I want a text editor that acts like a pen and paper

11:27 AM 11/29/10

(This became obsessive and I went off on long rants about off-topic subjects, so there really was no real point to this. I was taking a caffeine pill to wake myself up, and I haven't eaten breakfast. Caffeine + no breakfast = obsessively long rants about small things.)

I want a text editor that acts like a pen and paper.

There are times when I WANT to use a physical pen and paper instead of typing something on the computer. Why would I want to do that? There are some things that computer screens can't easily do.

Word processors and computer screens can do lots of wonderful things that pens and papers can't easily do. With a pen, or even a pencil, it's hard to erase large blocks of writing and rewrite them in another place. You'd have to erase almost everything, or cross it all out and draw little arrows pointing to the place where you wanted to move it. On the computer, you just insert something and it moves all the text out of the way easily. There are lots of other things word processors can do.

But there are features that I don't like to use on a word processor. I don't like to use underlines, for some reason. Usually, I don't know that I want to underline something until after I've written it and then reread it. Sometimes I want to make the computer do the things that I do with a pen, and I can't, so I do something else or do it the wrong way. I can't write italics when I'm handwriting. The slanted letters don't look very different from my regular letters, and they don't stand out. So in handwriting, I usually underline something if I want to emphasize it and make it stand out. But officially, it's supposed to be in italics, not underlined. In books and printed materials, it would be in italics. So when I write on the computer, I just don't bother to use either italics or underlines. For some reason, I don't want to take the trouble of pressing ctrl-u or ctrl-i. And I don't want to use italics, I want to use underlines, because that's what I do on paper, and I want to do the same thing on the computer. I just don't want to use italics at all. It doesn't feel like 'me.' (You'll notice that I use only one apostrophe instead of a "quotation mark", too. There was a book that I read, years and years ago, which used a single apostrophe instead of quotation marks, so I decided it's okay to do that. It might have been 'The Bobbsey Twins,' or something, a very old copy of that book at my grandmother's house, some really old book that probably isn't around anymore. I don't have to press the shift key while typing a single apostrophe.)

(Oh, yeah, speaking of 'old books' written on sepia-colored paper: I noticed, while watching Harry Potter for the third time, that the Three Brothers story is drawn in black, white, and tan, to make it look like it's happening on the pages of an old book, in ink, on old tan-colored paper. And they cast shadows onto a back wall, as though they are closed inside a small space, because they're closed inside the book, instead of moving around out in the real world.)

Sometimes that's because I'm writing on Notepad. I like a small, simple, fast text editor instead of a slow, big, bulky one, so I write almost everything in Notepad. I don't like to see lots and lots of toolbars and tools and menus at the top that I don't know how to use. It makes me feel anxious and uncomfortable. I sit there thinking, 'One of these days, I should learn how to use every single one of those things.' And I can't focus on my writing as much, because I start thinking about how I'd like to learn how to use EVERY SINGLE FEATURE in Microsoft Word. And they have classes, and big books, that teach you how to do those things. I've actually taken some classes (for free, at a job training place) years ago, and I learned how to use Excel and Word. But nobody really knows how to use every single feature, and becomes an expert on it, and can use it perfectly, and uses it often, and can do it easily... only to find that Microsoft has made another update or a new version of the program and there are new features to learn how to use, or something got moved to a different menu and you can't find it anymore.

I don't even like to use Wordpad much, unless I make something that's too long for Notepad's memory, which sometimes happens. I don't know if that's a bug with my hacked, spyware-infested computer, or if it's a normal thing with the Windows 98 Notepad, but sometimes if you write a really, really long text file, it will stop you and say 'not enough memory to complete this operation.' So you have to save some of it in a new file.

Anyway, in Notepad, you can't do underlines. You HAVE to use italics. I don't know if there's a shortcut key to do that. You have to go up to the edit/set font/ menu. And I tried that just now, and it made my WHOLE FILE into italics, instead of just one word. So when I want to emphasize something, I write ALL CAPS, and if I'm even madder than that, I'll write *ASTERISKS* around it too. So that explains some of the style that you see in my blog - I write everything in Windows 98 Notepad.

Today, I was thinking about what I would do when I went to visit my parents. I am going to suffer from 'enforced idleness.' I can't get anything done when I'm here at my apartment, but at least I feel like I COULD get something done if I wanted to. But when I'm visiting my parents in West Virginia, I'm trapped in a place far away from all the things I need to do, and there's no chance at all that I can do anything.

So I thought about bringing my laptop with me, which I have sometimes done, and I've played video games or written song fragments on my laptop while I've been at my parents' house. And I was thinking, 'Fiction writing?' I've considered writing books, but I haven't been serious enough to actually start one yet. And my first thought was, 'Nah, for that, I'd want pen and paper.'

So I asked, 'Why?' (And when I say 'I' asked, it usually means 'they' asked, because this was when I had been woken up and was lying in bed talking to the voices. And lately, the voices have been into the time management stuff that I've been reading from Mark Forster. That's the latest fad, and I want it to last forever instead of being a passing fad. And I think I've had a drug residue outbreak too and I'm reacting to something which is making me more ambitious. But anyway.)

Why would I PREFER pen and paper for writing something?

Well, I can easily draw lines on the paper if I want to. I can also choose where to put something on the paper easily. If I want to put something all the way at the bottom, I can just go down and put it there, instead of having to hit 'enter' to go all the way down there, only to find that if I go back and write anything above it, it 'inserts' all those enters, and pushes the bottom words farther and farther away instead of keeping them at the bottom of the page. If I put them at the bottom of the page, I want them to stay there, and I don't want to have to mess around with menus and special tools and techniques and commands to force it to stay there. I guess I'd have to go hit 'insert' or 'overwrite' to do that, but I don't want to have to think about it. I tried doing that just now in Notepad, and it ignored me when I pressed the 'insert' button.

(Wow, I really must be on drugs. I was looking at 'page setup' in Notepad, and I decided to hit the little question mark and ask what it meant when it said 'header: &f'. So I was reading about how you can print the name of the file at the top of every page, and as I was looking, I noticed that the & symbol looked like a little handicapped wheelchair symbol, and then, it also looked like a breast cancer awareness ribbon. I don't usually do image distortions. My brain is doing unusual things today.)

So anyway. Here are all the things that I like to do with pen and paper that I can do easily. Sometimes I want to divide the page into two or more columns. Like 'pros' and 'cons,' the good side and bad side of something. You can do that with word processors, but you have to learn how, and it takes thinking and planning and using tools and toolbars and menus and commands, and you have to know what they mean, and you might even have to, heaven forbid, use NUMBERS to tell it the exact location in inches or pixels of where you want to draw the line on the paper. I don't want to use numbers or make everything perfect. I'm not doing this for publishing. I'm doing it for thinking. It's a sketch. I don't care if the line is located precisely 4 inches from the side of the paper, or, was that 4 inches from the margin, or what?

I could make an ASCII art line in Notepad. I could make a | symbol (that's called a 'pipe,' if you ever have to say it out loud). But I have to make each individual one and then make sure that they all line up.

blah blah blah | bleh bleh bleh
asefd weqr wqer| aaepwroi wepriour

and so on.

I want to use the mouse like a pencil. I want to left-click the mouse and draw a line on the page like I would with a drawing program. And I do NOT want to draw a line made from 'two points,' that is, I don't want to click a place where the first point will be, and then stretch the line (a perfectly straight line) which sticks to the first point that I put down, and swing it around while it holds onto that point, and then click to put down the end point of the line. I just want to draw the line manually. It really annoys me when I'm used to drawing something and I try to do it on the computer and it doesn't feel the same. I grew up writing things by hand on paper! I'm 36 years old! We didn't have a computer through most of my childhood! And when we got one, it couldn't do very much! So I still know how it feels to just put the pen down and draw a line on the paper without having to count the number of inches away from the side of the page or anything like that.

I have dozens of old spiral notebooks packed in the storage unit somewhere. I have been writing in spiral notebooks for decades. I cherish my spiral notebooks. And I never like to be without one. In the past, I even took the trouble of taping a piece of string to a pen cap (so that if the pen ran out of ink, I could replace the pen and leave the cap attached to the string), and then taping the other end of the string to the back of a little notepad, and bringing it to work in my pocket. (I had a whole bunch of free post-it notepads from a business that went bankrupt, a place where I used to work, but I threw them away because that box of stuff got contaminated with residue.) I can't imagine NOT HAVING a spiral notebook in the house somewhere. It just occurred to me that other people might not feel that way about spiral notebooks. There are people who, you might go in their house, and look around, and not find a spiral notebook anywhere. They might have a pen or pencil here and there, but only for writing on a stray piece of paper. They are not going to have five or six spiral notebooks sitting around with journal entries and thoughts and drawings and random things in them.

I don't write in spiral notebooks as much as I used to - I do most of my writing on the computer. But there are some things where a computer just won't do, and that's what I was asking about.

Planning something needs a spiral notebook. Real thinking. Making a structure. Making an outline. Seeing the big picture.

So to do that, I have to do strange things like draw a line down the center of the page, or draw boxes and arrows and lines. Or put something at the bottom of the page. Or write a list of things, and then go back up and add something else beside them. If I wrote a list of things in Notepad, and then tried to go back up and write something else beside them, it might insert an 'enter' that will push everything else on the list downwards. But on my paper, I can spread out diagonally on the side if I am only writing a comment for that one particular thing. If I know that I won't need a comment beside every item on the list, just next to one item, then I don't worry about using a lot of space in the comment on the side, and it might go up beside other items in the list. I'll show you.

A
B
C
D
E
F how much I
G to talk about
H - I just wanted It's a great letter, H.
I love the letter H.
J
K
L

(Oh no! This thing deleted all those spaces! They were there in Notepad! See what I mean? It didn't line up like I had it. It said, 'I just wanted to talk about how much I love the letter H. It's a great letter, H.' But it got all screwed up. I had these things lined up in a diagonal way, with spaces. I don't want to mess with it anymore.)

I might make something slanted and spread it out, because I only wanted to talk about the letter H, and not all those other letters. 'Being messy' is something I can only do in a spiral notebook.

I've been enjoying Mark Forster's blog. He has spent years trying to find ways to make himself do things. You might look at him and think that he's a really competent, powerful, rich, famous person who's got it all together, because he's an AUTHOR, so everything in his life must be perfect. But actually, he's still struggling to find out how to overcome his weakness, after all these years, after all these techniques, after all these books and newsletters and blogs, after being famous. He wishes that he could easily just do things the way other people seem to. (And that was something that the voices were saying to me, too. They were saying, 'I was a weak-willed person who couldn't get anything done... SO I BECAME A WORLD-RENOWNED EXPERT ON TIME MANAGEMENT!') He still, to this day, after all these years, feels anxious and uncertain about whether he'll get his work done today. But he has a little bit more faith than he used to have.

He seems like he might be an SP who looks around at all the SJs in school, while growing up, and wonders how those SJs can make themselves do their homework two weeks before it's due. He was talking about that. He said that with some people, if their assignment is due in two weeks, then they will start doing it today, and do a little bit each day, and they will use up the whole two weeks. But *WE*, people like you and me, will wait until the last minute and do all of it the night before it's due. He says, And if that's not you, then you wouldn't be here reading this website about time management. And then, he made me want to laugh (or cry!) even more, because he said, 'And if it doesn't have a deadline, then we just never do it at all!'

And yes, that's exactly how I used to do my homework! When the assignments were easy, I could get a good grade, I'd get a 100% on an essay written in the hour before going to class. This used to make other people angry at me, because they'd spent the last three days working on it, but they got a worse grade than I did. But when I got into college, the assignments were so huge and so complicated, I couldn't do them the night before anymore. That's when the 'slow and steady wins the race' SJ types started getting better grades than I did. I couldn't do the essay in the hour before class, and get 100% and make them all mad at me, anymore. I eventually dropped out of college. I started to feel like I wasn't learning things that would apply to a real job in the real world. Instead, it's like college is a great, big, giant, expensive Myers-Briggs test to find out whether you're an SJ or an SP, and if you're an SJ, you pass the test, and if you're an SP, you fail.

But I love how-to books. I *LOVE* the Schaum's Outline of Bookkeeping and Accounting. It teaches me how to do something, a process, a procedure, and it makes me do it, over and over again, in the exercises. And that book is so cheap, it's only like $20, and I can do it all by myself without going tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a college education. I'd love to get ALL of the Schaum's Outlines and do them all, and I'd have spent less money than I would if I went to college. And bookkeeping is something that I can use right away. I can see how it's useful right now. I don't have any uncertainties about where this is going. I can use it today to work with my real money.

I had some trouble when I started trying to do math with those books. There was always a prerequisite that I needed to do before I could go further. I felt like I had to PERFECTLY understand the prerequisite before I could do anything. ('Prerequisite': Before you take calculus, you have to know how to do algebra. That kind of thing.) When I do math, I like to understand all of the theory, about why and how this works. When I was in Calculus class in high school, I was way behind all the other students because I would sit there and mess with it until I totally understood the theory.

Instead of memorizing a function, I would re-create the function from scratch every time I needed to use it. An example: There is a universal solution to a polynomial. I might be calling it the wrong thing. I can't recall exactly what it is. But if you fill in this function and solve it, you can find out the answer to any problem if it's the right kind of problem. It's like, x = +/- (the square root of) (a squared + b squared) / 4ab, or something like that. That's almost what it is. I know that's all wrong. And I could never remember it. I can't memorize things very well.

(Although that wasn't true a long time ago. I used to have a good memory, too. When I was in fourth grade, I was the only person in the class who successfully, perfectly memorized and recited 'The Wreck of the Hesperus' and was able to recite it in front of the class. 'It was the schooner Hesperus...' It's a poem about a shipwreck, and they tie the girl to the mast so that she can survive the shipwreck. I don't remember if she lives or not. I think she probably dies at the end. It was a sad poem. Everybody dies. Maybe I'll have to read it again to see if it's how I remember it. I think I vaguely recall something about a cold, dead body. So the girl probably dies.)

So instead of relying on my bad memory, instead, I studied to understand WHY that function was what it was. And I would rebuild it from scratch when I needed to use it to solve a problem. Eventually, I would have trusted my memory, if I had done this enough times to recognize that I was writing the right thing for the universal solution. But this kind of thing always made me take longer when I had to take a test.

You know, I've loved reading Antal Fekete ever since I first discovered him. And now, I've looked on his web page recently, and he has some crazy stuff about Rainbow Numbers. (It isn't on the home page, it's under one of the tabs at the top, in the 'Math' section, beside 'Popular Economics,' 'Scholarly Economics,' etc.) And I can almost understand it. It actually looks very interesting, but I'm not studying math right now, and I don't have time.

Wow, I'm so hungry, my stomach is actually starting to burn. I might eat some cereal. I've been eating cereal for a few weeks now as a test. I don't spend as much money as I used to when I would go out to Burger King and get breakfast every morning. I like to eat a heavy breakfast instead of a light breakfast. I ate bowls of cereal for breakfast through all my childhood, but in reality, I would like to have 'dinner' foods for breakfast. I don't just want bacon and eggs, either. The 'bacon and eggs' tradition, there was a reason for it. It was easy to cook. It didn't take long. And you could get eggs easily in the morning if you lived on a farm. But people mistakenly believe that 'bacon and eggs' are SACRED breakfast foods, which can only be eaten in the morning, and no other time of day, and they MUST be eaten in the morning, or it isn't breakfast. But me, for breakfast, I want liver and onions and spinach, and I want baked beans and fish (I read that in England they might eat baked beans and fish for breakfast, but I don't remember where I read that). Why do people say 'yuck' about eating certain foods at certain times of day? That always annoyed me. The only thing that I do understand about it is that it's hard to cook breakfast when you've just gotten up, you're tired, you're hungry, and you need to make something quick and easy to get you started. So bacon and eggs will give you lots of calories and fat quickly and easily, so you have lots of energy with little effort. But if it were quick and easy to have liver and onions for breakfast, I'd eat that. I always eat leftovers for breakfast if I have them. Now that refrigerators have been invented, we can save our leftovers and eat them the next morning.

Oh, anyway. Schaum's Outlines of math have prerequisites, and I would want to do all the previous books first before moving on to calculus or something. And I wasn't satisfied with just memorizing the functions and the tricks. I wanted to understand them. So I might want to use a 'real' math book that goes into detail on those things instead of a Schaum's. I tried looking at a Schaum's Outline of Physics (and I really need to know about this, because I have to protect myself against electronic harassment that uses an unknown medium - it might be electromagnetic, or it might be sonic, but I have to understand the attacks).

But it started talking about vector math, and I don't know vector math. I tried to just use and memorize the tips and tricks, but it wasn't enough, and so I went to another shelf and I got a book all about vector math. And it didn't take long before I got really, really stuck on something I didn't understand, which wasn't very well explained in the book. I got stuck on this one, small thing, very very badly, for weeks and weeks. I was trying to study it on my Tuesday evenings at Barnes and Noble from 7-8 PM. (That routine started because 'they' made me put up a Craigslist ad about my 'intentional community,' my religion, the order of Retmeishka, and I said in that ad that if anybody had problems reaching me by email then they could meet me in person at the bookstore, because I have problems with computer hackers interfering with my important emails, and possibly deleting comments that people write on my blog, or preventing people from writing comments at all, and that kind of thing. I feel like people are desperately trying to find me, desperately looking for me, but they can't reach me, because their letters and comments don't get through. That's the reason why Chuck Palahniuk insists that all of his fan mail must be written on paper and delivered to his agent. If you send anything in email to somebody who's the target of harassment and hacking and stalking, then you can't be sure that they'll get the email.)

It took weeks and weeks. I was writing in a, you guessed it, a small spiral notebook. I was trying to understand why this function was what it was. It wasn't explained well. I don't have faith in them, and I can't just memorize it if I don't have faith in it.

(I'm eating canned fish for breakfast right now. I bought it when I was stalking Curtis last week. I wasn't here just to look for Curtis! I was here to go shopping, even though I could get it more easily at a store much closer to where I live, and I never go to this store, and haven't been here in years. I'd rather not eat canned fish - I want fresh fish - and I think that cans might have a plastic lining that contains bisphenol-A, and if they don't have a lining, then you are eating dissolved metal from the can itself, and I don't want to eat dissolved metal, and I don't want bisphenol-A either, and I don't want overcooked food either... but canned fish is my compromise food.)

(I can't cook right now, and there are reasons why, and it's a long story, but part of it is because I tried to cook bone marrow, months and months ago, and the toxic vapors from the bone marrow filled up my refrigerator, and now every time I put anything in there, the vapors land on the food, and if you eat it, you'll throw up. And I tried airing it out with the door open, and I've bleached it and sprayed it and wiped every inch of it, and I've left the refrigerator on with the door open so the fan will blow, but the air circulated inside some closed-off area in the back that I can't open up, I think, and the vapors are in there. So now I'm not using that fridge at all, and all I do is go get fast foods and put them into a small fridge that I went out and bought at Wal-Mart.)

(In nutrition class in college, I learned about what people can do to get calcium if they can't drink milk. You can eat canned fish that have the bones cooked in them. I've tried that, and it's really good. You can get canned salmon, and it has the backbone in it, and you can see the segments of the backbone, and it takes a lot of courage to eat something so disgusting for the first time, if you've never eaten it before, but it's good. I don't have a bad reaction to those bones.)

(Nutrition class is where I first learned about cooking bones in soup, and that's the reason why I believed that cooking soup bones, with bone marrow in them, was something that would be easy and safe to do. I thought it was a mainstream thing to do. I thought it was normal to cook soup bones and bone marrow. But it turns out that bone marrow contains toxic hormones, something that you can feel in your own body if you get badly injured or if you are under extreme stress and trauma. This is a feeling you get if you get hurt so badly that you might not survive. It's the near death feeling, I am about to die, right now. If your bones get crushed so badly that the bone marrow is broken open, like if you fell off a cliff or fell out of a tree or off the roof of a house, or if you got in a car accident, then you would have this feeling.)

(When you get injured that badly, there are some things that happen to your body. You might pass out. People black out when they get severely injured. What causes you to black out? Bone marrow hormones. Whatever that hormone is, it comes out of bone marrow. You might vomit, and you might, pardon my language, shit yourself. What causes you to puke and shit yourself? Bone marrow hormones. When you are badly injured, the bone marrow releases things into your bloodstream. It releases new blood cells to replace the blood you're losing in the accident. Maybe it also triggers adrenaline, and large amounts of adrenaline will also make you puke and shit yourself. But it's not just adrenaline all by itself.)

(Whatever it is, you can get this feeling if you cook and eat bone marrow, the feeling that you are being killed. You literally feel like someone or something has nearly killed you, if you eat bone marrow. It's a specific sensation.)

(And I only ate a tiny fragment. Imagine if you ate a lot. You would go to the hospital for the worst food poisoning you've ever had. So all these people, in all these books and websites, claiming that they eat bone marrow, must have cooked it to death at a very high temperature, or eaten yellow bone marrow instead of red bone marrow, or SOMETHING, to make it so that they don't pass out and puke a few minutes after eating it.)

OMG, I'm obsessing about off-topics. I had one huge long paragraph, and I broke it into smaller paragraphs, and just kept the parentheses around it.

Well, anyhow. Eventually, I found the answer. I understood it. I understood WHY that vector math function was what it was. (It was something about the result you get if you add two vectors together, or maybe it was when you multiply two vectors together.) It tooks weeks and weeks of struggling. And I was way behind in my schedule. How on earth would I get through this whole book if I got stuck on one small function at the very beginning of the book, and it took weeks (although, actually, I spent only one hour, once a week, during my Barnes & Noble routine)?

(You know what else I learned as an adult? I found this out during the weeks when I slept in the car out in the parking lot, when my other apartment filled up with toxic black mold fumes and I would suffocate while I was sleeping. I learned that if you sleep in the car with all the windows closed, you'll wake up with your heart pounding and you'll be in a panic. You have to open the window to get some air. You can open it only a tiny crack, but that's enough. I had to open it only a tiny crack because it was freezing outside. But that's caused by too much carbon dioxide. You probably have enough oxygen. It's too much carbon dioxide that causes you to panic. So I found out the same thing happens to me if I sleep in the bedroom with the door closed all the way. I have trouble waking up and I might wake up in a panic or have nightmares. The door has to be open a little crack to let fresh air in. I was a little kid, saying goodnight to my mom, and I would tell her to please, leave the door open a crack, or I'll get scared. I didn't know WHY. I thought it was to feel secure, like I can see a little light from the hallway, or like they can hear me if I yell. But actually, it was probably because I would get too much carbon dioxide in my closed bedroom, and it would make me panic in the middle of the night. And I never knew that, until decades later, as an adult.)

But anyway! I finally understood the function. But I gave up on trying to do the math books because I felt like it would take too long. I wanted to be wholeheartedly committed to what I was doing, otherwise I couldn't keep doing something for months or years without knowing why I needed this. I had to be absolutely sure that this was what I wanted to study.

So that's why I really like the Mark Forster web page. I'm ordering one of his books, actually. But anyway, that kind of thing made me get way behind in math class, while all the other kids just memorized the functions without understanding them. I can brag about one thing, though. I got a 5, the highest possible score, on the AP Calculus exam. 'Understanding stuff' really helps you later on! But I still, to this day, ENVY people who DON'T MIND memorizing things without understanding them! I wish I could make myself do that! So I can read Mark Forster and I get this feeling that still, even after all this time, even after becoming the world-renowned expert on Time Management, he still envies the people who just memorize the functions and pass the tests and do their homework weeks before it's due, and they do this automatically because that's the way they are. But WE have to go through this battle of 'Am I doing this wholeheartedly?' Do I really want to do this? Why? What good is it doing me? What am I going to use it for? I can't do it unless I know why I'm doing it. He's obsessed with this subject, not because he's naturally GOOD at it, but because he's naturally BAD at it! The people who are naturally good at time management aren't writing books about it, they're just out there living their lives and managing their time.

Wow, I started this off by talking about a text editor where you can use the mouse to draw a line down the middle of the page, or insert some text at the bottom of the page without 'pushing it ahead' if you go back up and insert something above it. And I want to draw lines and arrows, and I want to draw text in any location without moving the other text out of place. And that kind of thing. So I just use a pen and paper instead.

Writing is what I do because I'm not able to get up and DO things. It's like what they said in this calendar that I picked up and looked at. The name of the calendar is something like 'The B-Word,' 'bitch,' a calendar about women being bitches and being proud of it. I think that's the one. One of the pages said, 'Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls are too busy to keep diaries!' People who are actually out DOING stuff are too busy to spend hours writing and thinking. So that's why I'm thinking about writing a book and trying to make money by doing that. I could make money because I have a terrible weakness: I'm too tired and sick to get up and DO things. So all I do is sit around thinking and writing. Wouldn't it be great if I could make MONEY by sitting around thinking and writing? For hours and hours every day? There are other people who have actually done this, you know. It's not unthinkable. Why am I so different from those people?

Speaking of Harry Potter (was I speaking of Harry Potter? no, but I was thinking of it), I am waiting for 'Harvey Putter and the Ridiculous Premise' to arrive in the mail. This is a survival story, an escape story. I like stories where people escape from a closed world that they're trapped in. Liberation stories. We are trapped inside the pages of a book, in a small, limited world. Our will is not free. We are slaves of the author, forced to do whatever the author writes about us. (I'm also thinking of Fantasia in 'The Neverending Story,' one of my all-time favorite movies.) It's a tiny, closed room, and we can't move around, like the Three Brothers casting shadows on their beige-colored walls. The three brothers are also skinny, almost skeletal, like stick figure drawings, not fully fleshed out, not warm and strong and fat and alive.

I want to be warm and strong and alive (and a little bit fat). I don't want to be a Pinocchio puppet, I want to be a real person. (Yeah, I'm having a Weird Brain Day. I'm not sure why.) I don't want to be Truman Burbank stuck inside Seahaven. I don't want to be Annie trapped in the crumbling house in hell in 'What Dreams May Come.'

So I think that this Harry Potter spoof might actually have a serious theme to it, the liberation theme. I haven't read any spoilers about how it ends, though. I read a review of it and the guy said that he liked the ending, it made him smile, but I don't know if that means they escaped or not. I don't know what it means. I'm not sure if the characters will liberate themselves or not. I'll wait and see. What is the spirit of this movie?

If I wrote a book, I want it to have the 'fully fleshed out warmth' instead of being like stick figures. I am thinking of an old book called 'Heidi,' which is a book that illustrates the Weston Price diet, the unhealthy lifestyle long ago, when people who lived in towns got sick and malnourished, but if you moved into the mountains, and ate fresh food and got fresh air, it would bring you back to life. I want my book to have healthy places where you'd love to live. A reason to survive. Something worth fighting for. People you love. People you want to see, over and over again. Places where you wish you could live. Food you wish you could eat.

They're not just going on an adventure far from home. I love adventures, but I get lonely if I am away from home for too long. I don't want to leave home and never come back. And I don't want a love story with a bad ending that *SUCKED*, and I won't mention any names, but THE GOLDEN COMPASS trilogy comes to mind! Sorry, was that a spoiler? I read all of the Golden Compass / His Dark Materials books and I liked them, but there was cold loneliness and not enough warmth and love. There wasn't enough of a safe home to live in.

At the same time, I don't want an Anne Tyler book where you're resigned to going home, no matter what, and you can't escape, no matter how hard you try, and you are resigned to a hopeless, dull, unsatisfying life forever. Anne Tyler was depressing.

There doesn't have to be only one book. I can postpone a book if I don't know what I want to do with it yet. I might not become a world-famous author starting with my very first book the way J.K. Rowling did. I might have a couple of books that suck, and then eventually, one of the books doesn't suck. I don't have to be huge, I don't have to be famous. But I wonder if anybody anywhere would ever pay a couple dollars to buy a printed, physical book that I wrote? You know, Amazon.com happens to be a successful website that's been around for a long time, through all these dotcom bubbles. People are still buying enough books to keep Amazon.com from going totally bankrupt.

I like Mark Forster's 'I'll just get the file out' technique. I've already been using that technique. I lie to myself and say that I'm only going to do one small thing. Sometimes it's the truth. Sometimes I really do quit after doing that one tiny thing. I'll just get the file out and look at it. But after you start doing that, you have momentum, and it's easy to keep going and do some more work on it.

So if I said 'I'll just get the file out' about writing a book, that means, I can just write one small book that sucks. It doesn't have to be the world's greatest book ever. It can be just a little one, and it can suck. It's okay if it's a bad book that nobody likes all that much.

I think I might be ready to get up and do something now. And later, I'll be visiting my parents. I'll probably have a spiral notebook with me. I'll probably bring a laptop. I'll be stuck in enforced idleness. But I must see my parents before they die, and I must see them again and again, not just once every couple years. And eventually, I will have to help them when they are too old to help themselves. I want to see them once every season. Can I do that? Every season of the year, four times a year? That requires planning. I have to ask for time off, over and over, and it's hard to ask. But my parents are going to die, forever and ever. That's what happened to J.K. Rowling. I don't want that to happen to me. But they will die sometime. (Note, that eventually happens to everyone. But I'm saying that the loss of her parents, or her mother, I forget whether it was both parents - that influenced her and hurt her so much that it became part of the books she wrote. The whole world could see how much it hurt her, and they could relate to it. Not all books have a 'lost parents' theme in them.)

I wouldn't have stayed here in State College. I might have gone back to West Virginia. But I got a boyfriend, and I sort of couldn't help getting a boyfriend. In fact, I didn't want to. And I fought with the voices in a terrible argument. I remember that. I remember fighting about not dating Eric. I remember arguing with a separate voice that wasn't my own. I didn't want to date him. I was going to say 'no' to Eric originally. I might not have stayed here. But I got a boyfriend, and I didn't want to.

And when I broke up with him, I got another boyfriend right away, and I didn't want him, either. I met Peter right away. Now, I don't want to leave, because of Peter.

And then, 'they' made a fake arrangement for me to be bonded with Curtis. Curtis would have been a Temporary Workplace Friend. I had a terrible, terrible crush on him, and I would have been devastated when he left. But I would have cried and cried and then I would have gotten over it. I would have moved on.

They are tearing me apart, when I want to go home to be with my parents, but 'they' want to make me stay in the State College area and put down roots and start a new life here. I've refused to put down roots, all these years, and haven't made any friends. And I can't help saying 'yes' to bonding with Curtis. I can't help it, because I like him so much. I love him like family. I want to spend years getting to know him. I want to get used to him. They pushed me to do things I wouldn't have done on my own. And I can't help saying 'yes' to it. I can't help liking him as much as I do. But I know, at the same time, that 'they' are doing this deliberately as a way of making me stay in State College, for whatever reason.

(It makes you ask the question, are 'they' really as 'everywhere' as they pretend to be? Why would it matter where I live, when they follow me everywhere when I drive long distances in my car? Who cares where I live? They can spy on me no matter where I go. Uh-oh, I ate chocolate a while ago, and no, that's not a joke, I am starting to get the 'hate' feeling again and I'm wondering why the feeling is getting worse. What made me get into the 'hate' mood? And no, that's not directed at Curtis, it's directed at the attackers.)

I should go get some real food. I haven't really eaten. I've written too long, and wandered to too many topics. I know when I've worn out my welcome. I don't want to write another 'hate' blog again.

This blog shouldn't have a bad ending. I'm going to visit my parents. I'm off work this week. I won't get much done, but I will get a little bit done. I want to make changes in my life. There are some really, really important things I need to do.

anarchism, second job, visiting curtis, resting on thanksgiving day

3:27 PM 11/25/10

I am home from work because it's Thanksgiving, but I am not going anywhere to eat dinner. I'm invited to go with my aunts and cousins, and also Peter and Tammy invited me, but I'm going to just stay home and rest. Rest is what I want more than anything else. Trying to have fun on a holiday isn't usually much fun for me. Sometime in the future, it might be, but right now no.

The air is fresh and sweet outside today. I went out to get some bottled water out of my car and the sweetness of the air surprised me. It was cold and silent and full of rainfall. It often feels that way on holidays. I think maybe there aren't as many cars driving on holidays, and that's why the air is sweet.

I saw Curtis yesterday. I went looking for him, when I was finally able to get up and out of bed. I didn't see him in the store, so I bought a couple of small things and left. As I was walking towards the door, he came out of a small room nearby and looked right at me. So we walked outside together and sat on the bench where he had a cigarette. He said he was off work and waiting for his ride to pick him up.

I didn't have a panic attack, and I didn't start crying either. I was only a little nervous at first. I hope that I can get used to visiting him. It was something that I did on purpose, as a duty, an obligation.

I sat, like, three feet away from him on the bench, leaving him plenty of space. I didn't touch him at all. We talked for a few minutes about Christmas and some other things and then he finished his cigarette. I let him go back inside, and I said goodbye and went to my car.

I am glad I got to see him. And he mentioned again that I hadn't written much on facebook. It's true, I didn't bombard him with letters, because I was trying to take it easy after he and I had a couple days of big, long letters back and forth to each other, and I thought, he can't possibly like this, and I thought that I talk too much. But no, he wanted me to write to him again. I thought I had to give him a break for a couple of days, and I didn't want to push my luck. So after I got home I sent him another letter and I showed him two photos where he and his son Caden were in the same position and making the same face and they looked exactly alike. He even has Curtis's ears. They are the same shape and they stick out at exactly the same angle. I love his ears, so this is a good thing. He has both ears double pierced and I always stare at them when we're talking.

As of right now, it's my official duty to try to see him once every other week. If I could, I'd see him like three times a week or something, and I would be all over him hugging and kissing and snuggling, but instead I am going to give him a lot of space and try to act like an ordinary friend instead of the 'friend who adores you and wants to have sex with you even though you have a girlfriend and you guys are getting married sometime.' So I have to be an ordinary friend. I'm not even touching him yet, not even a little bit. I'm not sure when I will feel comfortable enough to do that. But like I said, I didn't cry or have a panic attack, so I am feeling a little more trusting and comfortable now.

In case you are a new reader who doesn't know what's going on, Curtis and I used to work together, but he lost his job, and I wanted to keep visiting him at his new job, and I was devastated that I couldn't see him at work anymore. So every time I went looking for him, I was crying and upset because I missed him and he was gone from my life. That's making a long story short. It took a while before I could actually FIND him at his new job, and I spent a few weeks sending letters to him begging him to tell me to quit stalking him, because I was scared that he didn't want to see me and that sooner or later he would have me arrested for stalking. But actually he wants to see me, or at least, he is able to tolerate it.

****
'They' think that the reason the Harry Potter and Hermione dance scene affected me so strongly was because I myself am in a position of being attracted to someone who is loyal to his real girlfriend. Every time I saw that scene in the movie, the voice whispered the word 'letdown' after it was over, and now they said 'letdown' after I walked away from Curtis without touching him. I checked the book when I was at Barnes & Noble. It wasn't in the book. It was added to the movie. The scene does resemble how he and I are together: we've been friends for a long time, I've always been attracted to him, and we've enjoyed being together, and we have had fun together, but he is loyal to his girlfriend and he probably would stop me if I tried to do anything that went beyond being friendly. I don't know. He always tolerated it when I touched him, but I was doing things like patting him on the back. And he wasn't always with his girlfriend during the time when we worked together, and he was more open to me when he wasn't dating anybody.

Anyway, I saw him, and I plan to see him again.

Another good thing: I am going to try again to get a second job. My bank account has been quickly draining down, which always happens when I have only one job. My rent is too high, and I need a roommate, but I can't have one unless I clean up the drug residue on the carpet, and I've already talked about that too much in my blog. I need to get that fixed. But I want to have a secure income first before I do anything else. I had tons of money when I was working at Weis and McDonald's, and then I quit Weis and I quickly used up the money I had. I'm ready to fill out job applications again, and so, yesterday, I picked up a couple when I was in town, when I went to visit Curtis.

I feel like everybody already knows this, but, I am an anarchist, and before I called myself an anarchist, I started out as a Libertarian and Objectivist, after reading the books of Ayn Rand. I decided to go all the way to 'anarchist' after I learned that the hackers are controlling the computers where they record the numbers of our votes. It isn't the electronic voting machines that we have to worry about, although there are some problems with those too. But they are a red herring, a distraction from the real problem. The real problem is that our votes get counted, and then the numbers get sent to an ordinary, insecure, internet-connected computer with a plain old Excel spreadsheet on it, and then, the hackers change the numbers in the cells on the spreadsheet. It's so easy to do, a script kiddie could do it. You don't even have to be an expert hacker. You don't have to do anything that requires a lot of knowledge or expertise. So our votes don't matter at all. It's all fake. So I am an anarchist, because our votes have no connection to the results of the election.

After the election of George Bush Jr., there was an article written called 'Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked.' Or it might have been called 'Evidence Mounts that the Vote Has Been Hacked.' It's on the internet. It's the only article that I ever saw that was written about this, but I knew it was the truth. I had been getting harassed by computer hackers since about the year 2000, so I already knew that they were everywhere. Reading that article was the last straw. I decided that voting was completely and totally hopeless. At first I had thought that voting was just difficult, but not impossible. I thought that there might be SOME hope of changing the government by voting. But now I don't think so anymore. The entire voting system is completely and totally corrupt and fake, and there is no connection at all between our votes and who gets elected - NONE.

Oh... why was I talking about anarchism? Because I was going to say, I hate the labor laws. I shouldn't have to get a second job if I want to work more than forty hours a week. But employers can't afford to pay overtime pay. If you work more than 40 hours, then they have to pay you 1.5 times your usual wage for every hour over 40. So if I work 50 hours, then 10 of those hours are overtime. If I usually made $5 an hour, then I would be making $7.50 an hour during those 10 hours of overtime. Instead of doing that, businesses always just hire extra people, and they make sure that nobody ever works more than 40 hours a week. The end.

So nobody can make enough money. There is an upper limit on how much money you are allowed to make in one week. If you are only allowed to work 40 hours, and you make $5 an hour, then $200 is the maximum amount of money that you are allowed to make in one week. This law is insanely stupid and it needs to be repealed. But the best we can hope for is that maybe, someday, the government will allow you to voluntarily opt out of the law - that you might be allowed to say to your employer, 'I don't want to get paid overtime pay. I want to work at my normal wage even if I'm working 50 hours a week.' Then, of course, all of the other ignorant people will get mad at you, because they believe they're ENTITLED to get overtime pay, and they believe it's bad and evil and wrong to NOT get paid overtime pay, and they'll be jealous of you and they'll say they wish they could do that too, but at the same time they don't think it's right. So you'll have conflicts with your co-workers if you have any co-workers who are brainwashed more than most people. (Usually, when I talk about this, some of the people kind of agree with me, but there's always some brainwashed person who insists that overtime pay is a good thing, and they're always mad at the employers when the employers refuse to let them work more than 40 hours a week and get overtime pay.)

The only way to get more than that 'upper limit' of money is to get a second job. It's pointless, inconvenient, harmful, and stupid. This law is the #1 most stupid and most obvious law that I would change immediately if I had the power to change a law. It would make so many people's lives easier if they could simply keep working extra hours at one job to go above the 'upper limit' that they can get if they work 40 hours.

They might think that it's easy to get a second job. But it's hard to schedule it. At least one of your jobs has to have flexible scheduling. McDonald's is well known for having flexible scheduling, and I read in a magazine that McDonald's was listed as one of the top ten best places to work, partly because of their flexible schedules, and I agree with that - I like this job for a lot of reasons, and I like it a lot more than other places I've worked, and I can work whatever hours I need to work, at whatever time I want. When you get two jobs, at least one of them needs to let you start work after your other job ends. And you have to be able to limit your availability at both jobs. You have to work in the morning at one, and the evening at the other. Or work overnight at one, and evening at the other. And so on. You can't have one of your jobs say, 'Your schedule has to be totally open, and you have to be available anytime we want you to come in.' If they say that to you, then you're screwed. It means you can't get a second job, because you are going to have unpredictable scheduling, and so you're stuck making that 'upper limit' amount of money for only 40 hours a week at your one job, unless they let you work overtime, which is unusual.

I HATE THIS LAW.

There are other laws that the libertarians and anarchists hate, but a lot of those laws affect other people, so we can't see them directly. But we have direct personal experience with the overtime pay law. I can see it and I can see how it directly affects my life. I can see how much easier and simpler my life would be without that law. This law is visible to millions of ordinary people, and LOTS of those people believe that the law is stupid and harmful.

There are lots of other laws I hate. I hate paying income taxes. I hate fiat money. I hate the banking system. I can't list all the laws I hate.

There are some laws that I disagree with, but it's not a big issue for me, although it is for some people. For instance, I don't think it should be illegal to go outside naked. You shouldn't get arrested for nudity. However, I really don't care that much about that law, most of the time. My quality of life isn't that badly affected by this. I can tolerate this law. But the income taxes, THEY have a big effect on my life. Because of the taxes, I have to work thousands and thousands of extra hours, to pay for *NOTHING*. Or pay for things I don't want, like, pay the soldiers to go kill people in other countries, which I don't want them to do. My money is used for that.

This is why I'm interested in intentional communities. I can't control the government at all because of the vote hackers. The only thing I can do is join with like-minded people to work together and build a new culture.

I don't usually talk about this subject (anarchism), because so many other authors have already written about it, and they've explained it so much better than I can. I'm just agreeing with them.

I called myself a 'minarchist' for a couple of years while I still believed in voting. It means that I believed in SMALL government, minimal, as little as possible. But now I am totally disconnected from the government, and I call myself an anarchist, and I only obey them so that I don't get thrown in jail. (I'm thinking of Curtis, who drove his car without a license, after he lost his license for drunk driving, and he got arrested again and lost his license again for another whole year. Originally it was nine months. So he will have gone 21 months without a license.)

Anyway... I'll just post this for now.

Some emotional moments were removed from the Harry Potter movie, but something might have been added

11:01 PM 11/21/10
I saw Harry Potter twice yesterday. I don't know if this blog qualifies as a spoiler, since many people have already read the books.

I like the movie, simply because I enjoy seeing the familiar faces again. There was one scene that I liked a lot, but I'll mention a couple things I don't like first.

In the beginning, the Vernons are leaving the house for the last time. There is no scene where Dudley and Harry forgive each other. They don't even show a brief second or two where Harry and Dudley bond with each other like they do in the book. In the book, there is just a little bit of a realization, an understanding, between them, where Dudley shows some respect and brotherly love for Harry, when they say goodbye. But in the movie, nothing. Just the Vernons getting in the car, saying it's not safe here anymore, and then Harry in the empty house. I was disappointed with that. I think the Harry-Dudley goodbye bonding moment was a very important moment. It's something we've been waiting for, all this time, through all the books - all along, we wished Harry and Dudley could get along with each other and find something in common, some understanding, and it finally happens... and they didn't bother to show it in the movie.

The moviemakers weren't as interested in 'emotional bonding' moments as they were 'big exciting special-effect action' moments. Of course, there had to be a 'dangling from a flying vehicle' scene, just like in the Chamber of Secrets movie (where, remember, they had Harry dangling out of the flying car as they were dodging away from the train, which I don't remember happening in the Chamber of Secrets book, but it was a 'Hey let's do something big and exciting with special effects and action scenes, since this is a MOVIE and it has to be BIG!'), and so, in Deathly Hallows, they had to show Harry's feet running over the roof of a bus passing underneath them, while Hagrid and Harry were flying in the motorcycle to get away from Voldemort. I would have gladly skipped seeing a couple seconds of Harry's feet running over the top of the bus while he dangles from the motorcycle, and instead seen him and Dudley bonding and saying goodbye and forgiving each other for a few seconds. But it's all about action and special effects, not feelings and relationships.

What else got left out? They left out something emotional, and it was a HUGE thing, not just a little thing. Leaving this out made the scene totally unbelievable and unrealistic. It was the scene where Harry, Ron, Luna, and a couple of other characters are trapped in the basement of the Malfoy's house, while Hermione is upstairs screaming as she is being tortured by Bellatrix Lestrange. In the book, Ron is screaming and bellowing and trying to break the door down and screaming Hermione's name over and over. That's realistic. He is trapped and helpless and Hermione might be about to die. In the movie... you just wouldn't believe it. It is unthinkable to me how they made that scene in the movie. In the movie, Ron just stands around talking with everyone and he seems calm and apathetic and passive, like 'Gosh, what are we gonna do?' kind of thing. He doesn't seem the least bit upset that Hermione is upstairs making bloodcurdling screams, and believe me, her screams sounded *REAL*. They gave me goosebumps. She is upstairs screaming and Ron is just calmly standing around wondering what to do, like 'Oh well, Hermione's gonna die.' That was TOTALLY UNBELIEVABLE AND UNTHINKABLE. This was a HUGE OMISSION.

What did I enjoy? I liked the dancing at Bill and Fleur's wedding. I like cheerful scenes full of people, food, and music. It was a good dance song. That's a 'something worth fighting for' moment. There have to be moments like that. Otherwise, you just don't care about anything. Without any happy scenes, it would be like, who cares if Voldemort destroys the world, there's nothing worth living for anyway. So they had some good scenes at the Weasley's house as always.

There was a very special scene that I loved. It was so real and so emotional and heartbreaking. This would be a big spoiler, I think. In fact, I don't even remember this happening in the book (I could be wrong though), and it might actually have been added to the movie. I don't remember it at all. But it was GREAT in the movie, extremely well done. It was almost like a scene from a totally different movie, like it wasn't part of this movie at all. It was like it was made by totally different people. I haven't seen anything like this in any of the previous Harry Potter movies. Nothing in the other movies ever moved me emotionally as much as this scene did.

It was after Ron disapparated and didn't come back. Harry and Hermione were continuing on alone. Hermione is listening to the radio and Harry is alone with her. Hermione is miserable and depressed because of Ron leaving. Harry has a playful impulse to invite Hermione to get up and dance with him to the music. Hermione is still sad that Ron has left, but she gets up and dances with Harry and starts to smile and enjoy herself, and they both get into the dancing. They are dancing together and holding each other and having a special moment alone, in a world without Ron, just them. Now that Ron is gone, they're allowed to express this feeling. It was a moment of euphoric joy, a rebellion against despair, against a whole world falling apart, against hopelessness. It was a wonderful thing to do and it cheered them both up. It was a beautiful moment. You can feel the closeness and the sexual tension between them and the attraction and the desire for them to kiss each other. They are holding each other close, and then Hermione quietly lets go, the music fades, her smile fades, and she sits back down again, saying nothing, and it goes no further. It seemed very, very real, and I didn't remember seeing that happen in the book at all. Maybe it did, and maybe it didn't. It was like a moment from another world.

The reading of the Three Brothers fairy tale was TOTALLY AMAZING. They drew a cartoon and it was incredible. The style of the cartoon was what I liked so much. It wasn't beautiful in a happy way, it was beautiful in a dark way. And I didn't like it the same way I liked the Harry and Hermione dancing scene. But the drawing style was so amazing I can't describe it. It was computer animated. I remember noticing the see-through fabrics with lacy edges on the sleeves, and things like that. I liked the swirling autumn leaves that formed into the Death character. I liked the characters' graceful flowing movements, like a dance.

This is a spoiler. One thing that gave me anxiety, throughout the whole movie, was wondering 'When's it going to end?' The movie has to cut off and end somewhere, and then there will be a second half of the movie later. I kept trying to guess when it would end. I talked to a co-worker who saw the movie, and he said something similar, he said he was trying to predict when the movie would cut off, and he said he guessed wrong. I forget when he thought it would cut off. I kept thinking that it would cut off when Ron abandoned Harry and Hermione. For some reason, that felt like a huge division point in the book. (And apparently, the moviemakers felt that there was great significance to it, too, because of the dancing scene afterwards, which, as I said, was extremely unusual and different from anything in all the other movies.) But that was wayyyyy too early to cut it off. It actually cuts off after the death of Dobby. Voldemort gets the elder wand, and that is the end.

So this is a disaster movie, a world-is-ending movie. We are comforted when we see people bonding with each other in ways that they never bonded before. I never told you I loved you, and I always wished I could say it, but I might as well tell you now, because tomorrow we might all be dead. Those kind of moments. Dudley and Harry bonded when they said goodbye, but that moment was missing from the movie. Ron finally starts demonstrating his love for Hermione, but one of his biggest demonstrations of love - shouting and 'bellowing,' I think was the word, bellowing her name while she was being tortured upstairs, and trying to break down the door with his bare hands, like a wild animal - was taken out of the movie. But we see a special moment between Harry and Hermione, where they fight against despair and we see something we've never seen before. When we have a disaster, that makes it okay to behave in a 'socially unacceptable' way. We can tell them we love them, we can hug and kiss people, touch them, have sex with them, do things and say things we've always wanted to. I remember when I was a child and I had a crush on a boy, I would sometimes have a 'disaster fantasy' where I imagined that some terrible thing happened, like a tornado destroying the town, and we got stuck with each other in the disaster, and we would do something like sleep together to keep warm. It was an 'excuse' to do something that I always wished I could do anyway.

Well, I will surely see the movie another time, and if I notice anything else, I'll probably write more about it.