10,000 BC, the movie

9:40 AM 3/4/11

I'm recovering from a stomach virus this morning and I called off work. I don't call off work very often, but I'm not one of the people who NEVER calls off, either. I couldn't eat or drink anything last night and almost got sick after trying to eat just a couple tiny bites of food. I am only now starting to drink sips of plain water again.

Yesterday afternoon when I got out of my car after work, one of my neighbors was standing outside with a fishing pole. I have talked to this guy several times before. The first time I talked to him was funny, but it would have been scary if we lived in a city with lots of violent crime. That first time, I was getting out of my car when it was dark outside, and I looked up and almost yelped with surprise because a guy was standing only a couple feet away from me and I hadn't seen him.

'Do you have any quarters I can borrow?' he asks. This was anticlimactic, as it was dark and scary and creepy and there's this scary guy sneaking up on me, only to ask if he can borrow some quarters. He was doing laundry at the apartment's laundromat and ran out of quarters. So I went digging through my big plastic cup which was full of tons of change, and I gave him a bunch of quarters.

We talked several times since then. He has extremely thick glasses, which are one of the Weston Price birth defects.

I just mentioned Weston Price to a co-worker yesterday, because he was complaining that he would have to have a wisdom tooth removed because it was growing in sideways, and I told him that this was actually caused by a jaw deformity which was a birth defect caused by malnutrition and exposure to chemicals during pregnancy, and there was a dentist named Weston Price who researched primitive tribes and observed that they didn't have these deformities, so it was the result of something in the modern lifestyle. He was interested in hearing this, and after I was done, he said, 'Well, I bet not many people would make the lifestyle changes necessary to prevent that, I mean, not for something as small as this' (meaning a deformed jaw, since it's not as bad as, for instance, having no arms and legs because of Thalidomide).

I was grateful that he took me seriously. He wasn't arguing, he was actually agreeing with me, I could feel that. His response was a sort of bitterness, like 'I wish people would know about this and do something about it.' He believed it. After that, we made more eye contact than usual and felt more bonded. 'They' reminded me about something Curtis had once said when he met me at Weis: 'I don't know who to trust... except you.' 'They' meant that this guy didn't know who to trust either.

So this neighbor told me that he had a disease that made it hard for him to walk, and I told him I had a college friend who had a disease that messed up her balance and we always had to walk her around by letting her hold onto our arms, so I understood.

Well yesterday when I came home from work, that neighbor was holding a fishing pole, and then his roommate came out and said, 'You're going to hit her over the head with that!' because the guy was holding it up and moving it around and examining it while standing next to me. We talked about fishing and I said that I had never gone except long ago with a neighbor, and I said I don't like catch and release - I would want to keep the fish. I actually feel that catch and release is cruel and that they might die of infection from the injury, although I realize they don't always. I had never talked to the guy's roommate before. He pointed out that their names happened to be Jacob and Isaac, both from the bible, and then he was trying to think of the story that they came from, but I don't know the bible anywhere near well enough to think of it.

Well, Isaac (the new one I hadn't met before) commented on my dreadlocks. He saw them as having either a religious or tribal meaning. However, I myself view dreadlocks both ways; they might possibly be meaningful, but also, they are the inevitable default way that the hair goes if you don't have shampoo.

Dreadlocks were just a normal, inevitable thing when shampoo and soap didn't exist. They had no particular meaning. That's why I don't like to read websites that try to portray dreadlocks as being 'nothing but' a social or religious statement which is superior to the hairstyle of mainstream culture, or websites that strongly emphasize the long tradition and the profound meaningfulness and significance of dreadlocks, emphasizing that they were worn by religious groups and that kind of thing - without remembering to mention that dreadlocks happen all by themselves and are merely the result of not having shampoo. Dreadlocks, in that respect, could be viewed as a sign of extreme poverty, or a sign of a culture that hasn't invented, or doesn't use, soapy substances that dissolve grease. Dreadlocks viewed that way could be a sign of an inferior culture. (I am not saying they are inferior. I am saying that there is more than one way to view their cultural meaning, and I'm saying that they are a physical consequence of not having shampoo.)

Whenever people emphasize too strongly that dreadlocks have a deep, profound, superior religious or cultural meaning, it makes it inaccurately sound as though dreadlocks must always be something done consciously and deliberately, by choice, and probably with long hours of painstaking effort (the way some people do them, people who want to have dreadlocks instantly tomorrow instead of waiting a few months for them to form), and constant maintenance. That is the mental image I get from the idea of 'consciously chosen religious ritual' instead of 'the inevitable consequence that happens if you sit there and do nothing at all.'

So this guy asked if I had ever seen the movie '10,000 BC,' because the people in that movie had locks. I hadn't seen it, but I had thought about renting it several times, but had always passed it up, and then I complained that Blockbuster video had just closed and I had just seen it closed today or yesterday, and I complained that I wasn't using Netflix yet (and I probably won't, because I don't rent movies very often - I might rent one movie every few months, on impulse). So now, I have absolutely nowhere at all to go, except Lykens gas station, where they still have a wall full of DVDs. I don't like to buy movies and have them taking up space in my house, especially if they are mediocre movies that I don't want to watch a hundred times and memorize. I like to buy movies if they are so great that I want to watch them a hundred times and memorize them.

He offered to lend me his copy. I had the feeling it was 'maybe, possibly, one of these days in the distant future, whenever you feel like it.' There was a non-pushiness there. I said, 'Can I borrow it RIGHT NOW?' That was a leap and it felt exciting. Something was a theoretical offer, something that I would turn down and say 'oh, maybe someday in the theoretical future,' but instead I said RIGHT NOW. I like doing that - I like it when something could be 'just possibly someday' and I respond with 'right now.' In fact, that's how Rachael and I stopped shaving - she was complaining in an abstract way about the difficulty of shaving, and passively wishing she could stop, and asking why women have to shave, and she had been repeatedly complaining about this several times over a period of time, so I said, 'let's do it, let's stop shaving,' and so we did. I don't find this neighbor guy sexually attractive, by the way, but I enjoyed talking with him. So I went upstairs with him and he got the movie for me.

Well, I watched this movie. I was in the process of coming down with a stomach virus at the same time, too, so I didn't really feel good while I was watching it.

At first, I had a scoffing reaction, and was thinking 'dumbest movie ever.' But part of me liked the movie and I kept on watching it. It sort of did things that were cool, and it also did things that were ridiculous and laughable, but failed to give enough of the 'fairy tale signal,' so you expect this movie to be realistic and believable, and instead it does something impossible, which can happen and it can be okay if you do the 'once upon a time' signal somewhere. For instance, these people went hiking to follow some people who had kidnapped some of their tribe. They came from a winter climate, but within a very short time, they were walking through a tropical climate, and then a desert climate. And since I've been reading about socionics, and went wandering around Rick's web pages, I've been reading about what happens when you go hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail, and it's not something where you can be in a winter climate one day and then a day later you're in a jungle and then a desert. The movie didn't make me feel as though a large amount of time was going by. If they had said that they traveled for weeks and weeks, or months, or something, then I would get the idea that it wasn't just two days or three days worth of walking to go from the snowy north, to the jungle, then down to the desert full of dark-skinned people. So I had to make some mental adjustments to accept that idea, but I managed to accept it, but I had a little bit of the 'scoffing' feeling while watching it.

Then, my hair obsession can never be satisfied. Sure, everyone had dreadlocks. That's wonderful. But they still had shaved faces with a day or two of stubble. This annoys me very much. What's wrong with beards? Why are beards so terrible, so unacceptable, that we can't grow them (or even put on fake ones) for a movie about what life was like in 10,000 BC? They all had to look like a socially acceptable, still-mainstream 'image' that is popular in our culture today - the long-haired man with a mostly-shaved face and a couple days of stubble. Never a long full beard - that's just not popular, we can't get away with that, we wouldn't want our viewers to have to make *TOO* much of a cultural leap.

Not only that, but on the rare occasions when I could get a glimpse of a female armpit, they were shaved, of course - and it wasn't a 'day or two of stubble' like the men - THAT WOULD BE *UNTHINKABLE*! No, it was perfectly smooth as though they were prepubescent children who had never grown an armpit hair in their lives.

AND, the blue-eyed woman that they were all chasing after, the one who the whole story was about, she had painted-on darkened eyebrows, artifically made to appear thicker and darker - an attempt to imitate what female eyebrows might have been like in the past - but they were still clearly 'arched' and had... this is hard to explain. They had clearly lined edges which were so obviously painted on. When you see a real eyebrow, the edges of it are seen as individual hairs. But this woman had thick dark brown lines clearly painted on her brow. You couldn't see individual hairs in the edges of the eyebrow. It wasn't anything like unplucked eyebrows. It was very heavy makeup pretending to be semi-thick eyebrows (but HEAVEN FORBID she should ever have a unibrow - that's unthinkable), but with the 'socially acceptable' feminine 'arched' eyebrow which is totally artificial.

What is this obsession with the 'arched' eyebrow? All of them INSIST that it ABSOLUTELY MUST BE ARCHED. (I'm hungry now after not eating all night long, so this is a bad time for me to try writing without ranting and getting more and more worked up as the hours go by. So watch out for CAPS LOCK!) They can't stand the sight of a flat, horizontal eyebrow without an arch, but I find those natural eyebrows to be very pleasant and comfortable to look at. Oh, you can't tell the women from the men when they look that way? WHY NOT GROW BEARDS! Then you can tell the women from the men! But no, that wouldn't go over well, we don't want our viewers to struggle with an unfamiliar cultural image.

I'm comparing this movie to 'Babies,' a movie I rented a few months ago. I liked that movie's portrayal of foreign cultures much better. That's not the entire title - I forget the whole title - but basically, someone watched four babies in four cultures from around the world, and just filmed them in their normal lives. They didn't make the 'actors' in the movies 'pluck and arch their eyebrows' because Westerners would like them better that way. They showed everything, including all that would be gross and unthinkable to Westerners, like an African baby picking up sticks off the ground and chewing on them, for instance.

So the 10,000 BC movie had a 'romance novel' feeling to it. They take modern-looking, American-looking people with familiar American mainstream images, and put them in the distant past, still looking like familiar modern Americans, except just barely doing something (dreadlocks) which are seen as more primitive - except they didn't look like real neglect dreadlocks, which often stick together over time, forming several large locks instead of a large number of thin locks - so even their dreadlocks weren't very realistic. They wouldn't have showers with running water back then. Showers let your dreadlocks remain thin, individual locks of hair. But if you are bathing in an ocean, a lake, or a stream, your hair will lock differently, and although I haven't tested this, I'm guessing that it will cause much larger locks to form, the kind of 'congo' locks that are unpopular and associated with Indian ascetics. I'm not absolutely sure about that, because I've seen photos of Indian ascetics who still had narrow strings instead of large snakelike connected locks.

So, unfortunately, my hair obsession didn't quite like this movie enough. It's good for someone who has an unexplained 'fetish' for dreadlocks, without a real thorough commitment to it, and without the courage to take it a few steps further and question everything else.

Note. I have to describe the process that led me to where I am now. Some of my recent choices resulted from talking to 'them.' 'They' were the ones who suggested that I go all the way to dreadlocks. It actually wasn't my idea on my own. But they only did that because they knew I would happily accept this idea and would be eager to do it. The point is that I understand when people aren't able to make the leap themselves, when it doesn't occur to them that the women also have to have unplucked, archless eyebrows, the men must have full beards, and so on, when instead they are inconsistent and partial about everything.

I might try to eat something soon...

About the story of the movie. When I was watching this, I started thinking of 'intuitives' because of reading about personality types. Intuitives are interested in the past, and the future, because the past connects to the present and the present connects to the future, and so on. When you look at the present, you can say, 'How did we get to be where we are now?' and then look into the past to explain it. So for instance, a myth might be created to explain 'How did humans lose their tails?' and then there would be a story about how humans used to have tails like other animals, but they got into an accident, or the gods were punishing them, or something along those lines, and forever afterwards, humans had no tails.

So a 10,000 BC story might be something like that, something that asks 'How did we come to be where we are now?' It could make some connection to the present. This movie didn't do that. It was just a bunch of people who almost looked modern, who just happened to be living in the distant past, for no particular reason (probably only because the movie writers wanted an opportunity to express their 'dreadlocks fetish'), but it could just as easily have been in the distant future, or the present, except that it involved a lot of walking instead of driving or flying. But hey, it could be a story about a bunch of Amish people, if you wanted a story without cars. Or it could be about a tribe of modern-day hikers who had rejected the automobile and were living in an intentional community or who had created an intentional religion, or a large group of people who were trying to protect the environment. Or it could be a 'dystopian future' where there were no more automobiles and people went back to walking again.

In fact, that kind of story might be more interesting to me than a story about primitive tribes who actually look modern and have arched, painted eyebrows in 10,000 BC. There was no particular reason why this story had to take place in 10,000 BC except for the opportunity to make lots of cool dreadlocks and hope that the dreadlocks trend catches on and becomes popular in mainstream culture (which it didn't).

If they insisted that the 'chase scene' of the movie had to involve many days of hiking after the people who were on horseback, they could have found some other way to do that besides being in 10,000 BC. If they wanted to show really cool computer animated saber-toothed tigers, which actually weren't all that important to the plotline, except in a symbolic way, they could have done that differently too. The saber-toothed tiger actually didn't play much of a role in the movie at all, except as a kind of superstitious belief, or prophecy, that a guy who could talk to saber-toothed tigers would be somebody important who would bring down the king.

Yes, I'm ripping this apart. Maybe the movie will grow on me if I watch it again; however, I will always be irritated about the hair and grooming. I'd have to watch it when I didn't have a stomach virus.

Not only that, but when they showed arts and crafts and technology, it looked messy and primitive. Primitive technology, primitive crafts, are not at all messy, sloppy, or primitive looking. In fact, primitive craft work and primitive tools are amazingly beautiful and sleek, and often it is higher quality and more durable than modern junk. They do amazing things and we can't even imagine how they put this together, like the huge stones that weigh several tons in South America, where the stones fit together perfectly and were cut that way, and they remain standing even after earthquakes. That's my idea of primitive technology, something which is actually superior to a lot of modern technology. Primitive people were much smarter than modern people, and they had to do all of the thinking themselves, and had to often reinvent the wheel, because they didn't have printing presses or the internet to tell them how to do everything. So whenever they invented something, it was even more amazingly unique and new than it is when a modern person invents something and has all this help from all the research they've done.

It's hard to explain this, but I saw that 'messy look' when they showed the houses and things where the original tribe lived in the beginning. They just looked messy and flimsy, like a strong wind would blow them down. There were these stick things sticking up with thin little rags of fabric hanging off of them. Everything was brown - there was no color, but in reality, people invented paints and pigments and used them long ago. Everything looked that way. It looked weak instead of strong, colorless instead of colorful. It's like they didn't have faith in primitive people's ability to be really, really strong and to know what they're doing and to do it really well. They had this idea that primitive life was fragile, vulnerable, weak, and uncertain, and always on the edge of extinction. That is a common belief. After reading Weston Price, I have the belief that primitive bodies are stronger and healthier than modern bodies, that they never need to go to the doctor, that they do not have outbreaks of disease (and I'm probably going too far with that belief, because I guess there would still have been some disease). But a lot of diseases are caused by poisons and malnutrition in the modern world, and bodies are vulnerable because of growing up deformed. (I know, I need to try to eat - that's what's going on when I obsess about food.)

It's like the dinosaurs. Michael Crichton wrote 'Jurassic Park,' and they made it into a movie, and because of that movie, it finally became popular to imagine that dinosaurs are alert, energetic, and fast-moving, very quick like birds. It was his book that made it popular to see them that way, instead of huge and heavy and slow and stupid.

This is analogous. People think that primitive humans are 'huge, heavy, slow, and stupid,' or 'always prone to disease, barely scraping by, poor, with fragile tools that can barely function,' and so on. I am trying to say that primitive people are extremely strong, extremely healthy, extremely smart (smarter than we are!), extremely good at communicating, and very competent at surviving. I am saying that they can do things that we can't even imagine, things that are unthinkable - for instance, guide a ship across the ocean, even under cloudy skies where they can't see the stars, by sensing and feeling the magnetic fields of the earth. They can sense the magnetic field, that kind of thing. They can hunt animals on foot, by smelling them, by walking quietly after them instead of running, by going barefoot on their tiptoes, by intuiting the pathway they must have followed, by knowing everything about where they go at what time in what situation. When they throw a spear, it isn't this awkward throw where it doesn't even look like the spear could penetrate the skin. They might throw it with an atlatl - I'd have to read about it and I never understood how an atlatl worked, and I might not even have the right words - or they might throw something that spins, instead of a plain old long spear. I got the 'barely scraping by' feeling instead of 'strong and confident' feeling from that movie.

All of this reminds me of socionics because I was reading about the functions. It's like the movie was written by someone who wasn't very sure about their sensing function. 'I'll do you one better' is the phrase 'they' are putting in my head right now - you think those are dreadlocks? watch this! you think that's a primitive weapon? I'll show you a primitive weapon. (If I could find that website again where the guy is making obsidian blades out of rainbow obsidian... that web page never stops loading because the photos are extremely high resolution and there are like twenty photos on one page, but that's an example.)

I'm definitely a socionics devotee now. I've decided that socionics is 'better than' other theories, that it's better than the Myers-Briggs, or David Keirsey and the four temperaments, or any other theories that I saw so far. It could happen in the future that I stumble across something unimaginable, something analogous, which is 'better than' socionics. Who knows.

I'm going to very carefully try to eat solid food.

a handwritten note; dreams; random topics; electronic harassment - ultrasonic attacks

8:42 PM 8/23/10

curtis - no phone, nickname, note, dream
new tables?
watching movies - a substitute for socializing
feeling optimistic, which means sjw exposure
not trying to do online dating now
flat tire
new refrigerator
dreadlocks progress

I'm not sure if I have enough mental focus to write a blog today. I have a few different things to say. I could tell the dreams first. The dreams are always fun to write about. There were a couple of sexual dreams. This happened because I gave Curtis a handwritten note. I told him that I had texted him a bunch of times the other day. He was shocked and surprised. He didn't get any of them, and he didn't get the voice mail message I left either. 'Maybe they shut my phone off already,' he said, as though he had been using it up till now and thought it was okay. His phone is being shut off temporarily because he didn't pay the bill this month. He hasn't worked enough hours to make enough money. So that was why I decided to give him a handwritten note. He told me he also doesn't have internet right now, so he's not getting his emails.

I gave him a note which didn't ask him to *do* anything specific. I told him, 'Humor me,' and handed him the note. 'Don't worry about it - it's just a reminder,' I said. In the note, I summed up all of the things which I've said to him again and again, many times, in various notes and text messages and emails that he hasn't gotten. The note's theme was, 'I always say the same things.' I always tell him that someone's blocking my emails and phone calls, so I worry about how I will reach him if he, or I, leave our jobs for any reason. I always tell him that I want to be friends with him away from work, and that I'd like to be friends with him a long time, not just temporarily. Sometimes I tell him that I love him and that I want to touch him but I don't want to make him uncomfortable.

Later that day - after he probably read the note - I walked past him, while he was standing with a bunch of people, and he was watching me with big, big, wide eyes.  I don't know whether that emotion was fear, excitement, shock, or whatever, he was just wide-eyed.  That is something I love about him, how his face, and his whole body, express his feelings in a dramatic, visible, obvious way.

He has always responded positively to my notes and to my touch. He keeps coming back and calling me pet names. He doesn't avoid me or act grossed out. In fact, several times when I've given him notes in the past, the name-calling started happening even more than ever before. I looked at his girlfriend, and I decided, yes, I'm ugly, but she's ugly too, and he's marrying her. So he's able to tolerate ugly girls.

Well, since I gave him that note, I had dreams that night. In the first dream, I was kissing a very little boy, a prepubescent child. I didn't expect to kiss him. I was just leaning over close to him and he started kissing me, if I remember correctly. Then he started rubbing against me and he had an orgasm. It was sort of unrealistic. He ejaculated a clear liquid and it sprayed up between us. Then a voice said, 'You didn't expect him to get hard.'

Then there was another dream the next day, in the morning sometime. This was a 'symbolic' dream that the voices explained to me after they woke me up. It's complicated, so I'll just tell what happened and then explain the symbolic interpretation. My ex-boyfriend Eric and I went over to 'John's' house (my brother). We were playing video games on his computer because I had a problem with my own computer at home. It was a role-playing game, something like dungeons and dragons. The character in the game was controlling an animal using magic. I couldn't tell what the animal was, from the image, but the voices told me it was a goat. It was standing up on legs and walking, so it didn't look like a normal goat - it must have been an anthropomorphic goat. That's when they woke me up, and then they proudly explained to me the interpretation of their dream.

John (my brother) = I moved into John's apartment because I was kicked out of my parents' house, so John = Carrie, Curtis's girlfriend, because Curtis moved into her house after getting kicked out of his parents' house. John represents Carrie.

Eric represents me. Eric was my 'older' boyfriend. Now I'm the older one.

I was Curtis in the dream.

(Yes, every person was somebody other than themselves, in a different role.)

We were playing a 'role playing game.' Every person was in a new role this time. The game was a sexual game, and the animal was a goat - the goat represents a penis. I had to use this computer at my brother's house, without asking his permission, because I had a computer problem at home - they told me that I would be on Curtis and Carrie's bed (the 'computer'), without Carrie's permission, instead of my own bed, because I don't really have a bed here at my apartment. And we were afraid that 'John' (Carrie) would find out that we were using this 'computer' (the bed) to play 'role-playing games' on. And the voices got even more complicated with their explanation, saying that I was controlling the goat without touching it, by magic. I'm not sure what that meant. I couldn't see what the video game character was doing to magically control the goat, because that's when they woke me up.

It's complicated when I look at what I've written. My brother John was Carrie; I was Curtis; my older-than-me ex-boyfriend Eric was me.

Those dreams weren't quite as cute as the furry black bull dream, but they were okay.

********

I can't stand to do online dating right now. There is this inhibition stopping me.

*******

My life seems to go nowhere, because the attackers constantly prevent me from thinking. I could meditate and get a perspective on my situation and quickly decide what is the best thing to do, and then do it. But I can't do that. I get zapped every time I think. They were doing it the other day, and if it were possible to kill them, I would have done it that day. I was trying to think about finding a REAL husband, not a young guy who's extremely attractive but can't be reached and already has another girlfriend that he'll be marrying. They kept forcing me to fall asleep *EVERY TIME* I tried to think about the real husband. Curtis isn't going to be my husband. He is someone else's husband. The most I could be is an extramarital affair, if that.

****
The nickname: He must have received the BAD text message (but not the good ones), because he acted like he'd gotten the message that I had sent him, telling him not to call me that name anymore. Then again, it might have also been because he called me the name in front of Stan, and I responded by acting hurt and then saying, in a slightly angry voice, 'Yeah, THAT'S ME,' and then walking away. Anyway, he either got the text message or he didn't. Regardless, he changed what he was doing. He started calling EVERYONE the nickname, at least the adjective part of it. (I wrote a blog a week or two ago saying, pretend the nickname was 'my fair-skinned beauty,' and he started calling everyone 'fair-skinned'. It's like that. It's an unusual adjective that you wouldn't use in an everyday sentence.)

He saw me walk into the back room, where I went to write a department transfer, and he was drunk on Dayquil that day, since he had a bad cold. (It was so bad, he went to the hospital the next day. I don't know how exactly he was sick, or why he needed to go to the hospital, but he did, and he said they gave him two shots, in his butt. He was limping the next day. What kind of shots do they give someone who has a cold? I hate mainstream medicine and its placebos.) So he was acting even more talkative and friendly than usual, being drunk on Dayquil, and when I went back to do the transfer, he said, 'Is that my fair-skinned.... Orry? I thought you were fair-skinned Orry.' (Yes, I'm substituting the adjective.) I said, 'Yeah, he's about the same size as me.' (Orry is short and small, but I don't find him attractive merely because of that. He's not a competitor. I'm not helplessly attracted to *ALL* small guys.)

So whatever I did, I got him to start calling everybody the adjective. He might possibly not need to do that anymore. We sat together and talked a bit one day - I already wrote about that. Then he sat next to me again when I was on my lunch break and getting ready to go back in, and I stayed out there five minutes later than I was supposed to, because I decided that spending five extra minutes with him was more important than getting back to work on time. He is still being friendly to me, after all of this. He still acts trusting instead of afraid or 'weirded out.'

I'm not being extremely aggressive or pushy. I'm not putting deadlines on it. I'm not directly asking him to go out with me at a specific time. ('Go out' is the wrong phrase to use. I don't want to 'go out' with him. I want to spend time together with him, doing anything at all.) I'm just reminding him that I exist and that I care about him and that I want to continue being his friend even though I can't reliably get emails or text messages or phone calls to him.

*******

I had an extremely flat tire today. I had noticed it was getting flatter over the past few weeks. Today I checked it. It's supposed to be 32 psi. It was 10! It was 1/3 of the pressure it was supposed to be. It was so flat, the sides were bulging out at the bottom. I'm lucky to be alive. It could have failed while I was driving down the highway and I would have gone straight into the oncoming lane. I refilled it, and I will keep an eye on it. If it keeps getting flat, I will have to get a new tire or something.

New refrigerator? I was talking to the maintenance guy today. He mentioned that an energy efficiency inspector would be coming over, and that we were all going to get new refrigerators for all the apartments, no matter what. That's nice for me, because I still don't feel safe using the fridge after the bone marrow vapors. There's just a tiny bit left, and I don't want to ruin any food or drinks I put in there.

Dreadlocks: I started the no-shampoo experiment in January, 2009. I wrote about it in this blog. My hair gradually formed natural dreadlocks. In the beginning, I had a couple of badly formed monster locks that were too big and in a bad position. They were pulling the hair in a bad way, and it hurt, and it was hard to lie down on that part of my head when I slept. Now, they have gradually moved and mellowed out a little bit, and they're not really pulling anymore. Some of the roots connected to the monster locks have fallen out, so that the lock isn't connected to as many roots as it was in the beginning. The locks are moving to different positions on the scalp, instead of staying in just one place. But I still have a bald spot on the right top side, where there is hardly any hair, and a big empty space in between the locks. It's not 'bald,' it's just thin.

Tables: I got rid of my tables that I had at the other apartment, because they were contaminated along with everything else. I am thinking of getting new ones and putting cardboard on them (so that it's easy to clean up if they get contaminated again), and under them, so that I can set up my computer table and use it more easily to do computer projects and anything else.

Curtis said he's been watching a lot of movies, since he's disconnected from cable TV right now. I've been watching movies too. I rented Twilight - New Moon, and watched it again, and it didn't suck as much, now that I understand what's going on, and now that I've seen the first movie and read some of the first book. Movies are my substitute for socializing. I am not spending time with real people. I am watching imaginary people without having to interact with them, and they're pretty to look at, and people have a real need to look at beautiful people. I think it's natural to need to see beautiful people. That's why I'm interested in Weston Price's studies of the primitive diets and the facial deformities that make us ugly. We don't have to be ugly. An ugly person can have beautiful children if they use the diet. That is what I am hoping to do.

I think I'll post this now.

The murderers are enraging me while I wait for this blog page to load. I have been hit with St. John's Wort recently and so they are able to trigger rage. My elbow is leaning on the cardboard box where my computer keyboard is, and the murderers are shooting sonic bullets, or whatever it is that they use, to slowly make the computer keyboard slip downwards under my elbow, a fraction of a millimeter at a time, over and over, while triggering the feeling of rage. I don't know why they do the slips. It makes me want to kill them. AJH at tiworld.blogspot.com knows about this. He has the same thing happen. Clicking, snapping noises on objects near me, and my body parts 'slipping' down against a surface, without moving at all, or slowly moving, when there is, in reality, enough friction to hold them still, and they shouldn't be moving, and when it slips, it emits an extremely high-pitched, painful noise above the level of human hearing, but it's audible enough to cause me physical pain, and rage. I usually hear voices at the same moment that it slips, or just afterwards. It's like the sonic bullets are being used to 'deliver' the voices. Sometimes I think the sonic bullets are taking snapshots of an image, the image of me sitting here. Sometimes when they do this, I punch something and hurt my hand. I try not to do that, and it mostly happens if I'm having a St. John's Wort reaction.

A long, silver hair

Today, by accident, I just happened to find a new silver hair that I never saw before. It happened because I temporarily wrapped my hair up around my head to get it out of the way while I was doing something. I hadn't wrapped it like that in a long time, and I was examining it because it works differently with dreadlocks. The last time I tried wrapping it that way, my hair was more like 'greasy strings' instead of actual mats. This is the one year anniversary of the no shampoo experiment, which I started last January. The dreadlocks at the roots of my hair are now longer and more visible, several inches long.

(I've had coffee but not food, so this is a 'hunger blog.' This could be long and obsessive.)

The silver hair sparkled in the light when I looked in the mirror. It appeared because the hair was wrapped in a different position than usual. I traced the piece of hair back to where it came from, somewhere near the right ear.

I've never seen any that long before. I've found short ones on my temples, the edge of my face, and they never grow longer than an inch or two before they fall off. I also have a couple of gray eyebrow hairs.

This very long silver hair has been there all this time, and I didn't even know. It is years and years and years long, at least a foot and a half, maybe longer. It brought tears to my eyes when I found it - an unexpected treasure that I didn't know I had, sparkling and beautiful and amazing, secretly growing where I couldn't see it.

Gray hair means 'I survived.' It means I didn't get killed doing something stupid, or having an accident, or committing suicide, or being destroyed by any of the terrible things that have happened to me. It means that either I'm lucky, or I know what to do and what not to do. It means I care about my life.

No Shampoo experiment

This is a somewhat incoherent blog, as I'm not really able to concentrate today. I'm having a problem with mysterious fumes in the house and I'm trying to fix it, but right now, it's still lingering. I've been so sick for the past few weeks that I can't even write blogs.

Well, I just read about using vinegar on your hair, and now I've decided NOT to try it. I did try it a long time ago when I had much shorter hair. I didn't dilute it, and it burned and irritated my face, so I had a bright red face for a couple days. (That was white vinegar, undiluted. They recommend using apple cider vinegar, diluted.) I am still going to use vinegar for housecleaning, since I'm not keeping any chemicals in the house anymore. (The definition of 'chemical' is anything dangerous and reactive, in a bottle, that's going to spill and fill the house with mysterious fumes for weeks.)

Anyway, the results of the experiment so far:

I've only rinsed my hair with hot water, and combed it out in the shower. Nothing else. Not even vinegar, baking soda, or the other things people are trying. (I didn't like the idea of baking soda, after reading somebody who said it was similar to getting a perm, and that it actually changed the structure of the hair. Since I'm in a hurry, I didn't research that any further to find out whether it was true. It might be wrong.)

After several weeks of using nothing at all except water: My hair has always been greasy, and I used to shampoo it daily. It is now classic length (hip length). The grease is building up on the hair, and has a sticky texture like chewing gum. My hair is now very hard to comb, especially being as long as it is. Lint is sticking to the grease on the hair. When I comb it, the lint sticks in the comb, and I can see the color of the sweater I was wearing that day.

I have a feeling that the goal of this experiment is to convince me to just let my long hair form natural dreadlocks. The un-combability of it suggests that to me. If I didn't comb it, it would start matting, but it wouldn't look the same as the dreadlocks of the afro-coily hair texture. The grease is so gummy and sticky, not oily, that it sticks the hair together and tangles it. I'm sure it would form dreadlocks, and I haven't yet firmly committed myself to accepting dreadlocks just yet.

However, dreadlocks wouldn't be the end of the world. I think that, with my straight hair, if I decided I didn't want the dreadlocks anymore, I could painstakingly comb them out. It would create a lot of loose, disconnected hairs that would detach whenever I combed out the dreadlocks. I have a feeling that the next step of my experiment will be to stop combing it, accept the tangling and matting, maybe just slightly detangle it with my fingers, and see what happens when gummy grease and tangles form dreadlocks in thin, straight hair.

My only concern about natural dreadlocks is that they will be irregular. I've seen some pictures of people with irregular dreadlocks. They can have some places with large mats, and other places with small strings. They aren't the perfectionistic dreadlocks that you see on people who are deliberately and carefully making dreadlocks on purpose.

I will create a way of pinning up my hair in a bun so that I can wear it in a 'tidy' style at work. It might end up being a rolled-up ponytail or something - I'm not sure yet - it will have to be something that is short and wrapped up and neat looking, which won't tangle in any moving parts of machinery, like the conveyor belt of the pizza oven. (Avoiding the pizza oven's conveyor belt has been one of my main concerns of the long braid.)

One of my coworkers was looking at a caucasian male customer who had waist-length blond dreadlocks. She looked revolted, horrified, and disapproving. "He'll have to CUT those out," she muttered quietly to me. That assumes that he merely 'wasn't aware' that he would 'need' to cut the hair to remove the dreadlocks, and it assumes that he WANTS to remove the dreadlocks, or that there is some reason why he should.

I'm not convinced that dreadlocks have to be cut out. A long time ago, my family had a Samoyed dog. Some parts of her long white fur tangled into mats. I used to get a fine toothed comb, and gently pluck apart the mats. If she could tolerate sitting patiently long enough while having her hair tugged and fooled with, then I was able to get them out. She had straight hair, not coily hair, so her texture would be similar to my own. It just takes patience. I could do that if I decided I didn't want my dreadlocks anymore. I would do a little bit at a time, and then braid the untangled portions so that they would stay untangled. Then I'd work on it a little at a time. In other words I don't have to be 'afraid' that the dreadlocks won't comb out or that they'll be permanent and irreversible. There would be a few tangles that would be too complicated to remove. I do occasionally have 'complex' tangles that I rip or cut out, but it's rare, and it's usually due to a lack of patience rather than the knot itself being unsolvable.

So I haven't decided yet. I might possibly stop combing, tolerate the sticky grease, endure the unwanted clothing lint, and see what happens. The grease makes my hair stay wet for a long time, which will make me freeze in the wintertime. That's the nice thing about combing - it helps the hair dry. So I have a feeling that with greasy dreadlocks, I am going to get wet hair that stays wet for four hours at a time or something. I guess I'll find out...