Mindfulness, animals and pithy memes

Another mindfulness day, another pithy meme and another animal video. Mindfulness seems to have replaced schemes like ‘the secret’ for people in the motivation market.

Looking through my timeline, I am drawn to the conclusion that ‘mindfulness’ is ‘success technology’ for people who have given up hope and are suffering from anxiety and depression.

So, I wonder, does this mean that I could actually draw a correlation between trends in motivation and the state of the American economy?  The idea that everyone who isn’t making money is an unemployed millionaire in the making seems to be fading somewhat in favour of navel gazing.

I can only see this as a good thing for America.  The days of Ayn Rand taking the piss out of American culture with her stinging Soviet backlash are really quite far behind us now.  When I look at motivational material now compared to then, with the aforementioned (previous posts on public speaking) respect for speakers having been replaced by a kind of grazing mentality.

Basically, the message is, you cannot do anything about external forces, so quiet your wandering mind and just be.  Frankly, fuck that.  You don’t achieve anything by taking that attitude. I may be a creature of extremes, but I always have something to achieve, big or small. If people actually discussed taking action in relation to the external forces rather than sat around being mindful, we would get on a lot faster. Even I spend too much time watching animals, reviewing memes and generally wasting time on living in the moment.

At this moment I am addressing my apparently dodgy liver.  My friend, who seems to be on a permanent binge as he is dying, has gone now, and so I am safe to return to my healthier eating habits.  It was very interesting that in the course of his gaining 14lb, I gained ten times as much eating much the same thing, so I can now say with confidence that eating normal food just causes me to continuously gain weight.  I have lost the same 150lb about eight times now, so I am at least happy that I can safely ignore all the areas of the supermarket I was ignoring seven years ago.

I have employed the strategy of pretending that I am going to see Wolfe in October, for the sake of an initial goal.  I have no actual intention of doing it, but I am using it as a pleasant thought. (I am of course aware that I would not enjoy or get anything out of it as he would probably have me thrown out, going by past experience)  This unrealistic and rather empty goal is working wonders on my liver however, some of the symptoms were calming down just doing that.

Maybe that is my version of being mindful.  Rather than living in and experiencing/wallowing in the moment, I am escaping to somewhere I regard as more interesting.  The internet seems to be hidden behind a wall of mindful bullshit.  I much preferred the days of Dale Carnegie.  Life was much simpler and more innocent then.

 

 

 

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Taking stock

Taking Stock

I have a pile of stuff to complete before I can start any more, which is cramping my style somewhat.

It strikes me, as I optimise the blog, that I spend a lot of time crediting Wolfe for stuff that is really nothing to do with him. I have kind of dumped anything good about myself on someone who hasn’t even been particularly pleasant. I wonder why I am doing that?

Have I really got to the point where I cannot even acknowledge myself anymore? Has everything that has happened taken me to the point where I am not safe to achieve anything? If this is the case, I really need to address it.

Over the years prior to my apparent obsession with giving things to somebody equally obsessed with taking from elsewhere, I tried to give presents to many people. Most of the time, my mother told me that I was being crazy by wanting to give anything to anyone. She used to hang her head in shame, as if giving people presents was some sort of mental aberration. The rest of my life was perfectly normal, i just liked making weird gifts for passing strangers.

I always felt this was particularly odd for a religious person. Surely the whole point of religion is to make you nicer to other people, I thought? No, apparently it is just to make you feel shame.

Any residual trace of shame was eradicated in the course of my silent war with Wolfe. It is not that I think he is wrong – quite the contrary – he has given far more, to far more people than I ever could. I am his complete opposite however. I apparently believe that giving always involves expense to me, whereas he has found a way of making it work for him.

I have been optimising the website today, as a prelude to it being recrawled, then I will take a look at Adsense to make it pay for itself and hopefully promote itself elsewhere. I do not know how many people will be interested in looking at a lot of weird objects, but if I am making them, and nobody is accepting my gifts, then they might as well be shown off.

Likewise, I should be concentrating on making Ina write for money elsewhere, rather than bothering with more tedious jobs to pay for more materials whilst I take care of my mother. I have good ideas about these things, and then fall into a horrified pit where I talk myself out of doing anything remotely progressive.

Sometimes it would be nice just to have some encouragement. Despite some compliments, and some terrible advice, I have had no encouragement at all with the Ina Disguise project, primarily because of its association with Wolfe to start off with. My friends seemed to think it was exclusively about him. When a tree develops a branch or two, you do not immediately assume that it needs a reason, now do you?

Anyway, there are now 230 odd posts on this site. Most of them can be optimised, and I will complete this in the next couple of days before starting work on updating the youtube channel. I need to rethink the whole thing.

To begin with, it was a revelation to me that I could just throw work out there and people would enjoy it anyway. I am more interested in academic writing, and word vomit was not my previous MO. Word vomit, however, is what people actually read. A very popular Yank blogger was talking at me about writing 6000 words in 3 hours the other day. His quality must be shit, I reasoned, until I mentioned it to my friend, who said that yes, word vomit is what people want. The internet must be bursting at the seams with it.

Anyway, enough rebellion for one day. I should have been respected and able to give presents if I wanted to. Ina would not exist if I had just been able to do that. Why would that be difficult for anyone to understand?

Many thanks to the follower of Osho for the photo that accompanies today’s rant.

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What would Mrs Wolfe do? (shocking)

What would Mrs Wolfe do? (shocking)

 

Google analytics has indicated that I am not quite as dead as I thought since I connected it.  I am still stuggling a bit with isolating the blog.  It is a slightly different format to the rest of the site, but still, I have readers so yay!

Today I am going to tell you a story which shocked my closest friends.  The are all male, which I suspect is why they were shocked by this, but I think given my degree of social isolation it is not a particularly surprising story.

Back when I first ‘met’ Wolfe – I use the term very loosely since we merely exchanged a few words on a website – I was being hounded by my family because they wanted to take my mother’s money.  they did not like that I had done well in any of my careers, they did not like us remaining in our beloved home, and they wanted ‘their’ money.

Fortunately, my father had warned me before his own period of dementia that they would do something along these lines.  Evidently he was aware what a grasping and selfish bunch of no-hopers he had brought into the world with my mother.  He was very clear – it is her money – do not let them take it from her.

So, as I was restoring our house, I stuck to the programme.  My siblings are too stupid to know how much of ‘their’ money they would have lost had I chosen to walk away at any time.  As a result of their lack of help, my life has not been my own since 2003, when my father was brought downstairs due to his illness.  Explaining this to them is pointless, as they simply reject the information.

Anyway, I got through the worst period of my life without telling anybody anything, thanks to Wolfe.  The shame of having these people as relatives has meant that I do not want to bring anybody new into this situation, my friends have dropped by at times and helped, otherwise I have at times been awake for several weeks ensuring that my mother is well looked after.  My imaginary friend has been very helpful, although in person he actually just briefly messed about, realised he was out of his depth and ran ten miles to get away from me.

The climax of this horrible state of affairs was seven years ago, during the time we actually communicated briefly.  The social work department got involved, saw an opportunity to seize my mother and her property, and used my spiteful siblings to try to take everything, even as I was pulling the rubble out of the house and restoring it.

So, since I was shaking like a leaf 24 hours a day, vomiting and weeping constantly with stress, I had to take on social services and my family in battle to protect my mother from the same horrible death that was inflicted on my father in 2007. Within two days of being taken, my father was drugged and a testing team was brought in to tell us he could not eat.  Having seen their actual reports, what they really said was that my father was not awake, and could not be tested.  Hence, despite my fighting them, my father was starved to death for the sake of the convenience of the NHS.  I tried to remove him, and was told that I could not.

Back to seven years ago, and I wiped the floor with both my family and social services.  How did I do this, despite the trauma and the horror of what my family had grown into?

I asked myself “What would Mrs Wolfe do?”

Now, for the shocked males – this is a normal part of the female psyche – within hours of dating or even noticing you, we are looking at our clothing and deciding what you would rather we wear.  It is very annoying, and a part of our female selves that we do not like or even acknowledge very much, but for somebody like me, who is habitually scruffy, it is very noticeable and rather annoying..  It is a basic part of nesting instinct – we want to make the theoretical nest as pleasant as possible.  At least women do not do things like rubbing their vaginal fluid on the furniture any more  (yes, this was a thing many decades ago)

Mrs Wolfe is quite assertive, compared to me.  She doesn’t take any shit from anybody, she sees through problems in much the same way I do, and she presents a rational and forceful presence, particularly when she is being attacked.  She dresses better, walks straighter, and elbows some room for herself when she needs to.  In short, she is a much improved version of me.  I am inclined to sit and watch the drama before bulldozing it.  Mrs Wolfe does not wait for the drama before telling you exactly what is going to happen and then implementing it.

Being in love – and I do mean in love, as opposed to being a fan – Wolfe would have been very well aware at that time that I was not a fan – with/of a famous person is not fun.  You question everything.  Since I have never entertained poster boys in the past, it was particularly odd for me.  There are many, many things that I do not like about the history of Wolfe, just to make things even more confusing.  As I walked the hundreds of kilometres to regain my health, I pondered this, and many other things, including the probability of my actually doing anything with my useless emotion.  To make things worse, Wolfe swithers between over-intense interest in you and blocking you, which means you are also in love with someone who blows hot and cold even more than you do, if you happen to be me. The first thing you do is stop looking or listening to them, because you fear madness.

So, in putting my heart in the unlikeliest safe place in the world, I was beautifully distracted from the horror of discovering that my superficially respectable family were actually the worst people I had ever met in my life.  I have frequently had cause to laugh at what Wolfe himself would actually do to them in the event he was presented with a similar situation.  It is the weirdest version of saying ‘My hero’ ever.

Anyway, having taken a step back from all this and looked at it again over the years.  I am now at a suitable distance from it to say it was the healthiest flight of fancy ever.  Rather than have a breakdown, run away from my family and see my mother die at the hands of the NHS and social work department, and rather than seeing my own health destroyed, I survived thanks to delusion.

The problem was in the years following, when I wondered how I could let go of the idea that I really should be more like Mrs Wolfe.  Mr Wolfe does not like or want to talk to me, and so letting go is something I should have done a long time ago.  I hate crowds, I hate the whole idea of the USA, and I don’t particularly relish travelling as much as I used to.  Wolfe, in short, is the worst candidate for a partner ever.

And yet, here we are seven years later, and I am still thinking of Wolfe.  Perhaps it is an internal rebellion to a situation that I am stuck in.  My siblings are all retired now.  There is still no question of them giving up so much as a night out for my mother, and I have not only spent a great deal on maintaining her ailing health, but my youth and life are pretty much finished doing it.

Having said this, given that trying not to be in love with Wolfe seems to make me ill, perhaps I should just stay in this safe but pointless bubble.  There are worse delusions than finding the person that completes you, however unlikely he happens to be.

 

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Twitter netiquette and the power of delusion

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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