Monthly Archives: July 2015

The power of harmlessness

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Male culture is, even in this enlightened age, highly hierarchical. It’s easy to miss, because it’s not like every male group of friends had uniforms and epaulets. The hierarchy is, amongst peers, entirely informal.

But it is also extremely strong, and that means that nearly all men rapidly internalize the idea that they have to always be ready for a challenge, and that in order to protect their spot in the pecking order, they have to project a certain amount of menace. There has to to be those who are afraid to fuck with you unless you are at the very bottom.

Few men at the bottom are there by choice.

In fact, these are most likely the harmless men. The men who, for whatever reason, lack enough of the urge and the machismo of the male hierarchy in order to be able to (or even want to) intimidate anybody. They want to be liked, or left alone.

So they attract bullies. Bullies tend to be very invested in the hierarchy, and the harmless man puzzles them. They can’t understand even the possibility of someone opting out of the hierarchy. They will be drawn to the harmless man and pester them until they do something the bully can understand, namely fight back.

(That is, of course, a lab-pure example. Physics in a vacuum. The real world has many more variables, including gender role enforcement and recreational sadism. )

In fact, such is the confusion in the mind of the hierarchical bully that the harmless man’s attempts to withdraw from the hierarchy can feel, to the bully, like a kind of rejection. It is processed as if the bully had offered to shake the harmless man’s hand, and the harmless man had, instead, pulled away from the bully and ignored him.

Switching genders, women also enforce male hierarchy. They do so by evaluating men, at least partly, on that selfsame ability to produce a “don’t fuck with me” vibe. This leads them in the direction of men who seem like they could protect a woman from harm, usually in the form of other men who might be looking to take “their” woman.

Luckily for the harmless man, there is his female half, the gentle woman. The gentle woman does not like anything rough, brutish, or frightening, and she is drawn to the harmless man’s gentleness, kindness, and above all, how nonthreatening he is.

And that is where the harmless man shines. He is nonthreatening, and hence to some women, very approachable. And this approachability has benefits far beyond merely attracting the gentle woman.

In every man’s life, there will come times when dropping their guard and being gentle and harmless are not just advantageous but absolutely necessary. The testosterone driven alpha stud might very well be good at protecting a woman from harm, and be virile enough to give you strong babies, but might well be just as aggressive and challenging to his own children.

And who wants a father you can’t leave alone with the kids?

And what about how he treats you in between battles? The attitudes and behaviours that make him a prime cut warrior will lead him to be rough, even brutal, at home if he has no “off switch”.

From this heteronormative (the GLBT version of this phenomenon is beyond me at the moment) template, we can see that the ideal man according to the baseline of female desire would be a man who is an alpha dog outside the home and a sweet and gentle lapdog when inside the home.

This is, of course, the equivalent of the male-oriented female ideal of “a virgin in public and a whore in bed. ”

Nature is not usually so discrete, however. Not only does testosterone lack an off switch, the modern man is stuck with the dilemma of trying to both retain enough male power to make his woman feel safe and to retain her respect while at the same time reassuring her that he is no threat to her or the kids and is, in fact, a very good parent too.

The harmless man oversolves one half of the equation. He gives off all the signals of being a good and gentle, patient parent who will be safe to leave with the kid. But can he protect the home?

The aggressive man oversolves the other half. He definitely seems like he is the biggest and strongest and could take on all comers. But is he safe?

In this, the harmless man has the advantage, in that there is very little home protecting or wife earning to be done in the modern world. There is, however, a lot of caring and tenderness needed.

But sadly, the human sexual instinct has not caught up with that. Like with food, our brains are knocked around by supra-normal stimuli. In this case, it takes the form of the men and women we see in the media. Whether it’s the zero body fat Photoshopped supermodel with the huge tits or the equally Photoshopped mountain of meat with a killer smile, our sense of reasonable expectations is distorted, and what we imagine to be the “average” person is skewed by the adding of so many high potency sexually stimulating people.

And all the while, our basic human sexual programming tells us to go with the most sexually stimulating partner, not the one who is actually the most compatible or the best breeding partner.

So when people are young and full of hormones, they will let their gametes do the talking and sleep around with the high stimulus people, and for some people, the lesson that sex is no basis for a relationship takes a long time to sink in.

But the harmless man has the ultimate trump card in that once the hormones die down and the women become capable of thinking long term, they are the ones the women will turn to for long term romance and possible child-rearing.

Mot all the women, of course.

Just the ones worth keeping.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Beware the minimizer

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The self-minimizer, that is. People who minimize others tend to look like this.

Bring Myron Reducto back, Stephen Colbert!

Bring Myron Reducto back, Stephen Colbert!

No, what I am talking about is a psychological tic known as self-minimizing. When a person has low self-esteem (yup, we’re talking about that again), sometimes they have a tendency to self-minimize. That means that they always minimize their own needs and desires and treat everyone else’s needs and desires as more important than their own.

What they want isn’t important. They want to know what you want. It can seem like selflessness, and in a sense it is, but only in a very unhealthy and unbalanced way.

It partially comes from a very low sense of self due to intense self-loathing. To even ask the question of what one really wants or needs is to look at oneself, and for the depressed, that gives rise to an extremely high level of psychic distress as they gaze upon the object of their greatest loathing, themselves.

Thus, a lack of self-reflection retards the individual’s ability to perform the kind of soul-searching and examination of life experiences that leads to a stronger sense of self. The depressed person might spend hours ruminating over a painful incident from the past, or contemplating their fears about the future, but because of this intense self-loathing and hence self-aversion, they cannot put any of their ponderings into the context of the self.

Then there is the fact that depression itself is caustic to the self. As I mentioned last night, one definition of depression is “anger turned inward”, meaning that depressed people have a tendency to take their anger and frustrations out on themselves. This is not only detrimental to the self-esteem, but to the vry frabric of the self. It’s hard to build a solid sense of self when one is always tearing oneself apart.

Another route by which self-minimizing behaviour arrives is through a toxic childhood environment where the child’s needs and concerns are treated as trivial or even so unimportant that it’s a crime just to bring them up. Children write down everything that happens to them on those impressionable little minds of theirs, and it is from these notes that the child learns who they are and what their place in the world is.

Treat the child as unimportant or obtrusive, and they internalize this message and end up treating themselves the exact same way you treated them.

Now that we’ve established a few theories of origin, let’s look at the phenomenon itself. It is characterized by an unwillingness to express any sort of desire, need, or even preference in any matter. The overall message is “Oh, what I want isn’t important!” and, relatedly, “Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m just fine. ”

This is the person who says “Oh, it doesn’t matter to me. Whatever you want is fine!”. Or “I’m just happy to get anything at all. ” Or “I’ll just have whatever you’re having!”

And if, by some bizarre brain abnormality, the person genuinely did have absolutely no needs, desires, or preferences, that would be fine. But of course, they are human beings who actually do possess the usual complement of needs.

That too would be fine if the person lived in a world of total sociopaths. But in the real world, there is bound to be at least a few people in your life who care about you, and that’s where the trouble begins.

Because if you care about someone, you want to make them happy. That means seeing to their needs, catering to their desires, and respecting their preferences.

And if you are dealing with a self-minimizer, none of that information is available.

What seems superficially to be selflessness and compassion is revealed to be something darker and deeper. No matter how much you love and care about the self-minimizer, you will be unable to get the information about their desires etc straight from the source. You will have to get it via observation and deduction.

So already, this “selflessness” is actually forcing people who care about you to work a lot harder than they have to with other people who are not so “selfless”.

But it is actually much worse than that, because the self-minimizing behaviour comes with an even heftier price-tag, namely the total abnegation of personal responsibility. By withholding all information about their own desires etc, the self-minimizing person guarantees that they are not responsible for anything that happens.

And this would be fine if it was possible for responsibility to simply disappear, but it does not. For the most part, responsibility is preserved, and what responsibility is not taken for oneself is inevitably forced upon others.

Also, self-minimizing people lie. They lie all the time without even thinking about it. When someone expresses no preference when some part of their mind knows damned well that they have a preference, that’s a lie. When someone says they don’t care about what happens to themselves and (of course) they do, that’s a lie. And worst of all by far is when someone says they don’t need anything when they in fact they desperately need many things, that’s a lie.

Think of what a position it puts people who care about you when they can’t even ask you how you are and get a straight and reliable answer. Helping and pleasing a loved one isn’t merely a desire, it’s a human need, and by denying someone you claim to love and care about the information necessary to do so, you cause them immense and needless distress.

And that’s the message I want to leave for you, gentle readers. When you compulsively self-minimize, you are not being selfless. You are in fact being incredibly selfISH and causing untold pain and suffering to those poor souls unfortunate enough to care more about you than you do yourself.

For their sake alone, fellow self-minimizers, you need to get over your self-aversion and, if not exactly get in touch with who you really are, at least make up a plausible set of preferences et al to use when the situation calls for it.

I think you owe it to those who care about you to give them at least that consideration.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Also, remember what it means when I shift into the second person…. )

Low self-esteem as a defense machanism

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What, exactly, do people get out of having low self-esteem?

Because make no mistake : nothing happens within the human mind which does not, in some sense, benefit it. It might be a lousy deal which costs far more than what is gotten out of it, but the actions are still in search of something.

Indeed, the main problem in the life of the modern human is a question of how to meet our many and overlapping emotional needs. We have thrown open the gates of possibility, and that has made this happiness equation more complicated than ever.

So what, exactly, is the need met by low self-esteem? Even self-loathing?

The most common hypothesis that I have encountered is that the need met is one for a sense of safety. Lurking within the mind of people with dangerously low self-esteem is a very deep fear that higher self esteem will somehow attract danger, and that it is only by staying buried in the mud out of humility that one can avoid attracting the lightning bolts of the gods.

This is an excellent theory, and I think gets to the root of the problem. But it is not a complete theory. There is a lot more going on than compulsive humility. We must dig deeper.

Another theory is that low self esteem is the product of people taking out their anger on themselves, internally. Everyone’s life results in some frustration and anger, and while others might take it out by becoming cranky and irritable, and hence securing a target for their anger, a low self esteem individual might well attack themselves instead, criticizing themselves and attacking their own self-worth as a way of venting that anger without risk of confrontation.

Of course, this is tragically futile, because when attacker and the attacked are the same person, the short term gain in vented frustration comes at a heavy, heavy cost to the self-worth of the individual in question, and from that low self worth comes a whole new world of frustration and pain.

It’s a lousy deal.

Then there’s the chemical argument. Without the right serotonin levels in the brain because of the too-hasty re-uptake of it by the brain’s own cells, all positive emotions are suppressed. Normal emotional expression is impossible and the psyche cannot help but be warped by this constant chemical imbalance.

In a sense, if this is true, then all other theories must pale in comparison. It may simply be impossible to love yourself when your serotonin levels are off, and there is only so much modern medicine can do to fix them.

My antidepressants keep me from killing myself by keeping my mood above a certain level. But they don’t make me happy.

However, when examined, this proposition begs the question : how did those levels become chronically low in the first place?

Maybe it’s a genetic defect. Or the result of an infection we didn’t even know we have. Maybe somewhere within us, there is a parasite that is very fond of the raw materials for serotonin.

But we can’t discount the possibility that the reason is entirely psychological. We are still very shaky on the relationship between brain chemicals and psychological reality. In fact, we generally don’t like thinking about it at all. We prefer to think of ourselves as more autonomous than that, and the notion that something going on in our minds, possibly even the result of a consciously made choice, is to blame for a chemical imbalance offends and disgusts us.

Myself included, of course.

We can accept that what goes on in our brains is electro-chemical in nature, and we can accept that our psyches can be supported or damaged by life events, but when you interpret one in terms of the other, things get discomforting pretty fast.

See that little blip on your brain scan? That’s the time your father took your bicycle away.

Another theory of low self-esteem is that it stems from a lack of positive self esteem input from one’s life, either in the past or in the present. This is often misinterpreted as a lack of praise and positive reinforcement, but that interpretation leaves out the vitally important ingredient of meaningful effort. Self-esteem, in short, must be earned. It cannot simply be handed to you by the powers that be.

It is certainly true that the “nurture” of one’s life can be wildly insufficient and one can suffer from a kind of emotional malnourished as a result. This lack of emotional nutrients can even lead to something akin to a disability in life.

But no amount of unearned praise or arbitrary reward will fix that.

That is why I think that we need to incorporate meaningful labour into our conception of human needs. It’s not a need like oxygen is a need, but it’s a need like love, sex, acceptance, and so on. Society needs to recognize said need as well as realize that it is in its best interest to find a use for everybody, and do its best to provide for that need.

Sorry, that was a rant, not a theory.

So which of these theories is true? Probably all of them, in different ways. They are all different perspectives for something that is too large for us to see all at once, and as such, can see radically different from one another and even in conflict, but they are all true perspectives on the same enormous subject of human self-esteem.

The truth is, we know so very little about how our minds work, even a century after Freud. The human brain is the most complex object in the universe, as far as we know, and the more we learn about it, the more there is to learn. Every answer spawns a dozen more questions. And it’s a tossup as to whether the scientists or the psychologists will be first to the finish line.

One thing is certain : low self esteem is pandemic in modern civilization, and we need to understand the nature of the problem before we can find a cure.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feel good food

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Author’s Note : I am not talking about comfort food or delicious food. Also, I am going to rant about nutrition again.

You hear a lot about what food tastes good, and what food is (supposedly) good for you, but very little about how food makes you feel. And this seems odd to me.

It’s like there is no happy medium between the (sometimes very) long term thinking of healthy eating and the extremely short term pleasure of flavour. After all, we human beings are not terribly good at thinking in the long term when it comes to our basic pleasures like food and sex, and on the other hand, the most delicious taste in the world is gone seconds after you experience it. There has to be some kind of middle ground.

What I want to know is how foods make you feel later that same day. What foods lead to a better day, and which ones are almost guaranteed to make you miserable? In short, how does one eat to be happy?

This problem is complicated by something I have talked about before, which is the need for human beings to stimulate the reward centers of their brains in order to maintain positive self-worth. It might well be that the high-reward foods we love so much that it is killing us are nevertheless, in a strictly short-term sense, the better bet for being happy that day.

Or maybe not. The problem is, we simply do not have the information to make this kind of decision. The world is polarized between “tastes good” and “good for you”, and while corporations compete to push that reward button harder than anyone else, they also compete to sell you health food and fad nutrition.

Meanwhile, ideologues of nutrition, as well as people that can only be described as nutrition denialists, muddy the waters further by trying to get followers for their own little empires of thought and influence, and all under the guise of trying to help people lead better lives.

If they truly wanted people to lead better lives, they would look at the whole picture.

We the public are left without plausible data. The world of nutrition research is maddeningly unscientific and non-comprehensive. as well as completely without method or reason. There are so many vested interests trying to sway the science their way, and so many people wedded to their nutritional beliefs because it seems like they worked for them, as well as various actual medical professionals selling, with total innocence, nutritional folklore as science, and it’s no wonder that the modern human just shrugs and eats whatever seems to make sense to them at the time.

And when it comes to how foods make people feel good after eating them, the data basically does not exist. People have theories about it, but there is no systematically collected and carefully collated dataset on which to base these theories.

All we have is mountains of unhelpful anecdotal evidence, and people’s own life experience, which as I have mentioned before is not so great at long term thinking when it comes to basic needs.

A person could live a decade in deep depression because of how they eat and have absolutely no idea. In fact, they might double down again and again on the very foods making them miserable because they use those foods to self-medicate their depression.

This is clearly and categorically unacceptable.

What is needed is a coordinated and integrated effort to study the effects of nutrition on mood. Not a million little projects from corporate scientists looking to please their masters or desperate professors seeking tenure.

Instead, it should have the same combination of open-source accessibility and the ability to put all valid results in a comprehensive framework that will lead to a single body of solid knowledge that the Human Genome Project used.

People will be free to claim a section of the problem and work on it on their own, and if their results are deemed valid, that section of the problem will be considered solved.

Frankly, this is how all large and complicated science issues should be tackled.

Of course, the first and most likely to stir the hornet’s next is a comprehensive review of all current nutritional data and beliefs. No sense in re-inventing the wheel on that score, but the review would have to follow all the current lore to its source and then evaluate the validity of that source.

And if no valid source is to be found, the information is deleted.

The next phase would be to do all the basic research needed to fill the gaps left in nutritional lore (I have a feeling those gaps will be quite large) so that the basics of human nutrition can finally be hashed out.

That will not be easy, but it will at least be a matter of biochemistry. The final phase is the really tricky one.

In said phase, we will have the enter the murky, slippery world of happiness research. You will have to feed people certain foods (or types of meals) and then figure out how that food made them feel.

Obviously, there will be self-reporting. As unreliable as self-reporting can be, it is still the best way to establish a baseline on what the participants think is going on.

Harder data would be more elusive. You certainly can’t tell how happy someone truly is simply by observing them. Possibly, in the modern day of fMRI, it might be possible to at least establish what is really going on in the brain, and by comparing that to the self-reports of participants, it might be possibly to get some kind of clue as to what the real story might be.

But for the most part, we would have to take people at their word.

In the end, what I hope for is to give unto the world the knowledge they need to make informed diet decisions. If people could see what they eat in terms of how it will make them feel after eating it, they would be empowered to make smarter choices and in the end we would have a happier, healthier population.

And that’s something we all want.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

On living forever

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Just found out I’m a god. There’s a blood test for it. Still processing the news.

Seriously though, I have been watching a documentary called The Immortalists, about the recent advances in understanding how and why we age and what we can do about it, and it has gotten me thinking about all the big questions concerning immortality.

First of all, do I want to live forever? Do I want to be forever young?

The answer is, of course, hell yes. More specifically, I don’t want to die before I’m ready. I would like the possibility of death to remain open should I decide I am done and want to put that final period on my life’s sentence, but other than that, I want to become young again and stay that way.

If I had to pick an age, I think I would go with 25.

If it was just a matter of nostalgia, it would be 20, because that was the best time of my life. I was in college, taking courses, with a circle of friends, and everything seemed pretty wonderful. My life had a plan, my friends were a hoot. All I had to do was get good marks and have fun.

But I am a cautious type, so I would go for 25, because by then I would have completely my final stage of brain growth, and honestly, who wants to face eternity with an incomplete brain?

Maybe 26, just to be safe.

Leaving the personal, let’s move on to the bigger issues of immortality, such as : what about aging? After all, to be immortal only means to take death out of the equation. Technically, it says nothing about youth.

What if someone invented this kind of just-past-the-post immortality? Would people choose it, knowing that it inevitably meant aging to the point of being little more than a pile of pain and imbecility?

I think some would. Certainly, if it was the sort of thing you did once and that was it, like taking a pill and then boom, no death, a lot of people would go for it. After all, nobody wants to die.

Which would lead to another of immortality’s issues, population. Eventually, all those young people who took that fateful pill would reach the drooling imbecile stage, and society would begin to accumulate them. They would be expensive to maintain for people who are not even there any more, and pressure would build to “pull the plug” on them.

But of course, that would not kill them. It would only increase the suffering of whatever was left of them.

That leads us to the quality of life issue. Sometimes, death is the only way out of intense suffering. What if someone suffers some profound injury, like getting torn in two, and yet continues to live? Would it be humane to deny them death however it might come to them at out hands? Euthanasia becomes a vital issue when it is literally the only way to die, period.

Another vital issue : brain death. At one point is the person, despite being physically alive, effectively dead?

But say we have the aging thing licked as well as the dying, which seems likely. What then? What would true immortality be like?

Well, for one thing, while an end to aging might keep our brains from becoming old, it does not keep them from becoming full. We act as though our memories are infinite and we can just keep on learning and remembering forever, but that is only because our lives, like our brains, are finite.

When life becomes infinite, we are on a collision course with brain capacity. No matter how efficient and capacious our minds are, they are still finite, and no matter how much our brain compresses the memories (which we experiences as a fading of memory), eventually we would hit the hard limit.

So what when? Hopefully, we would simply forget most of our previous life. Our brains would develop a form of helpful and limited amnesia, and we would carry on more or less the same.

That’s biographical memory, though. What about knowledge? If we lived forever, those two forms of memory would begin to compete, and it could be that for some people, biographical memory would have the higher priority, and they would lose knowledge in order to make room for it.

Not the basic things, of course, like speech and toilet behaviour and basic social rules. But a lot of non-essential knowledge could go. I find it hard to even imagine what that would be like.

Of course, for us cerebral types, the opposite might be true. We might find that we still remember all the trivia we love, but sincerely have no memory of the first fifty years of our lives.

As far as we know, we came into existence on our 50th birthday.

Another thing to consider in an immortal world is the stages of life. It used to be that puberty and adulthood were the same thing. This was necessary because people didn’t live that long and they couldn’t waste any years of reproductive potential.

But then we developed agriculture and civilization, and people started living longer, and so childhood could, in most senses, be continued past puberty. This let us invest more in each child, and that advanced the level of society far faster than ever before. Suddenly, we had a new category : teenager.

But what happens when everyone lives forever? Theoretically, childhood could last forever. Or it could end at puberty like before, and people could be teens forever, or whatever they wanted.

The phases of life would be, essentially, voluntary.

Of course, that assumes that we are all aging to adulthood before the immortality “kicks in”, so to speak. A truly horrifying possibility : the treatment that makes us immortal can be done at any age, and so some people are literally children forever.

Imagine if parents could keep their child all sweet and dear and innocent…. forever….

With that happy thought, I hereby finish the day’s speculation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

On being unique

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Yup, it’s that topic’s turn in the barrel.

I am struggling really hard to see my uniqueness (or rarity, I suppose) as a good thing. I realized only today that I have viewed my uniqueness as almost exclusively a negative for a very long time.

Pretty much, ever since my social world fell apart in the second half of first grade.

For the first half, I was no pariah. The details are understandably fuzzy and so it’s hard to summon up more than a vague and blurry emotional impression of the time, but I recall being somewhat popular and I definitely remember making people laugh (on purpose), and being quite happy with my teacher as well, who was a very sweet and kind woman of gentle and caring demeanor.

A lot like my mother, come to think of it.

But then a little red haired kid named Trevor told everyone I was fat, and made fun of me for that, presumably out of some form of jealousy, and that was that as far as my social status was concerned. I fell all the way down.

Part of me will always hate his guts for that. That can’t be changed. But my more adult side doesn’t really hate him. After all, he was a kid too, and had no more idea what he was doing than I did.

Life just works out that way sometimes.

After that came the realization of how little in common I had with the other kiddies, and the social gulf was sealed. To them, I was weird, gross, and full of myself. To me, the world went cold and I felt truly abandoned and on my own.

And to be frank, I was.

Every since then, I have felt cursed. I had these two things, being fat and being crazy smart, that meant I was alone all the time. I couldn’t get along with kids my age. And I didn’t have a lot in common with my siblings either, who after all were all 4+ years older than me.

Age stratification is very harsh when you are young,.

And my two best friends from my preschool world, Trish from next door and Janet from across the street, were a year older then me, so they went into school a year before me (the year I spent in Not Kindergarten), plus I was socially embarrassing, so they wanted nothing to do with me.

They didn’t know what they were doing either.

The obvious conclusion, from a child’s point of view, was that there was something very wrong with me that made it so I had no friends and no support from anyone. Whatever that thing was, even if it was something that the outside world told me was supposed to be good like being really good at schoolwork, had to be something terrible as well.

Essentially, I was cursed. And I felt that curse as a heavy weight every single day. I was always trying to do the right thing, but in my life that meant do what you’re told and stay where you’re put.

And to be honest, I was never told or put much.

I think every kid wants to be good. Kids want their parent’s approval more than anything in the world. But what that means is up to the parents. Whatever it is, that’s what will form a very deep level of their child’s personality.

Mine wanted me to be a low maintenance as possible. So I was.

So I have spent most of my life feeling like my role was to wait patiently for someone to tell me what to do. Whatever I did other than that was up to me.

Sadly for me, that is still the case. Perhaps that is why I am so afraid to take initiative on anything. What if I am doing something else when my instructions finally come in?

Anyhow, I have not experienced any positive effects from my uniqueness. Not consciously. School was too easy for me to take seriously. Getting an A on something was par for the course. It was so easy for me, and I received so little positive feedback from the world about it, that it never felt like an achievement at all.

It was just… what I did, I suppose.

Even today, when I know I have a lot of intelligence and talent, it is hard to take any comfort at all from it. I’ve always had a lot of potential. I was told that over and over again as a child. But nothing ever came of it, so I can’t take it seriously, even though I totally should.

Not everyone has the gifts that I have. I should be grateful. They told me that over and over again too.

But I wasn’t. And that hasn’t changed.

I wish I could be grateful for my gifts. That gratitude might motivate me. Go out there and show the world how awesome I am, and all that. But I just don’t have enough motivation to overcome my fear, ennui, and inertia.

In a sense, I suppose I am waiting for the world to make the first move. Waiting for someone to hold out their hand to me and say “I believe in you, and I will help you get through the rough terrain between you and success. ”

Obviously, that’s not how reality works. Even if such a person existed (which is unlikely), I would at least need to put my works somewhere they can see them and decide to help me. Nobody is going to break down the doors of my tiny little world and rescue me from the custom dungeon I have locked myself into for twenty years.

So obviously, whatever keeps me from putting myself out there has to go. Around, through, or over, it doesn’t matter, but it has to be taken out of the picture before I can truly grow.

And I want to grow. I need to grow. I am so tired of being so small on the inside.

I’m a sad little Peter Pan, who desperately wants to grow up.

But I might need a little help.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Too much input

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So like, a reverse Johnny Five.

The outline and details of my massive mental stimulation addiction are becoming clear. And it scares me what a huge and ugly a thing it is when you take a good look at it.

I spend my whole days stuffing my mind with as much stimulation as I can take. And it’s about far more than merely passing the time till I die, which is bad enough.

It’s about actively suppressing my emotions and anxieties with a steady drip of distraction and absorption, letting my mind toys envelop my entire world just to keep me from having to deal with reality or my emotions.

It’s a sick habit, despite its philosophical and creative benefits.

And the worst part of it is, I never give myself down time to finish processing everything I have absorbed. I’m not just constantly stuffing myself, I’m swallowing it all whole without pause and suffering massive intellectual indigestion as a result.

That indigestion is, at least some of the time, called “depression”.

Today was a therapy day, and talking about this idea with my therapist really advanced my thinking on it. It’s all so clear to me now. I have a massive addiction that went unnoticed for so long because, thanks to the Internet, its needs are always met.

I don’t go Jonesing for Internet for very long.

And for the mental stimulation junkie, the Internet is an all you can eat custom buffet. I will never miss a fix. I can always acquire as much mental stimulation as I want at any point in time. That’s especially true for me because I stay home most of the time. My dealer is never more than a WiFi signal away.

Today was an exception. Today was quite busy for me, by my standards, and likewise was rather stressful.

First, I had to go see my GP. I very stupidly kept forgetting to make the appointment and so I ended up running out of all my oral diabetes drugs all at once.

The last full dose of them was Saturday morning. It’s Wednesday today. I went three days sans meds. I… was not well.

In fact, I was clinically diabetic. That means everything was way the fuck out of control. I felt ravenously hungry all the time as my lack of proper insulin response left whatever I ate just sitting outside my cells, waiting to be let in.

Plus, I hardcore craved sweet things. Way back before I was ever diagnosed with diabetes, that was one of the things that tipepd me off that something was seriously awry. I developed this massive sweet tooth, like nothing I had experienced before, and I started to crave sugary things with my entire body.

And I would do highly uncharacteristic things, like buy a box of cookies and eat the whole thing in one sitting. And still want more. It was my body urging me to eat so much sugar that some had to get through.

Now, don’t get my wrong. I enjoyed sweet things as much as the next guy. But I had never had the traditional “sweet tooth”. I never craved sweet things. I just liked them.

So yeah, it sucked to go back to those pre-diagnosis times for a few days. I got my meds now, and hopefully those will put me right in a couple of days.

Back to the GP. Technically, I was late for my appointment, which was at 1:30 pm. I showed up at around 1:45 pm. I underestimated how long it would take me to catch the 405 bus.

But that doesn’t matter in the slightest, because my GP (by the way, did you know Americans don’t call them that? Weird. ) is never ever ever on time.

So despite my lateness, I still had to wait 45 minutes, until 2:30 pm, till I actually saw him. Yup, over an hour late for my appointment. This is sadly typical.

In fact, if he had been much later, I would have been gone already. I had a bus to catch for my therapy appointment!

As is, I didn’t get out of his office till 2:55 pm, and that meant I misses the 405 I should have taken, and had to take the next one. As a result, I ended up arriving at the stop for my therapist’s place at 3:30 pm right on the dot.

That meant that I was going to be late by exactly the length of time it took me to walk from the bus stop to my therapist’s office. Isn’t that special.

It was rough going, as it always is. But it turned out that, by some amazing miracle, it once more didn’t matter, because he was late too. He came out and said “Sorry to keep you waiting, I lost track of time!” and once more, I said “Don’t worry, I only just got here myself!”

The next bit of tension and excitement came when I stood up after the therapy session and got a simply massive head rush. One of the worst I have ever had, and I have had a lot over the years. It felt like my head suddenly filled with hot staticky cotton balls. It was all I could do to stagger down the middle of the hallway (well, it averaged out to the middle) cna get to the public phone to phone Joe.

It eventually calmed down as, I presume, my blood got around to all the right places again, but I still felt pretty wobbly.

It was then that I remember that I hadn’t eaten since I had a light snack at 10:30 am, and that was a very stupid thing to do any time but especially when clinically diabetic.

I am just not fit to care for myself.

I got food at 7-11 eventually, and I more or less back to normal now, apart from some slight dizziness.

But for a while now, I was technically in mortal peril.

Oh well. Tomorrow I will call to make an appointment at a sleep clinic to get myself back on CPAP. I have the money for new shoes. And in September, I go back to school.

Things are looking up!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My idea for a fat farm

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First, plant yourself a crop of high grade fat…

Seriously though, I have some ideas for how I would set up and run a weight loss clinic, and today, I will share them with you.

First, it should be somewhere somewhat remote. It doesn’t have to be way out in the middle of nowhere, but it should be far enough away from the nearest town to discourage people from fleeing. After all, the likely clientele are not exactly going to be in shape for a fifteen mile hike across the wilderness.

And even if they are, think of how many calories they will burn!

The basic idea would be to have the whole thing run on a points system. [1] Healthy food costs nothing, or very very little. The unhealthy foods would be more expensive. and the less healthy a food is, the higher the price.

Patients would be given a small amount of points each day, which will be more than enough for healthy meals with a little slightly naughty food for dessert with dinner.

Anything else you will have to either save up for or earn.

You earn points by doing healthy things. Small amounts of points can be earned from doing small healthy things, like drinking water and keeping body and teeth clean. But if you want to get points-rich quick, there is only one way : exercise.

This is where a certain amount of fine calibration of the system will be required. The idea would be that exercising results in enough points to be motivating but not enough to earn more calories than the exercise burned.

This way, the supra-normal rewards of unhealthy choices actually work toward the patients’ health. If a patient craves that piece of chocolate cake enough, they will be willing to earn it via exercise. If not, then they have at least avoided eating dangerously unhealthy foods.

Either way, the patient’s health wins.

Towards this end, it is vital that the staff maintain an attitude of bright and friendly indifference. No pressure is to be applied to any patent towards any particular solution to the patient’s needs. This way, the patient has to find their own balance between diet and exercise, and that is exactly the lesson they need to learn.

And speaking of staffing, the staff will have to be top notch because they will be dealing with people who are, in essence, addicts experiencing withdrawal. As such, the patients will likely be experiencing a high level of emotion, the most common of which is likely to be anger. But sadness, withdrawal from social activity, hysteria, and even suicide attempts are not out of the question. These people are trying to overcome a massive problem. One must be prepared for anything.

To that end, counseling is to be available 24/7, both in the formal sense and in the “just someone to talk to” sense.

In order to put the patient at ease and minimize the feelings of deprival, there is to be absolutely nothing clinical about the facility. Instead, everything should be luxurious, comfortable, and pleasing to the eye. The facility should look more like a high class luxury resort than any sort of medical facility.

In addition, there should be a strong emphasis on pleasures other than eating. Toward that end, anything goes, as long as it’s healthy. Again, it should be like a luxury resort, able to support any sort of sport, game, or body treatment people desire.

Personally, I would also include some very deft, subtle, and skilled sex workers. If there is anything that could distract people from food cravings, it’s amazing sex. Not sure if this service should be free or cost points. I could go either way.

However, I realize that prostitution is illegal in most places, so this might not be practical. At the very least, then, there should be no rules whatsoever about the patients fraternizing with one another.

If anything, it should be encouraged. Whatever can keep their mind off food long enough for the withdrawal symptoms to die down and let them adjust to a healthier way of life.

Health should be the central focus of the facility’s mission – NOT weight loss. Weight loss has many health benefits, true, and if the plan works as well as it should, weight loss will likely result.

But there should be no weigh-ins whatsoever. There will be scales available for those who like to track their progress, but their use will be entirely voluntary and there will be no official records of the results.

A certain amount of encouragement to socialize should be available. Again, nothing mandatory, but a wide variety of functions like dances, mixers, speed dating, and lightly silly group games should always be available. There is often an element of loneliness to overeating. Socialization can go a long way to easing that loneliness.

Again, no pressure towards anything in particular. And no unsolicited advice. If a patience asks for guidance, then they must receive it. A lot of patients will feel quite lost and out of place, and they will need someone to point them in the right direction from time to time. It is very important that these people do not feel abandoned or bereft.

But there is to be no unsolicited guidance. The patient must remain in control of the process as much as possible.

Oh, and I should note that there should be a concentrated effort to find the best tasting healthy snacks and meals as possible. A top notch chef experienced in healthy cooking would be ideal. And there is to be no monotony to the healthy fare. Every effort is to be made to make the healthy foods as exciting, tasty, and filling as possible.

After all, we’re not trying to teach people not to eat. We’re trying to teach them that eating healthy does not mean completely giving up on enjoying one’s food. It just means making better choices.

There’s more, no doubt, but those are the broad strokes. Obviously, this is the ideal system. Realistically, a facility like this would be extremely expensive to build and to attend, so no doubt in the real world, sacrifices would have to be made to keep the budget down to something affordable.

Nevertheless, I think the system as described would be highly effective, even if scaled down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. What can I say, I am a sucker for the flexibility and efficiency of token economies.↵

Sleep is life

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Or so it seems today.

Having one of those sleepy days I talk about now and then today. Every time I have one, I feel the need to blog about it, even though they are all the same.

But they’re such a drag.

Slept for most of today, and I am still sleepy now. Slept from around three in the morning to 11:30 am, so that’s eight and a half hours, then went back to sleep at 1 pm and didn’t wake up till 4, so that’s another three.

So we are looking at almost twelve hours of sleep, and it doesn’t seem like nearly enough. I feel like I could sleep for a week.

Partly, this is due to a medication change I initiated. For a while I was taking only 1 Quetiapene with my Trazadone every night instead of the two I started out with. And it worked okay for a while.

But then I started having nights of insomnia where I didn’t get to sleep until 6 or 7 in the morning, and that sucked. The whole point of these pills is to prevent insomnia and ensure that I get at least six hours of decent sleep a night.

Trust me… good sleep is a precious thing.

Abd aksim as I have mentioned before, I want the ability to decide to go to sleep, and have that decision stick. I want something that can override whatever level of mental stimulation and hence mental agitation I have and just plain make me go to sleep.

Basically, I need a drug powerful enough to quash all the noise in my head and take me off to dreamland.

That would be nice even without sleep being involved, to be honest. Something to reduce the overall noise lever in my head would be wondrous beyond measure. I sometimes feel like I live in a stressful environment, like a war zone, because of all the noise and chaos and battle. It would do me a world of good to be able to spend a week in the country, far from battle.

But the battle is in my head, and I kind of have to take that with me wherever I go.

After all…. I live there.

True to form, I am not even half way through this blog entry, and I have already come close to dozing off at the keys twice.

So far, my sleep has not been packed with dreams, or at least, not that I can recall. So perhaps that’s why I am still so very sleepy. I haven’t gotten to the part where I catch up on my highly necessary dreaming yet.

Humans need to dream.

I definitely feel like I did dream, though. I just can’t remember anything in particular. But I have a very strong feeling that dreams did happen. I can’t tell you what they were but I can feel the footprints they left behind in my consciousness. Making forgetting them more irritating.

I hate knowing that I have forgotten something and that no amount of brain wracking will bring it back. It’s frustrating as hell to know it’s in there somewhere but I can’t get it out.

Oh well. At least it spares you lovely people from having to read my long rambling dream descriptions. I have heard that listening to other people’s dreams is one of the dullest things ever, and I can see why. There’s no way for you to put another person’s into context, because the context is their own very personal inner world.

So what seems very important to the dreamer because it resonates with their deep table of symbols is just stream of consciousness oddity to everyone else.

Personally, I love hearing about people’s dreams. Dreams are amazing. When we dream, our mind is open in a very powerful way, and we can perform operations on the contents of our minds that would be far too dangerous to do consciously.

But when we’re dreaming, the consciousness as we know it is inactive. So in a sense, it’s like putting something under anesthetic in order to perform surgery on them,

In sleep, your mind can heal itself.

That doesn’t make it a sure thing, though, sadly. The deep structures (and strictures) of our minds do not disappear when sleep comes. That which you cannot accept when awake will likely still be unacceptable in our dream worlds, no matter how good a job our subconscious minds to at disguising the truth in order to make it more palatable.

Near-sleep experiences : 4, and counting.

If only there was a way to fully relax the mind and cease all resistance to its attempts to fix itself. We could probably save ourselves years of therapy that way. All the unresolved emotions would express themselves and then fade away, and we would have minds that are fully healed, balanced, and clean.

But of course, that’s not possible, because all that detritus becomes part of our identity and preserving identity has an extremely high priority in the human mind, possibly the highest. Once something becomes part of our sense of who we are, our sense of identity will preserve it no matter how self-destructive or poisonous it is.

That’s why so many gurus teach that in order to find salvation, one must overcome the self. Enlightenment comes from understanding who we really are underneath all our false assumptions about ourselves and returning to the state of identity of a young child, who has no thought of who they are in the eyes of others and experiences life directly.

Hence the question, “Who would you be if you didn’t know who you were?”.

Perhaps that’s why I am so fascinated with the amnesia story. You wake up somewhere with no idea who you are. From that point on, it’s up to you who you are. You are freed from all the accidents that formed you and can start over from scratch.

To most people, I suppose, that sounds utterly terrifying. But to me it seems like…. salvation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Art and patience

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Art requires patience. Everyone knows this.

But in a sense, I only figured this out for myself relatively recently. My lack of patience when it comes to creation is a severely limiting factor on the quality of said creations, and I can no longer pretend like that’s no big deal.

Like I have said before (I think), creativity burns inside me. Once I get the creative juices flowing, the fuse is lit and the fire is burning and I am filled with the desire for release.

So yeah. It’s a lot like sex. Or rather, masturbation.

And my problem, not to be too gross about this, is premature ejaculation. The big release doesn’t happen till I complete the thing I am working on, and this wild impatience of mine makes me all fired up to get there as soon as possible.

Hey…. fire imagery!

Obviously, such haste is inimical to quality. I get by, but no matter how you slice it, my work tends to be quite rough. Whether it’s a blog entry or a video or a minute of music, I am working against the clock.

What I really fear is the fire going out. It’s happened to me before. I have lost the fire in the middle of doing something creative and hence lost the thread, so to speak. And then I have to stop because anything else would be just going through the motions and I refuse (so far) to do that.

For me, unfelt art is not worth doing. It has to be alive and vibrant or I might as well be typing “all work and no play makes Fru a bad playwright) over and over again till I fill up the Internet.

I realize that makes me sound a tad precious, maybe even spoiled, but that’s the way it has to be. Creativity like mine comes from a deep sensitivity that acts on many levels, and some of those levels don’t necessarily make sense, but they are what they are and there’s not a lot I can do about that.

My muse, ladies and gentleman. She’s in charge. I just work here.

This burning impatience also leads to my crippling unwillingness to go back to something I have “finished” in order to make it better. My need for creative release demands acts of pure creation, not rehashing something I have completed. The very idea of going back to something after my mind has labeled it “done” makes me feel nauseous. Why would I want to go back to something old and dead when what I really want is to do things that are fresh and new!

So I end up pushing my creations out the door as soon as they are fully formed, then I lock the door from the inside.

I know how it should be. I should be able to tame that muse of mine well enough to harness those flames of creation and use them to drive an engine that can move me further and slower. And with more power.

But I don’t know if that is even possible. I’m addicted to the rapid burn. The very idea of slowing that down makes me want to weep from sheer impatience. Slower? If anything, I want it to be faster. I’m barely holding my fudge as it is!

So instead of slowing the process down, I have made it deeper and broader. More of my energies go into writing my little diary entries of mine than ever before, and I hope to eventually get to the point where it takes my all.

Maybe then I can make art that is truly worth something. Right now, I feel like I just dabble. My lack of a reverse gear means my output is brilliant but messy and I feel like it can be hard to see the shine under the sloppiness.

It’s not what I want for myself as a creator. I want to present the world with beautifully cut gems of art, not rough uncut stones still embedded in the ore.

Here’s a hunk of mud. I swear it has jewels in it somewhere, really good ones! You’ll just have to dig around for them. I couldn’t be bothered. I sure hope you don’t find that, say, incredibly insulting. That would suck, I guess.

Still… it’s your fault I’m not a rich and famous author yet! After all, you’re the one who couldn’t see my unparalleled brilliance which should be evident to all of sensate creation through the big pile of mud I dumped on your desk.

Oh, who am I kidding. It’s shit.

I can only hope that as I age, taming the muse will become easier because I will become less impatient. I’ll be able to finally slip that harness on her and ride her to where I want to go instead of helplessly trailing behind her.

The view’s better from above.

In theory, there could be a superior creative outlet for me, one I have never even thought of, which could increase the density of my output to the point where it uses all the wild horses I can rein to it. I have no idea what that would be, but who knows, maybe it’s lurking out there for me to discover it.

And maybe I am being too hard on myself. Maybe my output isn’t as intolerably sloppy as I feel it is, and it actually is good enough for some editor or other gatekeeper to see the jewels shining in the muck.

Of course, I will never learn the truth until I start sending my stuff to editors and whatnot, and just like that, we are back at where we always end up. Looking at that wall between me and the outside world, and trying to work up the nerve to build a door into it. Leave my safe little matchbox of a world long enough to at least leave one of my babies on the doorstep of someone I think will treat it well.

Or at least tell me what I need to do in order to make it adoptable.

That metaphor gut weird real fast.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!