1723 Freak

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

I have fibromyalgia. It's not formally diagnosed because it's not something that can be cured or treated, so there's no point in having it on my record, but I do have eight of the sensitive points, and I have pain somewhere all the time. I also have a very high pain threshold - that "knuckle the sternum" thing to check for consciousness doesn't work on me, for example, and when my gall bladder went west, I didn't know there was anything wrong until I started throwing up coffee grounds. (Translation: blood.)

Anyway, I have something a little weird, and I don't know if it's common or not. If it's not common, I wonder if it's related to the fibro.

I found an ingrown hair on the outside of my left thigh this morning, and I was poking and pinching at it, and I didn't feel the pinch in my thigh. I felt it on the outside of my left bicep. I often sense a surface pain on my lower body as on the upper body, and vice versa. Like the nerves are messed up. The brain interprets a surface pain on the thigh as coming from the arm, and then I semi-consciously remap it to the proper place on the thigh. This is normal for me, and I've never really questioned it.

IS this common, normal? Do you ever, often?, feel a pinch far distant from where the pinch really is?

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Gov. Spitzer has been caught in a prostitution scandal. His legal problem is not with the misdemeanor visits, but with the felony act of moving money around to hide the payments.

I'm having some trouble understanding that. It's a felony to move money around? He moved money from his personal accounts to a holding company for the prostitution company, which may have had some "tax implications". That's the part I don't understand. Don't the taxes still get paid, one way or another? I'm going to have to follow this.

The visits to prostitutes is a public relations problem. My opinion on that? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

A lot of the blather is about how so many men in positions of influence and power seem to have sex scandals that take them down. People with

--- break ---

I had to run off mid-sentence. I looked at the clock and it was 5:15 pm. I had to leave the house by 5:30 to meet some friends for dinner, grand opening of a Thai restaurant, and I was sitting here in my PJs, unwashed and uncombed (yeah, at 5 pm, wanna make something of it? Benefits of retirement! I earned it! Shuddup!) Darn daylight savings time. My internal clock is all messed up.

--- end of break, 10 pm ---

So where was I? People with a lot to lose seem to do stupid things they know will hurt them if they're found out, and yet they do it. And the blatherers seem surprised by that.

I'm not, for several reasons.

The neighbor next door might be cheating on his wife with the secretary (or intern), but the big difference is that he doesn't have reporters and everybody else in the world following him around and poking into everything looking for dirt. Nobody cares. Spitzer turned up on a list of clients of the prostitutes. If neighbor John turned up on the list, no one would care, and we'd likely never hear about it. And there are a lot of Johns out there. A lot of men do exactly the same things that have taken down politicians and preachers lately. They escape scrutiny and vilification because, frankly, no one cares.

So that's one reason why. Scrutiny.

A second reason is that you don't acquire power by playing it safe. Powerful people take risks. Risk takers go for it. They did. Some of them took the risk and lost. You can bet your patooty that there are a lot more powerful people out there taking the same risk, and they will often be the loudest in condemning the guy who got caught. (Monicagate springs to mind.) They're not condemning him for what naughty thing he did --- they are condemning him for getting caught.

That's another reason why. Risk taking.

Third, the more powerful men get more women. At least they're supposed to. That's deep in the brain from cave days. More women, more breeding opportunities, more progeny. Otherwise, why work so hard and risk so much? It's animal nature. So a powerful man, deep in the dark recesses of his brain, thinks he deserves the reward. A powerful man also has more temptation thrown at him. That's why so many of them have serial wives, and/or get caught in embarrassing sexual escapades.

That's a third reason. A desire to collect the rewards.

--- Flash! On TV news this very minute, an analyst has said that Ms. Clinton's "as far as I know" (that something was not so) was a slip, and an admission of guilt! Oh, come on! "As far as I know" means that "I don't know that what you said is true, it may be true, but I know nothing about it". She's a lawyer! If she doesn't know that something is not true, then she CAN'T say "It's not true", because she doesn't know that. All she can truthfully say is "As far as I know, it is not true." Good Grief, people! There are very few things any of us know with certainty.

Am I going to have to stop watching the news again? End of flash ---
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