It would be best, if I went the way of the AEC Routemaster.

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CockneyRebel
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29 Jan 2007, 5:00 pm

Thankyou for your kind replies.

Here are some other reasons that I have a very dark outlook.

:arrow: I've just lost a good friend
:arrow: I've gained 15 lbs in the past month
:arrow: I'm sick of seing scantly-dressed NT girls necking with their well-dressed NT boyfriends
:arrow: I start out thinking about something trippy, to end up thinking about the Routemaster, in the end, so I'll never change.
:arrow: All I want to do is spend an evening, watching good TV, but all that's on is Reality Shows and I HATE reality.
:arrow: I was assaulted by a man in a wheelchair and it's all my bloody fault, and I feel like a weak, dirty victim, even though I stand tall, all the time.
:arrow: My Grandpa just got his leg amputated, my Nana is developing either Alziemer's or Dementia, and my crippled, and sickly underweight Aunt is trying to control what happens to them



CockneyRebel
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29 Jan 2007, 5:04 pm

If I've waisted anybody's time at WrongPlanet, I apologize, and maybe I should die for that, as well.



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29 Jan 2007, 5:14 pm

Listen, the man-in-the-wheelchair incident was not your fault. How could you foresee that he was a nutcase?
It seems you have gone into this evil circle of self-blaming.
About being obsessed with Routemasters, is that a negative trait? IMO obsession = passion, something that isn't negative at all.
If people think you're weird because you only talk about your favourite subject, its their loss since their pre-judging NT brains fail to comprehend.

Here is a technique you can try:

-Close your eyes
-Think of the best happening in your life, really put yourself into that scenery and focus on the satisfying feeling of accomplishment
-Now imagine you're right there, right now. Let the happening "play" before you
-Now tell yourself: "When I open my eyes I am going to feel better than I have ever felt before"
-With your eyes still closed, count slowly to 10. make sure that you are totally relaxed when you inhale and exhale.
-Open your eyes

It might work. If you do such exercises a little bit every day, you will gradually program your brain to make you feel better. It has worked for me before.

You can cheat your brain this way. If you have a social problem with a friend or aquaintance, do the above excercise before leaving the house to meet the person. Use a scenario where you imagine yourself and this individual as two persons who get along perfectly. Now you should be loaded with confidence which you will outshine when meeting this person.



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29 Jan 2007, 5:18 pm

You haven't wasted anyone's time and you certainly shouldn't die. You have value, you have worth, you are important, and it's important that you realize that because it is true!!

To address your last points:
I've lost so many good friends, I've lost count. Some have been through death, others have just gone their separate ways - usually because I was just too "off" for them. It hurts either way. You have my condolences and a big cyber hug!

I understand the weight thing, too. I used to be nice and thin and in the past two years, I've gained 30 pounds. Not too happy about that. 15 pounds in a month is quite a bit. Have you changed your eating habits?

I feel your pain about seeing the scantily clad necking with the well dressed boyfriends. Just remember, that the odds are in favor of their relationships ending badly, so keep that in mind before you envy them too much. They have theirs coming!

Why try to change??? If Routemasters make you happy, then more power to ya, sister!! We all need something that makes us smile!

I happen to like some reality TV - not a lot, but some. I do agree that there really isn't much worth watching now days!

I don't know what you mean by assaulted - physically or sexually? I also don't understand why you think it is your fault. It sounds like HE is the one with the problem, not you. Please don't put blame on yourself!

It sounds like you are worried about your family, too. I am worried about mine as well.

It is hard to be happy when it seems like the world is crashing in around us. Please remember that these things will pass. They always do. Today may be dark, but the sun will come up tomorrow and the day after that and one day soon, you will feel better.


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29 Jan 2007, 5:19 pm

Excellent point, Revenant. I'm posting a copy of an article from last month's Smithsonian Magazine (which I subscribe to) about an 18th century "Renaissance Man" (for lack of a better way to describe him) basically did Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on himself. In the article, he seems to have some Aspie traits.

http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issu ... esence.php

Doctor Feelgood
Stricken by "vile melancholy," the 18th-century critic and raconteur Samuel Johnson pioneered a modern therapy

By John Geirland
Related links


Mel Gibson did it. Brooke Shields too. So did Uma Thurman, Ben Stiller and Carrie Fisher. They and dozens of other celebrities have all come forward, in books or on TV, to discuss their struggles with alcoholism, or drug addiction, or postpartum depression, or other long dark nights of the soul. Quite possibly, misery has never loved company more than in American pop culture right now. So strong is our preference for redemptive narratives of adversity overcome that after James Frey's purported memoir A Million Little Pieces was revealed to contain a pack of fabrications, it returned to the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for an encore appearance.

Samuel Johnson was no Mel Gibson, but his biography includes the makings of a modern celebrity sobfest: birth into poverty; a host of ailments, both physical and psychological; and, of course, the burdens of fame. In his time (1709-84), Dr. Johnson was a renowned critic, biographer, moral philosopher and creator of A Dictionary of the English Language. He was also known to be a bit strange. But in his moments of crisis, he issued no statements through his publicist (or his protégé and future biographer, James Boswell), and he declined to retreat into solitude; instead, he fashioned his own recovery, in ways that anticipate popular currents in contemporary psychology.

Johnson went on to write about happiness and melancholy, joining a larger Enlightenment dialogue on those topics among such luminaries as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham. (Like our own time, the 18th century was preoccupied with the idea of happiness.) His writings don't provide the drama of, say, addiction-induced kleptomania, but they do offer a refreshing contrast to the current template for melodramatized suffering and contentment. With diligent effort and keen insight into the workings of the mind, Johnson simply figured out how to work around his afflictions and make himself happy.

He started out with the odds against him. "I was born almost dead and could not cry for some time," he recalled late in life. In infancy, scrofulous lymph nodes were found in his neck and attributed to the tuberculosis of his wet nurse. He was transported to Queen Anne's presence in the belief, common at the time, that the royal touch could cure "the King's Evil," as scrofula was called. All his life he had poor vision and hearing. Bizarre tics, odd vocalizations ("too too too," he muttered when excited) and wild gestures rendered his appearance, one observer said, "little better than that of an idiot."

But Johnson was a precocious lad. He read prodigiously, mastered Latin ("My master whipt me very well," he told Boswell) and was so helpful to his fellow students that they carried him to school in gratitude. Neurologists now believe that Johnson's convulsions and odd behavior were symptoms of Tourette's syndrome, a disorder first identified in 1885 by George Gilles de la Tourette. Johnson's contemporaries left vivid accounts of its effects on him: "His vast body is in constant agitation, see-sawing backwards and forwards, his feet never a moment quiet; and his whole great person looked often as if it were going to roll itself, quite voluntarily, from his chair to the floor," wrote Fanny Burney, the English diarist and novelist. Frances Reynolds, sister of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, recorded the curious method by which Johnson led a blind member of his household through a doorway: "On entering Sir Joshua's house with poor Mrs. Williams...he would quit her hand, or else whirl her about on the steps as he whirled and twisted about to perform his gesticulations; and as soon as he had finished, he would give a sudden spring, and make such an extensive stride over the threshold, as if he was trying for a wager to see how far he could stride."

As if his oddness were not enough, Johnson inherited from his father, Michael Johnson, what he called a "vile melancholy," which, he confided to Boswell, made him "mad all his life." Johnson's first major depressive episode occurred at age 20 while he was on vacation from Oxford, where he was an impoverished but extremely well-read student. Johnson, Boswell wrote, "felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom and despair, which made existence misery."

But even in this early period, Johnson exhibited a genius for self-analysis. He wrote up his own case in Latin and gave it to his physician and godfather, Dr. Samuel Swinfen. The doctor was "so much struck with the extraordinary acuteness, research, and eloquence of this paper," writes Boswell, "that in his zeal for his godson he shewed it to several people." Naturally, Johnson was furious.

The gloom lifted, and it may be just as well that Johnson didn't seek further medical help after the gross violation of doctor-patient confidentiality. The preferred treatments for melancholy in his time were purges, emetics, bleedings and physical punishment.

Johnson prepared to manage his own case, a contemporary noted, by studying medicine "diligently in all its branches," giving "particular attention to the diseases of the imagination." His greatest fear was that he might lose his reason, for it was his powerful intellect that allowed him to keep a grip on sanity. "To have the management of the mind is a great art," he told Boswell, "and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise." Johnson would have agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment of the Greek philosopher Epictetus, who wrote: "People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them." This is the idea at the heart of cognitive-behavioral therapy, a pragmatic, short-term form of psychotherapy now widely used to treat a host of psychological problems.

Cognitive-behavior therapists believe that emotional disturbances are caused by "distortions in thinking," erroneous beliefs or interpretations that can trigger anxiety, depression or anger. Take a patient who tells himself: "I got a parking ticket; nothing turns out well for me." Cognitive-behavior therapists refer to this as "catastrophic thinking." It is the therapist's task to help the patient replace such distortions with more realistic interpretations, as in, "It's too bad I got a ticket, but it's a small matter in the scheme of things."

Johnson sometimes played cognitive-behavior therapist to the fretful Boswell. On one such occasion, Boswell arrived at Johnson's London home upset and uneasy. He'd had a run-in with his landlord and resolved not to spend another night in his rooms. Johnson laughed. "Consider, Sir, how insignificant this will appear a twelvemonth hence." This insight made a big impression on Boswell. "Were this consideration to be applied to most of the little vexatious incidents of life, by which our quiet is too often disturbed, it would prevent many painful sensations," he wrote. "I have tried it frequently, with good effect."

Johnson often touched on psychological matters in The Rambler, a twice-weekly pamphlet that he published between 1750 and 1752. Typical is Rambler #29, in which he used cool reasoning and striking imagery to show the folly of catastrophic thinking about future misfortunes. "Whatever is afloat in the stream of time, may, when it is very near us, be driven away by an accidental blast, which shall happen to cross the general course of the current."

He believed that idleness provided fertile ground for the melancholy that threatened to consume him. "It is certain that any wild wish or vain imagination never takes such firm possession of the mind, as when it is found empty and unoccupied," he wrote in Rambler #85. He formulated and lived by a simple mantra: "If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle."

A childless widower in midlife—his wife, Tetty, more than 20 years his senior, died in 1752—Johnson gathered an odd household of characters that became a kind of surrogate family for him. There was his young servant, Frank Barber; the blind Welsh poetess Anna Williams, whose habit of using her finger to judge how much tea to pour in a cup offended Boswell; Robert Levett, a dissolute physician to the poor, and later the penniless widow Elizabeth Desmoulins, the hapless Dr. Swinfen's daughter. They were a motley lot, but he was fond of them.

Johnson also gathered a wide support network of friends throughout London society. He filled his evenings with an endless round of dinner parties and was a founding member of the famous Literary Club—Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith and Boswell were members—in which he found sociability, amusement and a forum for displaying his rhetorical skills. "There is no arguing with Johnson," Goldsmith observed, "for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it." He loved to talk and to eat, but "most important of all," wrote biographer Joseph Wood Krutch, Johnson "won hours of freedom from his own sick mind."

But he could not escape solitude entirely. When alone he sought, as Boswell put it, "constant occupation of mind." Naturally, he was a voracious reader. He was also an enthusiastic amateur chemist, often befouling his rooms with noxious fumes. He engaged in a variety of nonchemical experiments, too, once shaving the hair around his right nipple in order to observe how long it took to grow back. A diary entry for July 26, 1768, reads: "I shaved my nail by accident in whetting the knife, about an eighth of an inch from the bottom, and about a fourth from the top. This I measure that I may know the growth of nails."

Johnson's various investigations provided occasions for what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the "autotelic experience," or "flow," a state in which the individual has "intense emotional involvement" in a rewarding, goal-directed activity. Flow "lifts the course of life to a different level," Csikszentmihalyi writes. "Alienation gives way to involvement, enjoyment replaces boredom, helplessness turns into a feeling of control, and psychic energy works to reinforce the sense of self, instead of being lost in the service of external goals....Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems."

What saved Johnson, time and again, was his ability to step back and view his illness objectively, a talent he exhibited notably when he suffered a stroke near the end of his life. He described the episode in a letter to a friend: "I went to bed, and in a short time waked and sat up, as has been long my custom, when I felt a confusion and indistinctness in my head, which lasted, I suppose, about half a minute. I was alarmed, and prayed God, that however he might afflict my body, he would spare my understanding. This prayer, that I might try the integrity of my faculties, I made in Latin verse. The lines were not very good, but I knew them not to be very good: I made them easily, and concluded myself to be unimpaired in my faculties."

He never lost his reason or his zest for human connection. And he kept a clear vision of what would keep him happy: "If...I had no duties, and no reference to futurity," he told Boswell, "I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman; but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation."

John Geirland, a writer based in Los Angeles, has a doctorate in social psychology.



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29 Jan 2007, 5:19 pm

Revenant is right. You're being too negative.

The way I stay happy is to make jokes about everything I can. I laugh as often as possible. When I have nothing to watch on TV, I turn on Comedy Central and just watch some stand-up.


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29 Jan 2007, 5:56 pm

Hi Cockney Rebel I havent posted for a while but your words made me want to say that even though I have never met you, I know you are a genuine, good person worthy of great things.
Your love and loyalty to your Routemasters is not pointless, you have brought this fine vehicle to many peoples attention who otherwise would be unaware of its history and beauty.
Your tummy troubles are something many of us share, I do, sometimes. Try and get to the doctors, there are lots of good treatments available for what is a nuisance, but a very common problem.
Take care, Cockney, we all love and value you.



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29 Jan 2007, 11:16 pm

I would like to thank all of you who've replied, so far. I'm in a far better mood, than I was this morning. I've been to the doctor's and he told me that it was a matter of needing to re-train myself. I'll be posting about the Routemaster more often than I have been, over the past six days, between once every 5th and once every 10th posts. There won't be any formulas, this time. I'll be doing what's right for me, from now on. Not what's right for everybody else. I'll also hone my eating habits, so I start losing the weight. I was having a really hard time getting back on track, after Christmas, and the meals that they serve at my Clubhouse are too big. I'm better off making my lunch at my flat, and eating it there.

That's all for now.

Cockney



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30 Jan 2007, 8:05 am

Well done on going to the doctors I know its not easy, making the appointment, getting ready, actually getting up and going, then telling someone personal stuff, its an achievement in itself. Hopefully it has made you feel better already, Cockney!



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30 Jan 2007, 8:58 am

Quote:
I would like to thank all of you who've replied, so far. I'm in a far better mood, than I was this morning. I've been to the doctor's and he told me that it was a matter of needing to re-train myself. I'll be posting about the Routemaster more often than I have been, over the past six days, between once every 5th and once every 10th posts. There won't be any formulas, this time. I'll be doing what's right for me, from now on. Not what's right for everybody else. I'll also hone my eating habits, so I start losing the weight. I was having a really hard time getting back on track, after Christmas, and the meals that they serve at my Clubhouse are too big. I'm better off making my lunch at my flat, and eating it there.

That's all for now.

Cockney


Great stuff Cockney! To be honest, I don't think planning how much you should post about the routemaster in advance is a good idea. Just doing it when you feel like, as you have decided now is an excellent idea. Good to hear that the doctor appointment was sucessfull!

About diet. If you want to lose weight, eat fiber. They have these special crackers that you can use as a replacement for bread. Unlike bread, they don't contain excessive carbohydrates. The fiber are very rich in nutrients.

Also, dairy products are a devil. Replace milk with soy milk. It is very energizing.

I am sure you can accomplish it. Anything you want for that matter, as its all about willpower in most aspects of life.

Again, glad to hear things are going better!



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30 Jan 2007, 9:36 am

Revenant wrote:
Quote:
I would like to thank all of you who've replied, so far. I'm in a far better mood, than I was this morning. I've been to the doctor's and he told me that it was a matter of needing to re-train myself. I'll be posting about the Routemaster more often than I have been, over the past six days, between once every 5th and once every 10th posts. There won't be any formulas, this time. I'll be doing what's right for me, from now on. Not what's right for everybody else. I'll also hone my eating habits, so I start losing the weight. I was having a really hard time getting back on track, after Christmas, and the meals that they serve at my Clubhouse are too big. I'm better off making my lunch at my flat, and eating it there.

That's all for now.

Cockney


Great stuff Cockney! To be honest, I don't think planning how much you should post about the routemaster in advance is a good idea. Just doing it when you feel like, as you have decided now is an excellent idea. Good to hear that the doctor appointment was sucessfull!

About diet. If you want to lose weight, eat fiber. They have these special crackers that you can use as a replacement for bread. Unlike bread, they don't contain excessive carbohydrates. The fiber are very rich in nutrients.

Also, dairy products are a devil. Replace milk with soy milk. It is very energizing.

I am sure you can accomplish it. Anything you want for that matter, as its all about willpower in most aspects of life.

Again, glad to hear things are going better!


try whole wheat bread, that uses the good carbs on the glycemic index, crackers, beans (pinto, garbanzo, kidney,white,) barley,oatmeal(quackeroats) rice, pasta(yummmm) couscous,

tofu, (soy product)

^^^ copied most of the low glycemic index carbs(healthy carbs) from the nutrisystem meal planner

like i said in past, portion control is the key and self control over cravings for junk foodwill really help in weight loss. the junk food items are perfect for dessert (things like cheese doodles, pretzels, cookies,etc.)


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CockneyRebel
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30 Jan 2007, 6:09 pm

I thank all of you who've responded to my destress. The stuff that I was feeling, yesterday morning was real, and I wasn't make any of it up for attention. You're been a great help. It's good to know that there are people who care.



CockneyRebel
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05 Feb 2007, 8:38 pm

I've been acting pretty nasty, towards another member. I don't deserve to live. I should push a knife through my heart and end it all. I want my tombstone to be the shape of a Routemaster.



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05 Feb 2007, 8:57 pm

Just say your sorry sincerely and thats more than 99% people do in this world and then forget about it.



CockneyRebel
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05 Feb 2007, 9:13 pm

TheMachine1 wrote:
Just say your sorry sincerely and thats more than 99% people do in this world and then forget about it.


I've posted an apology in the Members Only forum. I hope that it's well recieved, or else.



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05 Feb 2007, 9:28 pm

CockneyRebel wrote:
TheMachine1 wrote:
Just say your sorry sincerely and thats more than 99% people do in this world and then forget about it.


I've posted an apology in the Members Only forum. I hope that it's well recieved, or else.


The apology is posted, I'll have a restful sleep and I'll see what happens when I wake up, tomorrow.