Must've

[sathor]

Must've been a manic phase. Be prepared for a lot of swearing.

Down in the dumps again. My mind is running in circles on a topic that seems basically unsolvable - essentially, it breaks down to, "who the fuck designs a world in which people are basically running on rails, especially when it comes to how the world responds to them (genetic beauty, intellect, sociability.)" I had three instances tonight/today, whatever it is, that all collided. The first was an admittedly stereotypical attractive lady that delivered food to work, which was followed by about an hour of various coworkers who saw her talking about how much they'd like to bang her, how hot she is, etc, including the laziest asshole of them all, who has slept with about a hundred women, saying he stayed the night at her house and didn't bang her and regrets it. Now this lead to a mindset of basically, "How the fuck can this whiny little brat get so many women so easily." Oh, it all makes sense. He's fake as hell, a narcissist and a lazy bastard that is literally insubordinate daily and hasn't even been written up for it yet. God just hates people like me, that explains it. He hates people like me, and he rewards worthless pieces of shit. I get it now.

This person I'm speaking of is the most vulgar, egomaniacal, insane person I may have ever met. I can barely stand being within earshot of the shit that spews out of his mouth CONTINUOUSLY - he has serious issues, it's apparent, but the thing is, I'm basically certain all of his sexual exploits, all of his social life, is absolutely true. Why? Because humanity fucking sucks. That's why. And because God rewards people like that. He just shits on anybody with half a brain. Or maybe it's that this whole society is a joke, and I really need to work harder on hitchhiking a ride to a more advanced extra-terrestrial society...or just pray to God that if there is a next life, I end up somewhere else, in a different world, on a different planet, with beings who...aren't like this.

Later on, one of the nearly retired outsiders I pull parts for nightly during shutdown said to me, "You should've been out here trying to hump that chick's leg or something." I responded, "I don't really believe people deserve to be treated differently because of what they're born with." He says, "Well, that's just the way the world works. At least for some of us. Look at Helena of Troy, whole empires crushed over her." True, old man, but we're supposed to fucking learn something from the thousands of years we've been around. Guess not.

Or maybe more simply, God just hates people like me. Physically ugly, misanthropic, bitter and jaded - but I wasn't always that way; my life experience just keeps pushing me further down a pathway and it feels like the harder I try to steer towards better horizons, the worse it all gets. I literally feel like screaming, "I fucking -hate- humans" more times than I'd like to admit, and I'm sure that's not healthy. Obviously, you can't have a successful relationship, you can't have real friendships, and you can't have any meaningful impact if you hate everything around you, and would rather just cease to exist - but it would be nice to fucking know at some point WHY the world seems to think that some people, however fucked up, ignorant, mean, sadistic and selfish people are, they STILL have a fulfilling life with physical and emotional pleasure while I get to stand by and watch as I'm rejected, beaten up, used, abused and scapegoated TIME and TIME again, and the blame, no matter who is telling me, is ALWAYS going to end up on my shoulders. It's ALWAYS my fault. I'M the one that's BROKEN. I'M the one that's WRONG. I'M the one that ISN'T DOING THINGS RIGHT. What the fuck is right, again? Does anybody even know? I thought living morally upstanding, keeping my mouth shut when I didn't have something good to say, being respectful towards women - treating them as equals and as human beings - working hard, sharing the burden of work, not being vulgar, not harboring constant sexual or derogatory thoughts and expressing them openly was RIGHT. But everyone I know who does all of those things...guess what...they're fucking HAPPY, and they're fucking -fulfilled- in a way that apparently just isn't gonna happen for me! I can't even see it ever happening, given the kind of shit I've had to go through so far in life. I'm so beat up and scarred, I often can't perceive myself ever feeling REAL empathy for another human being ever again. Pity, maybe.

And yeah, I have my moments where I can forget about all this shit, where I can push it deep inside myself and hide it away, and put on the mask again, but you know what? It never lasts. And that mask isn't me - this is me, in all my glorious ugliness.

Later on in the night, that same outside contractor brought up the fact that the amount of retardation in the plant is disproportionate to its size compared to most other modern refineries. Go figure. The place is a disaster area. He said it reminds him of the 1950s, he's never seen more piss poor planning, organization...never seen the kind of junk parts handed out...never seen the kind of stuff that we get away with happen without the EPA getting involved.

This whole fucking area is a shit hole, and every single one of these guys knows it, and I've inquired many of them without implying my opinion. Maybe I really have been getting gas lighted my whole life by a bunch of inbred retards here.

The third instance, by the way, was logging into face book upon arriving home and seeing (yet another) picture of the same, narcissistic girl that resides in one of my friend's circles. I've met her before. Of course, she tried her best to look as sexy as possible. Of course, the whole fucking thing was blown up with comments about how pretty she was, coddling her already over sized ego. That lit me right off because it fit right into what happened earlier tonight - "Must be nice to be complimented for attributes you're born with" I posted on my timeline. Humans make me sick.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Oh, my poor friend. *hugs hugs* Yes, it is true: your job sucks big hairy orc dicks. Your outside contractor is doubtless correct in saying that your refinery is a disaster area run by morons and/or crooks. And yes, I think you probably HAVE been getting gas-lighted your whole life by a bunch of inbred, stump-ignorant assholes. (Note: you won't want to be using the R-word any more; it's a term of abuse and people will jump on your case for it.)

So: "who the fuck designs a world in which people are basically running on rails, especially when it comes to how the world responds to them (genetic beauty, intellect, sociability.)?" We do. We humans. But we didn't design it that way, any more than the inside of a hoarder's house has been 'interiorly designed'. Human societies just grow, they pile up, they fall down; we all carry the evolutionary psychology of our primitive ancestors, to whom 'society' meant maybe 30 people.

All that is neither here nor there. The reason you get bullied at work is because you're an easy mark. You're young, you're shy and polite, you're probably cute, you're smarter and more educated than most, and most importantly, you don't respond aggressively to aggression. It's like sharks, right? First they bump their prey, and if it hits back, they leave it alone, because there's easier prey out there. Bullies do the same thing.

"the laziest asshole of them all, who has slept with about a hundred women"

Oooh, such an accomplishment; slept with about a hundred different women and didn't find a one worth keeping, or that considered him worth keeping. I bet there's been a couple-hundred scathingly contemptuous blog-posts made about this guy, because I have seen a couple-thousand posts about guys just like him. How does this whiny little bastard get so many women? Law of averages: he relentlessly hits on anything female in sight. Probably also specifically goes for the sad, drunk and/or not-too-bright ones, because they're easiest to con. I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of his sexual encounters were actually date rape.

Yes, young Jedi, if you dropped your standards, you too could sleep with a hundred different lonely, desperate, mercenary and/or intoxicated women; have dozens of rotten short-term 'relationships', maybe two or three illegitimate children by women who ought never to have had any... srsly, does that sound like a happy, fulfilled life to you?

Your depression is lying to you again, m'friend. There's an aphorism to bear in mind: "Don't compare your insides to someone else's outsides." You don't know that these guys are happy - sure, of course they've got to do the traditional Guy Thing of presenting themselves as confident, competent, successful and self-satisfied, even if they're just as miserable inside as you are. Which would not surprise me, since they work in the same wretched refinery as you do.

As a beautiful woman, and as the mother of a beautiful woman, I can tell you for a fact that the luckier a lady has been in the genetic lottery, the more she gets fed up with hearing about it all the damn time. Not that a gallant compliment isn't appreciated, especially when one's made an effort to look nice, but when one hasn't, when one is just going about one's ordinary business, it is so bloody tiresome to be ogled and hit on by a dozen creepy horn-dogs a day.

Make no mistake, the pretty lady who delivered the food was not flattered or amused by your creepy co-workers, even though she probably feigned it out of expedience. And she probably had things to say about them to her female co-workers. Men who act that way have no clue what depths of rage and disgust they actually inspire: that while they think they're impressing us, we are fingering the safety-lock on the pepper-spray in our pocket and thinking about how they'd look puking and crying on the floor.

[sathor.livejournal.com]

I believe you for some women, I think you are correct. I think some of them do in fact, feel the way you do, and maybe even appreciate when someone treats them like "just another person." But of course, I also know without a doubt, that there are many who use, abuse and feed off of it. After all, that lady let the whiny brat into her home - whether she was drunk or not, it leaves something to be said for her "type" whatever that may be.

You're right, I wouldn't be satisfied with a life like that, but the kicker is that these are all people - ladies and men alike - that I would prefer to avoid like the plague, and ultimately, by being the way they are, by perpetuating that kind of lifestyle and whatever screwed up personality type it is, they're making it harder for me to find happiness. I told someone last night I hoped I'd be born a few hundred years in the past in my next life, just so things weren't as ridiculous as they are today - because I honestly don't see the future getting much better in general...if anything, it will get far worse.

My depression is probably lying to me, you're right. But I just can't help it.

Thanks for the kind words, it soothed. But I seriously doubt I'm cute - I know better. There's a reason that the vast majority of women literally will not give me the time of day if it's anything other than a professional interaction. Physical attractiveness is as much a part of creating a relationship as anything else...and when you don't win the genetic lottery, you don't have to worry about having too many opportunities...you're lucky if you have a handful, and it's probably safe to say I screwed up the ones I had while I still had my somewhat youthful good looks, and something of a positive outlook left.

Thank you again, I know it's probably tiresome to read these - I don't expect you to respond, especially to something as full of hate as this was, but if I don't express it, it just eats me alive.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I can't blame you for hating your situation, hon; it sounds nigh-unbearable. Your depression is definitely lying to you, though - telling you all the same bullshit that depression tells everyone - and there are things you can do about that. Negative self-talk is a habit; one can't just *decide* to never do it again and have that stick. One has to have a strategy, and use that strategy, and keep going back to that strategy every time one slips up.

My own strategy is Handbook to Higher Consciousness. When I was about to divorce my abusive first husband in the Spring of 1984, I prayed for help and that book came to me. When I was doing Initiatory training, the pre-req I gave all candidates was to buy that book, read it, follow the instructions in it for 30 consecutive days, and keep a daily journal of their thoughts about it.

The majority of people who asked me for Initiatory training failed this pre-req. It's a thin and simple book, and the methods don't take much time each day, but it's very prosaic - "wooden prose" is a sadly accurate description - and those who wanted Big Woo were let down; they'd hoped for something more like Hogwarts' textbooks. Well, Hogwarts is fictional, but Real Magic is in fact real, and that thin, simple, prosaic little book is one of the strongest tools for doing it that I know of. I reckoned that anybody who couldn't or wouldn't do it for one little month would never be capable of handling the much more difficult books and practices of Training anyway -heh, one of my Initiates described it as "standing behind a dump-truck full of books and shouting 'Let 'er rip!'".

Anyway: Handbook to Higher Consciousness (H2HC for short) will fix your negative self-talk and toxic rumination. And like any other bad habit, your toxic rumination will fight back, tell you it's stupid, will never work, etc. If you have the perseverance to Just Do It anyway, carry the book around for one month and just follow the instructions, your life will change.

(Comment's getting too long here, so I'll start another.)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Okies: about women. No, most don't want to be treated like 'just another person'. Heterosexual women want men to treat them like women - which is not the same thing as being 'treated like a lady', but definitely not the same thing as being treated like a whore. It may well be that your whiny little co-worker has a knack for this, which would account for his success with women.

Don't make assumptions about the lady's character just because she let the whiny little brat in her home. He probably made every effort to get in her bed, and failed. You wouldn't believe the number of people I've allowed to sleep in my house just so they wouldn't go die on the road, or kill someone else.

Dearheart, you have not met the vast majority of women. You've met some of the women in your tiny, impoverished, industrial town, where you're the downtrodden thrall of Mordor. Body language has at least as much to do with physical attractiveness as one's luck in the genetic lottery, and depression and exhaustion make even a genetically-gorgeous person look like shite. I surmise the reason most women aren't attracted to you at this point is because your non-verbal signals fluctuate between 'Needy Black Hole of Neediness' and 'Go Away, Leave Me Alone' - which is also characteristic of depression, and will change when the depression lifts.

LOL, I seriously doubt you'd know it if you're cute. The most strikingly-handsome young man I know - so gorgeous that women literally walk into walls when he passes - doesn't think himself very attractive either. But it doesn't matter. Male attractiveness (to straight women) is not about the 'youthful good looks' anyway. You're still in your 20's, and I bet you are cute when you smile, but you'll be a lot more attractive in ten years, assuming you take decent care of yourself. Men don't start getting really interesting until they're over 30; a whole lot of geeky boys turn out to be gentlemen worth dating once they've polished the rough edges off. On the other hand, a lot of pretty boys turn out to be selfish jerks once the pretty wears off, as it inevitably does.

"the kicker is that these are all people - ladies and men alike - that I would prefer to avoid like the plague, and ultimately, by being the way they are, by perpetuating that kind of lifestyle and whatever screwed up personality type it is, they're making it harder for me to find happiness."

That's one way to look at it. Another is that they're making it easier for you to find happiness by making you dissatisfied with mediocrity. Why do you stay in Warren, anyway? I understand that you can't just quit at United and expect to find another job with comparable pay in that town, but what holds you there? Do your parents rely on you, or you can't bear to leave your forests, or you've just never lived anywhere else and the concept of moving seems overwhelming?

I mentioned your situation to my daughter, and her advice to you is to take a vacation - go somewhere you've never been, and spend a week or two having fun. She suggests taking the train to Washington DC, touring the Smithsonian Institute and the assorted monuments, before the weather gets too hot. I think this is sound advice; would shake you out of your rut and give you fresh perspective, without costing a lot or requiring any permanent decisions at this point.

After these 30-to-60 days of killer shifts at United, what happens? Do you get laid off then, and can seek another job with honor while receiving Unemployment checks? Or are things going to drag on much the same until you finally give notice?

What happens in your next life is irrelevant, even if you think you'll get one. What happens in this life is all you can know, and all you can do anything about. Yeah, the world is in pretty dire straits right now; there's a lot of despair and apathy floating around; we need everyone still capable to take a stand. One person can change the world.

*hugs hugs* You hang in there, 'kay? Spring is always the hardest time to be depressed, I know; I hope you are at least getting outdoors. Take your fish oil and Vitamin D! ;~)

[sathor.livejournal.com]

First thing is first, something really caught my eye here and that's initiatory training. I doubt you're capable of it at range, but I'm incredibly interested. I've been reading occult books since I was about twelve years old - I practiced meditation and pursued astral projection (I never succeeded in projecting - the times I came closest, I have very vivid memories of...incredibly powerful and deep "vibrations" that overwhelmed my entire body and spirit.) for a decade. I'm lucky enough at the moment to be free of physical ties, so it is a great time to pursue that side of myself (and I have been, albeit slowly.) I'll definitely pick up that book...and maybe if I'm lucky, you'd be willing to divulge some further information. Wicca was probably the first occult group I stumbled on, followed by Qabalah, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Rosicrucians and others. My grandfather was a Freemason, and I have a bible of his with about a hundred extra pages of secret dialogue and information passed down by grandmasters.

After these 30-60 days, things go back to normal - eight hour day shift for me, five days a week. I actually feel pretty good at the moment - I may stick it out for a little while longer, in hopes that I land a bid on a job I'm more interested in within the plant. I'm out of vacation, so I can't leave for more than a weekend at a time this year - but I may put my notice in anyway, which would allow me to do as your daughter suggests. I spent about four months in Alaska before I started at United...so no I'm not a stranger to strange lands or travel exactly...but I also had family there who were able to help and house me. I didn't land a full time job, so I couldn't stay.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Fl8JT-gsq9k/U0aBbyLF4EI/AAAAAAAAAzs/IDgPJqbx1rw/w464-h856-no/shoveit.jpg

That is what I look like, if you can view it. Pretty sure I made it public, but no telling. It's a blurry pic, but that only makes me look better than what I actually am, anyway. Honestly, I feel like that picture makes me look HUGE. I worked out for six months prior to this shutdown, but it's hard to believe I made gains like that. I have a large frame and have always been at the low end of my ideal BMI - so basically, I was and still am a giant skinny, bony guy. The hope is eventually I have the muscle over the frame to fit. My face is scarred up, it's hard to see in the pic - in particular my chin has permanent scarring from acne, a permanent red tint. It's the hardest thing for me to look at in the mirror and it's so rare on people, I know it stands out. Even most -men- have much better complexions than myself. But that's the way it goes...it's the hand I was dealt...I have to live with it.

Why do I stay in Warren? Yeah, the pay is excellent. The fear of pursuing what I enjoy and ending up back here anyway is immense, with a house mortgage from education in tow. Even if I make it somewhere else, you have to remember...I'm not an attractive personality, and I haven't really made any new friends since high school. Temporary ones, I suppose. Maybe I'm just a very aloof personality...but the saying goes, "Wherever you go, there you are." This house has a lot of family history too, and I'm the one that gets it in the end. I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable not being here to keep it going until the death of me...but then again, if there's no one to take it after me, it hardly makes any difference at all.

Thanks Elen. -hug-

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Aha, this is the post I was looking for! I answered it once, but lost my comment, then couldn't find the post - argh.

Like I said in the last comment, I'm not doing Initiatory training any more, but I'm certainly willing to talk about it. 30 consecutive days of the Living Love Method (H2HC) was the prerequisite for training, after the person had already taken Dedication in the Coven, which just made them basic members. Lots of people are witches all their lives and never take Initiation, just like most members of Christian congregations never go to Seminary.

As I mentioned, the majority of people who asked to be considered for Initiatory training didn't make it through 30 days of H2HC, which was fine - saved both them and me a whole lot of time and trouble; that's what scrub-out pre-reqs are for. Merry meet, blessed be, dance in the Circle, share the bread and wine, call on the Lady and Lord, do little spells and charms, have Woo.... yeah, the Woo is out there, for sure. All that is good fun; why spoil it with years of arcane study, tedious rigamaroles, and scary, uncomfortable experiments that end up demonstrating that everything you know is wrong?

The first book on my assignment list is How To Think About Weird Things. The main purpose of Initiatory training is to make clergy - teachers and leaders - who are supposed to be able to tell true from false, and there are a lot of Weird Things to think about in the Craft, so gaining the skills to do so is crucial from the start. I have zero interest in teaching True Believers, so Lesson #1 is How To Not Be One.

Here's A brief Introductory course In the Craft that I posted some years back. Generally a person would have read most of those before deciding to seek Initiation, and would already be proficient in group and solitary ritual. Wicca is characteristically Earth-centered, seasonal, celebratory, home-grown and quaint, and it's not really an ancient tradition, though it does have some ancient roots. My own Tradition, the Tradition of my High Priestess Lady Nakomis, is Pantheist Wicca, and differs on a number of epistemological questions from other branches of Wicca.

Thanks for posting your pic - *grins* - I knew you were cute! You look like the sad Elven Ranger type; ought to get yourself some medieval garb and go to Pennsic War or the Ren Faire some time. Acne scars always look worse to the one who has them than they do to anyone else - use raw organic coconut oil twice a day, and they will fade away.

Excellent pay is a good reason to stick where you are for the time being - like the saying goes, "don't throw out dirty water until you have clean" - and a shot at a better position in that company seems reasonable to try for, especially if you've got a pile of student loans to pay off. But do you love Warren? Do you want to live there for the rest of your life? I do understand the family-home thing; my own family pioneered Bennington, NE, and even now, I feel that bond. However, I would rather be pecked to death by chickens than live the rest of my days in Bennington, even if I stood to inherit my cousin Gordon's amazing historic house, because I would go dotty within a year in that town. If Warren drives you crazy, family honor does not require you to die there.

*hugs hugs* Gotta fly, hon; hope your day goes well!