It`s official. The Cursed "One Ring" has been removed.

[JennyWren]

OK....so I`m going to really show up how FREAKING INSANE I am over this ring! It bothers me to have it melted down...because I won`t` know where it is. Or what it is doing.

Oh Lordy...did i just write that?

Until I feel it has forgiven me ( ).....or it is not so darn cross ( )...I want to know where it is.

THAT is absolutely flaming MAD I know. But...it doesn`t feel evil now it`s off. It just looks sad.

I really have taken leave of my senses with this one. I am a Biochemist by training. I might know better. 

[Imogene]

"Kook attraction."  I have it, too.  It's part of the reason I developed such rigorous personal boundaries that I scare off most everyone who isn't disordered.  I will not make eye contact with homeless people and the panhandlers who are at every intersection of my city.  I just look ahead and remind myself that I volunteer and donate and vote and write my congresspeople (or I used to before this crisis); I don't need to give money to strangers.

But I don't necessarily attract bad people (except for the cluster Bs I've gotten involved with).  I attract the developmentally disabled and the loners with dark secrets.  I have carried some pretty wild secrets around with me.  I remember the transgendered woman who told me the whole story of her surgeries when I volunteered at a Hotline for a community action program as a senior in high school.  She worked there with me; she didn't call in.  She was in her fifties; I was 17.  She said, "You're the only person in this town who I thought would understand."  She was a kind person, not looking for anything but someone to listen, but this is not exactly how I wanted to be singled out.  She was right, in a way, though.  I didn't judge her.  I didn't mind hearing about how they made a vagina out of her penile tissue.  It was interesting.  She was a very courageous person, and she lost everything in those days, before such things had any social acceptance.  Her wife, her grown children, her job--she was completely shut out.  But I also felt branded by this confidence and after a while, I started avoiding her.  Which is too bad, I guess, though she should not have confided in a kid like that in the first place.

Sorry, wow--THAT's something I haven't thought about in a long time.

Jen, I still think you should sell the ring.  But burying it is nicely symbolic.



 

[Never again]

Ok, it's only reading Imogene's post that I remember why I don't attract the loonies anymore .. I started actively avoiding eye contact on the street about 20 years ago when I couldn't handle them any more. I was convinced I was attracting them because there was something wrong with me - it seemed to me the more unhappy I happened to be (and presumably looked as I waited for my bus), the more total strangers would choose me to ask for help finding their lost aunt, the secret of the universe, instant happiness, ...

I remember one guy came up to me as I was walking to work one early morning and asked me would I please hold his hand because he just needed some human contact. I did as he asked and he touched my hand to his cheek and thanked me and went off again. It was sad and sweet at the same time.

Another guy sat down beside me on a train (broken-down train stuck for hours in a field!) and asked me was I a nun, and even if I wasn't I still looked like a nun so probably I'd be able to help him with his religious doubts - he was having trouble grasping the 'conundrum' of the immaculate conception. 

[JennyWren]

Those are such whacky and all-at-once wonderful examples Never again.

I have tried the no eye contact thing. And changing course too....but on a bad day...I just seem to pick up another one.

The interesting thing is that so often the examples display an immediate absolute trust from the random person you never met.

It doesn`t happen every single day. But I do sometimes feel like I am walking about collecting all the stray humans. I just thought it happened to everybody....until, by relating stories to friends...I found....it doesn`t.

And yet it is understood here. That strikes me as strange. And significant. But I can`t work out why.

[Rosemary]

It is strange isnt it Jenny ,this happens all the time to me and my D ,but not to my sons .

we dont seek them out  ,they come to us somehow  the NUTTERS she calls them .We tell each other  the chats weve had and just laugh .We sometimes have been sat  on diff seats on a train or bus ,and we both get one each  HA .

Its crazy really crazy and we dont know why .

[RB22]

I call the attraction my 'Nut Magnet' - no offense to Nutella.

I have wondered if they can 'feel' our empathy. True empathy, not the psuedo-empathy the N projects to the world.  In reading this I wonder how many other non-N's are attracting others... and are they really kooks or just people who have spent way to much time involved with the N's?   

I know in my really bad days of divorce hell.... I would go to a massage therapist because I was craving human contact.. was I a kook?   

Jenny...eloquently put regarding the bittersweetness of the arrival of the divorce pronouncement. As for the rings.... X didn't get me an engagement ring.. my mother gave him her diamond.  I bought the setting for it... all he had to do was get the ring from the jeweler and give it to me.  He did.. it was years later before I found out his mother did it for him!    I have that  ring still.  I keep it as a reminder that 2 women loved me enough to want this for ME. My wedding band I still have. It has 5 small diamonds in it..(I paid for that also) when I feel the time is appropriate I will have them removed and something done with 4 diamonds in 4 separate things (yet to be determined) and I will gift them to my children.  The fifth diamond I will keep.. in something similar that is special to me.  I also have HIS ring... when I decide what to make...ring,pendant, whatever...I will have his melted down along with other older family members (broken) jewelry into something for the girls.   And before I give it to them... I will have them Blessed (or exorcised whichever is needed).

His ring didn't mean much to him... he rarely wore it..I know the truth as to why .. but then I didn't.  I gave it to him in love... and I can take it back with the love I have for my kids...and I can repurpose into something new and regift it with blessings to my kids.

[Never again]

It is a bit weird, this kook attraction thing, isn't it? As Jenny said, these people seem to trust us completely at first sight. On the other hand, maybe it's us who trust them .. we don't run a mile (actually I do a bit now, or at least I avoid them in advance ..), but engage with them respectfully and non-judgementally, like Imogene did with her TG colleague.

And maybe we trusted the Ns in the same way ... ?

RB, I don't think there's anything odd about needing or sometimes even craving human contact. It was the way this man asked for it that was odd -  on a main city street with no preliminaries whatsoever: "Excuse me, could you please hold my hand for a minute?" But yes, if he'd just had his brain addled by an N monster, then I can totally understand him looking for a reality check from the nearest human being in the outside world :-)

[alatariel]

As long as other ppl have mentioned their rings...


I was getting ready to leave dickhead for the second time, back in 1994 or so, and he must have sensed it, b/c he bought me an "engagement ring", a cheap 10K gold ring with a sapphire heart and two miniscule diamond chips beside it.  Now, I don't like diamonds so I'm not insulting the sapphire, even though it's more black than blue b/c it's so cheap.  We didn't have much money, so I'm not insulting the 10K gold.  It was the timing.  And the fact that it didn't mean anything, he didn't actually ask me to marry him, he just gave it to me b/c he knew I was going to leave.

Come the actual "marriage", I had to insist that we finally get married, and I bought the rings.  Since we still didn't have any money, they were plain, cheap 10K gold bands with no embellishments at all.  We were married by a judge that we used to drink with, in our cheap apartment, with a couple of witnesses we dug up b/c none of my family cared and his only living relative didn't care, either.

Not long after we were married, dickhead "lost" his ring when he "took it off to give the dog a bath."  He hated wearing it, so I wasn't surprised.  Mine disappeared when I took it off and threw it at him after yet one more argument about his drinking and him accusing me again of infidelity just to take the focus off his drinking. (this was a few months before I left for good)  The ring was never seen again, though it bounced off him and into a corner of the room.

I still have the "engagement ring", it's not worth anything so I can't sell it to be melted down.

[JennyWren]

It is a bit weird, this kook attraction thing, isn't it? As Jenny said, these people seem to trust us completely at first sight. On the other hand, maybe it's us who trust them .. we don't run a mile

I`ve been thinking about this a lot. In between imagining using BigBird`s head as a bowling ball  . It thoroughly intrigues me.

Could it be that this aspect of our characters makes us sitting ducks for an N. We don`t judge people...we listen...respect individuals, however unusually they present?

I don`t know. It`s got me really thinking. 

[Never again]

Could it be that this aspect of our characters makes us sitting ducks for an N. We don`t judge people...we listen...respect individuals, however unusually they present?

Could be. All I know is I forgave el bastardo's behaviour time and time again on the basis of telling myself that I was no saint either, so who was I to judge.

In retrospect I realise that he was acting like a pr*** daily, whereas I was remembering individual incidents throughout my life that I still felt guilty about. There's a difference.

Now that I've been forced to grow up, it seems judging others is actually quite a good idea in this life.

And yet I feel in my own case, at least, that I'll be truly healed of him and of the FOO stuff that made me a sitting duck in the first place not when i become more judgemental, but when I have some kind of a natural, automatic defence system that simply turns my attention away from toxic people and towards healthy people .. I don't know how to describe it really, but I've found I've always abandoned unhealthy behaviours most successfully not when I've decided to and willed myself or forced myself to, but when I've kind of naturally lost interest in those behaviours .. or kinds of relationships in this case ..

[alatariel]

And yet I feel in my own case, at least, that I'll be truly healed of him and of the FOO stuff that made me a sitting duck in the first place not when i become more judgemental, but when I have some kind of a natural, automatic defence system that simply turns my attention away from toxic people and towards healthy people .. I don't know how to describe it really, but I've found I've always abandoned unhealthy behaviours most successfully not when I've decided to and willed myself or forced myself to, but when I've kind of naturally lost interest in those behaviours .. or kinds of relationships in this case ..

Yeah, that.

[JennyWren]

Could be. All I know is I forgave el bastardo's behaviour time and time again on the basis of telling myself that I was no saint either, so who was I to judge.

I do think this tendency to be very open to people, non-judgemental and accepting could explain the correlation between the kook attraction similarities many of us share...and the fact that we have largely been very accomodating targets for Ns.

How absolutely horrible to have to learn that the world....well...specifically Ns...seek out what are really very human and dignified tendencies to stomp all over. Shocking to imagine that to protect oneself from N one must not be trusting....and judge people without mercy. OK...so I`m taking it to extremes maybe.

Still much food for thought for me here.

[Rosemary]

I found a book in my public library called   "get people to do what you want " written by Gregory Hartley and Maryann Karinch .
Its about intterogation used by the USA ARmy and NAVY SEals .

Also about manipulation  .Ive only read halfway so far skimming it for useful info .Its all about words you infer /words you leave out /rather than say etc and body language and so on and so forth .

It says you can then recognise when people are trying to manipulate you .


hope it teaches me  a thing or two    

[JennyWren]

I don`t know if I imagined it....or DREAMED it....but I have a feeling that the book you are talking about got into the possession of somebody`s N.....and I remember the post here saying that the N had sat there enthralled....not in how to avoid manipulation of himself...but of how to be even more of a manipulative bazturd himself.   

I am always quietly terrified when I see how minds can be "persuaded" if you know how. Watching Derren Brown`s TV show is a facinating experience, in the way he can plant ideas in somebody`s head...and have them quite sure they independently thought it for themselves.

I guess the more you can educate yourself about such tricks, the more awareness you can use to protect yourself. That and wear a tinfoil hat. Or Saucepan on your head.

[nutella]

So, Nutt....you have her the 20 bucks simply because she put on such a good show that had such great amusement value? Or did she really tug at your heart strings. I attract homeless people on the street..they're always wanting a cigarette or five dollars and I used to always give it to them but now I just see one coming, and I go across the street. I think it's because I don't feel quite so sure of my ass-kicking abilities at my advanced age, though I wouldn't absolutely rule that out if I saw someone abusing an animal or a child or someone weaker or smaller. But now we can just call 911, so we don't have to actually be drawn into the fray......

wow..three kooks in one morning! Where do you live, Nutt that you are up and at work already by 5:30 central time???? Even if you're on the East Coast, that's only one hour ahead of me....................you must be a Lark with a capital "L"!!


Legs

Legs,

 I am sometimes up, not rising (insomnia), or I am up early (same reason: it's a cycle).  Answering  your question about my geography,  Metra and CTA to be more specific.   

  Not amusement.  Just sadness at the display.  I saw her today.  We talked.  No money.  I kept my boundaries. Just pleasantries and talk about mutual troubles: public transit fare increases, the weather, and the two skulls found and reported in the news not far from us both.     She got on the train and pulled the same skit, but she sat across from me. 

  The $20 was a moral compulsion.   It was more than enough, or was it?  Anyway, it was more than she expected, and she certainly knows that today, but I will give her a buck or 2 in the future.   

  Then going this morning, I volunteered  an old CTA card worth $1.25 ( I always travel with 2) to someone asking for 50 cents. to get "somewhere".   That's my own, not KA.....

 But this evening, major KA!   2 "conversations".      One just approached me out of nowhere.  He did not ask for a dime.   He was sincere, I believe.   Anyway, it seems that some of us have KA.  Or  marginalized  people see something, and WE also do. 

Legs, do you tend to be ideological?  Is that our weakness?

 

[Legs]

Shytown? Oh, how I love that city. My late hisband was from Wih-SCAN-sin, so we passed through on the way to Milwaukee. I loved the feeling in that town (and Milwaukee too, bit M felt more like Ft. Worth and Shy felt more like Dallas, except for the bars. GREAT BARS IN BOTH TOWNS!!!)

Will google the skulls....I have probably an unhealthy interest in true crime.....mostly the why rather than the how.

I would say I was terribly idealogical before this huge awakening/massive betrayal by a man that I had liked, admired and adored and finally loved for thirty years. To realize I was NOTHING to him was tremendously damaging..so much for me that instead of breaking my heart, it stopped my heart entirely. It is now a dead thing taking up room in my body. I feel like the walking dead as far as feelings are concerned. I have none and want none so all my "causes" have fallen away. I no longer give one chit about the underdog or doing the right thing.

It might be that I am still ideological, just in a completely different way. I used to care and now I don't. Not about myself or anyone else. My illusions were shattered and I realized my entire life had been a waste and now it might be over. Am I glad I found out everything in retrospect? Not sure.....but glad Lucifer did not get to keep all his nasty little secrets. I don't think my own happiness matters anymore because I don't want to ever go there again.

I think living in a big city would be the thing..............you could "disappear" and still be able to forage for whatever you needed. Here, people always know your name.


Skulls..........<shiver>

Legs