Movie: The Chumscrubber; and 'Something Worth Fighting For,' a vision of something happy in movies

7:06 AM 11/16/10

I watched a movie called 'The Chumscrubber.'

It all started when I recently googled 'Less is more.' I can't remember what it was that annoyed me so much. Maybe it was because my browser wouldn't work on one of my favorite web pages, or something like that. I like basic, simple web pages where almost everything is done using plain HTML. I like web pages that are retro-friendly, pages that could be viewed in old browsers and alternative browsers like Opera. I like pages that don't use Flash. Whatever it was that annoyed me, I don't remember, but I wanted to read about the 'Less is more' philosophy of web page design.

I ended up reading a bunch of different web pages. One of them talked about the psychology of making choices. I've read about this before, so I vaguely knew about it. It said that scientific studies have shown this, and also, it's something that I personally experience.

They did a test where customers could look at six different types of fruit jams, or 24 different types of fruit jams. They found out that when there were a large number of different choices, people would look at it but not buy anything. They were more likely to actually buy something from the display that showed only 6 different kinds of jam. People feel anxiety when there are dozens of choices and they don't know which one is the 'best' one to pick, and they can only have one, or they want to buy a whole bunch of different types, but they will still feel anxiety thinking that the other remaining kinds might have been better.

I know all about this. I know because I have ADHD, and every choice and every action feels that way for me. It's especially bad when I think about long-term plans for my life that will require years of commitment. Do I want to go back to college, but also, put myself deeply in debt on borrowed money, only to find that there are no 'jobs' available for someone with my major, because I'm not the aggressive type of person who makes my own 'job?' (Yes, I feel pessimistic about college. Even if I were able to completely finish and graduate, I still might not have a 'job' automatically handed to me by magic. And then I would have a college debt to pay off.) Do I want to start my own business? If so, what business? What will I do? I could do arts and crafts, but right now, I only have beginner level skills in a variety of different things, and I'm not skillful enough to start making money at anything right away. And I'm afraid I'll start the project and abandon it after a little while because of some unexpected problem, like an attack of severe fatigue. Every long-term plan seems to have too many options and too many risks, and I'm afraid I'll be missing out on something if I close off other alternatives. Should I live in Pennsylvania, or should I go to a lower-tax country, or should I go someplace with a better climate, or should I go someplace with really rich soil for farming?

It might be easier if there were fewer choices available to me. You have to choose from a small number of things, and then, make do with it. I've thought about this with regard to marriage. I've thought that maybe I should choose to have a 'loveless practical marriage' so that I can have children before it's too late, instead of trying to find someone that I'm passionately attracted to who also meets all of my other criteria, because I'm so picky that it's hard to find people, and almost all of the men available are unattractive to me. I could take too long if I look for true love, and then I wouldn't be able to have children anymore. A loveless practical marriage would limit my choices so it would be easier to make the decision. I wouldn't have to keep looking for a man who was 'perfect' in every possible way.

Anyway, about 'The Chumscrubber.'

I felt like renting a movie last night. It was my night off. I still rent movies the old-fashioned way, by walking into a movie rental store. Mike's Video is the one I go to, in Bellefonte. The other Mike's Video stores went out of business. There used to be one in town, in State College, that I used to go to when I lived there.

So I often get overwhelmed by the number of choices at the video store. Sometimes I like to rent a movie from Lyken's gas station, because they have only a small number of movies to choose from, so I'm forced to choose something almost at random that I never really thought I wanted to see. I've found a few interesting movies that way. Not great movies, not movies that I would buy and watch over and over again, but interesting enough to watch once or twice.

Last night, the voices gave me a recommendation that would limit the number of choices. They said, 'Get a movie that contains the letter B.' It doesn't have to begin with B. It has to contain the letter B. So I randomly browsed the shelves, and I don't remember all the movie titles that I skimmed over. (I know I didn't feel like watching 'Macbeth.') That's how I picked 'The Chumscrubber.' It had a B in the title. Then I also got the new version of Alice in Wonderland, too. That didn't have a B in it. It was a spontaneous choice. I'm not sure why I got it.

By strange coincidence, both of these movies happened to have a scene where someone gets their eye poked out. How many movies can you think of that have a scene with someone getting their eye poked out? Not that it matters.

So, Chumscrubber had lots of cute teenage boys in it, so I enjoyed watching it for that reason. It actually turned out to be a good movie, not just because I liked to look at the actors, but because of the story. It was about people drugging themselves. I've been trying again to look for enneagram type eight in real life and in movies. (Supposedly, there is a strong attraction between Fours and Eights. But also, there can be a strong repulsion, too. Sometimes we look at an Eight and say, 'That represents absolute evil.' Other times, they are the ones we love more than anyone else. I was reading about this and I felt the same way.)

Eights, Fours, and Sixes are in the 'Reactive Triad' in the Harmonic Groups. (The other two groups are the Competency Group and the Positive Outlook Group.) That's something that has helped me identify Eights.

The main character in the movie, I forget his name, I would have to look at the movie again - he saw someone die, and he walked away without telling anyone. (Don't worry, this situation gets fixed very quickly. I was afraid that the whole movie would be all about that. I was afraid that he was going to get blamed for it, that they would think he was guilty of murder or something, because he was there around the time when it happened. But that's not how the movie goes.) Walking away from something horrible, without telling anyone, seemed realistic to me. I can actually imagine real people doing something like that.

It reminds me of something Peter told me recently. He said there was an accident on the road, where somebody committed suicide by walking in front of a car on purpose, and the guy who hit him fled the scene - he left and went home. He was terrified. His grandmother made him go back and talk to them so that they would know who did it. He didn't get in trouble for it. But I have heard of this kind of thing before. People get so scared and upset and they think that nobody will understand, and they think that they could get arrested, or they think that nobody will listen to them. That's how it was in the movie, he thought nobody would care.

There was something that I thought was funny in the movie. The kid's parents kept urging him to take a psychiatric drug. He was already taking the drug illegally by buying it from his friends at school. When his parents gave it to him he took it gladly. This is the opposite of my situation. My parents, and other people, have said that I need psychiatric drugs, and I've fought against them and said that I want to take as few drugs as possible, and I do take a small amount of drugs, but I'm not happy about it, and ideally, I would rather not, and I want to work towards living without them. Right now I sometimes use St. John's Wort and I take Vivarin pills for the caffeine (although they're not working very much anymore, because I've gotten a tolerance for them). So I see the situation in reverse, that I don't want to take drugs, and if anyone tries to make me do it, I fight against them.

But the kid in this movie grabbed the bottle, ripped it open with his teeth, and gulped down like three pills at once, dry, while his dad watched, after he handed him the bottle.

All of the people in the movie had that fake cheerfulness that comes from being on drugs. I saw it in almost all of them. I don't know if all the adults were on drugs. I'm assuming that they were. They were always smiling in a fake way even when they were talking about dark subjects like the kid's suicide. That's one of the reasons why I don't like being on drugs. It makes me numb and unfeeling and 'always cheerful.' When I have that reaction to St. John's Wort, I walk into McDonald's to go to work, and everybody looks at me and smiles back at me. I walk around with a permanent smirk on my face, wrinkling up the corners of my eyes, and people can't help reflecting that look. It's normal for (non-autistic) people to reflect the facial expressions of the people they look at. (And no, if you don't do that, I'm not saying you're autistic. Some people do it more obviously than other people do.)

Do I envy the people in the movie? Yes, in a way: they had energy. They achieved their goals. They had money and good jobs. They didn't suffer from constant chronic fatigue. Even without their drugs, they were able to achieve more than I can achieve.

I don't want to be 'wealthy' in an obvious way. I want to make enough money that my bank account doesn't keep getting overdrawn. I want to make enough money that I can set aside money for long-term savings. I want to make enough money that I have some set aside for accidents and disasters and problems, like a job loss, or a car accident where I need to buy a new car. Those things are unpredictable, but at the same time, you know that they are likely to happen sooner or later in the next eighty years. Sooner or later, something bad will happen to you, and you don't know exactly what it will be, but you know it will be SOMETHING. And you'll need money to survive while it's happening.

The 'dolphin' guy behaved like a Myers-Briggs 'Idealist.' He was interested in abstract ideas and meaningful connections between events. And that type happens to be symbolized by dolphins. I wonder if the movie writers have read that book? I don't remember which author it was, if it was David Keirsey or someone else, but someone writing about the Myers-Briggs types characterized the Idealists as 'dolphins.' (I can't remember what the Artisan types were.)

'Trinity' from The Matrix played a 'MILF' in this movie. Unfortunately, nothing happened with her. (Maybe I should look at the deleted scenes?)

******

I haven't seen Curtis in a few weeks. The last time I saw him, I gave him a love note with a gift in the envelope. I went looking for him a week or two ago, and I thought I might have seen him from far away, but when I got closer, the person I saw wasn't there anymore, and I didn't see him again, so I left. 'They' haven't urged me very strongly to go looking for him. However, the voices have been bugging me, and bugging me, for a couple of weeks now, and it's gotten worse in the past week.

They've been pretending that Curtis misses me and wants to see me. They've been fantasizing about me touching him, hugging him, holding hands with him, kissing him (although I always avoid kissing him on the mouth, because I want to be safe and find out about STDs first, and I mean MY possible STD's, not just his; and also, I don't want to think about having sex with him yet either, because there are some things we would need to talk about first). I always fight whenever they show me these fantasies. I don't believe that it will actually happen. In reality, I am always having a panic attack when I see him, and I visit him and then run away as quickly as possible. If I were neutral, if it didn't matter so much, if my feelings weren't so strong, then I would be able to do it more easily. If I didn't need to touch him so badly, I could do it.

Being bugged by the voices isn't the same as a strong urge to do something. They cause me to suffer, and be sad, and worry, and to be unable to stop thinking about it, but that's not the same as a control urge. When they urge me strongly in a controlled way, there is actually a manual command to get up and do each small step of the process. The voices urge me to get up out of bed, go take a shower, get dressed, and do whatever else I have to do to wake myself up in the morning. (Meanwhile, I hear voices telling me that they wish I didn't have to take a shower because they like the way that I smell. I know, but I have to, because of the transdermal drugs. If my house weren't full of transdermal drug residues, then I wouldn't have to shower every day.)

The voices actually urge me and command me for every small step, until I'm up and I have momentum. This is because of the fatigue and the 'depression.' I don't like to use the D-word, because it's a catch-all word that destroys all the subtle nuances of what I experience. For instance, I feel constant burning pain over almost all of my body, but it's a low-level pain that I forget to notice, a pain that I get used to. It's especially bad in the joints, like my elbows and shoulders. It's also bad in the muscles of my arms. That constant pain makes me not want to move or do anything. All I want to do is sleep. I can't sleep because of the insane murdering morons who zap me awake several times each night after only a couple hours.

Anyway, when I have 'constant low-level burning pain in my joints, muscles, and over all of my skin, which makes me want to lie there and sleep instead of moving,' I don't like to just label it 'depression.' Just because an antidepressant drug makes that pain go away, doesn't mean that the pain should be called 'depression.' And yes, if I take Prozac or other antidepressants, that pain DOES go away.

(Ideally, I want to cure the problem that is causing that low-level pain. What exactly IS that pain? What's causing it? And I wonder if people in primitive societies feel that pain. That's why I like the Weston Price book. He said that in the most primitive societies, everybody was much healthier than the modern people living in town. Is it environmental illness? Is it the mold in the air? Chemical poisons in the paint on the walls? Anything, something in the modern life is causing me to feel this way. I don't want to just take a drug that gets rid of the symptom. I want to fix the problem for real.)

St. John's Wort is a little different - it gives me a wide variety of drug effects depending on how fresh the pills are, which is the reason why I started growing my own fresh herb a few years ago - and it numbs the pain a little bit, but not quite as much, and not in the same way, not as completely as Prozac did.

Prozac made me into a total zombie, a robot. I felt nothing. And I felt so uncomfortable on Prozac, so unnatural, so strange, that I actually opened up the pills (which were already at the lowest dose) and took only half of the powder. Then I went to my psychiatrist, who heard that I was reacting badly to the lowest dose, and that I was taking only half of it, and he said to me, in a disappointed voice, 'Oh, I had been planning to raise your dose!' This is the same doctor who never told me about all the side effects of Prozac because he believes in the fallacy of the 'Placebo Effect,' and I've never written the blog that I've always sworn I would write, a couple of blogs where I would rip them a new one, so to speak, about the fallacy of the placebo effect. This doctor said that if he had told me about the side effects BEFORE I took the drug, then I would have 'imagined' that I was experiencing those side effects merely because he had warned me about them. That is the placebo effect fallacy. And I'd love to talk all about this sometime.

Anyway... the movie. When I read the title 'chumscrubber,' I was thinking of 'chum,' the fish food in a bucket, that they give to the dolphins living in the aquarium. It's like, fish guts or something. (The murderers thought it was funny to force me to write the word 'cum' instead of 'chum', as a typo, but that's not what I was thinking of. I really was thinking of 'chum,' a bucket of fish guts. Now I will have to look up that word on the net and remember why I know that 'chum' is a bucket of fish guts fed to dolphins. I must have read this in some book somewhere.)

But no, it means 'The Friend-Killer.' 'Chum' is 'buddy,' and 'scrub' is 'to kill.'

The only unrealistic, unbelievable thing that happened in the movie was the drugged casserole. I don't think that the people would have been laughing and having fun. They would have had some bizarre drug interaction and probably a bunch of people would have collapsed and gone to the hospital. It wouldn't have been a recreational, funny experience. There are several scenes with people taking more than one different drug at a time and not worrying about the drug interactions. When you take a bunch of different pills at once, it will do such strange and terrible things to you that you might either drop dead or go to the hospital and barely survive and be so sick you wish you were dead. An example is, two different kinds of antidepressants, taken at once, can give you serotonin syndrome, which can cause you to have extremely high blood pressure, and have a stroke. So that was the only thing that I didn't believe, in the movie. But in the movie's story, it was a sort of 'You deserve this' scene, like the karma strikes back at them. It made sense in the world of the movie.

This was a movie that I won't be watching over and over again, because I don't like to watch 'dark' movies again and again. They make me feel depressed. But it was good to watch it once. It had a happy ending, true. But I have to watch a movie where a longer time, a bigger percentage of the time, is spent doing happy things in happy places.

Let's give a couple examples. I like watching the 'Shire' time period in the Lord of the Rings movies. It's pleasant to watch the hobbits walking around living their daily lives, buying and selling in the market, in a pleasant, green, healthy place with plants and animals. In contrast, I don't feel happy watching a 'Dystopian Future' sci-fi movie, where the whole world is made of crumbling asphalt and concrete and the air is polluted with smoke and there isn't any sunlight. I don't feel happy watching the 'Real World' scene in The Matrix, when Morpheus shows Neo what's happened in the outside world, for the first time, and the sky is covered with clouds.

I like watching the 'Weasley Family' scenes in Harry Potter. It's a big group of people interacting with each other in a comfortable way. They love each other. They are doing things together as a family, eating together, going on field trips together to see the World Cup, and that kind of thing. I also like seeing Harry and friends at school, with all the other kids, in their houses, and in their classrooms, a group of people learning things together and living together and sleeping in a dorm room together. This is a pleasant place to be. It's 'Something Worth Fighting For,' as Harry says at the end of 'The Order of the Phoenix' movie. You have to have something worth fighting for. The Shire is also something worth fighting for. Some pleasant home, some healthy place to be, some memory of love and friendship and family, something to live for.

But in 'The Chumscrubber,' I see a 'dystopian' modern community filled with fake, shallow people who don't really love each other very much. I see parents who can't talk to their children and can't relate to them. I see people who can't look at truth or darkness or possibilities or anything but the mainstream world that they see around them. They can't talk about anything. It's an unpleasant place, and I wouldn't like to live there. It's not 'something worth fighting for.' So I won't watch that movie over and over again. I need to watch something pleasant and wonderful and inspiring and refreshing in the midst of something bad. I don't want to watch a movie where almost everything is bad, almost all the time. In the world of that movie, I would say that there should have been more love scenes, more relationship scenes, with the main character and the girl he liked, more scenes where they are getting to know each other and finding out how much they like each other.

I guess that's it for now. I'll post this and then get on with whatever I'm going to do today.

I have to deal with something I started recently. I posted an ad on Craigslist asking for help at home. I did this before, I did it last year, and it worked out okay, and I learned from it, and I know better what NOT to do (for instance, they must have their own transportation, and I don't want to give them rides to and from my house). So now, people are replying to my ad, and I have to answer their emails.

I had trouble posting the ad. There was a technical problem. I posted the ad, but it wouldn't appear. I need to do some more testing, but it seemed to happen if either 1. if I wrote anything in the 'pay' or 'no pay' line at the very bottom, it wouldn't work, but if I left that line blank and set on 'no pay,' it WOULD post, or 2. the ad was longer than a couple sentences long, it wouldn't post. I'm not sure which one it depended on. I didn't finish testing, because, as usual, I was overwhelmed with exhaustion, and didn't have much time, and I only worked with it for a couple of minutes. However, I finally got something to post, and now I have to fix it. And I have to answer emails and explain to people what it is that I want from them. And I have to learn from experience what it is that I want, because I already know that I'll be dissatisfied somehow. I'll work with them, only to find that I'm not able to explain all of my 'secrets' to them, that they won't believe in the existence of transdermal drug residues, that they won't believe that I really need an electro-sonic shield to block out the voices and the attacks (which is one of my failed projects that I need help with).

Being able to tell them everything on my to-do list, and getting their support to get it done, is what I want, ideally, but in reality, I will have to tell them only a couple of tiny little 'believable' mainstream things first, and get help with those, in a mainstream belief system, from a mainstream point of view. ('Waahhhh! Woe is me! I'm sick with chronic fatigue and chemical sensitivity, but we all know that it doesn't exist and it's only in my imagination, and it's actually 'depression,' and I should go to a psychiatrist and get an 'antidepressant' drug to fix it, but instead I want you to 'humor' me and help me clean up the 'imaginary' contamination that I 'believe' is making me sick! Wink, wink, we both know that I'm crazy.') That is the way that I have to work with people. That is the reason why I am antisocial and I hate everybody. But even so, they will help me get SOME of the work done, at least, the cleaning up piles of garbage, and doing laundry, and that kind of thing. For now, I have to work with that.

Movie: The Chumscrubber; and 'Something Worth Fighting For,' a vision of something happy in movies

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my new shoes are nontoxic!

i am overjoyed. today: positive decontamination results.

i bought new shoes for work. the old shoes had been contaminated badly for a very long time.

how did they get contaminated? mostly because i would put them on, wearing socks that had been contaminated by the carpets. the main contaminants on the carpet are: borax, tobacco, stevia, st. john's wort, and ephedra. i wear sandals at all times when i'm in the house, but sometimes my socks or feet get contaminated by accident anyway. so gradually, the old shoes had contamination building up in them over time.

my feet have been burning quite noticeably for a while now. i know they're getting poisoned with something when they sting like that. and i feel slow and tired at work, while wearing the contaminated shoes.

the new uniform and new pants were very helpful. but i didn't get new shoes for a while. then i bought some and tried them on today. i was so much more alert and clear and energetic. i wasn't slow and exhausted all day at work. (i also wore new socks, and kept them separate from the socks i wear in the house. the new socks are kept with the new shoes. i won't put contaminated socks into the new shoes.)

something unusual happened on the way home, too. i cried while listening to music. i haven't been able to cry much for a while.

i had also covered up the car seat with a garbage bag, too - the old garbage bag ripped off, and i started getting hit with the mystery chemical on the car seat - it resembles the new york contaminant, but it might have come from someplace else - it causes physical and emotional numbness, sexual dysfunction, and i think also high sugar, insomnia, restless legs, akathisia, and trouble swallowing. i thought it was abilify.

however, i might have gotten contaminated with a similar drug someplace else - it could have been on the waiting room couches at the doctor's office where i took peter, in altoona, or it could have been on the waiting room chairs at his dialysis place. it began rather recently, in the past couple months, at the same time that i tried to wear clothing that had been exposed to the new york contaminant. all of those incidents happened in the past few months - reopening the bag of new york clothes and wearing something from it, and going to the doctor's office several times with peter. so i'm not certain what drug it is or where it came from, i just know that the car seat contamination correlated with several different things.

(note: quick story behind the 'new york contaminant.' i visited a friend in new york; he was probably using an anti-anxiety drug at the time, or at least, had used the drug at some time in the past, and was contaminated with it. at the time, i did not know that it was possible to get severely contaminated with a drug just by touching someone briefly - i suspected it, but i didn't know how severe it would be. when someone is using a drug, it gets all over their clothing - partly because it is excreted in sweat, and partly because they are handling and touching pills, then touching their clothes. i have found, since then, that if i hug or touch someone who uses a drug, i can get hit with it very badly even with a very brief, shallow physical contact.)

so... i also covered up the car seat again today, along with wearing my new shoes.

well, i heard 'halo' sung by beyonce, and i've been writing about beyonce lately, about how her voice has so much range from high to low. i was feeling overjoyed, manic, and very excited all day because of the decontamination - i felt so much clearer and healthier. i was able to react emotionally to music, while driving home. i wept listening to 'halo,' and, as i said, it's been a long time since i was able to cry, and a long time since i responded strongly to music. the drugs and contaminants have made me emotionally numb, and physically unable to weep.

it is wonderful to have a positive confirmation of what i knew: that there's nothing wrong with me at all. i'm just contaminated. all i have to do is get away from all of the chemicals, and the clothing that's contaminated, and things like the car seat. i will get healthy quickly, immediately, for sure, within the very first day of being decontaminated.

it makes me hopeful for other people too. peter has been worse than usual, especially with erectile dysfunction, and whenever i lean against or sit on the couch in his living room, i become numb and sleepy, and i stop moving and i lie still, and i stop responding sexually. there is something on that couch. i don't know for sure what it is or where it came from. it might have come from me, but it might have also come from his clothing or his drugs. he wasn't using anything new, though. well, not really, but kind of.

he's using phosphate binders, and THEY ARE HORRIBLE. phosphate binders are about the most horrible drug ever created. they make you vomit. i don't know how he's surviving. i think the only way he eats anything is by sometimes skipping the phosphate binders. so, it could be phosphate binders that i'm reacting to. he's only been using those somewhat recently.

he also used one free sample of levitra, and didn't use it ever again, because it gave him a headache - not just a headache, but 'my head is going to explode - this is almost bad enough to go to the emergency room' kind of thing, lasting for hours and hours. i wonder if levitra could, paradoxically, cause impotence? this would be like homeopathy. at a low dose, it causes impotence, but at a high dose, it causes an erection. the concept of homeopathy is that a particular drug or chemical has some effect, whether good or bad, on a particular organ or tissue - the 'target organ'. it affects it, that's all you know, and depending on the dose, the effects can be helpful or harmful. so that's one theory.

but i still believe it was a contaminant that came from my new york clothing, which was probably abilify. and i don't know for sure.

i know that i felt better immediately today, wearing the new shoes and new uniform, and re-covering my car seat with plastic.

'passive detox' or 'passive decontamination' is the name i'm calling it. i call it 'passive' because i do not detoxify people by using new chemicals - for instance, i'm not going to use chelation, where they give people some activated charcoal, or something, and other chemicals, to try to get the heavy metals out of their bodies. and i'm not going to tell people to take a whole bunch of nutrient supplements and herbal pills. that's 'active.' you add a new chemical. i'm not adding anything, i'm just taking things away, but i'm doing a more thorough method of decontamination than any other 'detox' programs do. there are lots of detox programs and methods that exist, but i haven't seen anything yet that mentions clothing and surface contamination that goes through the skin (transdermal route of entry) and affects the body at microdosages for many months or years, even after somebody stops using the drug.

so 'we' were thinking about this, all day long - i was talking to voices about it, and they were seeing it as a program or method or protocol to follow, a set of rules for decontaminating yourself from drugs and chemicals that cause symptoms by entering the body through the skin.

i was overjoyed by the results. the new clothing and new shoes worked - i got rid of the contamination, and felt better immediately, the very first day.

it will be difficult to fix the car seats. i was thinking about reupholstering them. anything durable, any objects or belongings that are very expensive, and sentimental, things that can't be cleaned off or thrown in the garbage - those will be the worst.

this is like a 'cursed item.' cursed objects might be real. all you have to do is contaminate something with a poison that cannot be washed off, and it's 'cursed' forever. there are rumors that have been around for hundreds, or thousands, of years, about magic, and some of the phenomena can be explained if you know about transdermal drug contamination. cursed areas, cursed locations, cursed people, the 'untouchable castes,' all of those things could be explained if you knew that some people, places, or things were covered with chemicals or drugs that made them sick and would be passed from person to person through touch.

so it's nice to have hope.

dealing with air pollution will be a little more difficult... the health problems caused by urban air pollution - that's what i'm researching now. or rather, researched a little bit recently. 'dabbled in.'

so far:
1. no vaccines
2. no synthetic dietary supplements: vitamins, minerals
3. no drugs, no herbal drugs, no alternative medicine drugs (there could be some exceptions to this)
4. avoid air pollution
5. avoid contaminated objects and surfaces, avoid plants and drugs and chemicals that cause contamination
6. eliminate certain foods and chemicals from the diet, which can trigger reactions in some people
7. no dental fillings of any kind, no retainers, no braces
8. no removal of body parts, organs, teeth, tonsils, appendix, foreskin, etc
9. no implants, like pacemakers or defibrillators (i don't know what to do about pacemakers - i don't know enough about them)
10. no drinking tap water

i'm sure there are more things i'm forgetting, which i will think of as soon as i've posted this. or rather, 'they' will think of, and remind me about. there are more things to do and things to avoid, on the list of ways to prevent chronic illnesses.

what i have lived through is almost unimaginable to anyone who hasn't experienced environmental illness or chemical sensitivity.

Monday is my official day of rest. No coffee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a fellow sufferer may have fallen.

i subscribe to aussietargetted's weblog.  she was having a lot of really severe problems recently.

(damn it, i accidentally screwed up and lost this draft - i never type directly onto the page - i went and tried to click on a menu which i expected would be a drop-down box, but instead it started to go directly to that page.)

there was another blog, 'electronicabuse.wordpress.com,' where the person (a different person, not aussie) was having a lot of really severe problems and then suddenly her blog started saying it was 'protected' and you couldn't log in to it.  now aussietargetted's weblog is saying the same thing.  and she was having a lot of chemical problems in her house - she said something was making her really, really sick in there.

she was so far away, i couldn't do anything - i wish i could have met her in person, but i am already struggling just to barely get by, myself.

i can still find aussietargetted (with two t's) on google, in the cached version of the pages.

when this happens, i wonder if the person has committed suicide, or died from some other cause, or whether somebody isolated them from the internet, or isolated everybody else from seeing them.  it's possible to mess with people's connection to the internet and she might not know that anything is wrong - she might not know that her blog is no longer accessible.   but i don't think that's what happened.

whenever a person has chemical problems or health problems, it makes it much harder to endure harassment.  aussie was getting both.  in that kind of situation, where the person is already sick, the attacks seem to be much crueler, much worse.  in my experience, they behave as though they want to help me, but they are also much more abusive when things are going wrong in my life.  they don't like it when there are things they have no control over.  that's been my observation.

if something goes wrong, if your life has a problem, and they DIDN'T cause it to happen, they sort of 'kick you when you're down.'  but when they do this to me, i always feel that they are anxious, terrified, that they wish i would get angry at them, and it reminds me of how, if somebody falls down unconscious, and you're trying to resuscitate them, and they don't wake up, you might attack them and hit them really hard and scream at them, trying to wake them up, but they don't wake up, and you get angry.

i found this on google:

aussietargetted's Profile
[ currently offline ]
• Name: Judith Lesue
• Birthday: 31/12/1969 (Age: 39)

Entries Written: 0 entries
Comments Written: 0 comments
Signup Date: March 15, 2008
Last Login: April 23, 2008

it's from a different website, but i'm sure it's the same person.  i never googled her before.

i am not suicidal and am nowhere near that, not even close.  i have a lot of financial help from my parents, and a few close friends who i can talk to.  my family knows about my mental experiences, although they don't believe it's real - they think it's a mental illness - but i am not having problems with them and i don't feel as though i've been isolated from my family.

most of my problems are caused by chemical sensitivity, environmental illness, chronic fatigue, etc, and while the mental harassment adds to the problems, it isn't the main cause of everything.  'they' do not cause all of the problems in the world, and they don't control everything.  they might kick you when you're down, and i'm not saying it's okay, but sometimes they too have psychological motivations for why they are attacking and abusing someone, and, like i said, i've observed that the attacks get worst whenever something in my life has gone wrong, something 'they' have no control over, something they can't help me with, and they're trying to get me to do something about it.  for instance, i had a bad cold one time, where i had a high fever, and the attacks were really severe and abusive, and they pretended that they were the ones causing me to get sick and feverish, but in reality, it wasn't their fault.  and i wish that during those times, they would leave me alone, but they don't, and it makes it worse.  i think the same kind of thing was going on with aussie.

i do not want to condone the attacks.  but i want to explain that the attackers are human, and the things that they do always have some kind of motivation.

i will be healthier when i leave this apartment.

i'm looking forward to moving out of this apartment, even though i love it here and don't want to leave the duckpond. what am i looking forward to: not being sick all the time.

sometimes when i talk about being sick, i get voices who make it sound as though ALL of my problems are caused by attacks and are artificial. however, 'they' are NOT omnipotent. they don't control every molecule in the universe. people get sick, for random reasons having nothing to do with 'them.' my recurring illnesses are the unfortunate result of being chemical sensitive all of my life.

i've had more death threat voices than usual in the past couple days, people jumping on the bandwagon, since i commented about haldir of lorien. i usually ignore them. TIs get death threats all the time, like dobby the house elf getting death threats three times a day or whatever he says. my rationale is: if they intended to kill me, they would be able to just push a button on some device and make me stop breathing or make my heart stop beating or make some blood vessel hemorrage or something. if they were going to kill me, they would do it, and there isn't anything i can do about it. i assume that they gain more by not killing me.

once i've moved out and am no longer severely sick all the time, i will be able to do more things - although i won't be able to do as much as other people can do so easily. i'll never be one of those extremely healthy people who wakes up at 4 am and accomplishes 100 productive tasks and falls asleep at 12 pm only to get up at 4 am the next day and do all of it again. for me, focus is important, due to my lack of energy, so i must focus on one or two projects of the highest priority, and skip all of the other things that i wish i could be doing.

but right now, with the clothing contamination continuing, and the moldy air in here, i still don't have any energy. there are so many things i wish i could do, but merely getting up out of bed and going to work is usually the only thing that i can get done. i can't even cook for myself and i have to buy fast food instead.

in addition to that, i've been switched to 'distrustful' towards everybody, and don't want to associate with any of the guys who i met when i was in the 'meet people and try dating' phase. i've been feeling totally disgusted with all men. i know that's not fair, and it isn't really ALL men, but it's any men who express the slightest sexual interest towards me. i should be specific and say that the men who are actively expressing interest in me also happen to be quite unattractive to me. and since i am too exhausted and overwhelmed with moving out, i haven't been able to refocus my efforts to meet people - i have thought of trying other methods, like going to a church, to try to meet new people in this town. i also need to spend the effort of clarifying, in writing, the exact things that i am seeking, which requires me to go someplace more quiet, and less toxic, where i can think, because i can't think very well in this apartment.

writing a blog is the easiest thing to do when i don't have any energy.

The Chinese Drywall Disaster

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

Moldy Shelf Makes Me Sick!

Well, something happened yesterday which was good in some ways, and bad in some ways. It was bad because it made me really sick. It was good because it was a very definitive result of a test that I was doing. I know for sure now that one of my theories is right.

I noticed mold growing on a wooden shelf underneath the kitchen sink, in the cabinet. There is a small drip from either the faucet, the drain, or both. When I use that sink at all, it leaks, and sets off the moldy smell.

However, in the past, it might have been a different kind of mold. I used to smell the odor, but it didn't make me feel sick. So I thought that the mold couldn't be what was making me sick this winter. (I should say, 'One of several things that made me sick.') It had never been anything but a bad smell in the past.

Well, I went several weeks without using that sink. And yes, the smell went away, and so did a lot of my bad fumes: I was in the house, and didn't get sick.

Yesterday, I used the sink again to run the portable dishwasher for several weeks' worth of piled-up dishes. It had to be done. Afterwards, I opened the cabinet to look in at the mold, and see whether the sink had been dripping while the dishwasher was running.

When I opened the cabinet, a burst of humid, moldy-smelling air came out, and immediately, that instant, I got sick, felt like I was going to throw up, and got dizzy, tingling, faint, and unable to think clearly. My legs and arms got weak and uncoordinated, and I stumbled when I walked. My throat and lungs became a little bit scratchy and burning (but not very badly, just mildly).

So I opened the windows again, put the fan on, put on a new air filter that a friend got at Goodwill, and then I got out of the house. I felt sick for a while, but it gradually got better when I went outside.

The drip needs to be fixed, and the shelf needs to be replaced. As a compromise on replacing the shelf, it could be covered with something that is not permeable to water, such as linoleum, or wallpaper, or even just garbage bags as a temporary fix. That would help keep it from getting extremely wet, but wouldn't help whenever the air is very humid, and the humidity activates the mold even without any dripping. So it needs to be fixed for real, but something could be done to make it less bad for a while.

It helps to know for sure one of the things that was making me sick this winter.

can't wait for winter to be over.

I think that my recurring health problems, which seem to happen most in the wintertime, might be caused by closing the windows and breathing indoor air pollution from whatever is in the house. It's not merely 'Seasonal Affective Disorder,' or winter depression - and yes, I do get a little bit of that. But it was late autumn this year when everything just collapsed, and it happens year after year. I feel great in the spring and summer when the windows are open, and more and more awful in the autumn as it gets cold enough to keep the windows closed all the time. And eventually, by midwinter, I'm totally incapacitated and can barely make it to work every day, much less do any projects that require thinking or effort.

I had an incident with my landlord where I went to work, on a warm day sometime last week (or whenever it was pretty warm recently) and left my windows open and the fan on. When I came home, I had a voicemail from the landlord saying that he had gone up to my apartment and closed the windows because 'the temperature was dropping drastically,' and he didn't want the pipes to freeze. It wasn't dropping all that drastically, and also, I would be home from work before late night, when it would get really cold. The pipes wouldn't even come close to having time to freeze. It was like 50 degrees outside.

If this was merely the landlord expressing his annoyance and being worried about the pipes freezing, it wouldn't bother me so much. But I get scared when things like that happen because I could get evicted if my landlord and I have too many conflicts over things like that. I did get evicted once in the past for a variety of reasons - long story.

It's almost March, and soon I'll be able to have the windows open more often. Right now, my friend gave me an air filter, and I'm using it and observing the results. I'm not sure yet. There's been some improvement in here but every time I've thought that, it's gotten bad again.

I just hate the fact that a predictable, recurring event - a seasonal change - is ruining my health and disrupting my life, year after year after year. I am really serious when I say that I wouldn't mind living in a primitive mud hut with straw bales or whatever for insulation. After sleeping in my car, I know it's possible to keep warm with enough layers.

I read something in my book and I laughed yesterday:

From Diana Leafe Christian, 'Creating A Life Together,' a book about how to build intentional communities. I can't say enough great things about those Diana Leafe Christian books and I'd recommend them to everybody who calls themselves an anarchist or a libertarian. If you think the government needs to be completely shut down, then somebody somewhere must be responsible for doing all of the 'services' that government is supposed to do. These books are about how to build an intentional community - a community where you yourself are directly responsible for community decisions about how people will get along with each other, who is responsible for community maintenance (without government, who will clean the sewers?), where does our money come from, etc. As an anarchist I must ask myself, if government didn't exist, then what would I myself do to take its place?

Well anyhow I laughed at the phrase 'Sustainabler Than Thou,' in a section of the book talking about negative attitudes that community founders can develop. People can get into major arguments over relatively trivial things seen as ecologically unsustainable. She didn't give any examples but I understood right away.

Another attitude problem: When we were starting our community, WE slept in tents for three years without heat or running water. It was talking about how community founders had hard times in the beginning before their community was stabilized, and so, when new members come in after the place is built, they haven't suffered as much as the original members, and don't know what they went through. I used to have to walk to school uphill both ways barefoot in the snow.

Anyway reading about that reminded me of sleeping in my car. I actually feel stronger because of it: it's a primitive wilderness survival skill. I know how to sleep in the car in cold weather. I used to actually be planning a phase where I would live out of my car, but I hadn't gotten around to that yet. I was going to put all my stuff into a U-Stor shed or something. It would be a way to save money I would have spent on rent. I actually almost feel like I could do it now. But cooking would be really hard to do. I don't want to eat fast food all the time.

this site may harm your health, part... whatever

I cleaned up some parts of the floor, and also the top of the refrigerator where I had had the bottles of Clorox and other cleaning stuff. I moved some things around which I thought might have had spilled chemicals on them. A couple of things I set out on the porch.

Well, as a test, I've still been walking around and inhaling the air in different parts of the house to see if I can locate a source of the fumes. Now that I've eliminated some possible sources, it's easier to be sure that I know where it's coming from.

There is now a big 'DO NOT' on my list. Do not open the door of the electric water heater closet and inhale the air for a couple minutes to test and see if that's where the fumes are coming from. Because that is, indeed, where the fumes are coming from.

But it had a delayed effect. I felt relatively okay at first. There was some irritation in my throat. It was after I had shut the door, walked away, sat down, and tried to eat something.

I felt pain in my lungs that didn't go away. I expected it to fade quickly. I then gradually become more nauseated over the next few minutes and felt dizzy like I would pass out.

I called my landlord to ask him if he had sprayed anything in there at all when he came to check for frozen pipes a few weeks ago. He said no, he hadn't.

Here is my explanation. It might have been a couple of things happening at once. First, when he came in, I moved some junk out of the way, kicking over a bottle of household cleaner that was on the floor, which rolled over to another area where some other stuff had leaked/spilled. That might have set off some fumes. I cleaned that up as well as I could.

Next, the door to the water heater was open for a long time. And the cold winter winds are blowing through the cracks and holes in the walls, and I see there are holes in the places where the pipes go through, in the closet. So when the drafts blow, it blows anything that is in the closet out. I've done better when that door has been closed, but it was really bad when the door was open. So there might actually be two separate places where fumes seem to be coming from.

I cleaned up the only things that I had control over, but I can't do anything about the mystery fumes in the water heater closet. It seems to be what the heater itself is made of. Either that or something used to put it together. I smelled something from the top of the water heater itself. There were drops of melted metal solder, and some kind of dust that looked like it fell from above when somebody drilled something. I don't see any 'openly visible' chemicals that jump out at you. It seems to be coming from the material itself that something is made of. Maybe when it heats up, it releases some kind of fumes.

So having that door open for a couple days, and having drafty winds blowing through that closet, has made it worse. But that's not the whole explanation and I still don't understand.

Maybe it's a particulate dust instead of a gas. Then, it settled all over the house. Every time the wind blows, the dust is stirred up. It could be coming out of the walls through the holes, or coming off the water heater itself. I don't know. It seemed to get better after I vacuumed. Vacuuming was one of the things that I have done in working on the house myself.

I did actually get a few friends who responded to my request for help, but I haven't actually accepted their offers yet. I wanted to try to troubleshoot it myself a little more and do whatever I could.

Volunteers?

I put an ad on Craigslist tonight.

http://pennstate.craigslist.org/dmg/1035144077.html

I'm also going to start contacting people I know and asking them if they can help.

Fridge: 45 degrees, coldest setting

fridge was left on all night, door shut, thermometer inside it, and when i opened it this morning, the thermometer STILL said 45 degrees. that's what it said when i checked it last night, too.

last night i had noticed that it didn't seem very cold inside, when i reached in there for something. so i put a 'house' thermometer in there. (not a medical thermometer.) 45 degrees.

googled it. supposed to be around 33 to 47. mine is on the COLDEST setting, so i would expect it to be around 33. they gave it plus or minus 6 degrees: it varies when the room temperature is higher or lower, and if you're opening the fridge door a lot. so at highest, mine should be maybe 39 degrees.

left alone all night long, it would reach the coldest, with nobody opening the door.

called a repair guy to ask questions. he thinks a leak is unlikely. i think so too: it seems like it would have all leaked away by now.

but he agreed with me that 45 degrees was unusually warm, especially on the coldest setting.

but maybe i'm so chemical-sensitive that only a few molecules are leaking, and that small amount is screwing me up really badly.

another *anecdote* found on the web said that a coolant leak gave somebody else symptoms of fatigue, sleepiness, mental confusion, and some other problems, i forget, which were similar to mine. it was inside a vehicle and it came from the air conditioner, if i recall, but i'm not sure. (I <3 Anecdotes. I don't normally use metaphors, but, the internet is a gold mine, and medical anecdotes are the gold.)

it would have to be very, very slowly leaking only a few molecules at a time. it really seems like it would be all leaked out by now, and totally not working anymore, if it's been going on for these weeks and weeks.

this is in the category of things that might or might not be my fault. i don't know how i would have punctured any part of the fridge... except that i did accidentally push it back against the wall, when i fell or leaned against it one day. it's on wheels, and it rolled easily and banged against the wall. all those metal bars on the back, which radiate heat, DO NOT contain any refrigerant: i asked the repair guy that question. i mistakenly believed that refrigerant circulated around inside those metal 'pipes' in the back, but it doesn't. however, it could still have sent a mechanical shock to the place where the metal bars attach to the stuff inside.

so, latest theory: refrigerant leak, very slow, only a few molecules, somehow slowly enough that it still barely has enough refrigerant left to keep almost functioning, but not very well.

will talk to landlord. the thermometer shows a visible number which can be seen by the eyes of non-chemical-sensitive people. so he can agree: it's unusual for the coldest setting to reach only 45 degrees. he has no symptoms from the fumes, and will never agree with me that there's anything wrong with the air at all.

i am afraid to be hopeful: i'm afraid i'll get the fridge fixed or replaced, and the problems will still continue. but i can only do one theory at a time and then see what happens...

if you notice any misspellings or typos, i am being very careful, but even staying in here a few minutes (unless i open the windows and air it out) screws up my brain. (i guess i could use a spellchecker, but i am not in the habit of using them and i usually forget they exist. *REAL* bloggers don't USE spellcheckers! lol) when i'm close to the fridge, my legs get weak and i actually stumble and become uncoordinated. i have to keep typing and erasing words to fix the typos. it's annoying.

i still can't believe this would be the source of the fumes. it seems like there was SO MUCH. it seems like the fridge would have leaked it all and it would be gone by now. but we'll see.

The Great Chemical Purge of '09 - Toxic Fumes and Environmental Illness

This is hard to explain, because I'm sitting in my apartment, and I can't think clearly. I'm spending as little time in here as possible right now.

I've had severe fatigue for a while now, but I've had bouts of fatigue on and off for years, usually triggered by chemicals. I don't always know right away what's causing it. It takes troubleshooting and trial and error.

In the past couple days, the fatigue turned into the scary kind of sleepiness, where it's not like the usual chronic fatigue, but instead, it's more the 'Carbon Monoxide Is Putting Me To Sleep' kind of fatigue. I can't find my carbon monoxide detector - I think I might have left it at McDonald's or something, back in the great 'Poisonous Fumes At McDonald's' incident in December 2007. (I think I wrote about that one on MySpace. 'Go ahead and fire me!') But I don't think it's carbon monoxide.

(In addition to the fatigue and sleepiness, I also had almost two weeks of recurring Norovirus, which developed into appendicitis. The appendicitis is going away on its own. Viral appendicitis can happen when you get an ordinary stomach virus, but it's usually mild and it heals itself. I have had *mild* viral appendicitis many times before and I recognize the feeling. But with two weeks of Norovirus, it was getting bad enough that I was ready to talk to the doctor - and that's saying something. Just when I was about to look up a doctor in the phone book, the Norovirus went away and the appendicitis died down.)

So far I've had a couple theories. There is definitely bad air. I feel it when I breathe, especially in certain locations. It's very similar to what happened at McDonald's. And this is the third time that I have had a toxic fumes incident in my apartment. The previous two times, it seemed to have been triggered by cleaning chemicals.

Well, I just recently sprayed some Windex in the bathroom, and last time I had a toxic fumes incident, I had recently done something similar, except that it had bleach in it last time. This time, there was no bleach. I am not sure if the bad air is caused by the chemicals or if it has some other unknown cause. But it began shortly after I used that spray.

While trying to find the problem, I found a pool of mystery liquid which was in the middle of a pile of mystery powder. You don't know how messy my house is. This mess is the result of several years of unimaginable disaster and a lack of social support. (The lack of social support is finally being fixed right now, a little at a time.)

I had a whole bunch of bottles of cleaning chemicals sitting around in the kitchen on the floor, which I had been using to attempt to clean the herbal oils out of the laundry. (It didn't work, and the chemicals made everything much worse than it had been originally.) I just recently moved a bunch of junk around, and there was one bottle that I sort of kicked from one pile of junk into another pile of junk.

I had about a dozen different boxes and bottles of various things all around. There was Borax (I got rid of that long ago because it made me so sick), bleach, ammonia, PineSol, some kind of wood-cleaning oil, Windex, carpet shampoos, Mr. Clean, and other things. The one that spilled was the PineSol. Oh yeah, I also had de-limer and rust remover, and I remember that the de-limer we used at McDonald's was horrible to breathe, so I didn't trust the one that I had.

After cleaning up the spill as well as I could, I then collected every single bottle of every single chemical that I had, and I threw all of them away, out in the dumpster. (Definition of 'chemical': something liquid or powder, usually in a bottle or can, intended for cleaning, and able to react easily with other chemicals. It's a vague definition. I realize that, technically, all physical objects in the universe are made out of chemicals.) I don't use those things except on very rare occasions. I bought them all out of desperation when I was trying to fix the laundry problem.

Some of the bottles had been there for years. They are now no longer a hazard in my house.

I slept with the windows open last night. I bought a sleeping bag so I could keep warm.

Even though I wiped up the spill, there is still something wrong with the air. I am going to try a couple things. First, I've had the windows open. I will try again cleaning up the area where the spill was, and cleaning it more thoroughly. I am also observing the hot water heater because there seems to be bad air lingering in that area, although that could be just because it's back in an enclosed corner where the air doesn't circulate much. The water heater is electric, *NOT GAS*, thank goodness, so it isn't having a gas problem. I am afraid of gas appliances. They really can put out carbon monoxide. There are no appliances in my apartment or in this house anywhere that could produce carbon monoxide. It's most likely a chemical problem from the cleaning fluids.

So, I didn't sleep very well last night. I actually got a second sleeping bag just this afternoon. The first sleeping back was a lightweight one, and I used it while sleeping indoors. The one I bought today is a heavy-duty one and I am going to see what happens if I try to take a nap in my car.

This is deja-vu. It was the dead of winter the last two times that I had toxic fumes incidents. In 2007, the ephedra/tobacco/herbs cleanup triggered an incident, and I attempted to sleep in my car a couple times, and it was in the early spring or late winter, maybe around March, or April. In 2008, the incident was mild enough that I was able to handle it by just opening the bathroom window and putting a fan on - but it was also in the winter, around February.

This incident is mild enough, and I'm pretty sure it's the little pool of mystery chemicals that was on the floor in the kitchen. So I don't expect it to be that big of a deal to clean up and air out, and I expect it to be fixed in a day or two. In a way I'm glad it happened, because it caused me to throw away all of the bottles of cleaning chemicals that I wasn't using, and I'm happy to be rid of them. I will not buy cleaning chemicals again - I don't want any chemicals in my house except for just a couple of small, simple things that are less threatening. (Like dish detergent.)

The other positive thing is that I have spent the past few months meeting more people and making some (tentative) new friends, local people, so if it's an emergency, there are real people who I can go to if I have a situation so severe that I have to get out of the apartment immediately. This hasn't quite reached that phase yet, but if it did, I'd have somewhere to go.

The other aspect of this is that I recently changed my work schedule so that I'm on three days a week. I wasn't quite ready to do that, but I had to, because, as I said, I've had the problem with fatigue and it was getting worse, and I was having trouble going to work and having trouble concentrating and getting my job done. (There was an incident where I was supposed to make a whole bunch of salads because the salads were going on sale the next day, and I didn't get it done, and everybody was angry. And it was mostly because I was too tired to think clearly, and I didn't communicate with them about how many salads I could realistically produce in a certain period of time, while also shutting everything down and cleaning up. It would not have been possible for any person to do it, but I said yes, I could do it, and they all expected that I would do as I said.)

This is my very first week with the three days schedule, and cleaning up the house is exactly the type of thing I intended to do during that 'free' time. (I don't really feel like I have any actual free leisure time to do fun things - my life is still too full of problems and anxieties.)

This is the year of asking for help and getting more social support and meeting people. That's the only thing that can help me right now, getting more people involved in my life. The problems and disasters were piling up faster and faster, and they buried me. I could not clean up one disaster before the next disaster hit. And the time is passing. So I am doing something different now, and I am getting people to help.

So that's my day today. There's a lot more space in the kitchen with all of that clutter gone.