Holidays not so helpful

I came (to Big Bend National Park to get out of the apartment in Odessa I still refuse to call home, since I had belated Thanksgiving holiday days to burn).

I saw (I was more burned out on Big Bend than before, in particular, and on desert hiking in general, for whatever reasons).

I conquered (nothing, even with primal screaming f-bombs to echo off canyon walls, and even briefly entertaining thoughts of throwing my cell phone against one of those walls, or my camera bag off a bridge, since I couldn’t or wouldn’t let go of my anxieties and other issues enough.)

'Picking' as 'cutting lite'

I've never been a "cutter," but I have been a "picker" in the past. Picking at scabs. Picking at fingernails, or biting, until I strip them down into the quick and they start bleeding.

I've gotten kind of bad at it since my recent move. I have a spot on top of my balded pate that got a bit sunburned this summer, and I've been picking at it a lot. I want help!

Rabbi offered cocaine for sex

This news of the weird story is certainly more proof of the power of, ultimately, multiple addictions, not just one.

Work co-dependency?

I saw this phrase on a recovery blog today, namely from someone responding to a post of mine about my frustration with my new job, job hours, one supervisor and more here in Odessa, Texas.

For people like me who, by nature, nurture or some combination thereof, are somewhat loners in general, and/or who focus either on the world of ideas or the world of things rather than the world of people, our jobs often give us a fair amount of person-to-person interaction.

So, his phrase was eye-catching indeed. But, when you are more of a loner, is something like that possible of happening?

A stressful last couple of days

Free-flating anxiety still running in my head.

Did some fairly serious "picking" this afternoon.

(I never did "cutting," but, picking at my fingernails down to the quick, then, picking at the skin until it bleeds, or a hangnail bleeds? Yes.)

Here’s a couple of great asexuality resources

New Scientist has a very friendly article on asexuality. From it, I found this informative forum.

A dysfunctional marriage, in poetry

Influenced by Charles Bukowski....

MOM AND DAD AND MARRIAGE AND KIDS

A marriage — a painful silence.
An isolated, somewhat schizoid mom,
And an angry, temperamental dad,
Who married each other trying to solve some old psychological puzzle,
But stopped trying after very long,
Perhaps not even conscious of the puzzle at hand, or in mind.
Instead, they burrowed into and intensified
Their old psychological roles and stances,
Topping that
With old conservative Midwestern religious values and stereotypes
About sexuality and gender roles.
After three boys and a miscarriage
They took a child-raising break.
(Not that either was doing much to raise those they already had.)
Then, after a move
With an attempted geographic cure for their unconscious puzzles perhaps not enough,
They started on baby-making again,
Or at least did nothing to prevent it.
Nine months later, without any choice in the matter,
Out I popped.
I want my money back.

— Oct. 27, 2009

Junk food equals heroin in addiction

At least it does for lab rats. The more they consumed, the more they needed to consume to get the same pleasure feeling.

After just five days on the junk food diet, rats showed “profound reductions” in the sensitivity of their brains’ pleasure centers, suggesting that the animals quickly became habituated to the food. As a result, the rats ate more food to get the same amount of pleasure. Just as heroin addicts require more and more of the drug to feel good, rats needed more and more of the junk food. “They lose control,” Kenny says. “This is the hallmark of addiction.”

The effects lasted for days afterward.

Solitary, secretive, scared and shabby

I substitute "scared," for alliteration, for the "Solitary, secretive, timid & shabby" I heard earlier today in an online chatroom. Great description, sadly, of an end-state alcoholic drinker or addicted drug user.

Some more thoughts on sex and Internet pornography

This is not just about sexual acting out... i.e., inappropriately acting sexually on actual sexual feelings. That said, it's not just "acting out" as a process addiction, either, although it certainly is that in part.

Certainly, with a new job right now, it's in part about anxiety still here, anger still at losing my old job, anger at the way my old company was managed, anger about the state of the newspaper industry, anger about not being able to get a reasonable job back in Dallas and more.

But, there's one ogther factor involved.

Beyond Jung, there probably is some legitimate study of sexual splitting as part of our repressed selves, and I've started doing a bit of that with Nathaniel Branden.

And, I started realizing, or picking up on an old past thread, of how much I envied women being women. I don't think I'm a woman trapped in a male body, nor is the envy level high enough to want reassignment surgery.

But, in a number of ways, especially coming from a conservative family and religion background that "assigned" traditional, stereotyped roles to women, I recognized that I, as a person who feared the testosterone, anger and competition of stereotyped masculinity and felt beat down by it, that, I was jealous of the "passiveness" that stereotyped women could in some ways, seemingly enjoy, while working a backdoor, quasi-assertiveness angle as well.

And, short of male violence, nowhere did that seem more true than in sexual relations. And, now, part of me wonders if I'm not jealous of the pornstars and centerfolds, or the real women cammers, working that type of assertiveness.