Reactive Meta-Analysis

Recent search engine searches that have led to this blog, according to my StatCounter:

Num Perc. Search Term
6 30.00% high reactive
3 15.00% can you make iskiate with chia extract
1 5.00% intj said in one word
1 5.00% most successful INTJ's
1 5.00% prism diet
1 5.00% drink raramuri
1 5.00% "introvert power"
1 5.00% where to buy geranium niveum extract
1 5.00% one it starts the longing for a dog there is no cure for it
1 5.00% "geranium niveum"
1 5.00% "what a lot of hairy faced men there are around nowadays"
1 5.00% Iskiate fermented drink
1 5.00% things cling to hairs escpecially food things like gravy
20 100.00%

This changes a little every day and I'm sure a few of those are from me in my creation of this post, but there are patterns that emerge. For the longest time, my Twits post has brought people looking for hairy men and it's always on there. More recently, INTJ posts like this one have been bringing people and my Born to Run stuff has been my biggest hitter, especially the diet one. Not as high but consistently in the mix is the high reactive one. It's even, for the moment, the first result on a Google search for the term, coming before the article it references.

You should follow this link to that post now and review. Revisiting it is the point of this post (and the INTJ link above is highly complementary if you're willing to follow one more). Many posts appear then fade away, both literally and figuratively. This one hasn't. I still relate, wonder about it, and debate what it all means. It's a long article that spends too much time on the science and experimental techniques instead of implications, but there's good stuff mixed in. Pages 8 and 9 probably have the most key stuff if you want to be selective.

My manager has told me I always react with worst-case scenario thinking and she always know my first reaction to anything new will be negative. As I've gotten past the painful shyness and isolation I've gotten more outspoken, but often I end up just expressing more of my worries. I've always been conscientious, and learned to cope with my panic in the face of spontaneity by building layers and layers of pre-planned, thought-out canned responses to every situation I can imagine. I have to have a plan; multiple plans with many possible courses if I want to be able to vary from the plan. I never do anything that I haven't thoroughly thought through. I constantly fidget and exhausting myself with vigorous exercise is how I calm down enough to relax. There's more. The things described in the article make sense to me.

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The review I wrote today for Lemony Snicket's book Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid:

How could I not give this a positive review with such obvious panders as:

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.

and

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.

Because even though those examples aren't what give Snicket's collection their depth,

One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.

And, of course, that one isn't either. I'm glad I waited a few years before reading this collection of "truths," because time had faded my memory of what I love so much about Snicket's storytelling. This, after all, is the man who repeatedly through his Series of Unfortunate Events books extolled the virtues of drinking tea strong and black, because sometimes it's good to sip on life's bitterness. With wit and sarcasm and profound respect for intellect, but always with the undercurrent of bitter. The aphorisms are collected into short chapters with titles like, "Home," "Work," "Travel," and the like, but it's the title of the climactic twelfth (of thirteen, of course) chapter that captures what he's all about: "An Overall Feeling of Doom that One Cannot Ever Escape No Matter What One Does." So, with that in mind, a few more representative samples (saving the best for last):

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby--awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.

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Everybody will die, of course, sooner or later. Circus performers will die, and clarinet experts will die, and you and I will die, and there might be a person who lives on your block, right now, who is looking both ways before he crosses the street and who will die in just a few seconds, all because of a bus. Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.

-----

Deciding on the right thing to do in a situation is a bit like deciding on the right thing to wear to a party. It is easy to decide on what is wrong to wear to a party, such as deep-sea diving equipment or a pair of large pillows, but deciding what is right is much trickier. The truth is that you can never be sure if you have decided on the right thing until the party is over, and by then it is too late to go back and change your mind, which is why the world is filled with people doing terrible things and wearing ugly clothing.

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Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake someone else up, so that they can feel this way, too.

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End of the review (which was related, if you skipped it; see chapter twelve), and one more thought, the one that actually spurred all of this.

Still not ready to say what or why or how, but being blown away by my reading of Last Night I Sang to the Monster (first mentioned here). Great character voice that I can totally connect with, even though my life circumstances have never been one bit like his. I bury my emotions under intellectual pursuits like this. I can acknowledge when books work for me emotionally, but it's the rare one that really makes me feel deeply. This one seems to be speaking to me so well right now that I just found this paragraph completely overwhelming. There's enough me in my head already . . .

"Some people have eating disorders and there's a special group for that. Some people have more than one person living inside them and there's a special group for that. That's serious stuff. That really does stun the hell out of me. I mean, I only have one of me living inside me and that's bad enough. If I had more than one of me inside me, I'd off myself."