Ina Disguise's Blog: New blog, page 70

Twitter netiquette and the power of delusion

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I am not all that fascinated by having large numbers of followers – I appreciate that it is important if you want to be successful but I do not think I am in that kind of market. I also find it hard to care much about crap memes and bullshit clickbait, so most of my fake followbacks are muted.

I got a message today requesting that I take a photo showing that I had switched on notifications so that a 17 year old ‘could follow me back’ – as far as I know he followed me so this was some sort of threat – anyone who uses twitter for any length of time surely knows to use unfollower tools, which are themselves faster than taking pics of notifications, so I am not sure how this policy is going to work out for him?

Am I exceptionally lucky to have been young before the internet, so that this crap just doesn’t matter? This dude has 13.5k followers, and has apparently deluded himself into thinking that this makes him important.

Speaking of delusion, I finally got around to linking up the new(ish) website to google analytics today. I keep delaying things if anybody or anything needs looking after, because apparently I prefer to over-compensate for my perfectly normal personality by doing things for other people. Ina has died a horrible death as a result, and I am not sure if she can be revived. Perhaps things will improve once I complete the games. The tenth laptop of the last year has just died, so I am investing in two this time to proceed with that. (long story, but I cannot sew next to my mother anymore, so I am kind of irate with the world. From 50k unique visitors last year, Ina is getting barely 12 visitors a month according to google.

I also looked up Wolfe’s itinerary for the year, and I see that October is the last time I am likely to be able to afford to go and pay my dubious respects for the next three years. I am too huge to do this, even if I could leave my mother for 24 hours, however even the thought that I might has caused me to drop 2lb per day for the last four days.

Rather than dwelling on how crazy this seems, I am astonished that stress really does make you that fat. When my friend was still around, I was not losing weight at all, and I am not doing anything different at present. I look younger, the weight is suddenly plummeting, and apart from the persistent lump in my chest, presumably anxiety since my mother is still at risk, I feel a lot less like dying.

This tendency to put things off in favour of other people will be familiar to a considerable number of people with a weight problem. Abusing somebody for being fat, then, effectively makes them fatter as they become progressively less important and more likely to hide from the world. Eating badly then follows because who is looking and who cares?

So, remember – social media is not real life, nobody’s opinion matters and you should not take care of everybody else at the expense of yourself. If you aren’t there, your caring for others means nothing.

I will not be going to see Wolfe, despite it being probably the last time that there is a point in even trying to see Wolfe, because my experience tells me that I will be very disappointed and probably ignored. I may play with the idea for the sake of losing a large and rapid amount of weight, but I will never be thin enough or whatever-it-is-he-thinks-he-wants enough for it to be worthwhile.

So, another chapter in the epic saga of Wolfe Ina Disguise closes without an ending. That is far better than achieving closure, when it is so self-defeating and ultimately miserable. Besides, he makes me crazy within 30 seconds of starting the pitch. A dab of me in there would be sooooooo much better. Just a thin one though.

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USA versus UK healthcare – eat shit and die

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I played backgammon with a friend from Tel Aviv in NYC, then had a very drunken night out with the nephew of Wallis Simpson, before touring Pennsylvania with a gang of bikers, finishing with a very drunken week of secret gambling in South Carolina a few years back.  I was just as shy then, I just played a lot of backgammon.

The bikers wanted to know how I liked America, wouldn’t I want to live there?

“Definitely could not live in a country where people die from lack of healthcare because they are poor.” was my response.  I was as surprised as they were.

It is amazing how many Americans are indoctrinated into the idea that nothing bad will ever happen to them, if you are poor it is your own fault, and everybody else’s comparatively civilised system of public healthcare is daylight robbery.  It beggars belief at times, the lengths they will go to to justify a clearly rotten system.

So, from the perspective of a lady who failed to complete writing a very comprehensive book for Wolfe a few years back – here is how the system works, and I believe Wolfe may actually agree with me, for a change:

The USA is set up on the principle that money tops anything.  People are not very important compared to dollars.  Hence we see a government with a full complement of lobbyists who hand out money to dictate public policy. ie.  Coconut oil bad, because it is produced elsewhere, vegetable oil good, because it is produced in America, even though twenty minutes of research would tell you the opposite is the case.

This nurturing of corporations worked for a few decades, but companies are so large now that the system has entirely broken down.  It was not until I saw the Eli Lilly/Walmart deal to supply cut-price, reduced quality diabetes medication for the victims of the American diet, that I realised quite how rotten it had become. ie.  you shop at Walmart for food, buy your frosted flakes and your doughnuts etc.  Then, when you discover that your shitty diet has given you diabetes, you simply go back to Walmart to pick up your meds.  Win-win, as long as you happen to be a corporation rather than a person.

In the UK, we have a parallel copycat system where we have doctors who are paid by major food companies to sit on the Board of Nutrition – Hannah Sutter’s book Big, fat lies is a nice short introduction to how this works.  Again, you are given shitty nutrition advice so that large food companies can continue to sell you food.

The difference in the UK, is that the public pays for this corporate domination of judgements that we are told are gospel.  The so-called obesity crisis has also been invoked to attract yet more funding to the NHS.  If you had complained to your doctor that you were fat in the nineties, they would have told you to go raffle yourself, but now you have a wealth of useless advice to ensure that you spend your life worrying, or dieting, or both between enjoying your increasingly large portions of standard British fare, approved by corporate interests on the Board of Nutrition.

Of course, in America this situation is amplified by the fact that there are more middle men with interests in the eat shit/get sick/ die market.  Large insurance companies also want to ensure that private medicine stays private.  Providers want to make money by providing lots and lots of care etc etc. In short, no interest in served in America by your being healthy. Therefore, let us have McDonalds provide school lunches to get the ball rolling. Go forth and get nice and sick.

The public interest in the UK would be served far better if people were actually healthy, so we see a relatively small quango style operation shyly asking us to maybe, sometime manage five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.  However, the large number of medical staff would prefer to see money endlessly pumped into the NHS, so even the five a day message is pretty quiet.  I had quite an argument with a senior pathologist several years ago.  He wanted more money for doctors.  My response was that what we really needed was better health.

So, from a British perspective, we are copying a corrupt and mad system for the benefit of some food companies and a few thousand doctors, at the expense of public health.  Nobody gives a shit about this.  Nobody cares about nutritional research, nobody cares about the numbers of people becoming ill.  All they care about is more money to pay more staff ad infinitum.

So, stemming from this, we have this idea that science is good, nature is bad.  If a man in a white coat said it was so, therefore it must be so.  I have news for you, that man in a white suit was paid by a drug company to say so, just like the people telling you what to eat are paid by the food industry.  An eminent professor of nutrition from an American university was once asked what we should really be eating.  She readily admitted that she did not have a clue.

The WHO recommends 9-15 portions of fruit and vegetables every day, not five.  Statistics suggest that the benefits tail off after 7, but you can see from this that reading the newspaper does not cut it when it comes to staying healthy.  You really have to put the work in yourself.  Trusting in your government’s idea of what is good is not likely to provide you with a winning formula.

In terms of the harshness of the American healthcare system, Americans are fucked over in numerous ways, especially if shock, horror anything bad happens to them.  These people who scream about personal responsibility and not paying for other people’s healthcare clearly have no social conscience, and they will defend this to the death if you bother to engage them in conversation.  God forbid they should have a child with an expensive health issue.  God forbid they should realise that other people deserve to live, even if they disagree with them.  I am sure it makes perfect sense for a militarist country, but in terms of common decency it represents a very peculiar degree of poverty of spirit.

In the UK, meanwhile, we are looking at greed and stupidity.  Nobody genuinely cares about your health when they are handing out this incorrect advice that they have accepted from the USA.  As a peachy example of this, John Yudkin’s Pure, white and deadly, a book which identified sugar as being a source of heart disease, was ignored in favour of Ancell Key’s study showing that saturated fat was the culprit.  The noisy Yank must be correct, we were told, because we were processing about half of the world’s sugar at the time to flatten the prices and benefit our colonies.

So, now that you know this, please accept two things:

You are not important to capitalism.  You are a unit, and you are entirely expendable as long as someone else is in work and someone else is taking the money.

You are being lied to.  Every day, to maintain a system that will fail you throughout your life.

 

The post USA versus UK healthcare – eat shit and die appeared first on Blogging Ina Disguise.

USA versus UK healthcare – eat shit and die

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I played backgammon with a friend from Tel Aviv in NYC, then had a very drunken night out with the nephew of Wallis Simpson, before touring Pennsylvania with a gang of bikers, finishing with a very drunken week of secret gambling in South Carolina a few years back.  I was just as shy then, I just played a lot of backgammon.

The bikers wanted to know how I liked America, wouldn’t I want to live there?

“Definitely could not live in a country where people die from lack of healthcare because they are poor.” was my response.  I was as surprised as they were.

It is amazing how many Americans are indoctrinated into the idea that nothing bad will ever happen to them, if you are poor it is your own fault, and everybody else’s comparatively civilised system of public healthcare is daylight robbery.  It beggars belief at times, the lengths they will go to to justify a clearly rotten system.

So, from the perspective of a lady who failed to complete writing a very comprehensive book for Wolfe a few years back – here is how the system works, and I believe Wolfe may actually agree with me, for a change:

The USA is set up on the principle that money tops anything.  People are not very important compared to dollars.  Hence we see a government with a full complement of lobbyists who hand out money to dictate public policy. ie.  Coconut oil bad, because it is produced elsewhere, vegetable oil good, because it is produced in America, even though twenty minutes of research would tell you the opposite is the case.

This nurturing of corporations worked for a few decades, but companies are so large now that the system has entirely broken down.  It was not until I saw the Eli Lilly/Walmart deal to supply cut-price, reduced quality diabetes medication for the victims of the American diet, that I realised quite how rotten it had become. ie.  you shop at Walmart for food, buy your frosted flakes and your doughnuts etc.  Then, when you discover that your shitty diet has given you diabetes, you simply go back to Walmart to pick up your meds.  Win-win, as long as you happen to be a corporation rather than a person.

In the UK, we have a parallel copycat system where we have doctors who are paid by major food companies to sit on the Board of Nutrition – Hannah Sutter’s book Big, fat lies is a nice short introduction to how this works.  Again, you are given shitty nutrition advice so that large food companies can continue to sell you food.

The difference in the UK, is that the public pays for this corporate domination of judgements that we are told are gospel.  The so-called obesity crisis has also been invoked to attract yet more funding to the NHS.  If you had complained to your doctor that you were fat in the nineties, they would have told you to go raffle yourself, but now you have a wealth of useless advice to ensure that you spend your life worrying, or dieting, or both between enjoying your increasingly large portions of standard British fare, approved by corporate interests on the Board of Nutrition.

Of course, in America this situation is amplified by the fact that there are more middle men with interests in the eat shit/get sick/ die market.  Large insurance companies also want to ensure that private medicine stays private.  Providers want to make money by providing lots and lots of care etc etc. In short, no interest in served in America by your being healthy. Therefore, let us have McDonalds provide school lunches to get the ball rolling. Go forth and get nice and sick.

The public interest in the UK would be served far better if people were actually healthy, so we see a relatively small quango style operation shyly asking us to maybe, sometime manage five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.  However, the large number of medical staff would prefer to see money endlessly pumped into the NHS, so even the five a day message is pretty quiet.  I had quite an argument with a senior pathologist several years ago.  He wanted more money for doctors.  My response was that what we really needed was better health.

So, from a British perspective, we are copying a corrupt and mad system for the benefit of some food companies and a few thousand doctors, at the expense of public health.  Nobody gives a shit about this.  Nobody cares about nutritional research, nobody cares about the numbers of people becoming ill.  All they care about is more money to pay more staff ad infinitum.

So, stemming from this, we have this idea that science is good, nature is bad.  If a man in a white coat said it was so, therefore it must be so.  I have news for you, that man in a white suit was paid by a drug company to say so, just like the people telling you what to eat are paid by the food industry.  An eminent professor of nutrition from an American university was once asked what we should really be eating.  She readily admitted that she did not have a clue.

The WHO recommends 9-15 portions of fruit and vegetables every day, not five.  Statistics suggest that the benefits tail off after 7, but you can see from this that reading the newspaper does not cut it when it comes to staying healthy.  You really have to put the work in yourself.  Trusting in your government’s idea of what is good is not likely to provide you with a winning formula.

In terms of the harshness of the American healthcare system, Americans are fucked over in numerous ways, especially if shock, horror anything bad happens to them.  These people who scream about personal responsibility and not paying for other people’s healthcare clearly have no social conscience, and they will defend this to the death if you bother to engage them in conversation.  God forbid they should have a child with an expensive health issue.  God forbid they should realise that other people deserve to live, even if they disagree with them.  I am sure it makes perfect sense for a militarist country, but in terms of common decency it represents a very peculiar degree of poverty of spirit.

In the UK, meanwhile, we are looking at greed and stupidity.  Nobody genuinely cares about your health when they are handing out this incorrect advice that they have accepted from the USA.  As a peachy example of this, John Yudkin’s Pure, white and deadly, a book which identified sugar as being a source of heart disease, was ignored in favour of Ancell Key’s study showing that saturated fat was the culprit.  The noisy Yank must be correct, we were told, because we were processing about half of the world’s sugar at the time to flatten the prices and benefit our colonies.

So, now that you know this, please accept two things:

You are not important to capitalism.  You are a unit, and you are entirely expendable as long as someone else is in work and someone else is taking the money.

You are being lied to.  Every day, to maintain a system that will fail you throughout your life.

 

The post USA versus UK healthcare – eat shit and die appeared first on Blogging Ina Disguise.

Storytime

Once upon a time, a man was accused of horrific crimes by his family.  His wife left him, after telling over a hundred people of his plight, and went off with someone else.

Then he met someone else, whom he pretended to like in order to avoid being alone.  When he told her of the problems with his family, she realised she had to decide whether he was guilty or not, despite not knowing him for terribly long.  After due consideration, she decided that he was not guilty of the crimes, and despite him being very difficult, remained as his friend and helped him as best she could.

In the course of this ‘relationship’, ostensibly due to stress, he poured two pints of boiling water over her and repeatedly headbutted her shouting ‘You’re stupid, you’re stupid’ a lot.  She ended up in hospital.

Oddly, she still kept in touch after this, as he was under intense pressure at the time.  It was not until he did something similar to his sister that she realised that she had been used to rehearse the second attack.

Several years later, when as she knew, he turned out to be innocent he returned to her life.  She was trying to repair her damaged health at the time.  An on-again -off-again friendship ensued, during which he attacked her again.  He was suffering from PTSD by this time, and had poor health due to the earlier trauma.

She, in the meantime had taken care of her parents, and as her family was also abusive, did not go out.  He was the only person that she saw, since there was nobody she could trust at all.  She was so lonely, in fact, that she fell in love with a random stranger that she had met online.  Her other friends, in the meantime, had decided that she was mad to be in love with the stranger, he could not possibly be interested in her and she had always been a bit weird anyway, since she did not share their low self-esteem and yet did not appear to need other people as much as they did.

So, the man decided, he must take revenge on her.  So, he turned up at her home when she was very upset about the random stranger, and announced that he would do as he pleased and bring food that she did not want into the house.

This happened twice.  She had already asked him not to bring any more food, and he did it again.  In tears, she asked him again.  He laughed at her.

She stood in the kitchen weeping.  She knew this was another assault, but she did not know why.  He was, as usual very tense so she knew she either had to let him play out this scene or she had to physically remove him, which could prove difficult in front of her sick mother.  She also knew that she had nobody at all to talk to, and so she let him get on with it.

Over the months that followed, she often noticed his sneer as he watched her eat and grow fatter and fatter, and wondered what all this was in aid of?  He kept bringing it up, over and over again as if his behaviour was not his responsibility at all.  Because he had picked food as an issue, he imagined he could do this and insist that everything he had done was her fault.

When she finally confronted him and requested the reason why he would do these things, whether he thought her life was easy, he simply said:

I did not consider you at all.

 

The post Storytime appeared first on Blogging Ina Disguise.

Storytime

Once upon a time, a man was accused of horrific crimes by his family.  His wife left him, after telling over a hundred people of his plight, and went off with someone else.

Then he met someone else, whom he pretended to like in order to avoid being alone.  When he told her of the problems with his family, she realised she had to decide whether he was guilty or not, despite not knowing him for terribly long.  After due consideration, she decided that he was not guilty of the crimes, and despite him being very difficult, remained as his friend and helped him as best she could.

In the course of this ‘relationship’, ostensibly due to stress, he poured two pints of boiling water over her and repeatedly headbutted her shouting ‘You’re stupid, you’re stupid’ a lot.  She ended up in hospital.

Oddly, she still kept in touch after this, as he was under intense pressure at the time.  It was not until he did something similar to his sister that she realised that she had been used to rehearse the second attack.

Several years later, when as she knew, he turned out to be innocent he returned to her life.  She was trying to repair her damaged health at the time.  An on-again -off-again friendship ensued, during which he attacked her again.  He was suffering from PTSD by this time, and had poor health due to the earlier trauma.

She, in the meantime had taken care of her parents, and as her family was also abusive, did not go out.  He was the only person that she saw, since there was nobody she could trust at all.  She was so lonely, in fact, that she fell in love with a random stranger that she had met online.  Her other friends, in the meantime, had decided that she was mad to be in love with the stranger, he could not possibly be interested in her and she had always been a bit weird anyway, since she did not share their low self-esteem and yet did not appear to need other people as much as they did.

So, the man decided, he must take revenge on her.  So, he turned up at her home when she was very upset about the random stranger, and announced that he would do as he pleased and bring food that she did not want into the house.

This happened twice.  She had already asked him not to bring any more food, and he did it again.  In tears, she asked him again.  He laughed at her.

She stood in the kitchen weeping.  She knew this was another assault, but she did not know why.  He was, as usual very tense so she knew she either had to let him play out this scene or she had to physically remove him, which could prove difficult in front of her sick mother.  She also knew that she had nobody at all to talk to, and so she let him get on with it.

Over the months that followed, she often noticed his sneer as he watched her eat and grow fatter and fatter, and wondered what all this was in aid of?  He kept bringing it up, over and over again as if his behaviour was not his responsibility at all.  Because he had picked food as an issue, he imagined he could do this and insist that everything he had done was her fault.

When she finally confronted him and requested the reason why he would do these things, whether he thought her life was easy, he simply said:

I did not consider you at all.

 

The post Storytime appeared first on Blogging Ina Disguise.

Eating David Wolfe’s hat

I don’t think I have an appropriate hat to eat, so I think I will have to eat Wolfe’s hat instead.

This week, as a result of the constant bitching about my mother’s diet, I re-introduced meat in the form of a cooked Scottish breakfast.  This made the NHS nurses very happy.  I was having to ensure that my mother had a full mission jar of supermix before and after it to counteract the injection, of course, but in the middle I presented them with a picture of a woman stuffing her face with a variety of animal products.

Imagine my surprise when after only three days of this, her urine test, which I now do daily, came back with a positive for a UTI.  She had been clear of these for two whole months, which is something of a feat, whilst consuming her supermix diet plus eggs and some smoked salmon to balance her electrolytes. (sorry, Wolfe, but I just don’t see the point in fish oil tablets when she could just enjoy some fish with her salt.  She gets both anyway.)

So, it seems we have a fresh and unexpected addition to the many validations I have bestowed on Wolfe over the last few years.  The tiny bit of inflammation caused by eating meat and raising her acid levels by only a small fraction was enough to suppress her immune system and bring on another infection.

Needless to say, I stopped this immediately and put her back on Supermix only.  She has now, for the first time in a decade, beaten her infection.  She had her supermix with the juice of 20 peaches yesterday, consumed the lot and is doing fine.  Clear-headed, and pissing like a fountain.

So, after many years of wrestling with low carb versus raw, I am now of the opinion that although you can get away with alkaline foods alongside your raw diet, meat is indeed the devil’s work and damages you slightly every time you consume it.  It probably won’t stop any committed meat eaters.  I should know, I was one for years before I tried being raw in the first place.

That is not to say that this is the only diet that is worth doing.  I have not yet experimented with kim-chi or fermented foods, and I am not sure I want to.  However, I think the raw ‘vegans’ (they aren’t really vegan in many cases, but it is a useful way of telling people just to give you a salad rather than try to fit you around their dinner party table) are somewhat vindicated in terms of an almost complete diet (B12 is too important to omit when you are 90)

Otherwise, I am happy to say she is doing very well.  She is having Black Forest Gateau flavour supermix today, and I am sure she will continue to enjoy whichever flavour I choose to evoke tomorrow.  Mine of course, is cucumber and spinach, and considerably less glamorous.

The social worker came today, and asked about the dietician.  I explained that she did not know very much and that the NHS apparently believe that nutrition and medicine are separate things, which does not make it easy to explain my mother’s diet at present.  I know it is expecting a lot, but they could at least try to understand.

 

The post Eating David Wolfe’s hat appeared first on Blogging Ina Disguise.

Eating David Wolfe’s hat

I don’t think I have an appropriate hat to eat, so I think I will have to eat Wolfe’s hat instead.

This week, as a result of the constant bitching about my mother’s diet, I re-introduced meat in the form of a cooked Scottish breakfast.  This made the NHS nurses very happy.  I was having to ensure that my mother had a full mission jar of supermix before and after it to counteract the injection, of course, but in the middle I presented them with a picture of a woman stuffing her face with a variety of animal products.

Imagine my surprise when after only three days of this, her urine test, which I now do daily, came back with a positive for a UTI.  She had been clear of these for two whole months, which is something of a feat, whilst consuming her supermix diet plus eggs and some smoked salmon to balance her electrolytes. (sorry, Wolfe, but I just don’t see the point in fish oil tablets when she could just enjoy some fish with her salt.  She gets both anyway.)

So, it seems we have a fresh and unexpected addition to the many validations I have bestowed on Wolfe over the last few years.  The tiny bit of inflammation caused by eating meat and raising her acid levels by only a small fraction was enough to suppress her immune system and bring on another infection.

Needless to say, I stopped this immediately and put her back on Supermix only.  She has now, for the first time in a decade, beaten her infection.  She had her supermix with the juice of 20 peaches yesterday, consumed the lot and is doing fine.  Clear-headed, and pissing like a fountain.

So, after many years of wrestling with low carb versus raw, I am now of the opinion that although you can get away with alkaline foods alongside your raw diet, meat is indeed the devil’s work and damages you slightly every time you consume it.  It probably won’t stop any committed meat eaters.  I should know, I was one for years before I tried being raw in the first place.

That is not to say that this is the only diet that is worth doing.  I have not yet experimented with kim-chi or fermented foods, and I am not sure I want to.  However, I think the raw ‘vegans’ (they aren’t really vegan in many cases, but it is a useful way of telling people just to give you a salad rather than try to fit you around their dinner party table) are somewhat vindicated in terms of an almost complete diet (B12 is too important to omit when you are 90)

Otherwise, I am happy to say she is doing very well.  She is having Black Forest Gateau flavour supermix today, and I am sure she will continue to enjoy whichever flavour I choose to evoke tomorrow.  Mine of course, is cucumber and spinach, and considerably less glamorous.

The social worker came today, and asked about the dietician.  I explained that she did not know very much and that the NHS apparently believe that nutrition and medicine are separate things, which does not make it easy to explain my mother’s diet at present.  I know it is expecting a lot, but they could at least try to understand.

 

The post Eating David Wolfe’s hat appeared first on Blogging Ina Disguise.

Mindfulness and my male brain

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Apparently the latest in marketing bullshit involves introducing stressed men to the concept of mindfulness.  Mindfulness, as it turns out, appears to be the new word for meditation, or as my friend would say ‘switching everything off and concentrating on thinking about nothing.’

Personally, when I need to make space for extended periods of military ‘regrouping,’ I make something.  Depending on how complicated the (usually emotional) issue is, it can take from two to six months to figure out.  Switching off involves creating something.

I find the idea of making nothingness a thing a bit ridiculous to be honest, I prefer a good blow-out in the form of tantrum, followed by activity of some kind.  This may seem ridiculous, since I am not really achieving anything these days, but there it is.  I apparently believe relaxation is time-wasting.  This, according to these articles, is my male brain talking, however I have never noticed a particularly negative gender divide when it came to meditation.  It is second only to yoga for people who like getting touchy feely with relative strangers.

Speaking of time-wasting, I have declined the Microsoft contract and am working on the games instead.  It took only three hours before I realised what a huge mistake I was making in terms of potentially giving up twenty hours a week to do a job comparing search engine results instead of building up Ina.  There are a couple of other companies interested, so we will see if they have something less tedious on offer.

I spent years doing terrible jobs, I have nothing to show for it apart from some pretty mediocre memories.  The only thing that has been good about my current predicament is that I have had time to do other things.

So, today I went to university and sorted out my campus passes to renew my research for the Boris book.  I resigned, in true prisoner style, and I drank a lot of supermix.  The supermix appears to have removed the giant emotional lump in my chest, which meant that I was weeping rather a lot last night.  It is as big a mystery to me as anyone why thinking about Wolfe, even briefly, causes such grief.

I imagine it is similar to a former friend, who told me that he could not grieve for his grandparents, but became hysterical over some baby mice that failed to survive two months later.  The difference in this case, is that I am grieving for my sick family, lost potential and lack of power to do anything about it as long as I am the best option for taking care of my mother. I am terrified to leave her side at the moment as we have been under such scrutiny for the last couple of months.

I also purchased some Gynostemma pentaphyllum and some rosehip, with a view to promoting some AMPK.  Since I cannot afford the extracts, we shall see if the combination helps with promoting youthful cell renewal.  Nearly bought some Griffonia seed, but I think it can wait a while as my problem appears to be low dopamine rather than low seratonin. I am quite the fan of Durk and Sandy.

 

 

The post Mindfulness and my male brain appeared first on Blogging Ina Disguise.

Mindfulness and my male brain

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Apparently the latest in marketing bullshit involves introducing stressed men to the concept of mindfulness.  Mindfulness, as it turns out, appears to be the new word for meditation, or as my friend would say ‘switching everything off and concentrating on thinking about nothing.’

Personally, when I need to make space for extended periods of military ‘regrouping,’ I make something.  Depending on how complicated the (usually emotional) issue is, it can take from two to six months to figure out.  Switching off involves creating something.

I find the idea of making nothingness a thing a bit ridiculous to be honest, I prefer a good blow-out in the form of tantrum, followed by activity of some kind.  This may seem ridiculous, since I am not really achieving anything these days, but there it is.  I apparently believe relaxation is time-wasting.  This, according to these articles, is my male brain talking, however I have never noticed a particularly negative gender divide when it came to meditation.  It is second only to yoga for people who like getting touchy feely with relative strangers.

Speaking of time-wasting, I have declined the Microsoft contract and am working on the games instead.  It took only three hours before I realised what a huge mistake I was making in terms of potentially giving up twenty hours a week to do a job comparing search engine results instead of building up Ina.  There are a couple of other companies interested, so we will see if they have something less tedious on offer.

I spent years doing terrible jobs, I have nothing to show for it apart from some pretty mediocre memories.  The only thing that has been good about my current predicament is that I have had time to do other things.

So, today I went to university and sorted out my campus passes to renew my research for the Boris book.  I resigned, in true prisoner style, and I drank a lot of supermix.  The supermix appears to have removed the giant emotional lump in my chest, which meant that I was weeping rather a lot last night.  It is as big a mystery to me as anyone why thinking about Wolfe, even briefly, causes such grief.

I imagine it is similar to a former friend, who told me that he could not grieve for his grandparents, but became hysterical over some baby mice that failed to survive two months later.  The difference in this case, is that I am grieving for my sick family, lost potential and lack of power to do anything about it as long as I am the best option for taking care of my mother. I am terrified to leave her side at the moment as we have been under such scrutiny for the last couple of months.

I also purchased some Gynostemma pentaphyllum and some rosehip, with a view to promoting some AMPK.  Since I cannot afford the extracts, we shall see if the combination helps with promoting youthful cell renewal.  Nearly bought some Griffonia seed, but I think it can wait a while as my problem appears to be low dopamine rather than low seratonin. I am quite the fan of Durk and Sandy.

 

 

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About thinking positively

I have to be honest with you, memes like this drive me insane.  Especially with that stupid name tagged at the bottom of it.

Let me tell you a story about positive thinking, and how complicated it gets.

If you particularly want the background to this story, I am sure there are plenty previous posts on it, but to cut the preamble very short:

Seven years ago I was huge, even bigger than I am now.  I was extremely ill and I have an old video somewhere of my sounding rather drunk, although I had stopped drinking several years before.  That is how damaged my liver was.

One of the old boyfriends, that I had been very fond of at 16 or so when he went off with someone else, randomly decided that he wanted to see me.  I panicked, as he had posted a picture of himself at 18 online and I assumed that like me, he looked pretty much the same apart from weight.

So, I decided to create a database of health options for losing weight and solving the health problem, still undefined, that was causing me to be exhausted, covered in psoriasis, enormous and basically struggling with my workload, which at the time, since it was just after my father, best friend, and uncle’s deaths, was considerable.

I had created an exhibit for Patrick McGoohan online, and his family had been kind enough to acknowledge it, which was basically all I had going for me at the time.

In the course of researching my database, I came across Wolfe, and as I worked on my exhibit, laughed over several of his videos.  The database then transformed into an academic treatise on how obesity became desirable to Western economies, how much you are manipulated emotionally into following standard behavioural pathways, and how to rebel with a view to a more ecologically friendly version of capitalism. Naturally I assumed that Wolfe would be interested in this.

When I went to his facebook page, I was surprised to find him actually on it.  Over the next several weeks I was warily cheered up somewhat (I won’t go into it, but he can be very entertaining in his own way) It got me through an extremely stressful situation when my family was stabbing me repeatedly in the face for looking after my mother.  Apparently if they are selfish, everyone has to be selfish.  Having been told to give up any idea of a family or future to take care of her and my father, I do not know why they then decided they wanted me dead or destroyed for actually doing it.  That is the reason for Ina Disguise.  If I had done anything under my own name it would have been destroyed by now.

Stupidly, I put together a film offering quite an extensive critique of him and Durianriders, using the footage of my transformation thus far, with three months of research into 801010 and the superfood approach thrown in.  Unlike Harley, I am well aware why different people have different nutritional requirements, and unlike Wolfe, I just do it for a laugh.

He blocked me, and the rest is history.  I was broken hearted, although I did not quite understand why at the time, and it was probably three years later before another ex came to visit bearing cake.

I am still of the opinion that if there was a person I should have been with it would have been Wolfe.  I staked my remaining six boyfriends on it, and it is not a source of regret.  Too bad, how sad.

The reason I am writing all this down is because of this notion of ‘positive thinking.’  I was sufficiently positive to take care of myself briefly, because I thought that I deserved better from life.  I did not.  When I determined that I did not, there followed a titanic struggle to decide if I really wanted to be healthy and extremely lonely on a permanent basis.

It isn’t as if anything in my life went the way I wanted it to.  I was obsessed with work, and my parents’ illness, alongside the economy and my inability to appear mouldable enough for your average (very average) employer, rendered that a non-starter after my education.  I wanted children, and I failed to meet anyone because I have not had a social life since 2003.  I wanted to use my education to write a great book, and in the course of my musings on Wolfe, I determined that nobody would be at all interested in reading it unless I had an established name, or offered sufficient entertainment.

So, the struggle became a case of – if I think positively, I am stupidly in love with someone I never really want to meet and I stay healthy on that basis but nothing actually changes.  If I allow myself to be broken by this, I do a lot of sewing, give up writing anything weighty and either way I carry on taking care of my mother.  I was running out of time to have children anyway, and I never see anyone, so it was not as if anything was likely to change.

However, being in love is not useful.  It uses up a lot of capacity which is more helpful for doing other things.  If you allow it to run its normal course, there should be a period of hatred, and I was not at all interested in hatred.  I blow hot and cold as a matter of course, and that course has not altered.

Anyway, as you can see by the website I took option 2 and developed Ina.  Apparently she is fairly stylish.  Nothing that I wanted to happen is going to happen in my life, and this is regardless of meeting anyone or changing my perception of anything.  All that remains is the small things, and perhaps that is just as well.

I am sure that some people would say I have achieved a lot over the last four years in terms of self-development, and I am sure that is the case.  My friends would tell you that I have always had a masterplan of some sort that I am working towards.  I get side tracked a lot (an example being the computers to Gambia project) but I always finish things eventually.  Is it useful?  Probably not.  The book I would have written when I met Wolfe would have been, but considering that it was a labour of love, it would have been a waste of my time as even the one person I wanted to read and use it would not have done so.  Had I been thinking positively, I would have wasted years of my time on maintaining my health in order to have a longer period of extreme poverty in later life, and for what? Trying to impress yet another unimpressable boy?  What on earth is useful about that?

So, I have to say, I am not a fan of endless positivity.  Had I taken the positive route I may well have been beautiful by now, but there would have been nobody here to look at it, and I don’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror.  I would also have been stark raving bonkers to remain in love with somebody that repeatedly blocked me even for asking a question about his charity.  As it was I pursued that line of thought for far too long, although Wolfe has had some small benefit out of that.

I am unusually clued up about why people respond to him the way they do. I took a variety of lines of investigation into the emotional triggers they are experiencing.  Apart from the fact he has made a niche subject extremely entertaining and courted as much controversy as possible to attract more attention to it, which personally I regard as a stroke of genius, some of his speaking techniques have led to considerable leakage in his commercial catchment, besides the errors that everyone makes on a similar trajectory.

So, although nobody is interested in this knowledge apart from me, I have got to the end of that line of enquiry.  I am left wondering why I would spend 8 or 9 years bothering to sort this mystery out.  I am still rather entranced by the methodology, but I didn’t have the time for this really. It gave me something to think about apart from the horror of finding out my family were quite so vicious, and it got me through a difficult time because of the sheer distraction of weeping about something else.

In terms of myself, I still don’t rate myself highly enough, and thinking positively is not something that is likely to help.  Positivity involves hope, and hope is not useful when it has already gone.

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