1:51 PM 1/6/11
I'm not sure yet what time I should leave, because I have to go someplace else before I go to work. I have to go meet the manager at a hotel, so that I can get my employee evaluation. They do this every year. I know, it sounds very exciting to meet the manager at a hotel and get evaluated. But it will be done in a large, open room with other people there, so it's not quite how it sounds.
I'm just glad to get an evaluation. There have been particular managers, during particular time periods, who didn't give evaluations like they were supposed to, and we never got raises, not even small ones. And when they sent Peter to Milesburg, back when he was still working, he said he never got any evaluations at all, and no raises at all. Milesburg is one of the lowest-wage McDs around here, from what I'm told. My way of looking at it, after years of reading books and websites about Libertarianism and anarchism, is that I don't expect to be entitled to getting a raise or having a high-paying job. I believe that the government has made it so expensive and hard to run a business that they can't afford to pay high wages or overtime pay.
I have a horrible cold. I guess it's not horrible compared to some people's, and I'm getting over it now.
I'm having trouble emailing Carrie, but we have gotten a few messages through. I'm just not sure if ALL of them are getting through. She sometimes stops answering and then a few weeks later I get a message saying 'What's going on? I've been emailing you and you haven't been answering,' which is typical for me in the past few years, with my email harassment.
She and I have been talking about Curtis and trying to set a boundary of what would be appropriate behavior for me, since she is his fiancee. And I am very glad to be talking about setting boundaries. This is what I was afraid of all along. I get 'urged' to do something that I don't really approve of, but I agree to it, and I put myself at risk. If I scare them or give them the creeps somehow, or if I make them feel like they're in danger, or if they get sick of my inappropriate behavior, then they might call the police or get me thrown in a mental hospital. So I wanted to talk to them about boundaries all this time. I feel humiliated to talk about it, but it's necessary.
She said that I was telling him I loved him, in the notes, and that was making her uncomfortable, so I was trying to tell her that I would stop giving notes to him, but I don't know if my emails are getting to her or not. I tried to tell the truth: I said that I could stop writing to him, but if I felt like he was in danger again, like signing up for the army or something like he did before, then I would panic and I would be trying desperately to reach him again, and so I would probably start trying to find him and give him notes, assuming email wasn't working.
The feeling of humiliation: I can postpone the direct conflicts and direct confrontations, I can avoid them for a while, but sooner or later, somebody will always say, 'Hey, you're sending these emails or writing these letters, this isn't right,' and so on. That is what happens inevitably when 'they' urge me to do things that I think I shouldn't be doing. It's humiliating whenever the confrontation finally occurs. A false sense of security collapses. There is this feeling, whenever 'the voices' tell me to do something, a false sense of security, a feeling that if the voices are telling me to do this, then I can't possibly be in danger from doing it - only to find that yes, I am in danger.
So I'll see if she gets my message or not; I'll give it a couple days.
****
I need to get another second job, and I did put out one application and I'm going to try to go talk to them again, talk to a manager. But meanwhile, I've been fantasizing about starting my own business. I've fantasized about this for many years now. I would be happy with something arts-and-crafts related. I've always been artistic. I drew pictures when I was young, and as an adult, I decided that writing music was more important to me than drawing pictures, so I've neglected drawing for a few years now and instead have wanted to write music, and I have some partial song fragments on the computer, but that is all. I've also done some crafts like sewing, and when I was little, I hand-sewed a lion out of old scrap fabric, and I stuffed him with shedded dog hair from brushing our white Samoyed dog, Crystal. I didn't use fake stuffing. I think it's kind of funny that I used her real natural hair instead of that synthetic stuffing. The lion always had kind of a sour, wet-dog smell, forever. I like the idea of using natural animal hair for stuffing.
So anyway I've been fantasizing about starting a business, and imagining how I would calculate the prices and the profits and the hours of time spent, and all that. I would pay myself an hourly wage because I have to compare it to what I would make doing a 'real' job. Now that I think about it, I ought to pay myself the BEFORE tax wage. I've been imagining the AFTER tax wage. But in reality, the employer has to pay the full amount and pay the taxes. I should use that amount.
Sales of an arts and crafts item, like stuffed animals, would be slow. Only a very small number of people would buy one, and it would only happen once in a while. Months might go by without someone buying one. People will buy essential things like food because they can't stop buying them, but they are able to survive without buying arts and crafts.
But arts and crafts are the WHOLE POINT of starting my own business. I want to do something that I enjoy, instead of just making food. And it would be something that doesn't require a huge investment in technology - for instance, I've thought that there is a need for building shielded boxes for targeted individuals, to block against both electromagnetic and sonic attacks. But that is a 'scientific' project and I would have to do lots of research and hire engineers to work with me and it would require a lot of money, and it wouldn't necessarily be something that I would 'enjoy' doing. I could do it, but it wouldn't be happy work. Arts and crafts, however, is happy work. I do it because it's fun. It isn't necessary, and people will survive without it, but I'd enjoy it.
I'm categorizing these things as 'nonessential durable goods.' My fantasies all fall into that category. Stuffed animals are nonessential durable goods, and so are music CDs, which I could sell. Music CDs might sell better than stuffed animals. I could make a video game, too, although I would need help from people who know how to program, because I have only a few tiny bits of programming knowledge, and it's been years so I've forgotten it all. But a video game is a nonessential durable good too. And I could write books, and they are in that same category. Sales will be slow and occasional. Only a few people will buy one now and then. You have to advertise in a lot of places to let people know you exist. You have to sell it someplace where it can sit on a shelf without you watching over it. I've thought about consignment stores, where you give it to them, and it sits on the shelf, and if it sells, then they pay you for it. That's my understanding of what a consignment store is. The idea is that you can't be in a hundred places at once, so you will have to pay somebody to sit there with the item, and take money from people who buy it, at a flea market or wherever, and it's cheaper if you can just let it sit on the shelf and let somebody else take the money for it.
At Wal-Mart, a million different businesses make 'stuff' and then they sell it to Wal-Mart and they let it sit on the shelves, at hundreds of different stores around the country. They don't have to sit there guarding their own 'stall' and taking the money whenever people want to buy that particular item. Instead, Wal-Mart shoppers buy things from lots and lots of different 'craftsmen' and take them all up to the cashiers. It isn't like an arts and crafts fair where you have your own stall and you spend hours sitting there waiting for someone to buy something. All of that time sitting there is a 'cost of sales.' You're 'selling' the product by sitting there at that table waiting for customers. You could've spent those hours working at a minimum-wage job, so you have to calculate how much money you're missing out on by sitting at that table 'selling' your crafts.
(Yes, I've had a caffeine pill this morning. I noticed that I repeated myself several times in several different ways in that paragraph. Writing a lot without saying anything is one of my caffeine symptoms.)
I like the idea of a big building, like Wal-Mart, except it's a flea market, and local people bring in their 'stuff' and they can leave it unattended on the shelves. They could even bring local food products, too. Actually, at the antique store where I buy my bullion coins, it works that way - lots of different antique dealers leave their stuff there in the building, but only a couple of people actually sit there guarding it and selling it. The cost of the building would be a lot less if we were allowed to do it outdoors in an open air market, but it would be less guarded against theft, and more people would have to sit at each individual stall.
Anyway, this is all just a fantasy, because in reality, I need to start earning money RIGHT NOW. I need to fix my car's bumper, and I got the insurance money and then used some of it to pay my bills and my rent instead of fixing the car, because I lost my second job at Weis. Any arts and crafts work will be a slow-growing project, and I MIGHT POSSIBLY start making a profit, maybe a year or two in the future, after investing a lot of work into it.
That is how it is when you start your own business. It takes a couple years before you actually earn anything back. Don't quit your day job. That is always my advice. Don't quit your day job, and also, don't borrow money. I know, if nobody ever borrowed any money or took any risks, nothing would ever get done. But I think with the economy the way it is, and the banking system the way it is, that it's not safe to try to start a business on borrowed money anymore. This is a complicated subject and I don't have time to write about it. It's just my personal opinion, that it's not safe to borrow money for starting up a business.
Anyway, I like how it feels, trying to calculate my expenses and profits on 'nonessential durable goods' like my music CDs with songs I wrote by myself. It's amazing and unthinkable to imagine that yes, somebody somewhere WOULD buy one, at least one, once in a while. Somebody would. It might not be tons of people, and I couldn't quit my day job right away, but a teeny, tiny number of people would buy something for real. There would be the satisfaction of selling something I made, even though it wasn't profitable and I couldn't sell it FAST enough to pay the bills - I'd have to sell lots and lots and lots of them, whatever they were, stuffed animals or music CDs or clothing items or books, every month, every week, over and over and over, forever, to earn enough to pay the bills. Or I'd have to charge a huge amount of money, and have only one sale once in a while, but it's so profitable that I can pay the bills for a month on only one sale. Whichever scenario I chose, I'd feel good selling something that I made by myself.
I'm reluctantly going to start getting ready for work. I still haven't decided what time I'll go to the evaluation.
Showing posts with label business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business. Show all posts
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Soul crushing grief
5:43 PM 9/14/10
I just have to get through the next couple weeks and then I'll be okay. I requested a reduction of my hours at Weis. I fell off the wagon again! I had stopped drinking coffee for several weeks and was doing okay. But the 70 hour work weeks, and the increasing darkness of winter, and Curtis finally leaving just as I always said he would, made it so I was crying through the first few hours of work. I also have a theory that drinking the raw cow's milk had something to do with making me cry. It was several factors all at once. So I started drinking coffee just to stop crying and make myself able to work.
I have had bad fatigue attacks and drug residue outbreaks the last week or so too. The drug residues gave me courage to do some crazy behavior, such as offering Curtis's ex-girlfriend the money for her child support. I wouldn't have done that without the drug residues, but according to mainstream society, drug residues don't exist; therefore they are one of the most important areas of knowledge and experience that people will be taught when they join the order.
Anyway, I know I will be too tired to get up in the morning, so I went out and bought some Vivarin. I haven't had Vivarin in years, ever since the ephedra incident in 2007. I don't eat the whole pill. I shatter it and crumble it into tiny, tiny pieces, and then I eat only one tiny fragment of it. I will need to do this every morning to get myself to work every day for the next couple weeks until the schedule change sets in.
I won't be able to make it. There is nothing to look forward to at work. We have a new boss who is causing total chaos in the department. Not only that, but our old boss left, and everyone liked him, and he made the work environment much more pleasant and enjoyable. So that's adding to the difficulty of going to work every day.
And Curtis isn't there now, and he's the only thing I looked forward to every day. I begged him and I warned him, since the beginning, last summer, in 2009, when we first met - I told him from the beginning, 'Someday, you're going to leave, and when you do, I'm going to be a basket case, and I'm going to do crazy stuff like writing emails to your ex-girlfriends.' And he didn't heed my warnings. I told him, 'You have to give me some way to stay in touch with you in the real world, because all of our emails will get deleted and intercepted.' He didn't believe me. But my phone calls, texts, and emails are indeed all being deleted (and only some of them get through - the bad ones, not the good ones), and I've verified this several times with different people who insist that they really did call me and it never got through, and that kind of thing. It's real. I wrote these messages on paper, but I think he has a reading disability, and so he didn't really understand what I said. Not only that, but he's a victim and a puppet like everyone else, so they would blank out his brain while he was trying to read.
Getting paid to date people: I want to write about this and think about it some more. I must wait until the schedule changes, because I've been so busy, I can't even EMAIL anybody. And I swore I was going to get a new phone with an internet connection, but I was so exhausted all day that all I could do was sleep, so I didn't get the phone today or yesterday. That is why I've bought the Vivarin. I will not be able to get to work, and I'm going to be calling off sick just because of exhaustion. I will be taking Vivarin crumbles to help me survive for a couple weeks.
In fact, I'm doubting that I'll be able to get to work tomorrow morning, with the way I feel. I said I would talk to Scott about my schedule, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. It required more energy and mental focus than I had. I had to think of what I was asking for, and summon up the courage to do it. This is desperation. I really won't be able to show up for work.
And the murderers played a little oversleeping trick on me the other day. Usually, they wake me up an hour before my alarm, or several hours. Or they put me to sleep and then wake me up right before the alarm goes off. But a few nights ago, they forced me to stay awake all night long, and then forced me to sleep through my alarm. Then they forced me to wake up at exactly 7:00 AM - the time when I was supposed to be *AT* work - and I had to call them and tell them I was going to be late for work. That's something they've never done to me before. They were 'proving a point' that they had probably forced Curtis to oversleep and lose his job. I already know that they're *able* to do that, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they *did* do it.
I was going to talk to Scott and change my schedule right away. That would take courage, desperation, and commitment to do what I was doing. I had to be sure, and I had to *feel* sure, that this was necessary and inevitable. It has become clear and obvious to me that I can't get up that early and go to work while working a second job and being at seventy hours a week (and suffering from seasonal affective disorder, and the soul-crushing grief of losing a beloved friend). I was going to try to negotiate some shift changes with the other couple people who are still there. We've lost almost everyone, and nobody is available to cover the shifts, and they have this irrational phobia of giving overtime to anyone for any reason no matter how few people we have. They would rather see empty shelves with nothing on them, because there aren't any employees there to produce the food, rather than pay people overtime to stay a few hours and make the food. We really have had empty shelves lately.
What will you do differently next time? I said on Facebook that my life was just like the movie Groundhog Day, except it was actually Patriot Day, September 11th. You wake up every morning and you have to convince everybody that a terrible disaster is about to happen, that you're going to be attacked, and you have to do something to prevent the disaster. And you have to fall in love before you go to sleep that night, and get them to love you in return. Or the next day, you wake up to 'I Got You Babe' on the clock radio again. That is my life.
What will I do differently next time? Next time the puppeteers bring me a beautiful, skinny young boy to fall in love with, and they force me to try writing letters to him instead of saying 'It's impossible, don't even try.'
Next time, I'll assume he's illiterate. Curtis probably really is illiterate for real. This isn't a joke. I seriously think he is unable to read. How am I going to give handwritten notes to an illiterate person? This is basic troubleshooting. When the appliance won't turn on, the troubleshooter's first step says, 'Is the unit plugged in?' So my first troubleshooting step will say, 'Is he able to read?' The person must be able to read if I am to give them handwritten notes. The handwritten notes won't be intercepted, but they cannot have a reading disability, and I'm fairly sure Curtis had a reading disability. He seemed to only catch a few words of things I had written, and didn't understand any of the rest of it.
People with reading disabilities need to have a shield around them to protect them against being attacked while trying to read. The murderers make everything worse. If you have any handicap or weakness at all, the murderers attacking you make your brain even *less* able to function.
And I don't have anything against people with reading disabilities. I just can't reach them right now. As soon as I'm strong enough, I'll be able to reach them. But right now, the only way I can communicate is by writing. So all the illiterate people will be falling through the cracks right now until I am strong enough to protect us while we talk out loud about taboo subjects. The murderers prevent me from speaking taboo subjects out loud, and it was even more difficult because we were at work and had limited time to spend talking.
Taboo subjects: They know what those subjects are, but I don't. It's a list of ideas and beliefs. Some of the beliefs are things like 'What I want matters.' It matters what I want. You have to *feel* that it matters what you want. Your soul, your desires, your needs, your values, your life - they matter. They're important. To actually *feel* that feeling is taboo. To feel it, to be motivated by it: it matters what I want, and I'm going to *do* something about it, *right now*. That's taboo.
Cameraderie is taboo. We're all in this together. You're not allowed to feel that feeling.
I don't know if I'll make it through this week. I might call off sick from Weis. I still have McDonald's, and I can increase my hours there. I still need to buy a phone! I haven't decided which phone and which plan to buy. I might make a fast impulse buy and just live with it whether I like it or not, and learn from the experience, instead of getting it perfect the first time. But I have been so tired, I couldn't even bring myself to get to Best Buy to get the phone. I can barely bring myself to get up and go to Barnes & Noble this evening.
My blog will have photos in it now, occasionally, as soon as I get my photo-phone. I can write about what I see. I already have a camera, but because of some technical difficulties, it's a pain in the ass to get photos from my camera moved over to my PC. It *can* be done, but I tend to postpone doing anything that's a pain in the ass to do, especially when I'm working 70 hours a week and suffering from fatigue attacks and soul-crushing grief.
Right now, in the time of grief, nobody matters to me except Curtis. I can't imagine that there is anyone else beautiful in the world worth looking at. I see attractive guys but they mean nothing to me. I really don't care about them. I am torn apart, being social and antisocial at the same time, trying to force myself to meet people, then pulling away and dropping everyone all at once, neglecting to send emails, failing to meet anyone - even some of the people who expressed an interest in the order of retmeishka.
In the order, we hand-deliver important messages on paper. We all agree to this. It is required by the order. We can email them too, if we want, but we will have a troubleshooting procedure to find out, 'Did you get my message?' and find out which messages said what. The messages are corrupted by disinformation. Failure to get there at all, or having words changed, or only some of the messages get there but not all of them, or the person who wrote the message was forced to write something that would be taken the wrong way. We can't protect the person writing the message just yet, but we will be able to, eventually. We can only make sure that the letter is delivered, by hand. That's the best we can do for now.
I'm going to B&N tonight, and I might possibly talk to someone who expressed an interest in the order. I don't know if he'll be there or not. Emailing him and talking on the phone with him is one of the hundred things that I dropped while juggling them over the last few weeks. I dropped everything and everyone.
I've thought a lot about incentives to join the order. I have devised money incentives, for instance. Ways we can provide insurance to each other, and get paid to be in the order. I want people to have a material gain by being in the group.
Oh yeah, by the way: Silver is back up at $20 an ounce again.
I just have to get through the next couple weeks and then I'll be okay. I requested a reduction of my hours at Weis. I fell off the wagon again! I had stopped drinking coffee for several weeks and was doing okay. But the 70 hour work weeks, and the increasing darkness of winter, and Curtis finally leaving just as I always said he would, made it so I was crying through the first few hours of work. I also have a theory that drinking the raw cow's milk had something to do with making me cry. It was several factors all at once. So I started drinking coffee just to stop crying and make myself able to work.
I have had bad fatigue attacks and drug residue outbreaks the last week or so too. The drug residues gave me courage to do some crazy behavior, such as offering Curtis's ex-girlfriend the money for her child support. I wouldn't have done that without the drug residues, but according to mainstream society, drug residues don't exist; therefore they are one of the most important areas of knowledge and experience that people will be taught when they join the order.
Anyway, I know I will be too tired to get up in the morning, so I went out and bought some Vivarin. I haven't had Vivarin in years, ever since the ephedra incident in 2007. I don't eat the whole pill. I shatter it and crumble it into tiny, tiny pieces, and then I eat only one tiny fragment of it. I will need to do this every morning to get myself to work every day for the next couple weeks until the schedule change sets in.
I won't be able to make it. There is nothing to look forward to at work. We have a new boss who is causing total chaos in the department. Not only that, but our old boss left, and everyone liked him, and he made the work environment much more pleasant and enjoyable. So that's adding to the difficulty of going to work every day.
And Curtis isn't there now, and he's the only thing I looked forward to every day. I begged him and I warned him, since the beginning, last summer, in 2009, when we first met - I told him from the beginning, 'Someday, you're going to leave, and when you do, I'm going to be a basket case, and I'm going to do crazy stuff like writing emails to your ex-girlfriends.' And he didn't heed my warnings. I told him, 'You have to give me some way to stay in touch with you in the real world, because all of our emails will get deleted and intercepted.' He didn't believe me. But my phone calls, texts, and emails are indeed all being deleted (and only some of them get through - the bad ones, not the good ones), and I've verified this several times with different people who insist that they really did call me and it never got through, and that kind of thing. It's real. I wrote these messages on paper, but I think he has a reading disability, and so he didn't really understand what I said. Not only that, but he's a victim and a puppet like everyone else, so they would blank out his brain while he was trying to read.
Getting paid to date people: I want to write about this and think about it some more. I must wait until the schedule changes, because I've been so busy, I can't even EMAIL anybody. And I swore I was going to get a new phone with an internet connection, but I was so exhausted all day that all I could do was sleep, so I didn't get the phone today or yesterday. That is why I've bought the Vivarin. I will not be able to get to work, and I'm going to be calling off sick just because of exhaustion. I will be taking Vivarin crumbles to help me survive for a couple weeks.
In fact, I'm doubting that I'll be able to get to work tomorrow morning, with the way I feel. I said I would talk to Scott about my schedule, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. It required more energy and mental focus than I had. I had to think of what I was asking for, and summon up the courage to do it. This is desperation. I really won't be able to show up for work.
And the murderers played a little oversleeping trick on me the other day. Usually, they wake me up an hour before my alarm, or several hours. Or they put me to sleep and then wake me up right before the alarm goes off. But a few nights ago, they forced me to stay awake all night long, and then forced me to sleep through my alarm. Then they forced me to wake up at exactly 7:00 AM - the time when I was supposed to be *AT* work - and I had to call them and tell them I was going to be late for work. That's something they've never done to me before. They were 'proving a point' that they had probably forced Curtis to oversleep and lose his job. I already know that they're *able* to do that, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they *did* do it.
I was going to talk to Scott and change my schedule right away. That would take courage, desperation, and commitment to do what I was doing. I had to be sure, and I had to *feel* sure, that this was necessary and inevitable. It has become clear and obvious to me that I can't get up that early and go to work while working a second job and being at seventy hours a week (and suffering from seasonal affective disorder, and the soul-crushing grief of losing a beloved friend). I was going to try to negotiate some shift changes with the other couple people who are still there. We've lost almost everyone, and nobody is available to cover the shifts, and they have this irrational phobia of giving overtime to anyone for any reason no matter how few people we have. They would rather see empty shelves with nothing on them, because there aren't any employees there to produce the food, rather than pay people overtime to stay a few hours and make the food. We really have had empty shelves lately.
What will you do differently next time? I said on Facebook that my life was just like the movie Groundhog Day, except it was actually Patriot Day, September 11th. You wake up every morning and you have to convince everybody that a terrible disaster is about to happen, that you're going to be attacked, and you have to do something to prevent the disaster. And you have to fall in love before you go to sleep that night, and get them to love you in return. Or the next day, you wake up to 'I Got You Babe' on the clock radio again. That is my life.
What will I do differently next time? Next time the puppeteers bring me a beautiful, skinny young boy to fall in love with, and they force me to try writing letters to him instead of saying 'It's impossible, don't even try.'
Next time, I'll assume he's illiterate. Curtis probably really is illiterate for real. This isn't a joke. I seriously think he is unable to read. How am I going to give handwritten notes to an illiterate person? This is basic troubleshooting. When the appliance won't turn on, the troubleshooter's first step says, 'Is the unit plugged in?' So my first troubleshooting step will say, 'Is he able to read?' The person must be able to read if I am to give them handwritten notes. The handwritten notes won't be intercepted, but they cannot have a reading disability, and I'm fairly sure Curtis had a reading disability. He seemed to only catch a few words of things I had written, and didn't understand any of the rest of it.
People with reading disabilities need to have a shield around them to protect them against being attacked while trying to read. The murderers make everything worse. If you have any handicap or weakness at all, the murderers attacking you make your brain even *less* able to function.
And I don't have anything against people with reading disabilities. I just can't reach them right now. As soon as I'm strong enough, I'll be able to reach them. But right now, the only way I can communicate is by writing. So all the illiterate people will be falling through the cracks right now until I am strong enough to protect us while we talk out loud about taboo subjects. The murderers prevent me from speaking taboo subjects out loud, and it was even more difficult because we were at work and had limited time to spend talking.
Taboo subjects: They know what those subjects are, but I don't. It's a list of ideas and beliefs. Some of the beliefs are things like 'What I want matters.' It matters what I want. You have to *feel* that it matters what you want. Your soul, your desires, your needs, your values, your life - they matter. They're important. To actually *feel* that feeling is taboo. To feel it, to be motivated by it: it matters what I want, and I'm going to *do* something about it, *right now*. That's taboo.
Cameraderie is taboo. We're all in this together. You're not allowed to feel that feeling.
I don't know if I'll make it through this week. I might call off sick from Weis. I still have McDonald's, and I can increase my hours there. I still need to buy a phone! I haven't decided which phone and which plan to buy. I might make a fast impulse buy and just live with it whether I like it or not, and learn from the experience, instead of getting it perfect the first time. But I have been so tired, I couldn't even bring myself to get to Best Buy to get the phone. I can barely bring myself to get up and go to Barnes & Noble this evening.
My blog will have photos in it now, occasionally, as soon as I get my photo-phone. I can write about what I see. I already have a camera, but because of some technical difficulties, it's a pain in the ass to get photos from my camera moved over to my PC. It *can* be done, but I tend to postpone doing anything that's a pain in the ass to do, especially when I'm working 70 hours a week and suffering from fatigue attacks and soul-crushing grief.
Right now, in the time of grief, nobody matters to me except Curtis. I can't imagine that there is anyone else beautiful in the world worth looking at. I see attractive guys but they mean nothing to me. I really don't care about them. I am torn apart, being social and antisocial at the same time, trying to force myself to meet people, then pulling away and dropping everyone all at once, neglecting to send emails, failing to meet anyone - even some of the people who expressed an interest in the order of retmeishka.
In the order, we hand-deliver important messages on paper. We all agree to this. It is required by the order. We can email them too, if we want, but we will have a troubleshooting procedure to find out, 'Did you get my message?' and find out which messages said what. The messages are corrupted by disinformation. Failure to get there at all, or having words changed, or only some of the messages get there but not all of them, or the person who wrote the message was forced to write something that would be taken the wrong way. We can't protect the person writing the message just yet, but we will be able to, eventually. We can only make sure that the letter is delivered, by hand. That's the best we can do for now.
I'm going to B&N tonight, and I might possibly talk to someone who expressed an interest in the order. I don't know if he'll be there or not. Emailing him and talking on the phone with him is one of the hundred things that I dropped while juggling them over the last few weeks. I dropped everything and everyone.
I've thought a lot about incentives to join the order. I have devised money incentives, for instance. Ways we can provide insurance to each other, and get paid to be in the order. I want people to have a material gain by being in the group.
Oh yeah, by the way: Silver is back up at $20 an ounce again.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Okay, continuing last post. I charge $10 an hour for a date.
Okay, so anyway. I started talking about too many things and I needed to type fast with all of my fingers.
So I was keeping my iPod separate from all my logins at first, trying to keep it anonymous, but on the day when Curtis did his no-call no-show, I was frantic to reach Carrie, so I emailed her on Facebook from my iPod, even though I wasn't supposed to login to anything that I log into from my other computers. The iPod was supposed to login to a totally separate group of accounts. So it's potentially findable now. That's okay, when I want to be anonymous again I'll get another thingamajig to use. (Is 'login' ever used as a verb? I just realized, it's usually a noun. Oh well.)
So I'm still in the cliffhanger as to whether I'll ever get to see Curtis again. It's a perpetual cliffhanger that started the first moment I met him, the first time I sent him a text message and he didn't get it, the first time I left him a voicemail that he didn't get, the first time I looked in his eyes and saw that he was beautiful. Will he get torn away from me, or will we be able to bond with each other and stay connected for a long, long time? Will you disappear and become unreachable through any method of electronic communication? The cliffhanger was there all along behind every moment we spent together.
Why did I decide to start charging $10 for a date? This is why I needed all of my fingers to type. I wish I was at home with my earplugs in my ears so I could concentrate, but I'll use this for now.
1. Because I don't like ANY of them. NOBODY is attractive. Every date, every guy I look at, is this painful burden, this dull and boring hassle that I have to go through, this unwanted stranger who doesn't know me, doesn't care, doesn't understand, doesn't look attractive to me at all.
2. There are MILLIONS of them. There is this endless stream of total strangers begging to go out with me. They beg me even if I don't have a picture of myself put up on the website. They will beg for dates from an anonymous, faceless stranger. They beg to go out with me even if my profile says nothing about me at all. This tells me that something is very wrong.
3. I feel sorry for them. How can there be so many lonely, desperate men who can't get dates? They all say the same thing: 'Wow! You actually answered my email! Nobody ever answers my emails!'
4. I have a lot of unusual expenses because of my drug residues - another one of my life problems that nobody understands, cares about, or agrees with. I have to buy new socks all the time, for instance. So I'm working 70 hours a week right now, since I'm no longer receiving money from mom and dad. I'm exhausted and I can't take care of myself or do anything I need to do at home. And I get paid about $6 an hour after taxes. Charging $10 an hour to go on a sexless, social date is more money than I make at my 'real' job. It seems cheap, but it's better than $6 an hour. One of the first people I talked to was telling me I should charge $20. Like I said, the price will change over time. The goal is to cut back my hours at my 'real' jobs so that I don't need them anymore. (I'll still work one day a week because I like to stay connected with familiar faces and a familiar social environment. And it's more secure if anything happens, if I need to go back to work.)
This is a business. I'm not really getting to know these people deeply. They 1. don't understand, 2. don't care, 3. don't agree with all of the things that matter to me. It is painful to tell people things that matter most to me, the things that are life and death to me, the things that are the center of my universe, and see a reaction of apathy, indifference, incomprehension, ignorance, disagreement and a refusal to ever change their minds. Almost everyone will never understand me.
I'm thinking that over time I'll start showing a pricing scheme that's more detailed. Have a political discussion with me? $100 an hour. Why that much? (It probably won't be that much, but just play along for a minute.) Why so much, because nobody gives a shit what I think, that's why. It hurts to tell people my political opinions only to see that they're just another brainwashed mainstreamer who will never, ever, ever change their minds. It's physically painful to me. So I will set up some prices for things that people have to BEG me to do. You have to beg me to talk about politics, religion, and so on, because I'm sick of not getting the desired reactions from anyone.
Charging $10 is better than not going out with anyone at all, isn't it? Most of these men aren't getting any dates at all, and they don't even get an answer to their emails. I've been unable to bring myself to try going out with anyone at all. I've looked, I've talked to people, I've looked for interesting profiles, but I see nothing at all. I'm not seeing a lot of guys I find physically attractive, and I'm not seeing people who I would marry, and I'm not seeing people who would understand my ideas and beliefs either. Nothing. Just hundreds and hundreds of total strangers who will always be total strangers. And I'm sick of it.
I don't have a picture up in the profile, and maybe I won't put one up, either. I describe myself in the profile, so they have a general idea, and I say that I'll show them a picture if they want to see. So far, a few people are willing to drive long distances to meet someone whose image they haven't even seen. And I've warned them! I've said, I have dreadlocks, and a mustache, and I don't shave, and I'm a little bit ugly, but I have a nice body. That's a realistic description. I'm not hideous, but I'm a little bit ugly. I've warned them. I've tried to warn them. They don't believe me. I've warned them: You won't like me, you won't appreciate me, you won't understand me, you won't think I'm beautiful. And they don't listen when I tell them those things, they still want to go out with a faceless stranger who doesn't even have a picture up. So now I'm charging them money to do it.
What about repeat business?
The repeat business concept is the heart of it all. Who wants to come back again? Who wants to pay for a second date? The first date is the cheap one. It's only $10 an hour. Of course, that makes sense. You don't know what you're getting into, at first. You don't know if you'll like the products and services I'm selling. It's almost like a free sample. It's an almost-free sample. After that, will you come back again? Maybe the second date will cost more than the first? Maybe not - haven't decided yet.
Are you bonding with me for a long time? Are you serious? Can you stand to be with a woman who isn't attracted to you and probably never will be? Do you really like me that much? Are you really that curious to know who I am and understand me and be involved in my life? Do you really give a shit? Do you really have a clue at all? The prices will reflect this concept. All that I feel when I look at the profiles, when I talk to the people, when I meet these total strangers, is 'unattractive, clueless, indifferent, opposed to all that I believe and value.' It's true, I've talked to some nice people and some people who are similar-minded, and I know, it's not EVERYONE (and yes, I even gave the URL of this blog to one of the people who was similar-minded and a nice person, and he's not one of the ones that I'm complaining about). But almost all of them are in a different universe than the one that I live in. And it's SO hard to reach them at all.
So let's make it anonymous and impersonal. It's a business. You won't be getting any sex. You already know that, because I wrote it on the profile. You don't have to worry about whether or not we'll be having sex after the date. You don't have to ask yourself, 'Should I kiss her now?' because I wrote a rule that says: No kissing. The answer is no. I warned you that the date would be boring, cold, and impersonal. We're running a business here. I don't love you, you don't love me, and we probably never will, but if you insist, then yes, I'll go out with you anyway.
I'm really fascinated with this idea that they have to BEG me to tell them more about myself. It really does hurt to see that reaction over and over again: I don't care, I don't understand, I don't agree. It hurts! So I'm not going to talk about myself or the things I care about. They have to beg for it. And if they don't like what they hear, oh well, they paid me to tell them, so it doesn't hurt so much. I 'hurt' them back, by taking their money. You hurt me, I hurt you. It's painful for you to pay money to make me talk, and it's painful for me to talk and see that nobody gives a shit. At least I gained one small thing, a couple dollars, so that I can work fewer hours at my job.
I haven't been able to bring myself to go out with anyone for free, yet. There has been only one guy who I ever went out with from a dating website. It was a professor from Penn State, and I met him on AdultFriendFinder. We went to a coffee shop and talked for a little while. I felt zero sexual attraction to him. Our conversation was tense and didn't have much momentum. The conversation didn't get energized and carry itself away. It was a painful struggle. But even so, this guy kept emailing me over and over for many months. And I don't mean he was spamming me - he only sent me an occasional email once in a while, out of the blue. But why? Why on earth would you want to endure my unwanted company over and over again? Was the conversation really that great? Do you need to be reminded that we had this painful strain and tension that never went away? How can it be that I feel nothing for this person, but he somehow wants to keep seeing me over and over again anyway? Can't he tell that I feel nothing? Can't he see that I'm just talking like a robot and not really caring what I say? Can't he see that this is shallow and it's not going any deeper anytime soon? Can't he see that we will never really care, and we will never really support each other? I don't understand why he would want to see me again.
After that guy - that was last year sometime, I think - or maybe it was in 2008 - after him, I never went out with any more people from the dating website. I stopped using it, actually, and then in, what was it, 2009, summer, I met Curtis at work and focused all of my love on him, and wasn't interested in dating other people, and 'the voices' discouraged me from going after anyone else, too. So I really only went out on one date with one guy from a dating website, ever.
But now... I'll go out with all of them. That's the nice thing about paying for a date, from someone who views it as her 'job' to go out on a date with you: You're guaranteed a 'yes.' You don't have to worry about whether I'll say yes to going on a date with you. Of course I will! It's my job.
The repeat business concept... why? Why would you do this again and again? What do you really want to know about me? Do you really care what I have to say, that much? Do you really support me and my life? If you don't really care that much, you can keep on being just a plain old regular customer who never goes beyond the $10 an hour date. (Or whatever my eventual price will be, after I get it worked out.) You're giving me money, and I appreciate it. Thanks for helping me cut back my hours at my real jobs. We don't have to go any further than this if you don't want to.
So I am curious to see how this will go. Who comes back for a second date (and STILL doesn't get any sex)? Who wants to date me once a week every week (and still not have sex!)? Who wants to ask me what I think, value, believe, and do? Who cares? We'll find out who cares.
So I was keeping my iPod separate from all my logins at first, trying to keep it anonymous, but on the day when Curtis did his no-call no-show, I was frantic to reach Carrie, so I emailed her on Facebook from my iPod, even though I wasn't supposed to login to anything that I log into from my other computers. The iPod was supposed to login to a totally separate group of accounts. So it's potentially findable now. That's okay, when I want to be anonymous again I'll get another thingamajig to use. (Is 'login' ever used as a verb? I just realized, it's usually a noun. Oh well.)
So I'm still in the cliffhanger as to whether I'll ever get to see Curtis again. It's a perpetual cliffhanger that started the first moment I met him, the first time I sent him a text message and he didn't get it, the first time I left him a voicemail that he didn't get, the first time I looked in his eyes and saw that he was beautiful. Will he get torn away from me, or will we be able to bond with each other and stay connected for a long, long time? Will you disappear and become unreachable through any method of electronic communication? The cliffhanger was there all along behind every moment we spent together.
Why did I decide to start charging $10 for a date? This is why I needed all of my fingers to type. I wish I was at home with my earplugs in my ears so I could concentrate, but I'll use this for now.
1. Because I don't like ANY of them. NOBODY is attractive. Every date, every guy I look at, is this painful burden, this dull and boring hassle that I have to go through, this unwanted stranger who doesn't know me, doesn't care, doesn't understand, doesn't look attractive to me at all.
2. There are MILLIONS of them. There is this endless stream of total strangers begging to go out with me. They beg me even if I don't have a picture of myself put up on the website. They will beg for dates from an anonymous, faceless stranger. They beg to go out with me even if my profile says nothing about me at all. This tells me that something is very wrong.
3. I feel sorry for them. How can there be so many lonely, desperate men who can't get dates? They all say the same thing: 'Wow! You actually answered my email! Nobody ever answers my emails!'
4. I have a lot of unusual expenses because of my drug residues - another one of my life problems that nobody understands, cares about, or agrees with. I have to buy new socks all the time, for instance. So I'm working 70 hours a week right now, since I'm no longer receiving money from mom and dad. I'm exhausted and I can't take care of myself or do anything I need to do at home. And I get paid about $6 an hour after taxes. Charging $10 an hour to go on a sexless, social date is more money than I make at my 'real' job. It seems cheap, but it's better than $6 an hour. One of the first people I talked to was telling me I should charge $20. Like I said, the price will change over time. The goal is to cut back my hours at my 'real' jobs so that I don't need them anymore. (I'll still work one day a week because I like to stay connected with familiar faces and a familiar social environment. And it's more secure if anything happens, if I need to go back to work.)
This is a business. I'm not really getting to know these people deeply. They 1. don't understand, 2. don't care, 3. don't agree with all of the things that matter to me. It is painful to tell people things that matter most to me, the things that are life and death to me, the things that are the center of my universe, and see a reaction of apathy, indifference, incomprehension, ignorance, disagreement and a refusal to ever change their minds. Almost everyone will never understand me.
I'm thinking that over time I'll start showing a pricing scheme that's more detailed. Have a political discussion with me? $100 an hour. Why that much? (It probably won't be that much, but just play along for a minute.) Why so much, because nobody gives a shit what I think, that's why. It hurts to tell people my political opinions only to see that they're just another brainwashed mainstreamer who will never, ever, ever change their minds. It's physically painful to me. So I will set up some prices for things that people have to BEG me to do. You have to beg me to talk about politics, religion, and so on, because I'm sick of not getting the desired reactions from anyone.
Charging $10 is better than not going out with anyone at all, isn't it? Most of these men aren't getting any dates at all, and they don't even get an answer to their emails. I've been unable to bring myself to try going out with anyone at all. I've looked, I've talked to people, I've looked for interesting profiles, but I see nothing at all. I'm not seeing a lot of guys I find physically attractive, and I'm not seeing people who I would marry, and I'm not seeing people who would understand my ideas and beliefs either. Nothing. Just hundreds and hundreds of total strangers who will always be total strangers. And I'm sick of it.
I don't have a picture up in the profile, and maybe I won't put one up, either. I describe myself in the profile, so they have a general idea, and I say that I'll show them a picture if they want to see. So far, a few people are willing to drive long distances to meet someone whose image they haven't even seen. And I've warned them! I've said, I have dreadlocks, and a mustache, and I don't shave, and I'm a little bit ugly, but I have a nice body. That's a realistic description. I'm not hideous, but I'm a little bit ugly. I've warned them. I've tried to warn them. They don't believe me. I've warned them: You won't like me, you won't appreciate me, you won't understand me, you won't think I'm beautiful. And they don't listen when I tell them those things, they still want to go out with a faceless stranger who doesn't even have a picture up. So now I'm charging them money to do it.
What about repeat business?
The repeat business concept is the heart of it all. Who wants to come back again? Who wants to pay for a second date? The first date is the cheap one. It's only $10 an hour. Of course, that makes sense. You don't know what you're getting into, at first. You don't know if you'll like the products and services I'm selling. It's almost like a free sample. It's an almost-free sample. After that, will you come back again? Maybe the second date will cost more than the first? Maybe not - haven't decided yet.
Are you bonding with me for a long time? Are you serious? Can you stand to be with a woman who isn't attracted to you and probably never will be? Do you really like me that much? Are you really that curious to know who I am and understand me and be involved in my life? Do you really give a shit? Do you really have a clue at all? The prices will reflect this concept. All that I feel when I look at the profiles, when I talk to the people, when I meet these total strangers, is 'unattractive, clueless, indifferent, opposed to all that I believe and value.' It's true, I've talked to some nice people and some people who are similar-minded, and I know, it's not EVERYONE (and yes, I even gave the URL of this blog to one of the people who was similar-minded and a nice person, and he's not one of the ones that I'm complaining about). But almost all of them are in a different universe than the one that I live in. And it's SO hard to reach them at all.
So let's make it anonymous and impersonal. It's a business. You won't be getting any sex. You already know that, because I wrote it on the profile. You don't have to worry about whether or not we'll be having sex after the date. You don't have to ask yourself, 'Should I kiss her now?' because I wrote a rule that says: No kissing. The answer is no. I warned you that the date would be boring, cold, and impersonal. We're running a business here. I don't love you, you don't love me, and we probably never will, but if you insist, then yes, I'll go out with you anyway.
I'm really fascinated with this idea that they have to BEG me to tell them more about myself. It really does hurt to see that reaction over and over again: I don't care, I don't understand, I don't agree. It hurts! So I'm not going to talk about myself or the things I care about. They have to beg for it. And if they don't like what they hear, oh well, they paid me to tell them, so it doesn't hurt so much. I 'hurt' them back, by taking their money. You hurt me, I hurt you. It's painful for you to pay money to make me talk, and it's painful for me to talk and see that nobody gives a shit. At least I gained one small thing, a couple dollars, so that I can work fewer hours at my job.
I haven't been able to bring myself to go out with anyone for free, yet. There has been only one guy who I ever went out with from a dating website. It was a professor from Penn State, and I met him on AdultFriendFinder. We went to a coffee shop and talked for a little while. I felt zero sexual attraction to him. Our conversation was tense and didn't have much momentum. The conversation didn't get energized and carry itself away. It was a painful struggle. But even so, this guy kept emailing me over and over for many months. And I don't mean he was spamming me - he only sent me an occasional email once in a while, out of the blue. But why? Why on earth would you want to endure my unwanted company over and over again? Was the conversation really that great? Do you need to be reminded that we had this painful strain and tension that never went away? How can it be that I feel nothing for this person, but he somehow wants to keep seeing me over and over again anyway? Can't he tell that I feel nothing? Can't he see that I'm just talking like a robot and not really caring what I say? Can't he see that this is shallow and it's not going any deeper anytime soon? Can't he see that we will never really care, and we will never really support each other? I don't understand why he would want to see me again.
After that guy - that was last year sometime, I think - or maybe it was in 2008 - after him, I never went out with any more people from the dating website. I stopped using it, actually, and then in, what was it, 2009, summer, I met Curtis at work and focused all of my love on him, and wasn't interested in dating other people, and 'the voices' discouraged me from going after anyone else, too. So I really only went out on one date with one guy from a dating website, ever.
But now... I'll go out with all of them. That's the nice thing about paying for a date, from someone who views it as her 'job' to go out on a date with you: You're guaranteed a 'yes.' You don't have to worry about whether I'll say yes to going on a date with you. Of course I will! It's my job.
The repeat business concept... why? Why would you do this again and again? What do you really want to know about me? Do you really care what I have to say, that much? Do you really support me and my life? If you don't really care that much, you can keep on being just a plain old regular customer who never goes beyond the $10 an hour date. (Or whatever my eventual price will be, after I get it worked out.) You're giving me money, and I appreciate it. Thanks for helping me cut back my hours at my real jobs. We don't have to go any further than this if you don't want to.
So I am curious to see how this will go. Who comes back for a second date (and STILL doesn't get any sex)? Who wants to date me once a week every week (and still not have sex!)? Who wants to ask me what I think, value, believe, and do? Who cares? We'll find out who cares.
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