still follow the overall idea, as a guideline, but the details need troubleshooting, and those details can be extremely dangerous. Several of the books (not just Weston Price, but others associated with this movement) talk about eating bone marrow broth or using soup bones. I have never used them before and didn't grow up using them, so I haven't been familiar with what they do to you if you don't prepare them properly.

The first time I tried soup bones, months ago, I didn't eat a large amount. Instead, I took a knife, and ate a tiny pinpoint-sized fragment out of the marrow part of the bone, and I ate it raw. I'm not used to foods being 'medicinal.' I'm used to eating foods that don't cause any particular strong reaction. Bone marrow is not a food - it's a drug. It is in the 'medicinal' category of foods. You do not eat it by the mouthful. You eat it in pieces that are as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and even that might be too much.

I handled tobacco plants a couple of years ago and contaminated many of my belongings with transdermal tobacco residues. Whenever I hit a bit of that residue, I get a wake-me-up jolt feeling and something that feels like high blood pressure, which lasts for several hours. And that first time I handled the soup bones, I did, in fact, have some of the tobacco residue nearby, and I thought that I must have accidentally gotten it on my hands before eating the marrow, because the marrow triggered that same reaction. So I dismissed it as a contamination incident, instead of thinking it was the marrow itself. I have had other incidents where I ate something that had been sitting on a residue-contaminated area, and I accidentally ate some of the tobacco residue and almost got sick because of the strong reaction to it.

The discomfort was so unbearable, I had to go outside and take a walk for a couple of hours. I felt like I was going to die. But again, I thought it was just another residue contamination incident where I got some of the drugs on my food.

I tried beef bone marrow again today. This time I cooked it. Maybe I didn't cook it long enough - it might have to be cooked for a very long time to neutralize the hormones. I cooked it in water, trying to make a broth. Again, I ate a tiny pinpoint-sized fragment which was, maybe, an eighth of an inch long. I didn't have a bad reaction, and I ate a tiny bit more. I was being warned and cautioned by voices talking to me, telling me not to eat a lot of it, only a tiny bit, and to watch for the reaction.

It hits you after a couple minutes - less than five minutes. It doesn't happen right away. Maybe there are only a few specialized cells in there, and the rest of the bone marrow would be okay. Maybe only a few special areas produce the hormone. But it happened again. It gave me an intense, terrifying panic attack, and a wake-me-up effect, similar to tobacco. It's a tingling feeling of something flooding through your whole body.

Then, you feel the fear and pain of the animal being killed. You feel the trauma that it felt as it was dying, and you feel like you yourself are dying. I felt my eyebrows move into a facial expression of sadness and grief - it was involuntary - I felt my eyesight darkening as though I were about to die. I didn't actually feel physical pain. Instead I felt trauma. It was a feeling that something terrible and irreversible was happening to me, the feeling of death. Something terrible, so bad that it could not be undone.

Why does all this happen? Because the animal you are eating uses the same hormones, and has the same emotions, that you do. Every feeling you have ever felt, good and bad, exists somewhere inside the body of this animal. They all come from hormones and chemicals, and they all come from some particular part of the body. If you ate parts of the brain, you would feel the hormones and moods of the brain. I haven't tried it, but you would probably feel strange sensations of thinking somebody else's thoughts.

These warnings need to be given, because the diet talks about eating organs and bones of the animals, and using every part of the animal. They really do it, it's true. Primitive cultures really do use all the parts of the animal. But there are very strict rules about how they are prepared. I haven't successfully eaten bone marrow without this terrible reaction, but I think maybe you have to cook it for a very, very long time, and even so, it will still have a 'tonic' effect, a wake-you-up effect.

This is something horrible that you do not want to try. It is probably life-threatening.

I have also tried caviar a couple of times. I tried it a few weeks ago, but that night, I was already getting sick at my stomach before I ate it. I felt like I was coming down with a stomach virus already, that day, and I was sick while walking around the grocery store before I had eaten anything at all. So when I tried a tiny bit of caviar when I went home, I got sick for hours, and I thought it was just because I had already been sick. But I tried it again today, and it made me just as sick. If you eat a lot of it, it will cause vomiting. Again, it's not 'food,' it's 'medicine.' Like all other drugs, it has desired effects, and undesired effects.

A week or two after eating that tiny bit of caviar, last time, I ovulated, and I could tell that I was ovulating. It was different from my usual, thirty-something, winding-down, pre-menopausal feelings. I haven't ovulated quite so noticeably in a long time. I won't go into detail, but some strange and unusual things happened. The fish eggs are used for fertility, and even a tiny quantity of them actually works. But they will also make you vomit. You have to eat only a few eggs at a time.

It's been an hour ago at least, that I ate the bone marrow, yet I am still having occasional strange feelings from it.

Again, I am using Weston Price as a general guideline, but we need to remember that there are very strict rules to follow.  And I don't use metaphors, but I will use them here:  the path is very, very narrow and hard to find, and if you stray a tiny bit off the path, you will die.  You will die if you wander off the path in the woods into the rhododendron bushes, literally, and you will die if you wander off the path of instructions you must follow in how you prepare your food.  Again, I've never successfully eaten bone marrow without bad results, so I still don't know if there IS a safe way to eat it without having terrible feelings.  It is a hormone-producing part of the body that releases trauma signals if the animal is injured.  When you break bones open, something leaks out into the body, telling the animal that it is in terrible danger.  When you break bones open and eat them, you get that same hormone:  terrible trauma, danger, injury.  It is not fun and it is not enjoyable.  It's a 'bad trip.'  And it could be life-threatening.

Working with someone to do routine chores

I got someone to help me at home every week, getting my laundry done so that I at least have clean uniforms for work, and he's also going to help me with cooking, but we haven't started that yet.

This is the worst time of year for moldy air. I have some here at this place, but nowhere near as bad as at the other apartment. The long-term solution is to get my own place - I would start with a trailer - so that I have control over it and I don't have to just put up with somebody else's building. It gets bad when I use any of the sinks - I think that a little bit of water drips down the pipes back inside the wall, and then moldy air blows up through the cracks where the pipes go into the walls. Again, though, it's NOTHING like the other place. I can tolerate being indoors here. But I want to open the windows. It's almost spring.

***

Weston Price: I finished the book. I'm now thinking about a restaurant called McWeston's (a trademark infringement) with a golden W as its logo. It's open 24 hours and it has not only a drive-thru, but also home delivery. It serves the Weston Price diet to people all over the world, with local variations in the menu. And I'm not entirely joking. I'd like to see something like that.

I found an answer to one of my questions. I had wondered if the father has to eat a special diet too, to prevent deformities in the children. They had an incident where an Eskimo woman married a mining engineer who ate a modern Western diet of canned foods, white flour, etc. The Eskimo woman was still eating her primitive diet. She had 26 children (yes, 26, that's not a typo) and never had cavities in her teeth. However, a few of her children had facial deformities. I would have to look at the book again for details.

I drew another conclusion from this. We might conclude two things:

1. The father has to eat the diet too, to make sure he does not have defective sperm. Some of the primitive cultures required the father to eat a special diet before having children.

2. Deformities can be caused by environmental illness, which affects the entire household. Chemicals might exist in modern houses that didn't exist in the primitive cultures that Weston Price studied. Even if you were eating the healthy diet, you could still be exposed to chemicals. It could be anything modern, such as heavy metals, or pesticides, or a million other things.

Weston Price focused on the idea of providing the right nourishment. But there is also the idea of protecting against dangerous chemicals or other things that can cause problems in spite of having good nourishment.

***

I hear someone at the library talking about the books, His Dark Materials, a trilogy starting with Northern Lights - it was called another name when the movie came out - the Golden Compass. I haven't read those books, but I did see the movie. 'Nothing less than free will is at stake.'

I am calling this religion a Free Will order, a religion concerned with issues of free will.

My life outside of work

Everyone just left the library. I thought it closes at 8:00 tonight? Oh, wait, I hear somebody moving around. It was creepy when everyone just walked out. There's only one person left and it's the librarian, and me.

I only have fifteen minutes, because I spent the first 45 minutes surfing. I could get on again and go another hour.

I had been thinking of writing a post about my life outside the workplace. What happens to me when I leave work? Do I disappear and cease to exist? I feel like most of my time is spent at work and not at home.

The drug contamination problem is the central problem of my outside-work life. It has changed everything I do and it is the reason for all of my strange behaviors. I can describe what it's done.

I moved to my new apartment in Bellefonte. I didn't unpack all my belongings. They are in storage. Why? Because most of them are contaminated with some amount of the drug residue. I have only a few belongings in my apartment, just a couple of basic things needed for survival.

There are some books, papers, and my calculator on the floor. I am having a problem with the calculator. I returned the first one, because the add button was sticking. Now, on my new one, the add button is doing the same thing again. Sometimes I hear voices at the exact moment when the add button sticks, so they could be making it happen, but other times, it happens without hearing voices. I don't want to keep returning and re-buying calculators forever when it's actually caused by an attacker instead of being a fault of the calculator. But I will buy a different brand this time when I return it, and see if it has the same problem. They used to make buttons stick on my Oxygen-8 keyboard when I was playing with Propellerheads Reason, and they would trigger the 'rage' emotion at the same moment that they did this, making me want to kill somebody to stop them from attacking me. They would also make the song I was writing play over and over and over in my head so I couldn't think while trying to write music. So again, the calculator problem might be entirely an attack, or it might be a badly made calculator, and I don't know yet.

But anyway, the calculator, books, and papers are my most visible, obvious possessions, and they are sitting on the floor, not on a table.

I also sleep in a sleeping bag, and not in the bedroom, but in the living room, on the floor. The bedroom is more noisy because it's next to the road, and also, it has a tiny bit of moldy air coming out of an access panel in the closet (don't worry, the mold level is very, very low, and I keep that door closed, so it doesn't get into the rest of the house). I don't have a pillow, because I have thrown so many pillows in the garbage, just like I have to throw blankets and clothing in the garbage when it gets contaminated and won't wash out.

I was trying to explain to someone recently that my life is really strange and it would be hard for me to live with a roommate even though I would love to save $200 a month on my rent by sharing it with someone. I would have to explain all the rules of contamination prevention, and trust my roommate to follow the rules. My car is still contaminated, so my shoes get contaminated, so shoes have to be taken off and left at the bottom of the stairs, for instance.

I have paper covering large areas of the floor. There have been a few tracking incidents where contaminated footprints have gotten on my carpet. I also have lots of garbage bags sitting in the kitchen, because I can't bear to take out the trash when it's this cold outside and I don't have a coat. Why don't I have a coat? Because they're expensive and I keep throwing them in the garbage. They're expensive even from Goodwill. They inevitably get contaminated in my car or when I handle other contaminated belongings.

There is another weird behavior which I could laugh about, because it would seem like a benefit, a good thing instead of a bad thing, about living with me. But it isn't done intentionally to be - I am going to have to wait until I log in again, I have only a minute left here.

Anyway, there is this thing I have tended to do for several years now, for various reasons, and it's not meant to be entertaining or seductive, but other people would think that it was. I usually go around naked all of the time. I am a nudist and I believe that nudity should be no big deal and it shouldn't be seen as explicitly sexual, but people are brainwashed to believe that nakedness is always sexual and this is a BIG DEAL and it's something to get freaked out about.

When I lived at the other apartment, there was a peeping tom who started sending me emails with pictures of naked women in exactly the same position I was in, doing exactly the same thing I had been doing. There were woods behind the house and this person was up in the woods looking in my window. This was someone who thought that naked women were a 'big deal' instead of something normal to take for granted. I hate that attitude. I hated the person who was doing that, and no, they were never arrested, and instead, I got sent to a mental hospital because of that person. This person was freaking out merely because I was naked.

Everybody should be 'allowed,' quote unquote (I don't use the word 'allowed' - it implies that there is some authority figure giving permission, and it implies that their authority is legitimate authority that I respect, instead of a NOT-legitimate authority that I DO NOT respect or accept. The so-called authorities who 'allow' or 'forbid' people to do things are actually murderers, and I do not accept their authority, their use of force, their electronic mind control and other tactics, and yes, it isn't only 'government' doing it, it is also individual murderers, and groups of murderers, and 'official' government murderers - it's not the same people all the time, but a variety of people.) to walk around naked whenever and wherever they want to, outdoors or indoors, in public or in private. It shouldn't be illegal. It shouldn't be shocking, or exciting, or arousing, because people would take it for granted that everybody was naked and it didn't mean anything.

So anyway, I now have more reasons to walk around my apartment naked. When you have to throw clothes in the garbage after they get contaminated, that's even more of an incentive not to wear clothes. I wear them when I leave the house. Contaminated clothes would make me have drug effects all day long, which I don't want to have happening. Also, clothes from Goodwill - and I love Goodwill - but, when you first buy them, they have cooties. Cooties, mange, scabies, the same thing. Itch mites, microscopic, too small to see. They burrow into the skin and cause scratch marks and dots on the skin. The clothes have to be washed before you can wear them. It's not lice. Lice are 'macroscopic.' You can see them. These mites are too small to see. They are also on toilet seats, and all public seats that other people are sitting on, and they are on coats and jackets shared by people at work. (This was funny, I agreed with Britney at Weis when somebody told her she should just use one of the Weis coats when she was taking out the trash with us, and she said, 'Ew!' 'Ew' is because the coats are all dirty, they're used by everybody, and they DO have cooties. I get itch mites on me every time I wear the coats, because everybody shares them.) On public toilets, I either use the toilet seat covers, or I put toilet paper down, or I just crouch above the seat without touching it. The mites get all over the back of your legs and your butt, and then you have to scratch yourself, which is awkward and embarrassing. I am so allergic to them that I will get big red scratches and scars all over the back of my thighs. It's gross and I would not want people seeing all the scratches all over my skin.

Everybody has mange, but only some people are extremely allergic to it. I am one of the people who reacts very badly to mange, and my cuts don't heal, and they get red and infected and turn into scars. So people wouldn't 'catch' mange by touching me, because everyone already has it and it's everywhere. I'm not the only person who has it. But I'm one of the people who breaks out into horrible bleeding cuts and scratches all over my skin because of the allergy and being unable to heal properly.

So this is another reason why I avoid wearing clothes at home. It means I would have to wash all of my Goodwill clothes, and doing laundry is one of the small household chores that I can't bring myself to do when it's ice cold outside, and I don't have a coat, and I'm working five days a week during my temporary-Wednesdays month, December, right now, to prepare for the time off I'm taking in January.

Some of the unconventional or gross behaviors are things that I am doing consciously and deliberately, on purpose. I don't wash or brush my hair anymore, and that's done intentionally. I haven't talked about the experiment that I'm doing with my teeth, because I'm kind of embarrassed about it, but I am doing a grooming experiment that involves teeth. This is based on the assumption: Plaque DOES NOT cause cavities. I am assuming, or testing, the belief that cavities are caused by odontoporosis, the destruction of teeth from within, which is exactly like osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis is caused by synthetic vitamin D which is required by government to be added to all milk products. Synthetic vitamin D is extremely toxic and it should be illegal (if I weren't a libertarian-anarchist and if I went around saying this or that should be illegal). But the government requires this toxic, poisonous substance to be added to our milk. It causes a wide range of health problems that resemble Vitamin D deficiency, when it is actually caused by TOO MUCH of the synthetic type of Vitamin D.

DO NOT EAT SYNTHETIC VITAMINS. 'The Order,' my religion, which doesn't exist yet, and which is temporarily called The Order Retmeishka because it's being described in my blog by that name, but that isn't the permanent name - the Order forbids the use of all synthetic vitamins and minerals added to food or taken in pills. All synthetic vitamins and minerals are forbidden. Yes, the Order is a real religion, and it has only one member, and that is me, and I am not yet compliant with the dietary rules because I don't have help with cooking for myself.

Another problem I'm seeing is iodine in salt. I have a reaction to touching the french fries at McDonald's. It gives me 'thyroid eyes.' My eyes become puffy and swollen in a particular way which is typical for hypothyroid disorders. If you touch french fries a lot, they are covered in iodized salt, and the iodine goes through your skin and messes up your thyroid, causing symptoms resembling hypothyroid disorders. I only eat non-iodized salts like sea salt or kosher salt. People need to know if their local soil contains iodine or not, and if you live in an iodine-poor area, you need to know whether you should CHOOSE to look for foods that contain extra iodine, but iodine SHOULD NOT be UNIVERSALLY added to everybody's salt everywhere, because too much iodine causes thyroid problems. When I work with the french fries for long periods of time at McDonald's - and I'm NOT eating them, I'm only touching them and the equipment, so it's going through my skin - I wake up the next morning with severely puffy eyes. It's not just the salt, it's the iodine also. Some might argue that the salt is going through my skin, and it's only the salt. But I am exhausted and all I do is sleep, which indicates a thyroid problem, and the SHAPE of the puffy eyes resembles myxedema, a thyroid symptom. They get puffy up above the upper lid, and you can push down on the puffiness and leave dents in it which stay dented after you push them (yes, it's disgusting). This thyroid problem is temporary and it only lasts a short time after I have been handling large amounts of salted french fries, like when I work at College Avenue and I am doing nothing but french fries all night long.

Peter's wife has those myxedema thyroid eyes, and my eyes temporarily become shaped exactly like hers. Her thyroid problem is POSSIBLY caused by transdermal exposure to Peter's thyroid drug, Synthroid, a synthetic thyroid hormone which probably causes symptoms of thyroid deficiency (it's only my theory). His son also has the thyroid eyes. According to this theory, their thyroid problems would disappear if she moved to a temporary decontamination house, wearing all new clothing that had never contacted Synthroid, with no carpets and no furniture that had ever touched Synthroid, and if she stopped touching french fries, iodized salt, or anything else that goes through the skin and affects the thyroid. This is only my theory, and if I were able to convince people that this was plausible, it would be so easy to test. All you have to do is test it yourself, for free, and observe the results. Does the thyroid problem disappear when you move to a clean, uncontaminated location and wear all new clothing? Does the myxedema go away and the eyes become less swollen?

With me, it's only the right eye. The left eye is less affected. This is because the right side of my face and the right side of my sinuses are affected by the bisphenol-A plastic dental fillings, which I am going to remove whenever I get some help preparing my own food, so I can eat a diet that won't hurt my cavities. My right sinus became permanently swollen after I got the plastic dental fillings, and my right eye is also now permanently swollen a little bit. It's the one that has the most noticeable myxedema when I get this problem. I also had something like a sty on that eyelid, but I don't know what a sty is and I forgot to research it. It went away on its own. Anyway, whenever I breathe, there is swelling in the sinus that I can hear and feel, above the plastic-fillings teeth. The Order - and yes, it isn't a joke, it's a real religion - is designed to prevent people from ever needing to get dental fillings of any kind at all, and it's designed to support you if you choose to remove your dental fillings or choose not to fill your existing cavities, but instead you choose to modify your diet so that you can tolerate the pain of the cavities and just leave them alone. It assumes that cavities are caused by breakdown from within, which is caused by poisons and malnutrition, although I still wonder about this because certain foods make my cavities get worse temporarily - orange juice, for instance - and then they gradually get better if I stop drinking the orange juice.

I don't know all there is to know about this yet, about how much is caused by destruction from outside versus destruction from inside. I am very, very grateful to Weston Price for observing that facial deformities and jaw deformities are caused by particular types of malnutrition and poisons. I want to prevent the jaw deformity in my children, if possible. It might work, and it might not, but I will try.

Well, that all came from talking about clothing, somehow. I have to read back and see where I got angry and started ranting, because I forget what I was talking about. Oh - I was talking about how strange it is to be my roommate, when you see my unconventional grooming, and how I am not brushing my teeth right now, and seeing what happens to them.

They wanted me to mention something that a co-worker at McDonald's was talking about, but I don't really think I should. It had to do with somebody not taking showers, and it wasn't about me, but someone else. Every time she talks about this, I am thinking to myself how horrified she would be if she knew about my grooming experiments and all the subjects that 'they,' the voices, had been interviewing me about in the past couple years having to do with grooming. Yes, I take showers, but that is because I get covered in transdermal drugs that make me sick or exhausted or affect my moods in various ways.

I am so used to living by a strange set of rules that it would be very hard to explicitly remember what all the rules are. You can't touch contaminated objects and then touch other objects, or the contamination will spread. That's something that I'm so used to by now that I am not even really aware of doing it. I just know that I can't touch my shoes to the carpet in the car, and then go walking around on the carpet in my house, because it will spread the drugs from place to place. That's only one example.

Anyway... My life outside work is very strange, very difficult, and very sad. It's not much fun. I don't watch television, either, and I don't do lots of fun things. I mostly work and save money and then I go read things and write on the internet. Sometimes I drive my car long distances because I love looking at the scenery and exploring places. Trying to explain how depressing and sad my life is, explain it to somebody who would be my roommate, is something that I haven't felt ready to do yet.

'I don't care.' Tommy Lee Jones said 'I don't care' to Harrison Ford just before HF jumped off the dam and fell to the river below, in The Fugitive, when Harrison Ford said 'I didn't kill my wife.' 'I don't care!' he says, and it turns out that he actually does care, and he ends up helping HF find the real killer in the end. (I can't remember the characters' names - it's been a while since I saw that movie.) I loved that 'I don't care,' because it sounds like the exact opposite of what it says.

I am still badly blocked about expressing my feelings.

raw milk

I drank raw milk today.

1. I'm not dead yet.
2. The police haven't arrived.

But I did hear sirens going by a few minutes ago. Maybe they couldn't find my address and gave up. :)

This is the first time I've tried raw milk. Actually, it was frozen raw milk, because the goats don't produce much now in the wintertime. There was a little note taped to the fridge where I bought the milk, explaining that they were out of it, and frozen was all that was left. I'll try fresh-not-frozen whenever it becomes available again. (This makes me think of Antal Fekete writing about the 'good old days' of futures markets, where we expected seasonal variations in the prices of agricultural commodities. I can actually SEE this seasonal variation because the market is so small and low-tech. This isn't a factory farm operation. It's wintertime, so we don't have anything for sale. The milk is all gone. It's a reality check that reminds me of what it means to live in a climate with cold winters.)

I was pleased with the trust-based informal buying method where I got the milk. It's a place where you go only if you already know to look there. It's inside another place of business, because the original store shut down. I don't know why they shut down, but I'm guessing it was just another economic downturn kind of thing. It's a little refrigerator hidden in a dark, small, cluttered office area. If you didn't know what it was, and didn't look closely, you would mistakenly think it was just an employee break room. You just grab what you want and put money into a box, and write a note describing what you took. I also sent them an email first so that they would get to know me.

*****

So, what happened? I tried only a little sip at first, to make sure nothing bad would happen. All my life, I drank ordinary, store-bought, pasteurized milk, until my mid-twenties. I had a mysterious illness in 1999 that caused months of severe fatigue and digestive problems, and during that time, I became unable to eat certain foods and couldn't tolerate milk anymore. I had difficulty swallowing, and felt like I was going to throw up after eating, and had pain in the upper right quadrant of my abdomen. (That is the location of either the liver and gallbladder, or part of the large intestine. I thought I had hepatitis, but tests were negative.) I stopped drinking it permanently after that, because it just seemed too disgusting. So I was afraid that milk would be nauseating and undrinkable like it was during that time period.

The 1999 illness was my first experience of long-lasting unexplained illness, and my first experience of going to doctors and getting diagnostic tests only to find nothing wrong. (I watched a show called "Mystery Diagnosis" on cable at a friend's house last night. I'd like to talk about that show but I'll save it for some other time. You know I can't say anything in fifteen words or less. My reaction is: "They make it seem as though unsolvable illnesses are always obscure rare diseases - but actually, lots of hard-to-cure illnesses are very common and are caused by widespread problems in society." I have heard a million stories about people with ordinary, familiar illnesses who went to one doctor after another unable to get anybody to listen to them and unable to get any treatments that worked, even though their disease wasn't at all obscure. However, it's still important for doctors to recognize obscure diseases, and I don't have anything against that. I enjoyed the show and have a lot to say about it.)

My problem was probably from:

1. swimming in local non-chlorinated freshwater lakes, where I might have picked up a parasite or bacteria;

2. an unknown virus, since I heard stories of many people in the town getting sick at once with symptoms like my own - extremely severe fatigue that made us all think we had mononucleosis, and, in particular, a very specific type of fatigue that made your NECK in particular very tired, so that you could not hold your head up, and always wanted to lay your head down on your desk if you were working in front of a computer, as I was at the time. This "tired neck" and "wanting to lay your head down" was very specific and it was described by several people;

3. a bad reaction to the gypsy moth spray distributed every year by airplanes flying low over the trees (it seemed to happen right after that, and the gypsy moth spray is DESIGNED to interfere with the digestive system - but only the digestive systems of the moths, not humans; they say it contains a type of bacteria that only affects the moths, but I have my doubts - I've gotten sick every time they spray it);

4. food poisoning from a chinese restaurant, where my then-boyfriend's daughter threw up, and we all seemed to get sick for a while after that;

5. it might have even been bacterial contamination in PASTEURIZED milk, because during that time, I drank milk from a particular place - and I don't want to say their name - and even though the milk tasted good, I seemed to get sick a lot from drinking it, and strongly associated the sickness with milk.

The mystery is still unsolved. But I "got better" whenever I switched to the Feingold diet in winter 2000. I stopped drinking ALL milk. I stopped drinking coffee at that time, too. Quitting milk and coffee made my stomach able to tolerate food again. I became able to eat fats and greasy foods without getting sick. But now I drink coffee all the time, lots of it, and have few stomach problems. However, I am still sensitive to "bad quality fat" in restaurant foods, where a greasy hamburger might be sitting out exposed to the air, kept hot for a long time in a heated case, and the longer it's kept out, the more oxidized it becomes. There are changes when food is kept hot for a long time, or reheated over and over, and exposed to the air. I don't know the names of all the chemicals or how they change.

*****

Well, today with the raw milk, the first thing I noticed was allergic hives appearing on the side of my jawline, and above my lips. They appeared within about five minutes. That's the same place I get hives when I eat shrimp. They are merely a non-life-threatening nuisance. So, now I know, I'm mildly allergic to goat milk. It could be the particular plants the goats were eating in the pasture, or it could be the milk proteins themselves. I don't know. I decided I would drink the milk anyway.

After a while, I started wiggling my feet, because my legs get restless when I react to certain foods. This is something I learned about from the Feingold Diet (which is similar to the Urticaria Diet, a diet designed to eliminate the foods that trigger allergic hives). Milk makes some people hyperactive, restless, and uncomfortable.

So that's not too much of a surprise, but it's a little bit of a disappointment. Some raw milk advocates were hoping that maybe milk allergies were caused by the CHANGES in the protein that resulted from cooking it. But I reacted to the raw proteins (if it was the protein, and not the pasture plants).

Other fears about raw milk: that it could be contaminated with bacteria. I take this seriously. The bacteria come from the way the milk is handled and processed, not from the animal itself. A baby goat drinking goat milk from its mother would not get bacteria-contaminated milk. But a human might, if the milk has been in unclean containers or equipment sometime while being bottled.

There is a placebo-like hopefulness that maybe raw milk is a cure-all. I don't expect it to be a cure-all, but rather, I expect that maybe some things will get mildly better with dietary changes. Over time, if I make the right changes and observe which diets work best for me personally, then I will feel better. People vary with regard to which foods they tolerate, which foods make them sickest, and which foods they need the most.

If you talk to a random person about drinking unpasteurized milk, it triggers anxiety. They have always heard that pasteurization is necessary.

Raw milk is semi-illegal. (It's not as illegal as marijuana.) You need certain licenses to sell it and to make cheese from it. In order to get specific types of raw milk cheese, you have to go through some complicated loophole of buying the milk first and then contracting somebody else to make "your" milk into those types of cheese. (I read this on some papers that were there where I bought it.)

Some raw milk sellers have been harassed by government and by groups of people who don't understand the nuances of what causes it to be safe or unsafe. What I mean is that if you follow certain procedures, it will most likely be safe, and if you do things wrong, it will be dangerous... but instead, they want to forbid ALL raw milk entirely, instead of saying "It's safe if X, but unsafe if Y." They call it unconditionally dangerous, without understanding cause and effect.

My understanding is that milk becomes contaminated by the containers, pipes, bottles, and other equipment used to process it. If those things are clean, then raw milk is most likely safe. Raw milk AS SUCH is frowned upon, when instead, we should be frowning upon unclean milk-processing equipment.

You eat raw fruits and vegetables. Those can also be contaminated by containers and surfaces that they touch. They can be contaminated by manure or bad water in the fields where they're grown.

*****

Anyway, I am drinking small amounts at a time to see if it causes any problems (other than hyperactivity or hives). I will know what it is that's causing those problems and can easily stop drinking the milk.

I can also observe if it's giving me any benefits. I'm not sure what to expect. The cure-all claims are pretty extreme. There's something similar to the "cure-all" concept, and that's a "causes-all." (There must be a better word for that.) The lack of something, or some activity, CAUSES ALL modern illnesses or at least strongly contributes to them or makes us more susceptible to them. Raw milk, or, more generally, raw foods, are in the cures-all/causes-all categories. Supposedly all modern illnesses are made worse or caused by the lack of raw foods in the diet. This includes diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, among many other things. I get that impression from reading Weston Price articles - I agree with it, but also feel that there are other important causes to pay attention to.

I would add that the presence of certain chemicals, like pesticides, drugs, and heavy metals, are very significant causes of many health problems. Both of these are relevant to common modern diseases like obesity, deformities, mental health problems, severe tooth decay, and everything else (you name it).

*****

Genes

I was reading something today arguing against the belief that genes cause disease. I am noticing this idea and becoming aware of it. There is a pervasive belief in society that if you have any kind of long-term, hard-to-cure disease at all, it's the fault of your genes. You were born and destined to get this problem. Obesity in particular is viewed as something with genetic causes, and all of the focus is on looking at the genes to decide which people are most susceptible to obesity.

The "Genes Caused Your Long-Term Illness" belief makes people more helpless. Only high-tech, expensive, complicated, specialized drugs and procedures can fight back against those genetic causes.

In some ways I'm happy to read about highly technical scientific research and new drugs, new methods of treatment, and new knowledge. But the other side of me feels frustrated because so much troubleshooting can be done before you even reach the step of resorting to high-tech drugs and complicated treatments. Troubleshooting isn't emphasized enough. There are non-urgent, non-emergency problems where you DO have enough time - years and years - to try out different lifestyle changes and troubleshooting procedures. With long-term diseases, you aren't running to the emergency room about to DIE if you don't get some treatment right away. Sometimes in an emergency you accept a treatment you wouldn't have wanted, because your life is at stake. But not all problems are like that.

Anyway - though I don't necessarily agree with every single word of it - I liked reading this guy (http://www.youngerthanyourage.com/waisays/genetic.htm) arguing against the gene theory of illness. He said, if it's from our genes, then why were previous generations healthier than we are? Why did many problems appear only recently? If it's genetic, who did it come from? Why weren't our parents and grandparents sick with these same problems?

*****

I'll quit for now... this is a long ramble.