Toy Stories and pretending; taking Peter to the store; why Tammy doesn't drive now

3:00 PM 11/30/10

I'm resting today. No caffeine pills this morning, but I am having a little bit of coffee now. I'm recovering from one of those stomach viruses where I figure out that I'm sick so I stop eating and stop drinking, and I never throw up, I just get really dehydrated for 12 hours or so. I couldn't even take more than a sip of water at a time.

I 'got the file out' a few more times today and yesterday. I have a backlog of garbage that I have mostly cleared out. The piles of trash in my bedroom are gone, but I have 'objects' on the floor now, mysterious unexplained things that need an official place to be. They're not garbage, and I mean to keep them. But they need a more permanent place besides sitting on the floor in my bedroom.

This is going slowly, but at least I am doing a little bit. I don't trust myself. Anytime I've tried self-improvement or time management, bad things have happened, or the enthusiasm wears off after a few weeks, or it's just a passing fad, or I have a disaster and I end up worrying about and dealing with the disaster, and when I go back to trying to do the time management again, I feel too hopeless to try. I really would like to practice time management for the rest of my life, till the day I die. I would like to be conscious of my time management. I don't mean that I need to be obsessed with it or anal-retentive about it. I don't mean that it has to be perfect, or that every second of every day has to be scheduled down to the smallest detail. I just want this to be something I am aware of, and trying to do, forever, so that I can achieve more of the goals that I set for myself, the ones without deadlines, the goals where nobody will come to my house and arrest me if I fail to do it, the no-pressure goals where nobody cares, except me, if I never achieve the goal.

Somebody at my apartment complex doesn't watch Toy Story! There were a few toys in the dumpster today, and a bunch of them fell out when the trash truck lifted it, because the dumpster was overflowing with stuff this time. (I usually don't notice. I haven't been going to the dumpster for a while!) There were some rubber dinosaur toys. I used to have a bunch of those. They are probably still in the attic at home. The dinosaur toys next to the dumpster were actually pretty cool. I would have wanted them if I was still collecting dinosaurs. There were some matchbox cars too (I don't know if that was their official brand name or not, but they were matchbox-like cars). It makes me sad because I feel like toys are alive and they have feelings, just like in the movie. I really, sincerely used to feel exactly like that.

I haven't been buying or collecting any toys for a long time, but I still sometimes feel that desire to collect them. And now that I'm an adult, I have so much more money. I could collect every single toy and I could make the collection absolutely perfectionistic, and I would have every single piece, and every single thing ever made in that toy collection. I used to try to do that with Hasbro's My Little Pony toys.

What did I used to 'play' when I played with toys? Sometimes I played alone. Sometimes I played with my brother, and sometimes with the neighbor kids. We had various 'plots' for the stories that we would play. Sometimes the plots were very creative. Other times they were dull, reassuring routines. My brother John and I both felt like we were 'losing our creativity' as we got older, and the plots for my toy stories weren't as interesting as they used to be.

I remember one big story my brother and I did. We had Fabuland Legos, and the animals went on an adventure and got stuck in The Glue of Time. It was like being in a time-travel rift or something. They were trapped in another dimension and some of the other animals had to go rescue them.

Also, when Bonnie Bunny got mad, she sort of sounded like Miss Piggy from the Muppets. She would say, 'mad, mad, mad, mad, mad... BIGGGGG BUNNNNYYYY!' and she'd transform herself, and then we would bring out my huge, pink, stuffed bunny which was hundreds of feet tall compared to the Fabuland toys. Then she would do whatever she needed to do.

I had one of the 'dull, reassuring routine' plots that I often played with the neighbor kid Jeremy in West Virginia. It was 'feed the dinosaurs.' The dinosaurs were made from hollowed out rubber, and some of them had a big hole in their mouths which went into the hollowed out body. So you could stuff things down in there, as long as you could get them out again. We used to make them eat grass and weeds and other growing plants. We just sat there feeding the dinosaurs. Then, when they got full, we would hold them by the tail and beat them so that the food would fly back out of their mouths and they would be empty again. That was all we did. Sounds boring, doesn't it? But it was comforting. I guess it was like wanting to grow up and become a shepherd and watch the sheep grazing, or something. It's also a lot like playing Roller Coaster Tycoon, and watching the little people as they buy burgers and pizza from your little shops. It's satisfying somehow.

Playing pretend, while cooperating with someone else, is an interesting process, and I'd like to read more books about it. I have a book somewhere in my 'google books' list online, but I forget what it's called and I'd have to look it up - oh, it's called 'The House of Make Believe,' that's it. Anyway, when we cooperatively played pretend, one person would suggest something: 'Let's pretend that he can't talk anymore.' (Yes, that was the result of me 'hearing voices' right now while I'm typing.) So one of the toys would be trying to give a message to someone or ask for help, and they weren't able to talk, because they were under an evil magic spell. And you almost always say 'yes' to whatever they suggest, and try to go along with it. Then you adapt the story that's developing to whatever they suggested. And you don't know what the outcome will be.

You can see social dominance in whoever gets to decide what the main plot will be. Sometimes one person does most of the suggesting, and the other person does most of the adapting. Sometimes you play with kids who are more violent and aggressive, and they want to fight battles with you constantly. I didn't usually like plots where you fought battles all the time and were always competing and trying to win. I liked peaceful scenarios and cooperative scenarios. I liked it when there were good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys lose in the end, but neither I, nor my friend, are stuck in the role of 'bad guy,' but we both might help to operate the 'bad guy' toys, and then cooperatively fight against them.

Playing pretend with toys might be helpful for writing fiction stories as an adult. I could remember what types of things I liked to pretend, and try to remember why I felt that the plots were somehow boring or unsatisfying later on. For whatever reason, after a while, I felt like I wasn't getting what I needed from playing with toys. One reason was because my best friend Jeremy moved away. The other friends I had weren't the 'cooperative imaginary playing with toys' kind of friends. Many of them were the 'physical outdoor play with large objects' kind of friends. For instance, we might play volleyball, or do gymnastics, at my friend Christina's house. And my friend Sarah and I once built a sort of treehouse, but really, it was just a couple of big heavy branches and ropes strung between two trees, and the branches were big enough to walk on. Neither one of them liked imaginary toy scenarios. I liked playing with both of them, but I couldn't expect them to play toy stories with me.

I wrote fiction stories as a teenager, and many of the images came out of the dreams I had at night. This was before I was consciously aware of 'hearing voices,' and anytime I heard voices or talked to anybody in my head, I viewed it as a 'psychic' experience instead of an attack. So that was how I got a lot of ideas for my stories.

Later on, there was Rachael, my best friend in middle and high school, but she didn't play with toys either. With her, I had the most interesting intellectual conversations that I've ever had with anybody. And she enjoyed reading my fiction stories and cheering me on, and she would wait excitedly and impatiently for the next bit of the story to be written. (No, my stories weren't that great. She was just a very good friend and a very enthusiastic person.)

So I mostly liked cooperative, peaceful scenarios. I didn't like competition, and I felt that I wasn't very good at it. When I tried to compete, I felt like I usually lost. I didn't like submitting and being inferior. I didn't like playing with bossy kids who wanted to beat me down and brag about how great they were for winning against me.

But it's interesting to look at the pretend scenarios that I used to play. We play them because we want to, because they make us feel good. I'd like to know what kinds of stories make me and other people feel good, so that we want to play them, or read them, or watch them, whether it's a video game or a book or movie.

I didn't play in many sports, but I did run track. Running track was competitive, but I didn't get off on thinking about how great I was compared to all the people I had beaten. I was more into enjoying the excitement of traveling in a bus to go to some other school, and the fear and terror and excitement just before the start of a race, and then, running as fast as I could and enjoying that, but also, I had my limits, and I was a mediocre track runner, and I didn't win a lot there either. And I wasn't obsessive about trying to win.

I was a really fast runner if I was in a small group of people. In a small group, I could beat almost anyone. But if the group of people got larger, I became more mediocre in comparison. More and more people could run as fast as I could. So I didn't win much at the multi-school track meets. In fact, I still remember the two little girls who always beat me. It was the same people at every track meet. I think it was these twins, and I think they were black. Am I crazy? Am I remembering correctly? I seem to remember these two black girls who were twins and they were small and they could run the hundred-yard dash faster than I could, every time, and it was hopeless. Maybe it was only one girl, and it's not very likely that she was black, because we had almost zero black people in the area where I grew up. I think I'm remembering wrong. I just know that this one girl (or twins) could ALWAYS beat me at the dash, and there was no hope, ever. Their legs were just designed better than mine.

Actually, I had some problems, over time - my knees started to hurt, and I had 'shin splints' (where the bones in your ankles are slightly cracked, a tiny bit, and it hurts) and I couldn't run very well anymore, and I didn't have any energy either. That must have been during my 'chronic fatigue' phase that was happening in my teenage years. I think I was having a reaction to pesticides at that time, but also, I wasn't eating well. We didn't always have a lot of good food at the house, and I ate tons of cereal and pop-tarts, constantly, because there was nothing else to eat. 'Being trapped in a house with nothing to eat' is one of those things that almost all teenagers experience. You're helpless, you can't drive a car, and you don't have a job, so you don't have much money except maybe a small allowance, and you might not be allowed to cook freely either. And that's right when you're growing and getting a lot bigger really quickly, so you need huge amounts of healthy food. (Steak for breakfast.)

I'm waiting for Peter to call. He wants to go to the grocery store this evening. His wife has a problem with her driver's license. This is one of those things that I can understand and relate to, but at the same time, it never happened to me, because whatever happened to me, it wasn't quite as bad as it was with her. Here's the story.

First, Peter isn't allowed to drive, because he hasn't been able to control his low blood sugar attacks, and the doctors took away his license. The one doctor said that he could have his license back, maybe, if he used a constant blood sugar monitor. He has the monitor now, but he's not using it, and it doesn't matter anyway, because they don't have a car right now.

They actually have two cars. One is a van, and the other is a white car, I forget what kind. The white car is sitting in the lot at the tow truck place. It's basically possessed by the tow truck people now, and they would have to pay a big fee to get it back. The van is sitting in front of their apartment. Both cars are either barely working, or not working, and need lots of repair and maintenance. Both of them have expired registrations. Both of them have expired auto insurance. Both of them are uninspected.

Tammy is trapped in an 'I can't do paperwork' rut. She had the money. She had a job. But for whatever reason, she couldn't bring herself to do the paperwork, fill out the forms, pay the fees, and keep the cars legal. I actually understand EXACTLY how that is, but somehow, I got myself out of it, and it's happened to me several times.

There's kind of a funny story to that, for me. This happened earlier this year, in 2010. I had an expired inspection sticker on my car. The cops pulled me over two or three times for OTHER things - once was because my registration was expired, and once was because I had a headlight out. Both times, they ignored my expired inspection sticker!

I wondered what was going on. I looked at the sticker. It said: 08 10. That actually meant that it had expired in October, 2008 (a long time ago!). When the police glanced quickly at the sticker, they were mistakenly thinking that the sticker meant it would expire in 08/10, or August 2010. It was almost a year and a half expired, since October 2008, but they were reading it backwards. Apparently, the position of the numbers was strange, or reversed, and there was no obvious indication of which number was the month, and which was the year.

I sat there in terror while the cop walked up, looked down at the inspection sticker on the front, and said, 'Inspection's okay,' and continued giving me his ticket for the expired registration. I was thinking to myself, 'What??? The inspection is OKAY? It's been expired for a year and a half now!' He was reading the numbers backwards.

Soon after that, I did, actually, get an inspection, and now it's up to date.

But Tammy has had something similar happen. It is that terrible feeling that you cannot bring yourself to do some piece of paperwork. It is a physical pain, a block, an anxiety attack. I usually got myself through these attacks by using an antidepressant, St. John's Wort, if things were getting badly behind. But for whatever reason, Tammy couldn't get through it. Her health problems are worse than mine. She's taking thyroid medication now because her thyroid is too low. Her face and body used to be all swollen, and it's been improved since she started taking the thyroid pills. But she never had any energy. I can understand how that pain and anxiety of not being able to do paperwork made her not do it, for so long.

She no longer has ANY up to date paperwork for driving. Her driver's license, insurance, registration, and inspection are all expired. The cars need repair. One of them, as I said, is waiting in the tow truck lot. Every piece of paper that can possibly be illegal, is now illegal.

Peter tried to do some of the insurance paperwork for her. But he says that the insurance people told him they need HER signature on something, and they needed to talk to HER about it, because Peter wasn't a legal driver in the house. For whatever reason, he wasn't allowed to finish it. I have a feeling that this is actually not as bad as he's making it sound, but for whatever reason, whenever he tries to get Tammy to do it, she freezes up and can't do anything. She often starts crying when they fight and when Peter tries to make her do it.

Now Peter tells me that she actually didn't even get a driver's license at all when she was a teenager. She got one much later, as an adult, in her twenties, I forget how old. She was used to just not driving, and didn't really care about not leaving the house and not going anywhere. It doesn't bother her that much not being able to drive.

That's the reason why I sometimes drive Peter to the store. But lately I have been losing patience with this, because Peter always takes a REALLLLLY long time at the store. I am impatient because we have been doing this on my days off, and I never have enough time on my days off to rest, and to deal with my OWN disasters, like the garbage pileup. I have trouble sleeping, because of the drug residues and because of the attackers waking me up every few hours all night long, and it's hard for me to even get out of bed before noon. Then I spend the whole afternoon with him on his errands. In some ways, I enjoy being with him and I enjoy spending time with him, but when I am worried about my own disasters, it frustrates me to take so long on something else when I could be at home, when I'm finally awake, when it's the afternoon and I'm finally out of bed.

He will go to Wal-Mart, and he will take three hours to shop. I had complained a bit about how long these trips took, and Peter blamed it on the fact that he is riding a slow-moving motor powered shopping cart because he has foot blisters, but that's not why it takes so long.

Peter does everything slowly. I had forgotten about that. When Peter used to work overnight at McDonald's, people always complained that he was too slow. He would take hours and hours to do something. He shops like that too. I get impatient, and I want to run through the store and just grab something off the shelf and keep moving. But Peter has to pick it up and look at it, compare the prices to all the other prices on the shelf, pick up another item, compare the prices, gripe and complain about how the prices have gone up $0.20 because of inflation, talk about how much it costs at another store someplace else, and so on. Sometimes, he just seems to stand there, picking up one thing and then another thing, and not talking, and I don't even really know what he's doing or why he's doing it, which tends to happen more when his blood sugar is crashing. ('They' told me Peter is an SJ. His awareness of prices is something that I like about him, actually, but it can be annoying.) And he will do this with every single item he picks up. I wouldn't care how long he takes, but I'm the one driving him, and I'm the one escorting him around the store, watching (and smelling) to make sure his blood sugar doesn't crash, and it almost always DOES crash, and he's not using the constant blood sugar monitor either. The longer we stay in the store, the more likely his sugar will crash!

Peter started taking Wellbutrin to help him stop smoking. He still smokes, just not as much. But the Wellbutrin is an antidepressant, and ever since he started taking it, I've noticed that he's more mellow when his sugar crashes. He will obey a suggestion if you tell him that you think he needs to check his blood sugar. In the past, when he wasn't on Wellbutrin, he was - I can't remember the word for it, but it's a word that they always use to describe diabetics having an insulin reaction - it's a word that means something like 'feisty, noncompliant, fighting, defensive,' something like that. I think the word was 'combative.' They say 'no' over and over again and won't do anything at all. They won't eat or drink anything either. He would deny that anything was wrong, and he didn't know his sugar was crashing. He doesn't do that as much now that he's on Wellbutrin. No, I am not an advocate for antidepressant use - I always say that I would like to solve the root cause of the problem or find a better way to do it (for instance, the Feingold Diet to help hyperactive kids and adults). I see antidepressants as a temporary thing that you might use out of desperation, but not use them forever. But still, I have observed that some things are easier to deal with when he is on Wellbutrin.

I'm going to post this now. I've just been sitting and writing most of the afternoon. But I got rid of some of the trash, and I made another trash can out of a cardboard box, and I have some plans for what I am going to do to prevent these problems from happening (as badly) again, even if I get another severe chronic fatigue attack. If the system is hard to use, nobody will use it. So I'm asking 'why does this happen?'

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

11:27 AM 11/29/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why would I PREFER pen and paper for writing something?

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

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

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

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

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

and so on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soul crushing grief

5:43 PM 9/14/10

I just have to get through the next couple weeks and then I'll be okay. I requested a reduction of my hours at Weis. I fell off the wagon again! I had stopped drinking coffee for several weeks and was doing okay. But the 70 hour work weeks, and the increasing darkness of winter, and Curtis finally leaving just as I always said he would, made it so I was crying through the first few hours of work. I also have a theory that drinking the raw cow's milk had something to do with making me cry. It was several factors all at once. So I started drinking coffee just to stop crying and make myself able to work.

I have had bad fatigue attacks and drug residue outbreaks the last week or so too. The drug residues gave me courage to do some crazy behavior, such as offering Curtis's ex-girlfriend the money for her child support. I wouldn't have done that without the drug residues, but according to mainstream society, drug residues don't exist; therefore they are one of the most important areas of knowledge and experience that people will be taught when they join the order.

Anyway, I know I will be too tired to get up in the morning, so I went out and bought some Vivarin. I haven't had Vivarin in years, ever since the ephedra incident in 2007. I don't eat the whole pill. I shatter it and crumble it into tiny, tiny pieces, and then I eat only one tiny fragment of it. I will need to do this every morning to get myself to work every day for the next couple weeks until the schedule change sets in.

I won't be able to make it. There is nothing to look forward to at work. We have a new boss who is causing total chaos in the department. Not only that, but our old boss left, and everyone liked him, and he made the work environment much more pleasant and enjoyable. So that's adding to the difficulty of going to work every day.

And Curtis isn't there now, and he's the only thing I looked forward to every day. I begged him and I warned him, since the beginning, last summer, in 2009, when we first met - I told him from the beginning, 'Someday, you're going to leave, and when you do, I'm going to be a basket case, and I'm going to do crazy stuff like writing emails to your ex-girlfriends.' And he didn't heed my warnings. I told him, 'You have to give me some way to stay in touch with you in the real world, because all of our emails will get deleted and intercepted.' He didn't believe me. But my phone calls, texts, and emails are indeed all being deleted (and only some of them get through - the bad ones, not the good ones), and I've verified this several times with different people who insist that they really did call me and it never got through, and that kind of thing. It's real. I wrote these messages on paper, but I think he has a reading disability, and so he didn't really understand what I said. Not only that, but he's a victim and a puppet like everyone else, so they would blank out his brain while he was trying to read.

Getting paid to date people: I want to write about this and think about it some more. I must wait until the schedule changes, because I've been so busy, I can't even EMAIL anybody. And I swore I was going to get a new phone with an internet connection, but I was so exhausted all day that all I could do was sleep, so I didn't get the phone today or yesterday. That is why I've bought the Vivarin. I will not be able to get to work, and I'm going to be calling off sick just because of exhaustion. I will be taking Vivarin crumbles to help me survive for a couple weeks.

In fact, I'm doubting that I'll be able to get to work tomorrow morning, with the way I feel. I said I would talk to Scott about my schedule, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. It required more energy and mental focus than I had. I had to think of what I was asking for, and summon up the courage to do it. This is desperation. I really won't be able to show up for work.

And the murderers played a little oversleeping trick on me the other day. Usually, they wake me up an hour before my alarm, or several hours. Or they put me to sleep and then wake me up right before the alarm goes off. But a few nights ago, they forced me to stay awake all night long, and then forced me to sleep through my alarm. Then they forced me to wake up at exactly 7:00 AM - the time when I was supposed to be *AT* work - and I had to call them and tell them I was going to be late for work. That's something they've never done to me before. They were 'proving a point' that they had probably forced Curtis to oversleep and lose his job. I already know that they're *able* to do that, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they *did* do it.

I was going to talk to Scott and change my schedule right away. That would take courage, desperation, and commitment to do what I was doing. I had to be sure, and I had to *feel* sure, that this was necessary and inevitable. It has become clear and obvious to me that I can't get up that early and go to work while working a second job and being at seventy hours a week (and suffering from seasonal affective disorder, and the soul-crushing grief of losing a beloved friend). I was going to try to negotiate some shift changes with the other couple people who are still there. We've lost almost everyone, and nobody is available to cover the shifts, and they have this irrational phobia of giving overtime to anyone for any reason no matter how few people we have. They would rather see empty shelves with nothing on them, because there aren't any employees there to produce the food, rather than pay people overtime to stay a few hours and make the food. We really have had empty shelves lately.

What will you do differently next time? I said on Facebook that my life was just like the movie Groundhog Day, except it was actually Patriot Day, September 11th. You wake up every morning and you have to convince everybody that a terrible disaster is about to happen, that you're going to be attacked, and you have to do something to prevent the disaster. And you have to fall in love before you go to sleep that night, and get them to love you in return. Or the next day, you wake up to 'I Got You Babe' on the clock radio again. That is my life.

What will I do differently next time? Next time the puppeteers bring me a beautiful, skinny young boy to fall in love with, and they force me to try writing letters to him instead of saying 'It's impossible, don't even try.'

Next time, I'll assume he's illiterate. Curtis probably really is illiterate for real. This isn't a joke. I seriously think he is unable to read. How am I going to give handwritten notes to an illiterate person? This is basic troubleshooting. When the appliance won't turn on, the troubleshooter's first step says, 'Is the unit plugged in?' So my first troubleshooting step will say, 'Is he able to read?' The person must be able to read if I am to give them handwritten notes. The handwritten notes won't be intercepted, but they cannot have a reading disability, and I'm fairly sure Curtis had a reading disability. He seemed to only catch a few words of things I had written, and didn't understand any of the rest of it.

People with reading disabilities need to have a shield around them to protect them against being attacked while trying to read. The murderers make everything worse. If you have any handicap or weakness at all, the murderers attacking you make your brain even *less* able to function.

And I don't have anything against people with reading disabilities. I just can't reach them right now. As soon as I'm strong enough, I'll be able to reach them. But right now, the only way I can communicate is by writing. So all the illiterate people will be falling through the cracks right now until I am strong enough to protect us while we talk out loud about taboo subjects. The murderers prevent me from speaking taboo subjects out loud, and it was even more difficult because we were at work and had limited time to spend talking.

Taboo subjects: They know what those subjects are, but I don't. It's a list of ideas and beliefs. Some of the beliefs are things like 'What I want matters.' It matters what I want. You have to *feel* that it matters what you want. Your soul, your desires, your needs, your values, your life - they matter. They're important. To actually *feel* that feeling is taboo. To feel it, to be motivated by it: it matters what I want, and I'm going to *do* something about it, *right now*. That's taboo.

Cameraderie is taboo. We're all in this together. You're not allowed to feel that feeling.

I don't know if I'll make it through this week. I might call off sick from Weis. I still have McDonald's, and I can increase my hours there. I still need to buy a phone! I haven't decided which phone and which plan to buy. I might make a fast impulse buy and just live with it whether I like it or not, and learn from the experience, instead of getting it perfect the first time. But I have been so tired, I couldn't even bring myself to get to Best Buy to get the phone. I can barely bring myself to get up and go to Barnes & Noble this evening.

My blog will have photos in it now, occasionally, as soon as I get my photo-phone. I can write about what I see. I already have a camera, but because of some technical difficulties, it's a pain in the ass to get photos from my camera moved over to my PC. It *can* be done, but I tend to postpone doing anything that's a pain in the ass to do, especially when I'm working 70 hours a week and suffering from fatigue attacks and soul-crushing grief.

Right now, in the time of grief, nobody matters to me except Curtis. I can't imagine that there is anyone else beautiful in the world worth looking at. I see attractive guys but they mean nothing to me. I really don't care about them. I am torn apart, being social and antisocial at the same time, trying to force myself to meet people, then pulling away and dropping everyone all at once, neglecting to send emails, failing to meet anyone - even some of the people who expressed an interest in the order of retmeishka.

In the order, we hand-deliver important messages on paper. We all agree to this. It is required by the order. We can email them too, if we want, but we will have a troubleshooting procedure to find out, 'Did you get my message?' and find out which messages said what. The messages are corrupted by disinformation. Failure to get there at all, or having words changed, or only some of the messages get there but not all of them, or the person who wrote the message was forced to write something that would be taken the wrong way. We can't protect the person writing the message just yet, but we will be able to, eventually. We can only make sure that the letter is delivered, by hand. That's the best we can do for now.

I'm going to B&N tonight, and I might possibly talk to someone who expressed an interest in the order. I don't know if he'll be there or not. Emailing him and talking on the phone with him is one of the hundred things that I dropped while juggling them over the last few weeks. I dropped everything and everyone.

I've thought a lot about incentives to join the order. I have devised money incentives, for instance. Ways we can provide insurance to each other, and get paid to be in the order. I want people to have a material gain by being in the group.

Oh yeah, by the way: Silver is back up at $20 an ounce again.

Amish milk, and a fistful of glitter, and my butt's fat again

7:19 PM 8/16/10

(*This is a very disorganized post, with several different subjects.  I'm probably already suffering from ADD from drinking milk, and from quitting coffee.  I started on a couple subjects, wandered to something else, and never really finished all the things I had meant to talk about... and by the time I was done, I didn't care whether I wrote about all those things or not.  So if you feel like I went on a tangent and never came back, you're right.*)

Why did my butt get fat this month?

changes in drug residues
one tiny sip of milk wasn't enough? maybe it is. maybe one tiny sip causes ovulation later on
but i'm drinking amish milk today and it goes to my butt and breasts instantly; i'll look like i looked in college; i lost my college weight by quitting whole milk
milk is addictive; as soon as i've had one glass, i start craving more later on
i ovulated much more than usual this month for unknown reasons
peter's wellbutrin - maybe wellbutrin triggers ovulation
peter's other new drugs
put vinyl on my car seat, which means i withdrew from sjw; the withdrawal can cause weight gain

I had been wondering where I could buy raw milk.

The milk I get at the grocery stores usually is sour when I buy it. I think it's held at warm temperatures during shipping and handling. It usually makes me sick at my stomach. Even the Meyer Dairy milk made me sick, although it tasted fresh. So I wanted to try fresh raw milk.

I saw a sign near the town of Howard when I was out driving my car. It was next to a little farm, and at the time, I didn't know it was an Amish farm. It said they had fresh raw milk for sale.

A couple weeks ago I finally went there. I drove up the gravel road and saw an Amish man working on fixing something next to the driveway, some wooden thing. I stopped my car and asked him where I could buy the milk, and whether this was a bad time. He told me it was up the hill at the barn, right where they were milking, and he said it was a good time.

After I drove up, a little boy opened the door of the barn. He might have been about seven years old - I'm not sure if I can guess someone's age very well. He asked me if he could help me with anything. We'd never seen each other before, so it was awkward and anxious for both of us. I was on drugs at the time, I think, so I might have had more intense feelings than usual.

I bought a half gallon of milk for $1.50, and got a free little pint of mint tea, which was very good. A half gallon is too much for me, but that was the smallest size.

When he said goodbye to me, he gave me a polite smile that wasn't really a smile.

I only tried a small sip of it. I wasn't sure if it would agree with my stomach. I haven't had milk to drink in years, although I eat cheese and I drink milkshakes. I had some problems with milk a few years ago and stopped drinking it. But if it's very fresh, I might be able to - that was the idea. I tried only a sip, and never finished the half gallon, and I left it in the fridge for days and days and it spoiled.

This time when I drove up and he asked if he could help me, and I wondered if I could buy some milk, he smiled and he was more relaxed and genuine. He recognized me from the last time I was there. He opened the door and he was barefoot. 'We have cheese now,' he said. They had made all different kinds of cheese. I kneeled down and got in the fridge, which was right in the doorway of the barn, while he held the door open. I got a block of Swiss cheese along with my milk and my jug of tea. I thanked him and said I had enjoyed the mint tea last time. He told me they have a concentrate of it, and he opened the freezer door - all you have to do is mix it with water. I didn't buy that, because I don't have a container to put it in, but I might next time I'm there.

I thanked him again.

The feeling I had for this little boy was, 'I love you. I would do anything for you. I'll stay with you and I won't ever leave you.'

I don't have any children. I'm not used to the feelings that children can give you. Children are supposed to make you feel that way.

I've seen hyperactive children, tortured by the poisons of modern society. I was one of them before I got on the Feingold Diet. I see them at McDonald's. A mother was fighting with her son who was having a tantrum as they were leaving. He was screaming and crying. I felt a terrible feeling: 'I hate you. I loathe you. You disgust me.' I know it's not really me that feels that way. I felt sorry for the kid. It was the way he was crying, screaming, and begging his mom to let him keep playing, to not punish him, he promised he wouldn't do it again, PLEASE, I PROMISE, crying and screaming - he HATED himself, I could feel it by listening to him. He hated himself, he loathed himself.

I feel like I would almost marry an Amish man. I am close to being Amish myself in many ways. There are some differences. But I would like to learn how they work. I want to learn how to make a profit on a farm when you aren't using motor-driven tractors or electricity. (They use gas-powered appliances, though - the refrigerator had to be. I'd like to avoid using fossil fuel appliances because I get sick from their fumes.)

I'm different from the Amish because I'm not Christian and I don't think I ever could be. That is the reason for the order of retmeishka.

But I feel that Amish society is closer to being a healthy society than 'English' society. It gives me a model of how things can be, of how a religion can be. I have more respect for the Amish than I do for most English people.

I might find out that I'm too allergic to milk to keep on drinking it; this is only an experiment. I might find that it makes me too fat too quickly, and I'm not exercising enough to burn off the fat. I might find that I'm getting rashes or having other problems. I might find that it's making me hyperactive or ADD. I'm not sure yet how I'll react to drinking a lot of it. I don't have a scale in my bathroom right now, so I can't watch the changes in my weight.

I got a fat butt this month, out of nowhere, for no reason. I wasn't aware of changing my diet. I just suddenly got a very fat butt. I ate McDonald's food a few more times than usual. I was exposed to Peter's Wellbutrin and have been contaminated with it several times. I patched up something that was toxic and was exposing me to St. John's Wort residues, my car seat. All of those things have caused me to have weight changes in the past, and it's always my big butt that I notice first.

It might go away next month, or it might not. If I'm successful at drinking milk, I will probably gain ten or fifteen more pounds, and I'm not used to that. I weighed 145 in college, when I was eating in the cafeteria and drinking several glasses of whole milk every day. I stopped drinking the whole milk, switched to skim, and immediately lost the weight very quickly. I also started taking walks, but I was always taking walks, so that probably didn't explain it - I can't remember when I was walking more and when I was walking less.

So whole milk makes you get fat very quickly. That's all I know. I'm drinking it because of the Weston Price diet, wondering if it will affect my teeth. I've had painful teeth for the past few weeks. Bruxism from St. John's Wort exposure and Wellbutrin exposure - those drugs both make me clench my teeth. I think that's why they're hurting more than usual.

I can't believe this - I just drank a small glass of milk, then another one, and now I'm craving another one. I can't believe how much of it I want to drink. It's really addictive. Now, these are small glasses - less than eight ounces, I think - I'm not sure. Little plastic cups. I'll just drink as much as I crave, and this will be an experiment. I will probably get very fat very quickly. I'll have to buy a scale at Wal-Mart.

There is a sarcastic voice in my head, and I know it's not me, but it says, maybe if I get fat, Curtis will love me. Ha ha. He's dating a girl who looks so much like his mother, from a distance, that the first time I saw her, I thought that's who she was. She is about the same height and weight. 'Pleasantly plump,' and insecure about her weight, as some people have made fun of her and called her 'hippo,' even though she's not really that fat. She will probably lose weight as I think she's moved out of her parents' house - that usually makes people lose weight. Her diet will change and so will her environmental illnesses, whatever drug residues, mold, and anything else might be making people sick in her family's house, if anything is there. She will probably be thin after a while. She's going to be a nurse, a CNA, she said on facebook. She's not using facebook at all anymore, and neither is Curtis - I'm thinking maybe they moved into their own place and they don't have an internet connection at all right now. They don't need to socialize - they have each other. They're getting married.

I talked to him Sunday afternoon when we were both leaving, but we didn't get deep enough into our conversation. I haven't been able to look at him for several weeks, or just barely. I haven't been able to talk to him either, and have had few opportunities. He called out to me as I was walking to my car to leave, and I couldn't really hear him, so I said, 'what?' and looked past the bushes that were blocking my view, and I could see him sitting on the sidewalk waiting for Carrie to pick him up. I walked over to him because I couldn't hear if he was calling for me to come over, or what. I got there, and sat down next to him, and he said, 'I was just saying goodbye.' But I sat there while he smoked. I didn't leave. I felt that I probably should leave.

I had asked him earlier that day, 'Do you remember telling me to leave you alone?' (In a text message, after I had sent him a very long text message.) He said, 'Yes - as friends?' I didn't really understand that, and I started to cry, so I quickly walked away and I said, 'I had to find out whether it was really from you. You know why.' (Because of the hackers and the possibility that someone would be writing things to hurt me that weren't really from him.) I walked away, made it into the deli without crying, and then tried to go back to doing my job, but I couldn't, not for a minute, so I went into the back room of the deli, and I suppressed the sobbing in my throat, and then the tears started coming out. I cried for a minute, but not long, and then I was able to get back to work. I felt depressed and sick for several hours. I was affected by drug residues, but for right now, I will probably keep on being affected by various drugs, because I can't get away from them at the moment, so my feelings will be more intense and they will vary from day to day, with my mood swings.

When I sat next to him on the sidewalk I still remembered that I was leaving him alone. I wouldn't look directly at him, because looking at him is too intense. He is beautiful to me. I love to look into his eyes. I would love to touch him. So I looked at anything but him, and I sat there, cold and serious, talking to him like a 'friend.' We mostly talked about my work schedule, about how many hours I was getting at my two jobs right now. And he said that his life sucked, and every time it seemed like things were going okay, something else bad would happen and mess things up even more. I wanted to know what was going on, but there wasn't enough time to talk deeply. Carrie was on the way. And he asked me how I was doing, and I said, 'It's a long story.' 'I've got time,' he said, and I made a bitter smile, but said nothing. You don't have THIS MUCH time. I would love to tell you. But it's boring and depressing, and nobody understands it but me. For a chronic-fatigued person, most of my life is what happens in the world of my reading and writing on the computer, and the thoughts that I'm thinking while I lie in bed talking to the voices. That is my life. Nothing is really 'happening.' But I would tell you if I had a moment or two to relax. I would tell you a little bit of it. If I could find one tiny bit of hopefulness or something positive in it, I would tell you. I don't want to tell it to you while it's still hopeless and going nowhere. There's nothing you can do.

He told me that the store manager was bullying him - and I use the word 'bullying' because I read an online article about bullying today. Curtis himself didn't use that word. He just said that the store manager was talking to him and doing things to him that made him angry and he was sick of it. I've heard the way he talks to him. Curtis said that the store manager asked Brandon, 'Is Curtis texting?' right after Brandon himself had been texting. Curtis got in trouble for doing something that the department manager had been doing. He was walking around with him telling him what to do and talking to him like a child - I heard him. He said, 'CURTIIIIS.....' in a threatening tone the way you threaten a dog or a child with your voice. He isn't a child. He's a nineteen year old who looks like a young teenager because he has fetal alcohol syndrome, which causes him to be very small. (And that is why a hebephile like myself is so attracted to him.) So you have to talk to him with respect.

It wasn't long, only a couple minutes, that we sat coldly next to each other with a space in between us, not looking directly at each other, talking about things that weren't really deep.

I asked him, 'How did you and Carrie meet each other?' This was something I had wondered for a long time. 'At a party,' he said, and he said nothing else about that.

There are things I want to know. The voices in my head were wondering these things when I was bored at work that day, when I had nothing to do because I was working in the front part of the deli department and we had no customers, so we just stood there, and I stared at things, while standing next to Mary. I had asked Mary how she met her husband. And I wanted to ask, 'What do you think about when you have nothing to do?' Do you stare at the images? Do you contemplate them? Are they beautiful when you contemplate them?  I can't meditate or contemplate because of the zapping - every few seconds, my brain and body get a jolt that wakes me up. I can't focus my mind in the special way that makes you feel flow, the feeling of enjoyment you get from focusing deeply on something. But I didn't ask her that.

And the voices wanted me to ask her if she had ever had a broken heart. I didn't ask that either.

And I wondered if I was the only person who had ever felt this way, because it felt like I was alone in pain. Having a broken heart - it seems like I'm the only one who's ever experienced this. My broken heart is mine and only mine, and no one else knows what it's like. There are universal feelings that other people feel, even people you dislike, people who have nothing in common with you. They get broken hearts too and it hurts them the same way. So I wondered if anyone else on earth had ever had a broken heart.

I heard 'glitter in the air' on the way home. That might have been a puppet incident, I don't know, but it was an appropriate song. Have you ever...? Have you ever done this, or felt this way? Have you ever experienced this?

I didn't get to ask Curtis those questions. We talked about my work schedule. He said he would have a couple days off. Then Carrie showed up and he left.

He said, 'It was nice talking to you.'

Then I went to my car and got ready to go to work at McDonald's.

I'm working in the mornings. I'll see him more often. Just having him there near me makes me feel good, even if we don't get to talk. It's not like it used to be, when he worked evenings, alone, and he often came over and chatted for many minutes (when he wasn't supposed to). Or he'd ask for my help. It didn't matter what we did, we were spending time together, and sometimes I was able to open up and tell him things. He doesn't work evenings anymore. That's probably best. It's hard for him to get all the work done when he's alone in the evenings, but in the day, he has other people there, and they can make sure he gets his work done. It's easier when other people are around. I don't want him to lose his job. And the way the store manager has been bugging him lately, he is at risk, especially if something happens, like an unexcused call-off. If he leaves, it will break my heart - I will grieve, I will get over it - but I will feel like there's no reason for me to work there anymore. I don't love anyone there the way I love him. I don't look forward to anything but him.

A Dull and Boring Soul?

5:57 PM 8/10/10

I am in coffee withdrawal again. I have a splitting headache. This headache is much worse than it was the last time I quit coffee. I'm quitting coffee because I've been drinking tons and tons of it every day to help with my chronic fatigue. And I've been drinking coffee instead of eating food. And I've got some cavities developing in my teeth. Last time I quit coffee, my teeth gradually remineralized and stopped hurting, so I'm doing that again. But I can't get anything done.

There is a torture going on about my Ichazo's instinctual type. It wouldn't matter if I weren't fighting with the voices. If I were free to be myself, then I would be able to express my soul to the world - it's something I would have learned to do over the years. They're wondering if I'm a sp/so instead of sp/sx, because of how difficult it is for me to relate to other people, to bond deeply with them, to attract them, to express myself to them. They're always wanting to change my instinctual type - this is nothing new. They're saying that I have the 'coldness' in my personality instead of the warmth and charisma that the sx instinct gives you. I don't know how I'd behave if I were free, like I said, but yes, I do have a cold, formal dignity that gets in the way of sexual expression and openness.

I remember something someone wrote on a forum about the instincts. It was a sp/so type who complained about the stereotypes about that instinctual stacking. She said, 'I'm not just a coupon-clipping worker bee!' I agree with her. I have a soul. I have feelings. I have a desire to bond with someone and to love them deeply. I watch movies, and I listen to music, and I respond strongly to them if they're done right, and if they're done badly, I can't stand them, or if they express ideas that I hate, then I can't stand them.

I can give an example of something I'd never do. There's a lady at McDonald's who acts like someone who has a strong sx instinct in her personality. She isn't really beautiful - I don't like to insult people if I don't have any reason to insult them, and I don't dislike her, so I don't really want to describe all the ways that she's ugly instead of beautiful. Just take my word for it that she isn't beautiful, she is somewhat ugly, by most people's standards. But she has a husband, if I understand correctly, and children. And a few days ago, one of the other guys who works there had come in to work, and when she saw him, she moaned, 'Ooooh, it's Jeremy,' and she looked up at him in a seductive way. Then she said, 'Have you lost weight? Every time I see you you seem to be getting thinner.' He said that yes, he had been losing weight.

I can't imagine myself openly flirting with anyone like that, ever. Lack of confidence, partly. Partly because it just seems unnatural for me. Even if I am sure that someone is attracted to me, I can't say things like 'oooh, it's Jeremy', just because I can't talk that way. It's almost physically impossible for me to talk that way.

There is a sort of dignity that gets in the way, and a feeling that it is too special, too sacred, too vulnerable, to express myself that way out loud. There is something too direct about it, too exposed, - and maybe if I weren't being listened to and spied on by murderers who make a big, huge deal out of anything sexual, then it wouldn't be so difficult for me. It's something that you absolutely must *not* make a big deal out of. If you do, it gets destroyed instantly. When the murderers attack me they always attack me about things that are sexual. They zap me the most when I'm trying to be close to somebody and enjoy the moment with them. It's like their goal is to prove that I am soulless and therefore it's okay for them to destroy my life.

I've been reading Twilight. I never read those books before. I saw the movie Eclipse and so I decided to start reading the books. Everyone likes to read about people who have 'dark secrets,' like Edward being a vampire. But I was comparing that with myself. I have dark secrets too; why doesn't anybody like my dark secrets? Because my dark secrets are dark, BAD secrets. Mind control is real. We are all potentially its victims, although some people are attacked more than others, while many people are mostly ignored. Usually, this is something you don't need to know. If they're not attacking you, then you don't need to even be bothered with somebody's else's problem of electronic harassment. That person is just unusual and unlucky and they must have done something to make somebody mad at them. There is no good side to that secret.

But the 'dark secrets' in these books, like Edward being a vampire, or reality being a Matrix, or Harry Potter being a wizard, always have a good side to the dark secret. You're a vampire, but it's really cool because you can live forever and have special powers. The world is a matrix, but if you learn how to manipulate it, you can do amazing things that nobody else can do. You're a wizard, and you're different from everybody around you, but, once again, you have special powers, and you have a whole community of people supporting you.

My dark secrets don't really have a good side. So I was trying to figure out what 'special powers' I have that would make somebody want to know my dark secrets. There is one thing that I can do. I know about saving money and I know about a frugal lifestyle. If you question the way you spend money, if you question everything about money, then you can save enough money that you can work fewer hours at your job. And if you work fewer hours at your job, then you can actually spend time doing things that matter to you. You can spend time with your family, or working on hobbies and projects, or just doing nothing and relaxing and having fun. I have spent years learning all about money and how it works. So if you are trapped, working too many hours at a job you hate, I am the person you want to get to know, because I sympathize with your problem and I know there are ways we can solve that problem.

So that is the result of fighting with the voices about my 'boring' self-preservation instinct, and what could possibly be good and exciting about it. It really is exciting if you can control your finances and quit working so many hours after you change your lifestyle. You can have the things you want in life instead of just wishing for them. My 'special power' is power over money.

They have been giving me this feeling a lot: that I'm boring, that nobody wants to know me, and that my soul, if it exists, is worthless to everyone. Somebody out there is pushing a button on a machine to give me that specific feeling, and they've been pushing that button a lot lately.

The soul is a delicate and fragile thing.

9:30 AM 8/3/10

I wrote in my last post about how they try to hide the fact that I have a soul, especially when I respond strongly to music.

I cannot be close to people even when I am close to them. I remember noticing this one day, and I know it happens all the time, not just once. But I was particularly aware of it one day. I was sitting on the couch with Peter, snuggling with him, just sitting there, and I wanted to *feel* like I was close to him. I wanted to *feel* like I was there, with him, close, in the room, in the moment.

But I was constantly being zapped. Every few seconds, there was a zap. It distracts me and destroys my concentration. So I cannot feel 'in' the moment, no matter what I'm doing. This is called 'flow' - I read a book about it by some Russian guy - I could look it up on Amazon. Mihaly Cziksentmilhalyi, or something like that, a book called 'Flow.' I didn't spell it right.

There is no way to enjoy the presence of a loved one if you are constantly being zapped by an electronic attack. In order to experience love, you have to be 'in' the moment, so you can look into their eyes and feel yourself merging with them, to feel that you can see into their soul. I have experienced that feeling a couple of times in my life, briefly. And you don't have to do that CONSTANTLY in order for it to be love. But you do have to be able to feel 'in the moment.'

I don't know if all of the attacks are being consciously controlled by someone, or whether some of it is 'ambient radiation,' the ordinary radio waves around us from cell phones and radios. Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity - this is another group of people that I read sometimes, people who write about that. They interpret the phenomena as being caused by hypersensitivity to electromagnetic radiation, instead of interpreting it as being caused by conscious humans stalking, spying on, and attacking you. I believe that *both* phenomena are happening.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: This is the metaphor that I use to explain this. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that you can't know where a particle is, and where it is going, at the same time. Or how fast it's going, or something like that. You can know one or the other, but not both. If you shoot something at it, so that something bounces back to you and tells you 'That particle was over there,' you've just bumped into the particle and made it go a different direction. You have to bump into it in order to find out where it is. But if you do, you change what it was doing. It's no longer going the same direction it was going originally. So if you try to 'watch' a moving particle, you are always changing what it's doing, and it won't be able to 'act natural' or 'pretend we're not here.' That is how I feel every moment of my life.

That is the metaphor I use for electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Even if all they did was watch, they would still be disturbing the person they were watching. I assume they are using an 'active surveillance' attack, instead of a passive surveillance attack. If you are merely listening to someone passively, just receiving the signals that they send out, then no, you don't hurt them directly by doing that. But if you shoot something at them, if you shoot any kind of radiation at them at all, it disturbs them, even if it isn't 'meant' to disturb them, even if the military and all your superiors and your bosses and your leaders tell you that the radiation doesn't disturb them, *IT DOES*. If your bosses say, yes, okay, it disturbs them a *little* bit, but it's *nothing important*, what that means is that it disturbs the most fragile, delicate, most subtle expressions of their soul, and your bosses are too blunt, crude, blind, ignorant, and soulless to believe that those fragile things are anything important, that they actually *matter*.

I have meditated. I have studied self-improvement books. I have changed my beliefs and my habits. I have observed myself. I *know* that whenever you have an urge, or an impulse, or a feeling, or a belief, it's a very subtle, quiet thing, something very hard to feel, hard to hear, hard to sense. They aren't big and obvious things. The slightest noise will disrupt it. The slightest interruption, the slightest distraction in your concentration, totally destroys this fragile little whisper that expresses your soul.

Some people find it easier than others to express who they are. That is why I study personality types and instinctual types. For some, it's easy. They could express the deepest passions of their soul in the middle of a tornado. Nothing can disturb or disrupt them, because that is their strongest ability. Other people, however, will be inside the tornado screaming, 'AAAAAA! A TORNADO!!!' And I shouldn't make jokes because it's almost always some kind of unintended sexual reference, and I'm guessing this one probably is too.

Imagine Scrooge falling in love. We've watched the movie. (I've seen the Disney version.) We know it's possible. We know he loved someone once, long ago, and lost her. When we watch Scrooge trying to fall in love, we feel sorry for him, and we're cheering him on, hoping that he succeeds, hoping that he can win the love he deserves and become more of a person because of it. But imagine that something was happening to make it difficult for Scrooge to fall in love. He already has a hard enough time. If something made it even more difficult for him, he would never be able to do it. He would become totally preoccupied with his money and other things that usually worry him, because that is what's most important to him and most natural to him.

I keep telling the voices that I wouldn't worry about drug residues, except for the fact that *THEY'RE THERE.* If they weren't THERE, I wouldn't worry about them. It's like living in Iraq, in a war zone. You worry about the bombs going off, you worry that somebody might get killed, you worry about loud noises and other scary things, BECAUSE THEY'RE THERE. You really are living in a war zone. It's normal to be scared when you live in a war zone. That is what I am trying to say is happening to me. I *really am* surrounded by a dangerous situation that has to be fixed, and until it is fixed, I won't be able to live a normal life. But when it is fixed, I will stop worrying about it, and I won't just invent some other worry out of thin air, unless the murderers force me to do self-destructive things to keep ruining my life over and over again.

But when someone is in a stressful situation, in a dangerous situation, in an abusive or unhealthy relationship, or an unhealthy society, they aren't able to function at their best; they aren't able to express the most fragile, delicate parts of who they are. And especially when they are being zapped with radiation 24 hours a day. The weakest parts of you will always be weak if you are constantly under some kind of attack.

But I do have a soul, though it's hardly ever seen or felt by anyone. It is here silent, waiting, and alive.