Time management; categories of activities; the art of asking questions; using the word ‘you’

9:35 AM 12/27/10

I hunted for Curtis today, but I didn’t see him. I saw the manager-like guy, though, and he is the one who I originally asked about Curtis. I made eye contact for a fraction of a second but then I looked down. I’m paying attention to what my eye contact is doing, because it strongly relates to my drug residues. There are some drug residues that cause me to make prolonged eye contact comfortably, without fear.

Just now I took one of the St. John’s Wort pills, because I need to continue with my time management, my projects and tasks. I’ve had stomach viruses over and over again for the past week, although they weren’t as bad as the first one was. So I’ve hardly been eating anything, and I’ve spent a lot of time just lying in bed struggling not to vomit, and not doing anything.

Anyway, I didn’t see Curtis today, so I bought a couple of small items and then left. I will try again. I’m still not ready to try texting him, and I’m also not ready to ask for more contact, although ‘they,’ or ‘we,’ were thinking about it, thinking that it’s a conceivable possibility to ask him to let me visit him away from work, and to spend a short, limited time with him, and we will be required to talk about something other than work. We would be required to talk about something personal and get to know each other.

It could be boring, but we would just follow the rule that we were required to be together for a specific amount of time, and then I would leave. It would give me less anxiety, because if I were going to spend an unlimited amount of time with him, I would worry that either he, or I, would get bored and uncomfortable. (Although, I can imagine playing video games with him for a long time.)

I’m also trying to find a way that I won’t be disturbing his relationship with his girlfriend. This was just a fantasy. Playing video games together actually seems believable. I don’t know how he would feel about a psychological interrogation while I practice my questioning skills.

I was noticing how hard it is for me to talk to people about anything except work. It’s like the only question I have is, ‘How do you pay your taxes?’ I don’t ask that, and I don’t phrase it that way, but that’s what it comes down to. We are all working to pay our taxes, whether they are direct taxes or indirect taxes.

(Some people don’t really understand it or realize it, but paying the rent is an indirect tax. The reason rents are so high is because of the property taxes on land, and because the government’s banking system has distorted the price of land. So it’s an indirect tax, and it’s a huge tax – a large portion of our money goes to rent.)

Anyway, I don’t know how to talk to people about personal subjects. What do you like? What do you dislike? What do you care about? What scares you? What bores you? What excites you? What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What do you not really care about one way or the other? What do you remember from your past? What do you see in your future? What’s going on in your life right now? What do you want? What’s on your to-do list? What do you dream of doing? And then you can ask ‘Why?’ about all those things too. You can ask people a million questions about how they feel about things, and I never ask those questions, and I never know people.

I had an entertaining day reading the internet a couple days ago. I was having a drug reaction and it was causing me to do lots of wandering and exploring and reading. I started out by reading about children’s fantasy play and pretending, which is something I’m very interested in. I feel as though I still need it, as an adult, but it’s something I can’t do easily while being attacked.

Then I started reading about the questions children ask their parents, and they are often very hard, unthinkable, surprising questions. Some of them made me laugh and laugh. One kid asked, ‘What would happen if there weren’t any mosquitoes?’ Another kid asked, ‘Where does the water go?’ when it goes down the bathtub drain, and every time his father answered, the kid said, ‘Then where?’… ‘Then where?’… ‘Then where?’

Asking questions is an art. Your questions are shaped by the mood you’re in, and by the overall spirit of the answers that you expect to find. If you are in a bad mood, you will tend to ask negative-leaning questions that direct you towards negative answers. If you are in a good mood, you will ask positive-leaning questions that lead towards happy answers. Both people will believe that they have found ‘the truth about the world,’ but in reality, their mood gives them a way of looking at the world, and the mood came first.

You could categorize questions – I’ve been thinking about ‘categories’ – what type of question is this, what is the concept behind it, etc. The ‘no mosquitoes’ question is a ‘NOT’ question. There’s something in the world, and you imagined ‘What if NOT X?’ The libertarians (and anarchists, and anyone else who doesn’t want a government) asked ‘NOT’ questions: what if there were no taxes, what if there were no government, no regulations, and so on. Then they saw all the invisible potential things that don’t exist because they never happened – all the money we would have had, to spend on so many other things. All the free time we would have had, to achieve so many things. Those things are invisible and unthinkable to most of us.

You can always ask more than one question about something. If you think that you found a good question, it’s actually only one possible question among many other questions. Sometimes you can find a really good question that gives insight, but you sort of already have to HAVE the insight BEFORE you ask the question. If you’re stuck in ‘questioner’s block’ (like writer’s block), then your questions feel shallow and you can’t see or learn anything from asking questions. You get answers that you already know. That’s why I wanted to make categories of questions, to help people who have ‘questioner’s block,’ so that they can try to ask questions from various categories, deeper and more insightful questions, to break the block, to help them see the subject differently. This is a lot like Edward de Bono’s writings about creativity, actually.

The page I was reading said that children’s questions were interesting and challenging because adults ‘take everything at face value.’ We’ve already seen everything, and we already know what happens. It’s unthinkable to imagine ‘what if’ about something so familiar that we see it every day. What if there were no gravity on earth? We don’t even bother to think about it.

Questions are very hard to see. You don’t know what subject to ask questions about. If some whole area of consciousness is blocked out of your mind, if there’s some subject that you hardly ever think about, you won’t even know it exists and that you can ask questions about it. If you happen to see someone else asking those questions, you might feel bored and impatient, and look away from it, feeling like you already know this, or you don’t need to know it. Edward de Bono said that people tend to say, ‘We already tried that, and it didn’t work,’ or ‘That’s exactly like something we’re already doing.’ He said to focus on the differences. No, it ISN’T exactly like what we’re already doing. No, it ISN’T exactly like something I already know.

My time management attempts are not going very well. But yet, that’s not entirely true. I’ve done more ‘stuff’ than I was doing before. I just haven’t done things reliably and consistently no matter what the circumstances. And it depends on taking St. John’s Wort right now. I want the habits to be so strong that I can continue them even when I’m off the drug, but right now, it’s very hard to keep trying when I’m off the drug, and getting hit by other drug residues that make me want to do nothing but sleep. I want my habits to be strong enough that I can mess up for a couple days, but then get back into it again. I am trying to make realistic lists of things to do and then actually do them.

I’m finding that I have categories of tasks and projects. The book that I have, Mark Forster’s ‘Do It Tomorrow,’ describes a few categories of tasks and projects, but it wasn’t enough for me. I started to feel like I was doing too much of one thing, and it was making my life not worth living. I need to do something each day that makes life worth living.

Let’s imagine that all I did all day were chores. Life would not be worth living. I’d wake up and start cleaning the house, doing the laundry, cooking, and so on, and if that’s all I did all day, I wouldn’t have the spirit to do those things forever and ever. But if I do something else that I know is making progress in my life, making things better in the long run, or something that I really enjoy doing and that I really care about, then I can tolerate doing some of the meaningless routines and chores, because I know it’s not all there is to life.

So I started writing all these categories that I’ve observed in my own lists. These are only an arbitrary group of categories out of an infinite number of possible categories. Categories are so flexible and so arbitrary that each person will see them differently. Whatever is important to you, whatever is noticeable and meaningful to you personally, will stand out and will have its own category. Those categories are useful to you, but they might not be useful to someone else. You can make huge, general, all-encompassing categories too, but they won’t be specific enough to be useful. And even those are flexible.

I’ve seen authors and philosophers who like to put things into categories, and they act like THEIR categories are the only possible categories for everything in the universe. Like let’s imagine someone characterized all objects in the universe as being either ‘Blue’ or ‘Not Blue.’ And those two categories are all you have to choose from! And somebody says that those categories are enough to describe everything that exists. It’s true, you could categorize things that way, but there are infinity other possible ways that could be more useful. Things can be either ‘Living’ or ‘Nonliving.’ And so on. It depends on what you want to use the category to do.

So all my tasks and projects are being categorized. I need to categorize them because of how they make me feel. If I do too many tasks in the ‘Life is a meaningless, miserable chore’ category, then I will get depressed and hopeless.

‘Task’ and ‘Project’ are categories that the book gave me. I already vaguely felt that, when I looked at my to-do list (the original, infinite list where nothing ever gets crossed off), that there were some tasks that were small and quick and I could do them in a few minutes, and other things that were big and complex and they would take days, weeks, months, or years to complete. ‘Task’ is a small quick thing, although it can be slightly larger and it can have subtasks, but mostly it’s something you can get done all at once, in one day. When it’s done, it’s done. ‘Project’ is a larger thing, with more subtasks and subprojects, and it takes several sessions to complete, maybe days, weeks, etc.

But I have other categories of things that I see on my list. And again, these are not the only possible categories. They are only things that I myself see in my list. ‘Disaster Recovery’ is a category for both tasks and projects. I have to waste a lot of time and money cleaning up drug residues and throwing things away and buying new things to cope with the accident a few years ago, and I shouldn’t have to waste my time doing that, but if I don’t, then I have terrible reactions. ‘Patching up’ is when I have to do something that’s a temporary fix, without fixing the source of the problem – for instance, putting new clean paper down on the bed where I sleep, because it’s always getting contaminated.

The books describes ‘organization projects’ and ‘continuous projects.’ Organizational projects are projects that are meant to achieve a specific goal, to create something, to start a program or build something, to make a new system of some kind. The project has an end. That would be something like, ‘Start my own business.’ Continuous projects are something that you must keep doing forever, or for a long time, and it’s the same thing every day, like practicing a musical instrument, or jogging every day.

Because I’ve been reading about the enneagram for the past few years, I have mental structures that are based on the enneagram and the other psychological systems that they’ve connected with it. So I made categories called ‘Productive,’ ‘Protective,’ and ‘Leisure,’ which were loosely, vaguely based on enneagram type three, six, and nine. The enneagram gives me ideas for categories, but I know those aren’t the only possible ways of looking at it.

I also have ‘social, sexual, survival,’ because of Ichazo’s instincts. When I looked at a page about Ichazo’s work, he actually had much longer more detailed lists of instincts, and it was confusing, and of course he always had things in groups of nine. A lot of that stuff isn’t talked about much in the ‘Americanized Enneagram,’ the enneagram that is familiar to most of us. He has a lot more detail in his original work. So if I wanted to, I could take lots of his instincts as a suggestion for my categories.

An example of the ‘Leisure’ category: doing things that have to do with getting music and playing music. Authorizing my laptop yesterday was a task intended to help with my leisure, getting music to enjoy it for its own sake.

‘Protective’: Disaster recovery, fixing the bad consequences of an accident I had. Preventing future disasters, by doing things like a monthly check on my vehicle, according to the instructions in the owner’s manual, to check the fluid levels, tire pressure, etc. Finding ways to save money, to avoid loss of money, to avoid wasting money, to cut expenses, to reduce the harmful consequences of something, to fix problems and prevent them.

‘Productive’: Creating something. Writing a story or a song. Learning a new skill. Finding a way to earn more income. Expressing myself.

But all of these three categories can be ‘applied’ to the three instincts. ‘Applying’ a ‘higher level category’ to a ‘lower level category’ or ‘different group of categories’ is a concept or mental structure that I have, so that there will be categories within categories. So for all three of those, productive, protective, and leisure, you can ‘apply’ the three categories of social, sexual, survival.

That’s an enneagram system mental structure, after years of reading those books and thinking in those terms. So there are nine possible categories: Protective/social, Protective/sexual, Protective/survival, Leisure/social… and so on. And it’s hard to think of what would fit into those categories.

‘Sexual’ doesn’t just mean sex when people talk about the instincts and the enneagram – it also means ‘close, personal, intimate relationships’ and ‘charismatic, warm, friendly personality’ (instead of cold and formal) and it also means ‘intense experiences.’ An example of Protective/sexual might be… (this is hard to think of)… activities, projects, and tasks that are geared towards preventing you from getting hurt in relationships?

When something is hard to think of, that’s the whole purpose of making these category structures: it forces you to look for something that’s hard for you to think of. It isn’t in your usual familiar group of categories, the easiest things to think of. But to someone else on earth, that category might be very, very important, and it’s all that they think about all day long.

This kind of thing is useful if you’re trying to create a story character, for instance. What does SOMEONE ELSE worry about all day long, someone different from yourself? These personality type systems are meant to explain why some people are so very different from ourselves.

If you look at the celebrities in the magazines, if you read about celebrities, a lot of them are the ‘sexual instinct’ type, and all that they worry about, all day long, is whether they are attractive to other people, and whether they’re having enough intense experiences, and whether they are in love with somebody. Then there are other people, like a Social/Self-Preservation type, who don’t worry very much about that, and they’re more concerned with whether they have a job, and material safety, and they’re being respected, and the people around them are like-minded and cooperating with them.

Anyway, that’s something I like about the enneagram, or any personality typing systems. They give me categories that I can use to think differently from my usual way of thinking.

I’ve noticed people who use the word ‘You’ more often than I do. ‘You’ is almost a taboo word to me. It makes me squirm and feel uncomfortable. I almost feel like I’m sexually molesting them or harassing them. If I say ‘you’ to a female and ask personal-directed questions, I feel like she thinks I’m a lesbian. If I talk to a guy and I’m saying ‘what do you think about this’ or whatever, I feel like I’m flirting with them or suggesting that I’m attracted to them. It happened once when I asked a girl ‘What are you doing after work?’ or something like that, and I was just asking in a casual way, not meaning anything, but I had this feeling that I was a lesbian and that it was like I was going to ask her out on a date or something.

Then, afterwards, it feels like we have a ‘special relationship’ and I am supposed to give them priority above other people. So if someone else walks in, I am supposed to value this one person more than the other person. And if I then talk in a personal way to the other person, it lowers the first person’s status and feels like competition, like the first person will want to butt in to the conversation and try to make themselves important and special again. If I did that with everybody, then everyone would be competing all the time to be the most important and the most special person. If someone gets left out, I feel bad. I don’t like to have a conversation where somebody is standing off to the side feeling excluded.

So I don’t like to say ‘you’ to co-workers or have lots of personal conversations. And I almost never do it, unless I’m using St. John’s Wort, and it’s always the puppeteers who suggest that I speak directly to somebody or jump into a conversation.

I noticed, many years ago, that it was very hard for me to remember and keep track of everybody’s likes and dislikes. There are some people who can name a friend or family member and then say ‘He likes this, this, this, and this, but doesn’t like that.’ It helps you with things like gift-buying. It means you know someone really well. But even when I’m dating someone, I don’t know them well enough to quickly and easily make a long list of all the things they like and dislike. Even when I was dating Eric, and living in his house with him, it was still hard for me to know what kind of gifts he would want me to buy.

I was sitting at Barnes & Noble a couple weeks ago, and at the next table beside me, in the cafe area, there was a guy and girl who were clearly ‘going on a date.’ They were two strangers getting to know each other for the first time. They were talking directly to each other and asking questions, ‘do you like this, do you like that, why do you like it?’

And their conversation was boring, and fascinating, and irritating, and disgusting, at the same time. The guy seemed fake and annoying and I didn’t like him. He was putting on a fake persona. He was self-conscious and he was aware that I sat down next to them and that I could overhear their conversation. But he gradually relaxed as I continued to quietly look at my magazine. And when he asked the girl ‘do you like this or that,’ those questions seemed to excite him, and I could feel the sexual excitement between them, and to me it was strange and unpleasant and disgusting. I didn’t look at him, I didn’t see his face, and when I sat down I didn’t even glance at the two of them – I saw enough to know that they were in the ‘doesn’t exist’ category of people, the people who are totally unattractive and boring to me personally. I saw him for a fraction of a millisecond, long enough to see that he had short hair and was clean shaven and wearing normal clothing, so I put him in the ‘doesn’t exist’ category and ignored him. He was just another member of the faceless crowd. So it was strange and uncomfortable listening to him asking these personal questions and getting excited.

And the girl seemed stupid and smart at the same time. She seemed weird and neurotic. She seemed both shallow and deep. She had a slightly nasal, stuffy voice, like someone with allergies, or someone with the Weston Price facial deformities that affect the sinuses. (Yes, I also have face and jaw deformities.) I was annoyed with her, too.

And I felt at the same time that both of these people would never like me. The feeling went both ways. I didn’t like them, and they didn’t like me. I envied them, and wished that I could be on a date with someone asking them stupid, trivial, annoying personal questions. ‘I like black cats.’ ‘Why do you like them?’ ‘I don’t know, it’s sort of that creepy Halloween thing, you know, the spooky black cats with the green eyes, that kind of thing.’ ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ Every question, every topic, was you, you, you.

In the English language, we don’t have a formal and informal ‘you,’ but other languages do. Some other languages have a formal ‘you’ that puts distance between you and the person you’re talking to, as though you’re talking to someone important, talking respectfully, in a cold and impersonal way. The English equivalent word might be ‘They.’

Imagine if you talked to someone and referred to that person as ‘They’ and ‘Them.’ ‘So, what did they do after work?’ and the person would respond, ‘We went home and watched TV.’ Or you could use formal titles, like ‘Where is my lady going on vacation this year?’ Or ‘Sir’ or ‘My Lord’ or ‘Sire’ or some other formal title. (Yes, I looked these words up on the net a few months ago. I was curious about what words could be used.) When you talk to people that way, it puts a cold formal distance between you. I tend to talk to people that way, with a cold distance.

But other people have a more warm, personal ‘you.’ In their conversation, they observe things about me personally. ‘I see that you like to do this,’ ‘What will you be doing?’ ‘What do you think about that?’ They are directing it at me personally, as an individual. This is the ‘sexual’ instinct, which is why we say that it doesn’t just mean ‘having sex.’ It also means ‘individual person instead of a group,’ or ‘personal.’

Have you ever had a teacher, for instance, ask you the question, ‘When you write an essay, do you need to imagine a specific person is reading it, or do you talk to a faceless group of people?’ When I write, I can talk to a faceless group. Sometimes, I vaguely have a specific person who I want to be reading it, but I am comfortable addressing a whole group instead of individuals. Some people don’t feel comfortable that way. They want to focus on one unique, individual person with their lists of likes and dislikes, past and future experiences, and so on, which are always different from one person to the next, and no two people are exactly alike.

I know someone at work who I feel pretty sure is a So/Sx type. She is ‘everyone’s best friend.’ No matter what she’s doing, you can interrupt her with a personal comment or a conversation, and she will focus on you, listen to you, and have a response directed at you, and you feel that she cares about what you’re saying. But if someone else walks in the room and says something, she is just as likely to hear that person, and then get into a totally different conversation with them. She is warm and likeable. She targets her focus towards one person at a time, and is temporarily in that person’s world. But there are many different people who can temporarily have her focus. That fits the So/Sx description.

I get a lot of this from a web page called ‘Info from the underground’ at http://www.ocean-moonshine.net. That web page has a malfuctioning first page, so you can’t just type in that address in the browser, you have to google it. If you type the address, it gives you some kind of error message. The real address is something like http://www.ocean-moonshine.net/aPIU23hPOId_3ewpiuc1380734187dkjs, some kind of nonsense code.

I’m interested in these instincts because I want to know more about what’s missing in my life. That’s why I’ve been trying to pinpoint my personality type for so long. But I have made the enneagram system look like it’s not reliable at all. I have a long history of changing my enneagram type, and before that, my Myers-Briggs type.

Here is my enneagram history: First heard about the enneagram when I was doing telephone therapy with Judith Swack (which is also when the severe electronic harassment began). I thought I was a Type One, because I have perfectionistic tendencies, and strong beliefs about what’s right and wrong in society. Then I thought I might be a Nine. Then, a Six. Then I thought I was a Seven. Then, a Five. Then a Four. Now a Three. The only ones that I was sure about were the Eight and the Two. Those descriptions are clearly ‘not me.’ I’m not a ‘strong, dominant, controlling person,’ and I’m also not a ‘warm, loving, giving, helping, controlling, manipulating, flattering’ person. (I sometimes do helpful things, but the description of the Two is much too extreme to be me, in being helpful and other-focused, all of the time. I know I cannot possibly be that.)

Many of the changes were suggestions from ‘the voices,’ who have been controlling me for years since the therapy. I had electronic harassment experiences before that, but they were never so severe and life-ruining as they have been in the past few years. It was like the voices wanted to deliberately prevent me from feeling sure about who I am, to prevent me from understanding myself, to prevent me from being able to control myself, to prevent me from seeing outside my limitations.

Either the voices are really, really stupid and incompetent, or really, really malicious and evil. Either way, they have done extremely harmful things to my life for a very long time. They either intended to harm me, or were trying to help me but were so stupid and incompetent that all that they did was cause more damage. Whatever, the result has been that I have gone for a very long time unable to meditate, unable to ask myself questions, unable to look at myself, unable to look at the future, unable to make decisions for myself, constantly bombarded with zaps and loud noises whenever I try to think.

Yes, I could use a tape recorder and I could record the audible-to-everyone, physical, external clicking and snapping noises that they make on objects inside and outside my house. The voices are not just in my head. Other people hear these noises and they call it ‘The house is settling,’ or ‘the boards are creaking’ or ‘the temperature change caused the wood to snap’ or ‘the temperature change made your windshield glass shrink or expand,’ which is how they explain the snapping noises.

If I drive someplace in my car, park the car, and sit there and meditate, I will have a couple of minutes of quiet, but very soon, there will be loud banging cracks on the windshield, as though someone is throwing rocks at the windshield. And it will happen again, and again, and again, and again. Those noises are harassment, an attack.

Sometimes, during or after a snap, I can hear voices, as though it was a sonic bullet and when it exploded it delivered the payload, a message, a signal, a high-frequency audio message. It’s my understanding that the snapping noises are caused by ultrasonic attacks, not radio frequency attacks, but, like all the victims, I am just guessing, based on what I’ve read, because I don’t spend my time and money to collect and use these weapons against people, so I don’t know what does what.

I got into writing a very long blog with no ending, just because I am entertained by the activity of writing, and because I haven’t decided to do any other activities, tasks, or projects, or whatever. I should read over this and try to wrap everything up.

Because of reading and writing this, ‘they’ started to wonder if I might be a so/sx type instead of a so/sp type. Fine, whatever you want to wonder about, go ahead and wonder. They’ll probably change my instinctual stacking a hundred more times before they settle on one thing. I’m keeping it so/sp for now.

http://www.ocean-moonshine.net/e142857369/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=20&MMN_position=83:80

Okay, I read over it, and I inserted a few more paragraphs and comments. And I broke apart the huge, gigantic paragraphs that are so hard to read. I’ll go ahead and post it now.

A Dozen Possible Causes of Obesity; my yellowjackets; where will I live?; personality types

(The ‘Dozen Causes of Obesity’ are actually at the very END of this post, not the beginning. I wrote a lot of ‘diary’ stuff first. So scroll to the bottom if you are reading about obesity.)

because of the yellowjackets under my apartment door, i have to plan my outings and errands so that i get everything done at once, instead of making separate errands after i forget something. this is an advantage, and a disadvantage, of living so close to town – that i have a short distance to anyplace i need to go shopping, so i don’t care much if i forget something and then go back out again a little later to get it. i can’t do that now. i bought a yellowjacket trap, and (even after i figured out how to set it up properly) they’re totally ignoring the trap!

i haven’t blogged much because: 1. i am focused on apartment-hunting, and 2. i haven’t been exposed to drugs very many times lately, except in the past few days. drugs always make me talk a lot more. they change my personality at work, too, and i talk to people differently, and behave differently in social situations – not necessarily better. i think my personality changes in a way where it seems like i don’t need anybody, like i don’t need friends, and like i’m always happy and don’t empathize with other people’s emotions, when i’m on drugs. it’s a fake happiness facade, sort of a coldness.

hair: still going with the no shampoo, dreadlocks experiment. originally, i was ‘scrunching’ the hair, wadding it up, crumpling it, the way i used to do when i had a perm and used mousse, long ago. now, i’m not doing that anymore. the scrunching was making these loops of hair, and i decided i wanted to see what would happen if i just let it be straight. i don’t think my hair will form really strong dreadlocks on its own. unless i let the wind blow it really badly, but i don’t really feel totally committed to dreadlocks yet. one thing i am doing now is checking for fluffy towel lint before taking photographs! the towel lint fluffs annoyed me so badly, i actually edited one of my pictures to remove them – and that’s saying something, because editing a picture is something i associate with fakeness, artificial, made-up runway models in magazines who have perfect, airbrushed photos. i had one picture that i thought turned out really good, but all my eyes could see was the one bright white spot of towel fluff tangled in the hair, and i couldn’t see anything else. ‘just another discovery in the experiment,’ is the idea – that this is one more thing i didn’t know about when i started this.

martin: was ‘let go,’ which i guess means fired. i feel as though i will be able to see him again, but it won’t be easy to do. ‘they’ tried to bond me with him in a long-lasting way, and ‘they’ made a big deal out of it, and they made me write these letters and things to him, which i’m assuming was part of what made him avoid me. i’m still going with the ‘parallel universe theory,’ somewhat, though – that he has tried to contact me, but can’t. i’ve actually verified with somebody that they were trying to call my answering machine, left a message, and the answering machine said ‘thank you for your message’ and disconnected them, and i never got the recording. meanwhile, other people were able to leave messages, just not that person. however, it seemed like an artificial setup, like it was too easy to prove, just like the several incidents of email interference that were also ‘too easy to prove.’ so it seemed like i was ‘supposed’ to prove to myself that emails and phone calls were being intercepted. anyway, phone hacking, ‘phreaking,’ is part of the theory. but i have not tried to contact him recently. i am guessing that he will be back in the fall for another semester, but i won’t know for sure until then, and i am just looking at his pictures to try to understand what he’s doing.

west virginia: they have been reminding me that i never really wanted to live in state college. i moved here because i was young and i was not yet independent. i had never lived on my own before, didn’t know how to pay bills, and that kind of thing. so i moved in with my brother, and had help from my parents, in the beginning. then, for one reason and another, i ended up staying here, but still did not really ‘bond’ with this place.

however, i have bonded with peter. and peter is married, and i can’t participate much in the big decisions, such as his medical care, or where he will live. i can’t take him away, because his son has friends here, and i don’t want to uproot his son. i would actually invite him to come to west virginia with me.

i am remembering the fresh air in west virginia. the hills are very different there, topographically. they are lots of small lumps, very complicated, instead of these long, regular, huge mountains with huge valleys in between. these are the allegheny mountains, i think. the appalachian mountains are… like another planet. there’s a reason why this matters. the fresh air thing – i often notice that when i go to the other side of the mountain, away from the town, the air is fresher over there, no auto exhaust. but in west virginia, i suspect (according to this theory) that the large number of irregular hills makes it easier to have places where the air is fresh, because the hills block the polluted air from blowing over that way. however, i lived in a rather rural area, too, and i might remember fresh air just because of that. also, there’s a lot more forest in west virginia, instead of tilled agricultural land with no trees. (don’t get me started on the subject of ‘the reasons why people are doing corporate monocropping, and why it’s always corn and soybeans,’ from a libertarian-anarchist point of view. it has to do with property taxes, subsidies, laws, and stuff.)

i’ve decided that fresh air is very important to my happiness, and i want to raise children in a place that has fresh air. you don’t know what it’s like until you’ve been someplace where the air is very different, if you live in a city and you have auto exhaust around you all the time, and the smell of asphalt streets, a dry smell. in the fresh air, it’s humid and smells like flowers and trees, and with every breath you feel a pleasant sensation instead of the yucky, sickening, auto-exhaust nausea that you feel in the city.

i’d like to go back to west virginia, except that peter is almost like a child to me, someone who i feel that i need to take care of. if i had a good, safe place in west virginia, if i owned land there and i was settled, then i’d invite peter and his family to move into my ‘community.’ i’m putting that in quotation marks, but i actually would like to start an intentional community for real.

the enneagram: i’ve been reading about instinctual subtypes. i knew about them a few years ago, but i hadn’t read any more detailed information until recently. when i read more details, it became very useful. it explains a lot about different people’s styles, their priorities. you don’t need to know the enneagram at all to understand the instincts. the three instincts can be learned about on their own, separately from the enneagram.

i’m going to copy-paste:

***
Sexuals attract others without really trying. They also repel others in the same way, like an anti-pheromone. This works like a screening function in the mating process. People typically have a strong reaction one way or another towards Sx’s, and vice versa.

Self Pres (self-preservation) people instinctively avoid certain foods and environments, and are likewise drawn to those things that nourish and sustain them. Sp’s have a strong reaction against things that threaten to harm their comfort or health.

Social is driven towards gaining protection and empowerment within larger entities.
Soc’s typically react strongly against things which would jeopardize or displace their position or reputation.
***

by the way, a guy named naranjo, who talked to ichazo, when they were developing the enneagram and the three instincts, this naranjo guy experienced some electronic mind control incidents exactly like some things that have happened to me. it’s at a site which i think is called ocean-moonshine.net, info from the underground, in a link called ‘the hidden lore of the enneagram’ or something. i’m not connected to the internet at the moment so i can’t look it up. (i’m offline.) he describes having a lot of weird physical sensations at one point, and also, some fake incidents of being urged to go to a particular location at a certain time, where he ‘coincidentally’ happened to meet somebody he was supposed to meet, and was told ‘these things happen when you are on the path.’ my answer to that: no, they don’t. they happen when criminals push buttons on machines and force people to do things. the end. this is a crime. it is not a ‘spiritual’ event and has nothing to do with being on the path.

anyway, about the instincts. each person favors one of the instincts more than the others. that’s their primary instinct, most strongly developed. then there is the next strongest one, then the weakest one. and you can understand a lot about their behavior, their style, if you understand that they are acting on their strongest instincts. they use abbreviations to show the strongest instinct, followed by the second strongest.

i’ve decided that i am probably this: myers-briggs ISTP, enneagram type seven, self-pres/sexual instinct (sp/sx). this is after many years of reading about personality types, and also having some suggestions from ‘the voices’ about what they thought i am. the sp/sx description fits me quite well, especially when i reread journals and fiction stories that i wrote a long time ago, as a teenager: they had a very mystical, mythical, pagan, folklore, fantasy style to them (sp/sx is described as ‘the mystic, the mate, the quiet supporter’) – not like the ‘all business’ style that you usually see with the other type, sp/so (self-pres/social). i always tend to focus on one or two very close, long-term friends, instead of a large social group. maintaining a large, impersonal social group is very difficult for me… and yet, i will be working on this after my life gets a little more settled.

the myers-briggs test is screwed up, and it tells everybody they’re an intuitive, when they’re not. lots of people are getting ‘INTJ’ and ‘INTP’ when they are actually SP artisans. the test needs to be redesigned. david keirsey has a ‘temperament sorter’ which helps a lot.

i took the myers-briggs test many times, back when i didn’t understand it, and i got: INTP, INTJ, and INFP, after several different tests. those are wrong, and it was actually ‘the voices’ who talked with me and convinced me that i’m not an intuitive. i don’t like using symbols, abstractions, metaphors, etc very often, but i’m capable of understanding them if i know that they’re being used. but i don’t like to use them myself. i had to struggle against the prejudice that ‘sensors are bad/stupid, intuitives are good/smart,’ which is a belief that you find in a lot of the forums.

obesity: i have been getting voices complaining to me about obesity. THEY’RE the ones who had me write about it in a previous post, where i was saying, what would the ‘mainstream world’ tell dennis he had to do in his ‘makeover.’ they always say, ‘lose weight,’ as though that’s something a person can easily just choose to do, on a whim, just because they want to, as though it’s their fault and as though they have control over it. ‘lose weight’ isn’t part of MY makeover, but it might possibly happen as an accidental side effect (or not! some of the dietary changes might actually cause some people to GAIN weight).

so here is everything i have learned about obesity so far. i assume that obesity is *just barely* under your own control, but not very much. two people can sit side by side at the same table, eating exactly the same meal, in exactly the same quantities of the exact same foods, and one person will be very fat, and the other person will be very thin.

causes of obesity that i have learned about so far: (i will probably remember more of them after i’ve published this, which usually happens when i write a list of any kind. these are in *no particular order*, so they’re not ordered by importance.)

*** A DOZEN POSSIBLE CAUSES OF OBESITY ***

1. bottle-feeding, infant formula. you MUST breastfeed babies. if you cannot breastfeed them, you must find a wet nurse, a substitute who will breastfeed them for you. *DO NOT* bottle-feed babies ANY kind of formula at all, and, in my opinion, that includes cow’s milk, even if it’s raw milk, even if it’s the healthiest, organic, hormone-free cow’s-milk that you milked that morning from your own cow at your own farm at home… although that’s the ‘best-case scenario’ to choose from if you absolutely have to.

another thing, it’s good to breastfeed children for a very long time, like until they’re three years old, or even older than that. it’s called ‘extended breastfeeding.’ in the united states, this is viewed as strange, creepy, taboo, something which is almost like pedophilia or child pornography, like having a sexual relationship with a child. it’s also seen as encouraging immaturity and dependence instead of teaching children to ‘be strong and stand on their own and not need mommy anymore.’

extended breastfeeding *doesn’t* make children clingy and dependent – just the opposite, it makes them strong and trusting and socially open to other people. and breastfeeding is *not* a ‘sexual relationship with a child,’ not in a bad way, even though it’s true, breasts and nipples are sexual, and the feelings and sensations of it are sexual. but this country was populated by PURITANS. does that tell you anything about our culture? we are the puritans. i’m not sure, i should read about the puritans – they’re probably LESS anti-sexual than modern american culture, with its hypocrisy of blatantly encouraging sex on tv and movies, but being all secretive and forbidding about it at the same time, and valuing unnaturalness and artificial breast implants and shaving every inch of your body so you look like a plastic doll or a robot… don’t get me started. anyway, breastfeeding older children is very healthy for them, and it is *not* an inappropriate relationship.

2. plastics? plastics might possibly affect child development. i won’t let my babies use a pacifier. they can suck their thumbs the old-fashioned way. don’t let them put plastic in their mouths. don’t get dental fillings either, especially at a young age.

3. vaccines. vaccines do so many bad things to the body, i can’t list them all. i don’t know for sure, but i suspect that some of the newer vaccines might be worse than some of the old ones, or else it’s because nowadays, they’re vaccinating at a very, very young age, as early as two years old or younger. worst case scenario: a bottle-fed baby, on soy formula, who gets vaccinated before age two, will probably become obese and have health problems all of their life because the vaccines and the formula screwed up their development. they can also get severe ADHD, autism, allergies, etc.

fat isn’t just a useless body tissue – it isn’t just an extra unneeded thing that you should get rid of. fat is a tissue that actually does something. it produces hormones, among other things. it is an active, living body part, made of cells and blood vessels, just like any other organ or tissue. vaccines create auto-immunity problems in a lot of tissues, including the intestines and the nervous sytem tissues, and vaccines probably attack the adipose (fat) tissues too. obesity could be an autoimmune disorder of the adipose tissue.

4. drugs, including secondhand drugs. because of my experiences, i know that you don’t even need to be *taking* any drugs. you just need to be exposed to somebody else who is using drugs, and they will go through your skin, or else you get them on your hands and then you touch your food when you pick it up. so if you know somebody who uses prescription drugs, you’re sharing those drugs secondhand. i experienced temporary, short-term weight gain after contact with a person using a psychiatric drug that causes weight gain. but it’s even worse if you are taking any drugs yourself. that even includes some natural, herbal drugs. i’ve noticed weight changes with st. john’s wort sometimes.

a co-worker recently broke up with her boyfriend. she is a heavy person; but she told me, and showed me, that she had suddenly, drastically lost a lot of weight, and her clothes weren’t fitting anymore, because she said she was too upset to eat much because of breaking up with her boyfriend. however, i think it isn’t because she’s ‘too upset to eat.’ i think her boyfriend has a prescription drug, but i’m not sure. by staying away from him, she is no longer getting secondhand drug exposure from him, and she is able to suddenly lose like twenty pounds, or whatever it was. i’m not kidding, it was a huge sudden weight loss in only like one month. and she wasn’t even trying. she showed me how there was all this extra space in her old clothing (you know, like those advertisement photos where somebody pulls their pants waist out to the side to show how much extra space there is).

5. nutrient supplements. synthetic vitamins and minerals have been used more and more. they are everywhere. that includes weird things like amino acids and lots of other new supplements which aren’t just vitamins or minerals. now they’re in these sports drinks, which i won’t touch. i wish i could find the article again, an article i read which said that using synthetic vitamins will trigger allergies. it’s true, i started eating a breakfast cereal fortified with all those fake vitamins and right away started sneezing and having a runny nose, which hadn’t happened to me in years – i have no nasal allergy problems at all, unless i go inhale the pollen of a couple specific types of flowers, but no big deal. anyway, don’t take nutrient supplements while pregnant. don’t give them to children. that includes fluoride. fluoridated drinking water is very bad for you. anyway, it is possible that synthetic nutrient supplements are contributing to obesity problems, which have been getting worse and worse in the past couple decades.

6. air pollution? some studies are connecting air pollution with obesity. i’m not sure about this. i think that air pollution does do a lot of bad things to you, but i think that people living in the cities tend to be the type where the mother and father both have jobs, and they leave their babies at the day care, where they get… bottle-feeding. instead of breastfeeding. living in the city is very expensive, so both parents have to work. they can’t stay home and breastfeed. so air pollution may or may not be one of the causes of obesity. they noticed that obesity is associated with big cities that have air pollution. however, i still see a lot of obese people in areas that are ‘rural poor,’ where they don’t have much air pollution. poverty seems to be the cause of it. poverty, once again, causes families to send both parents off to work, and the children are kept at day care, or with a babysitter, bottle-feeding them. i could write all about what causes poverty – the income tax, for instance, and property taxes, and 40-hour work week labor laws, which cause people to always be under-employed because nobody wants to pay overtime… don’t get me started…

7. rbgh – recombinant bovine growth hormone. this is a synthetic hormone given to dairy cows. i have never gained weight more quickly and easily than when i was drinking a lot of milk. however, i read that rbgh was only created recently, in the mid-nineties, and i was in college, gaining weight (about 25 pounds: normally i range from 120-130, but in college, i went up to 135-145) and drinking a lot of whole milk, in the early nineties… although actually, i left school in 1997, so that kind of overlapped with the time period. i’m not sure. anyway, the hormone helps the cows produce a very large amount of milk… but the hormone comes out in the milk, and then it affects the humans who drink it, making them get fat and have other hormone problems. don’t drink milk. just don’t.

some people are switching to other kinds of milk, organic milk, raw milk, etc, making sure that it says it doesn’t have any hormones – i assume that’s okay. anyway i’ve noticed a problem happening when i eat butter in particular, or ice cream: my thighs and butt get slightly fatter, literally overnight. i wake up the next morning, and when i walk, my thighs will be rubbing together because they’ve gotten fatter. it can’t be just from the amount of butter itself, because it happens even if i eat only a very small amount of butter. it has something in it which triggers a fat increase. and i swore it happened even when i ate butter imported from europe, where bovine growth hormone is illegal, and i was deliberately avoiding rbgh by buying that. so it might just be all dairy products. or pasteurized ones. i really don’t know. that’s why i’m not sure whether it will be helpful just to avoid rbgh, but still drink and eat dairy products.

8. microwave ovens, microwaved foods, ready-to-eat foods. i hesitate to say that, because i don’t entirely agree. they say that the severe obesity epidemic began in america about the same time that microwave ovens became popular. it’s true in some ways, but not the whole story. supposedly, the worst thing you can do is microwave foods that are in plastic containers. i don’t know enough about this, especially about plastics and their estrogen-like effects. i know a lot about things which cause direct, immediate, observable effects (‘i ate this food, and felt sick and restless within an hour’ is observable). some of the effects of plastic are hard to observe. the only time i have seen problems with plastic is from my composite resin dental fillings, which gave me, and are still giving me, chronic breast pain. (i will be getting rid of those fillings before pregnancy.) i noticed it with a plastic retainer in my mouth, too, after i had braces – same thing, breast pain. so the microwaved foods might not all be bad, if they aren’t in plastic containers. again, i don’t know enough about this.

9. chemicals. unknown chemicals in food, or in your environment, your house, on the soil, in the air. i don’t know enough to be specific. this includes pesticides and herbicides, and heavy metals. it can be in the paint in your house, in certain kinds of drywall that puts out fumes, anything that causes environmental illness can also affect obesity, but i don’t know how much of an effect it has. lots of chemicals are hard to avoid, especially when you don’t know about them until it’s too late.

10. hormone disorders. hormone problems happen sometimes without a good explanation. but other times, hormone problems are caused by xenohormones, xenoestrogens – chemicals that behave like hormones when they get in your body. they can affect the thyroid too. i don’t know the whole list of chemicals that do this. if anyone ever tells you that you have a hormone problem, you have to wonder what is *causing* the hormone problem. don’t just assume that hormone problems happen for no reason. the doctor won’t bother asking what’s causing it. doctors will just prescribe hormone pills for you. doctors usually don’t have any idea about the chemicals in foods and in the environment which can have hormone-like effects. their solution to everything is just ‘prescribe a pill.’ nutritional disorders can also affect the hormones. you can have nutrient deficiency, and nutrient excess or toxicity. i think that toxicity happens a lot more often than people think, because of the huge amounts of synthetic vitamins added to foods and drinks. they add WAYYYYY too much. and synthetic vitamins behave differently than natural vitamins, especially synthetic vitamin D added to milk. synthetic vitamin D excess will actually cause symptoms resembling deficiency. you’ll think you’re not getting ENOUGH vitamin D, when actually, you’re getting too much of the FAKE vitamin D. so anyway, all those things can affect your hormones or behave like hormones.

11. plants and weeds. after my experiences with transdermal herbal oils, i know that you can have drug effects just by touching plants or inhaling the air around them. small quantities of plant drugs in your environment could affect you, depending on what kinds of local weeds and plants you live with. i read just recently about a couple of poisonous plants that can cause birth defects, such as cleft palate (harelip). all you have to do is walk next to them, walk through a patch of weeds, and if you are close enough to get this poisonous plant on you, it could cause birth defects, miscarriages, etc. the same thing could happen with obesity. that wouldn’t explain the recent severe obesity epidemic in the past couple decades, though, because people have ALWAYS been surrounded by plants and weeds, for millions of years. however, the article i read did tell me about birth defects, which i would like to know. i forget which poisonous weed it was. something which we have in pennsylvania. lupine? i forget.

anyway, i think ‘plants and weeds’ are not very likely to be a major cause of obesity, but they can cause some strange, unpredictable symptoms in people if you don’t know that they’ve been exposed to a poisonous or medicinal plant. and they can affect your sensitivity to other drugs, by interacting with them. i just have to mention it because this is my special area of expertise. view it as ‘herbal medicine,’ which isn’t necessarily safe just because it’s natural. natural herbs have side effects too, whether you eat them, drink them, take them in pills, or are simply living near them.

12. soybean oil, vegetable oil, hydrogenated oils, overcooked fats? these started being used in the twentieth century. the weston price website talks about how bad these are for you. they can explain it much better than i can. http://www.westonaprice.org. i think that’s the right URL.

vegetable oils and hydrogenated oils are chemically different from natural saturated animal fats. the oils have been changed so much, they can’t be used properly by the body. some of them, like soybeans, have hormone-like effects. it’s probably worse when given to young children, or during pregnancy, where it drastically affects their development for the rest of their lives.

i am becoming interested in raw foods, but i haven’t started trying to eat anything raw yet – but cooked fats might possibly be worse than raw fats. raw fats might be better for you. i want to avoid parasites, which can be deadly, like trichinellosis, so i want to learn a lot more about this before i try eating anything raw (other than fruits and vegetables). i mentioned raw foods (raw meat, and possibly insects) and raw fats because cooking foods can change the fats, too, but not as badly as hydrogenated vegetable oils. i’m still researching these diets to be safe before i try anything.

***

so i’ve listed a dozen possible causes of obesity (and as soon as i publish this, i’ll recall a few more), other than ‘you’re eating too much.’ the causes of obesity are more complicated than that. there has to be a reason why it’s suddenly gotten very, very severe in the last couple decades, out of nowhere. people have ALWAYS eaten food! but in the old days, hardly anyone was fat, not like nowadays anyhow.