April 1, 2011 9:58 p.m.
There's no code intended on this page today.
I can't log into my Polyvore account at all. It may be that I don't have the right password, or am erroneously capitalizing or uncapitalizing some part of it.
I did log into my Friendster account finally and made it private. If I edit it, the essence of it will stay the same.
Before I describe what some of my recent experiences have been like, I want to say how impressed I am by the number of generous people there are in the world. The time and effort that churches, schools and volunteers in this area put into making food and services available to people who don't have any money is really great.
This morning, a man who's staying at the same shelter that I am sat down next to me and started a conversation with another man. The conversation was about bed bugs, and it went on for a few minutes until the man sitting next to me said "The manager of the shelter isn't going to like what I'm going to do to get rid of the bedbugs, but we've got to get that mess cleaned up."
I had been ignoring their conversation up until that sentence, and then I said "Can you please continue this conversation somewhere else?" The man who had been doing most of the listening of the two men left, and the man who'd started to say what he was going to do to the bedbugs stayed, sitting next to me in silence for about 45 minutes. I think he might have dozed off somewhere in the middle of that 45 minutes; it's certainly possible that he had decided to sit where he did because it was an unoccupied section of the couch in the basement of the church that was providing day shelter hours, and that trying to scare me was something he thought of after he'd secured his goal of getting to sit on the couch. I was in the chair next to the couch, and someone else was on the other end of the couch. We're not allowed to be in the shelter that we sleep in during the day; we have to leave early in the morning.
I shouldn't make this joke, should I? I don't want to insult the would-be bedbug exterminator's pride to the point that he'll decide to carry out his threat, but it's not as intimidating as you might think to have someone threaten to kill or otherwise hurt you if he then falls asleep; snoring, no less.
There have been several incidents since I got to this town that have been unpleasant. More than one store had displays that make their support for the harassment and I guess execution of me and others obvious. On my first afternoon here, I walked around and two young men saw me as they walked toward me, going the opposite direction as me on the sidewalk. As they approached, one of them coughed loudly. He repeated his loud cough exactly at the second that I walked by them; he was closest to me of the two, and if I had been a foot closer to them he would have been coughing directly in my face because he turned his head to cough AT me as they walked by.
Yesterday morning I went with the rest of the group to a church that provided breakfast and some hours of day shelter. The first hour and a half were ok, and then all of a sudden there was a lot of yelling of "Crabby" and "Crabbycakes!" being done by at least one of the two volunteers who were running the day shelter. They were part of a group that included some of the other homeless people, and altogether they must have yelled the word "Crabby" a few dozen times in less than 10 minutes. A few homeless men and at least one homeless woman sitting at a table across from the table I was at started yelling things like "Go away! Go to Florida, go to the ocean!"
That went on for a while. I ignored it all and left a few minutes after it seemed to be calming down.
I didn't know where else to go for lunch, and I knew that the same place served lunch. The second I walked in the door after 12:00 p.m., one of the homeless women sitting at a table near the door said loudly "I'm getting sick from the smell."
I got harassed around the clock for the 4+ months that I was in the Vermont State Hospital. A lot of the staff and patients knew who I was before I got there. I filed hundreds of pages of reports of things such as a staff person walking by me and loudly saying things such as "It smells like fish!" Staff in the Treatment Mall, which is supposed to provide activities for the patients, made one comment after another about fish, cheese, wetness and smell. All of my reactions and reports were labeled delusional by three doctors in a row and completely denied by everyone in the administration except for the medical director, who at least tried to stop some of the harasssment but couldn't do much after the executive director of the hospital denied everything that was going on and wrote me a letter to that effect.
I'm not the only patient who got abused in that hospital; emotional abuse of the patients is a large part of staff culture there. Other female patients have been sexually harassed although the form that it took around me was probably unique to me.
I was under significant pressure to sign up for disability and Social Security benefits; I would have had to sign something that said I was schizophrenic and that I couldn't work because of it. I refused to do that; if I hadn't refused, I would now be collecting a check every month from the government for somewhere between $600 and $1000 a month.
I could have gotten an order of nonhospitalization that would have lasted only 3 months. It would committed me to the care and custody of the Mental Health Commissioner and set me up with a mental health agency, where I would have had to deal somehow with a psychiatrist who had been falsely informed by my last doctor from the hospital that I had a conspiracy theory blog and that I also freaked out frequently for no reason after hearing "key words" in innocuous conversation around me. I know that he had every reason to know by the end of my stay at VSH that 21,000 people had added my blog as a "like" on Facebook (it's 22,000 now), and I also know that he knew I was being harassed by staff.
An order of nonhospitalization would have automatically dismissed the criminal charge against me. It was helpful that the hospital did agree in the end to let me go without one, because I did not and do not want to agree to be labeled a schizophrenic when even the doctors who wanted to give me that label probably know by now that it's not accurately descriptive of me.
However, now the prosecutor seems to be reluctant to dismiss the criminal charge of assault. He didn't seem to like it that I got released to the shelter.
My parents told the police that on the night of 11/21/10, I committed an unprovoked act of assault on my mother.
Here is some of the report that the medical examiner at the Vermont State Hospital made on 11/23/10, after he'd seen the bruises that my father gave me on 11/21/10. In addition to the bruises, I had lost at least 10 pounds during the 3 months that elapsed from the time that my parents found out about my blog (not from me) and added sexual harassment to their usual routine of near-constant verbal and emotional abuse. At the jail that night, the nurse weighed me; the scale said 108. I haven't comfortably weighed 108 pounds since I was about 14.
" R medial elbow, greater than or equal to 3" in diameter
L medial mid-humorous linear bruise, more than 3" long
R patella 3" diameter over patella
L knee 2" diameter over tibial tubercle"
I had noticed the bruises when I got to the hospital, but I was used to getting attacked by my father in situations in which he claimed to be needing to restrain me or move me around, and I probably wouldn't have mentioned them to anyone if the medical examiner hadn't asked me during his routine exam if I had any injuries. Even when he asked me, I almost said "No," and then I realized that I did have injuries.
At least two of the bruises had spots of blood visible under the skin. The ones on my arms I got either when my father ran up to me and grabbed me in the corner where I had backed as far away from my mother as possible when I realized that I had lost control of myself for not even a few seconds, or I got the bruises on my arms when my father had me pinned to the floor as my mother was on the phone to the police to get them to come to the house and arrest me. The bruises on my knees I got when my father threw me on the floor of the kitchen after he'd run up to me, grabbed me, and told my mother to call the police.
It's a hardwood floor in the kitchen; the only carpet is a thick, small, braided wooden oval in front of the cabinet that has the sink. My knees didn't land on the rug.
The entire time that my father was beating me up, my mother was on the phone to the police. After she first dialed from the kitchen, she stepped around him and me where he had gotten on top of me after he threw me to the floor. She went upstairs so that she could talk to the police uninterrupted by my crying and saying "No." My father turned me over and re-grabbed my arms; I knew that my mother was on the phone to the police, so I repeatedly yelled "Please help me! My father is attacking me!" until the police got to the house. My parents wrote their statements to destroy me.
There's no code intended on this page today.
I can't log into my Polyvore account at all. It may be that I don't have the right password, or am erroneously capitalizing or uncapitalizing some part of it.
I did log into my Friendster account finally and made it private. If I edit it, the essence of it will stay the same.
Before I describe what some of my recent experiences have been like, I want to say how impressed I am by the number of generous people there are in the world. The time and effort that churches, schools and volunteers in this area put into making food and services available to people who don't have any money is really great.
This morning, a man who's staying at the same shelter that I am sat down next to me and started a conversation with another man. The conversation was about bed bugs, and it went on for a few minutes until the man sitting next to me said "The manager of the shelter isn't going to like what I'm going to do to get rid of the bedbugs, but we've got to get that mess cleaned up."
I had been ignoring their conversation up until that sentence, and then I said "Can you please continue this conversation somewhere else?" The man who had been doing most of the listening of the two men left, and the man who'd started to say what he was going to do to the bedbugs stayed, sitting next to me in silence for about 45 minutes. I think he might have dozed off somewhere in the middle of that 45 minutes; it's certainly possible that he had decided to sit where he did because it was an unoccupied section of the couch in the basement of the church that was providing day shelter hours, and that trying to scare me was something he thought of after he'd secured his goal of getting to sit on the couch. I was in the chair next to the couch, and someone else was on the other end of the couch. We're not allowed to be in the shelter that we sleep in during the day; we have to leave early in the morning.
I shouldn't make this joke, should I? I don't want to insult the would-be bedbug exterminator's pride to the point that he'll decide to carry out his threat, but it's not as intimidating as you might think to have someone threaten to kill or otherwise hurt you if he then falls asleep; snoring, no less.
There have been several incidents since I got to this town that have been unpleasant. More than one store had displays that make their support for the harassment and I guess execution of me and others obvious. On my first afternoon here, I walked around and two young men saw me as they walked toward me, going the opposite direction as me on the sidewalk. As they approached, one of them coughed loudly. He repeated his loud cough exactly at the second that I walked by them; he was closest to me of the two, and if I had been a foot closer to them he would have been coughing directly in my face because he turned his head to cough AT me as they walked by.
Yesterday morning I went with the rest of the group to a church that provided breakfast and some hours of day shelter. The first hour and a half were ok, and then all of a sudden there was a lot of yelling of "Crabby" and "Crabbycakes!" being done by at least one of the two volunteers who were running the day shelter. They were part of a group that included some of the other homeless people, and altogether they must have yelled the word "Crabby" a few dozen times in less than 10 minutes. A few homeless men and at least one homeless woman sitting at a table across from the table I was at started yelling things like "Go away! Go to Florida, go to the ocean!"
That went on for a while. I ignored it all and left a few minutes after it seemed to be calming down.
I didn't know where else to go for lunch, and I knew that the same place served lunch. The second I walked in the door after 12:00 p.m., one of the homeless women sitting at a table near the door said loudly "I'm getting sick from the smell."
I got harassed around the clock for the 4+ months that I was in the Vermont State Hospital. A lot of the staff and patients knew who I was before I got there. I filed hundreds of pages of reports of things such as a staff person walking by me and loudly saying things such as "It smells like fish!" Staff in the Treatment Mall, which is supposed to provide activities for the patients, made one comment after another about fish, cheese, wetness and smell. All of my reactions and reports were labeled delusional by three doctors in a row and completely denied by everyone in the administration except for the medical director, who at least tried to stop some of the harasssment but couldn't do much after the executive director of the hospital denied everything that was going on and wrote me a letter to that effect.
I'm not the only patient who got abused in that hospital; emotional abuse of the patients is a large part of staff culture there. Other female patients have been sexually harassed although the form that it took around me was probably unique to me.
I was under significant pressure to sign up for disability and Social Security benefits; I would have had to sign something that said I was schizophrenic and that I couldn't work because of it. I refused to do that; if I hadn't refused, I would now be collecting a check every month from the government for somewhere between $600 and $1000 a month.
I could have gotten an order of nonhospitalization that would have lasted only 3 months. It would committed me to the care and custody of the Mental Health Commissioner and set me up with a mental health agency, where I would have had to deal somehow with a psychiatrist who had been falsely informed by my last doctor from the hospital that I had a conspiracy theory blog and that I also freaked out frequently for no reason after hearing "key words" in innocuous conversation around me. I know that he had every reason to know by the end of my stay at VSH that 21,000 people had added my blog as a "like" on Facebook (it's 22,000 now), and I also know that he knew I was being harassed by staff.
An order of nonhospitalization would have automatically dismissed the criminal charge against me. It was helpful that the hospital did agree in the end to let me go without one, because I did not and do not want to agree to be labeled a schizophrenic when even the doctors who wanted to give me that label probably know by now that it's not accurately descriptive of me.
However, now the prosecutor seems to be reluctant to dismiss the criminal charge of assault. He didn't seem to like it that I got released to the shelter.
My parents told the police that on the night of 11/21/10, I committed an unprovoked act of assault on my mother.
Here is some of the report that the medical examiner at the Vermont State Hospital made on 11/23/10, after he'd seen the bruises that my father gave me on 11/21/10. In addition to the bruises, I had lost at least 10 pounds during the 3 months that elapsed from the time that my parents found out about my blog (not from me) and added sexual harassment to their usual routine of near-constant verbal and emotional abuse. At the jail that night, the nurse weighed me; the scale said 108. I haven't comfortably weighed 108 pounds since I was about 14.
" R medial elbow, greater than or equal to 3" in diameter
L medial mid-humorous linear bruise, more than 3" long
R patella 3" diameter over patella
L knee 2" diameter over tibial tubercle"
I had noticed the bruises when I got to the hospital, but I was used to getting attacked by my father in situations in which he claimed to be needing to restrain me or move me around, and I probably wouldn't have mentioned them to anyone if the medical examiner hadn't asked me during his routine exam if I had any injuries. Even when he asked me, I almost said "No," and then I realized that I did have injuries.
At least two of the bruises had spots of blood visible under the skin. The ones on my arms I got either when my father ran up to me and grabbed me in the corner where I had backed as far away from my mother as possible when I realized that I had lost control of myself for not even a few seconds, or I got the bruises on my arms when my father had me pinned to the floor as my mother was on the phone to the police to get them to come to the house and arrest me. The bruises on my knees I got when my father threw me on the floor of the kitchen after he'd run up to me, grabbed me, and told my mother to call the police.
It's a hardwood floor in the kitchen; the only carpet is a thick, small, braided wooden oval in front of the cabinet that has the sink. My knees didn't land on the rug.
The entire time that my father was beating me up, my mother was on the phone to the police. After she first dialed from the kitchen, she stepped around him and me where he had gotten on top of me after he threw me to the floor. She went upstairs so that she could talk to the police uninterrupted by my crying and saying "No." My father turned me over and re-grabbed my arms; I knew that my mother was on the phone to the police, so I repeatedly yelled "Please help me! My father is attacking me!" until the police got to the house. My parents wrote their statements to destroy me.