Antisocial behavior going quite well. Nothing to report.
Today is dave barry's son's birthday. Happy birthday, son-of-dave-barry! I know this because in his rather brilliant parody of an american history textbook entitled _dave barry slept here_, he dispenses with all dates, replacing them with 'October 8th,' and explaining the significance of that date to be his son's birthday. So, happy birthday, dave barry jr. October 8th has been stuck in my head for that reason for the past 11 years or so. It's sort of bizarre.
I'm currently having the experience of being hungry and not wanting to eat. I can feel the physical sensation of hunger in my stomach, but I'm just too lazy to go to the kitchen to get something to eat. I think for me, and likely many others, hunger and the desire to eat have been completely unlinked. However, I think I will make myself a sandwich, just to stop the sensation in my stomach.
October 20th is coming up, which is, of course, the 1-year anniversary of my blog.
I'm still in 'no social contact' mode. This isn't a big change, really -- I had hardly any social contact before. But this way, I don't even have the background thought that someone might call or IM me. Actually, today I disconnected the doorbell too, just for good measure. I guess I don't like the idea that just anyone can make things chime and ring in my house -- it's a combination of a boundary and a control issue. Same thing with AIM: I'm tired of the taskbar flashing at me when I'm trying to read, write, or do other things (like play 'maelstrom').
I think I've been too 'open' in the past. By 'open,' I mean easy to access, psychologically and emotionally. Other people I know don't give out information if they don't want to, don't see people if they don't want to, etc. But I developed this super-open hippy ethic along the line somewhere, which includes leaving my door unlocked, always picking up the phone, always answering email, always responding to instant messages, etc. When someone asks me a question, I have a hard time not giving them the answer, unless I outright lie. But this is difficult too -- and I'm sure there's another way to not give out information if you don't want to. I could do what Peter does: just sort of grin and not say anything. This constant availability sort of made me feel like an errand boy to society, and I'm not going to do it anymore. I don't have to explain myself to anyone -- I'm not on trial. I'm not angry about it, but I'm going to try to do more what I want to do, and not let other people get inside my head as much as they did before.
If one looks at humans on a continuum, with sociopathic autism (not caring about others and being utterly unaffected by them) on one end, and a sort of shivering, frightened, ultrasensitive neurosis (caring too much about others over one's self and being too affected by them) on the other, I'd say I definetly fall too far towards the 'neurosis' end. I've always said 'i hate people,' but what I'd really like to say is 'i don't care about people, and they're inconsequential to my life and happiness.'
Fuck laksjl sadfljksajflkdsfajasdlsfjad lsd fsladj glsajglsakjgs dgklsad lkgjasjdsljkg lkasjd glkjasdlkg salkgj sdjlaxmvacxjlb kxjcgaso ijvcx lkj lkjxvh lkjx xjkav klxz ilsajk vkjxc hilsahf oadyshv lksavh sajhv a.
I took a big step today. I wiped out my buddy list and uninstalled AIM, deleted my email address book, and turned off the ringers of both house phones, as well as the volume on the answering machine. The next step is to leave up a permanent vacation message on my email account, but I expect messages from the c & o canal association and the national park service, and don't want to give them the 'crazy idea' that I've completely flipped out and am eschewing society in its entirety.
Haha, or I could filter any and all incoming email to /dev/null. That would, by definition, be 'the toughest spam filter around.' I heard that on a TV commercial for verizon, and I thought it was funny -- it made me think of simply filtering out every email to best fit james earl jones's claim.
Maybe next week.
I have a meeting tomorrow with HIRRS and that idiot patronizing counselor I don't like, as well as a dedicated DORS public servant whom I very much like. I don't think HIRRS is the best agency to be helping me, really. And I'm not even sure I want help. Of course, I do need a job -- at least a temporary job, so I can earn enough money so that I can get out of here forever, since I listened to my father two years ago when he advised that I not take leftover student loan money and set myself up in vancouver. Instead, I frittered it away on food over the past two years. Yeah, that was a good move. I wouldn't have had a job in vancouver waiting for me, of course, but I'm sure that just getting out and on my own, plus the real pressures of survival (food and shelter) would have provided enough impetus for me to get a sustaining job. I'm not an idiot -- clearly, I can work. I just don't have to now, so I don't, because I prefer not to deal with dumb assholes. Anyway, I regret that decision two years ago, but the only thing to do now is get on the stick and earn some money so I can do what I should have done then. I'd say I need $5,000 or so. It shouldn't take too long. Anyway, if worse comes to worse, I'll just be a bum in the pacific northwest, and maybe lose some weight. See? Win-win situations! We look for those in the Total Quality Management program.
Anyway, tomorrow evening hopefully a couple of people will make it over to my house to drink a six-pack or two. There are about 5-10 DC area SDFers, and I posted on bboard that they should come over on Thursday and hang out, since my mom is out of town. I think at least one person will show up.
One person whom I hope does NOT show up is a girl who came over the other day. I made the mistake of telling her that I was lonely over the phone, to which she replied 'awww I'll come visit you.' one can't really say 'no, fuck off' at that point. Anyway, she came over, and it was a total fucking disaster. She is crazy, and more or less unfit for human interaction. She was ordering me around, insulting me, and acting like a spoiled 8-year old. She was also fearful and aggressive -- she reminded me of a wounded and cornered cat. For instance, if I incidentally walked near her, her eyes would get huge and she would say 'get away from me!' I felt like a babysitter and/or psychiatric nurse. Something is clearly going on there: either severe childhood sexual abuse or organic mental illness. Her 8-year old vocabulary, grammar and voice-quality, promiscuity, self-destructiveness and fear/aggression dichotomy all point to childhood sexual abuse, but I ain't no shrink. All I know is that she was rude, disrespectful, nasty, and insulting. A psychopathic, autistic, petulant brat, of the worst order. As a final coup-de-grace, she 'borrowed' $5 from my mom (whom she didn't even look at when greeted, much less thank for her generosity) so she could get home. So, no more of that -- she's not welcome in my house again. If she comes over on Thursday, then I'm going to have to tell her that she's not permitted to enter, which could get ugly.
As always, people can suck it. Boy, I have to admit I feel better after deleting AIM and turning off my ringer. Very peaceful and quiet.
I've begun a revolutionary new diet program (the 'molly groger ripoff program,' or MGRP). Alternatively, it might be called 'mindful eating practice' (MEP). It consists of four rules. The first three are listed in order of importance (most-important to least-important), but the fourth, being sort of a meta-rule, is in a class of importance by itself; it transcends.
The MGRP was, of course, inspired by molly groger and her book entitled _eating awareness training_, to which all credit is due. But really, her book could have been condensed into a few paragraphs, if not those three above paragraphs. I find that's often true of books, and even more often true of self-help books.
Groger talks a lot about not eating unless one is hungry, but that's sort of the whole point, I'm afraid. People who have been unable to control their weight or eating habits are eating more often than their body demands, and are paying attention to false 'eat' signals (loneliness, boredom, restlessness, anger, sadness -- almost anything can become a false 'eat' signal), which are usually harder to ingnore than genuine hunger pangs.
Groger, the slender buddha, suggests zen-like that people 'pay more attention to their bodies' and 'ignore the mind when it tells you to eat, but only heed the body' (I'm paraphrasing). Unfortunately she doesn't really get more specific than that. These 'mental' signals, or false 'eat' signals, can be extremely compelling, as I'm sure those of us with a weight problem are aware. In my opinion, it's more realistic to 1) chew your food, 2) sit down to eat, 3) keep a journal and 4) don't be a nazi about it, than it is to affect 'eating only when you're hungry,' which requires a great deal more strain, effort and self-discipline if one tries to 'just do it.' eating only when hungry will arise naturally from the four rather starkly un-abstract steps above (haha, my diet book is only one sentence long). Well, maybe the fourth is a little bit abstract, but not really, and that's the only one. Just to tell a dieter to 'eat when you're hungry' is a little bit silly and far-fetched, in my opinion.
Hunger is a reliable indicator of your body's need to re-fuel. If the urge to eat is felt without the physical sensation and noises of hunger in the gut, then it's safe to assume those urges are false 'eat' signals. But it's best not to even worry about this, but rather focus on my four rules. In my experience, it's even harder to resist a pathological compulsion to eat than it is to go without food when hungry. Often, I've been distracted on the computer and postponed eating, even though my stomach was gurgling. However, when the urge to EAT hits me late in the evening out of restlessness, sadness and boredom, I'm like a crack whore sucking the pipe.
Yes, a central issue is 'eat when you're hungry.' but this is such a huge paradigm shift and radical change in behavioral self-discipline that it might not be realistic to attack 'eating when not hungry' directly, but rather to achieve that kind of awareness and equilibrium by following the four rules of MGRP.
I'm not entirely clear whether this 'diet' results in weight-loss. However, I think it will, since it seems to result in 'less food consumed.' but, as we all know, the best way to lose weight is to author your own diet book.
I screwed up the date at some point. Or maybe not. Who cares.
I fear that I'm becoming more of an asshole lately, with 'lately' being equated to maybe the past year or so. I think it's definitely been on the overall increase during that time period. Actually, a good way to judge would be to go through all of my blogs and see if there are any trends towards assholishness from oct 2003 to oct 2004. I think it's pretty clear.
One thing I thought of was that instead of telling people off to their faces I tend to passive-aggressively write bitchy things about them in this blog. I think I should stop that, and start telling people what I think of them.
I've been getting very angry lately, and expressing it well through chat. I find it very freeing and empowering. But, of course, all I can do is get angry virtually. I can't do it in person.
Maybe I should start killing people.
You know...the scary thing is that this blog is heavily censored. What's written here doesn't represent the depths of my darkest being. It gets much, much worse in my own private thoughts and fantasies. I don't share those, mainly because I really do think people would avoid me even more than they do already if they knew the true extent of my depravity. James once told me that everyone has a dark side, and that one is supposed to suppress one's dark side.
I wonder what kind of evolutionary advantage a dark side might provide. I'd guess it allows one to suppress empathy and cooperative instincts if need be. Essentially, enabling competitive behavior -- that's the purpose of the dark side. Competition is an important part of survival, and (not to overuse this phrase) our 'hard wiring.' this brings me back to my theory on economics (even though it's likely been paraphrased to some approximation): cooperation within a discreet system.
Human cooperative drive is naturally expressed within a certain discreet system or group, and then this group competes with other groups. The theoretical variance of the group gets interesting; a group/system can be as small as one, or as big as everyone on the planet. As an example, imagine tribes of hunter-gatherers, wandering around europe 10,000BCE. They need to share food, defend each other from animals, help each other build shelter, etc. They can't undertake survival on their own -- that would be unreasonable. However, the resources they cooperate to harvest are also being sought by other tribes wandering around, who want to take them for their own use. This engenders competition between tribes.
Some contemporary discreet systems in which cooperation can work for the common good of that system's members are nation-states and families.
Which brings me to a critique of capitalism: under a capitalist system, everyone is made to compete with everyone else -- even individual family members take an adversarial stance against one other in terms of money: charging one other interest, wondering if another is holding out or hiding funds, making sure everyone pays 'their fair share,' etc. These attitudes are so entrenched that a typical family in a capitalist country doesn't realize that they are competing with their offspring, siblings, parents, etc. Unfortunately, under an economic system that encourages this kind of behavior, family members competing with one another is rewarded.
People are naturally cooperative creatures, but they've been brainwashed and coerced by the system of people who directly benefit from capitalism (the rich) into competing with one another. This is not to say that competition doesn't have its place -- it does, but to reduce the size of the discreet system to 'one' is unreasonable. With this system, we essentially eliminate cooperation. The funny thing is that such competition doesn't usually get them anything -- it only redistributes wealth to the already wealthy. But we still see a person who earn $30k a year as something like a store manager, who is a republican, capitalist, fiscal conservative. Clearly his competitive behavior isn't making him richer. However, the social brainwashing is still in effect, and works to take the store manager's money and give it to the store owner.
It's possible that the 'brotherhood of man' is an unrealistic vision, but certain instances of penny-pinching behavior within very small groups is an effect of capitalistic brainwashing. And obviously, competition with everyone else -- the existence of no discreet systems other than every individual -- doesn't work to better the majority of people. But this is essentially what we have in america: every individual is in competition with every other individual, and most are going to lose at this game.
The problem is, by a certain standard most don't lose, in america. Even the lower-middle class are quite comfortable with their satelite dishes and mcdonalds restaurants. And it's this comfort level of the middle class that prevents the overthrow of the wealthy and the equitable distribition of resources. So is it really a problem? Yes, on a global scale, as exemplified by anti-state terrorism. A nation in which all of the citizens compete with one another will inevitably bring global competition to a new level of ferocity, simply because that single-minded pursuit of 'more' that drives individual competition extends everywhere, and resources exist throughout the globe.
Capitalism, by definition, serves only the wealthy.
Ever since I've started chewing my food properly, I've had diarrhea. It might not be a causal relationship (i get random diarrhea from time to time, possibly because I'm so uncareful about eating old food). But it's possible that my digestive system isn't used to having so much of the job done in my mouth before letting loose the stomach acid, and that it'll take a little time to adjust. I've literally been swallowing my food whole since I was a toddler. People sometimes wonder 'how can he eat so fast?' the answer is 'he swallows his food whole, like a python. Sometimes it gets stuck in his throat, and he has to force it down with a swallow or two of water. But ordinarily, he sees no reason to drink with his meals. He's a big weirdo, really.'
The other day I realized something that maybe should have been obvious: sex is considered dirty because it literally is dirty -- human genital organs are precariously close to the excretory organs (not sure if that's appropriate nomenclature). Sexual intimacy carries with it, by definition, some fecal intimacy.
I'm in my night-time loneliness phase. My mom is at her boyfriend's house, and I don't have anyone to talk to. Sometimes I wish that I had more than one 'real life' friend (alpesh, who comes over from time to time). AIM, email, and SDF's social forums just don't cut it anymore, I'm afraid.
Now that I think of it, I used to be quite normal when I was younger -- from the age of 16 on through about 22, I had a group of friends with whom I hung around and did stuff. But they all got married and/or started on their career track (often moving away in the process) when they turned 22 along with me, while I remained in college. I didn't have any 'real' friends while I finished my degree, finally getting it in 2002, and hardly any now. Most people don't base their social life on a group of friends after the age of 22, but rather on a monogamous relationship. Then, the pair might be shallow friends with another couple, but having 'friends,' as they understood the definition at the age of 16-22, are a thing of the past.
It's hard for people who don't go along with the herd to find social happiness, or even any sort of happiness. Society has prepared a prescribed course of action for everyone: attend elementary and secondary school, go to college, start a career, get married, have children, retire, check into a nursing home, and die (sometimes they get married before starting a career, or even before finishing college, but the time-frame is still extremely similar). All of these things fall on a strict time-table.
So, this is a lonely time for those of us who are single, and have just finished college at the age of 28. Of course, some of this loneliness has to do with the fact that I'm antisocial and reclusive, but some of it does have to do with my not following the accepted and acceptable path.
On that note, here's an amusing image of my current account balance:
Here's what I have to do: 1) lose weight, 2) move out, and 3) get a job. I place these in the order of how appealing the activity is to me, from most appealing to least appealing.
There's a reason people like foucalt, who are prone to describing reality as a social construct, tend to study and write about mental illness: mental illness, even more so than most other things, is very clearly a social construct.