Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 1 (What are the 4 Ds?)

My life has a 4D quality:

Dissociative Disorder – Depersonalization and Derealization.

This is a tricky bunch, because I gather from reading about them that there are some standard definitions but a certain amount of leeway has to be granted. Not everyone has exactly the same experience or symptomology.

I understand that the DSM exists to standardize psychological symptoms into categories for ease of treatment (and probably insurance coverage. But I digress.). But often it seems to try and pigeonhole folks into vague or general categories without being able to properly account for the colors and textures that vary from one patient to the next.

So I will do my best and explain my flavor of this package disorder. When I say it’s a package, it is for me. I can’t comment on what other folks experience.

Here is the basic issue: sometimes I feel like an alien only roughly related to humanity, and other times I feel normal but I perceive the world around me as kind of unreal.

I’m not saying I’m ET, nor am I suggesting that I’m trying to escape the Matrix. Just that I have episodes where reality… well, ain’t quite real.

Most of the stress and anxiety from a dissociative episode stems from a few things: it’s jarring, it’s unpredictable, and it hijacks your conscious awareness. But most of all, for me, it’s because of my instant judgment of the episode: it’s a Bad Thing.

Anxiety ramps up when we stop seeing certain events of our lives as Things that are happening and start seeing them as Bad Things that are happening. If they make us uncomfortable, or aren’t what we want, we’re quick to slap a judgment label on them. Once we focus on how Bad these events are our Contentment Tank gets a huge leak and will run dry if we don’t get in there and do something about it.

I start making a huge deal about it in my mind using circular logic and assertions of how things ought to be.

Obsessive Self: “This shouldn’t be happening.”

Mindful Self: “But it is.”

“Yeah, but it shouldn’t be! Don’t you get it?”

“Yes, I get it. Regardless, it’s happening.”

“Yeah but it shouldn’t be! It’s really wrong!”

“It isn’t wrong, it is what it is. It is, however, hijacking your awareness.”

“I know! And that’s BAD!”

It sounds funny in writing, but trust me, that’s pretty much how the process snowballs in my mind within seconds.

Since it’s perceptions that are impacted, that’s where I concentrate my efforts to deal with depersonalization and derealization episodes.

If I had to choose, I’d rather experience derealization over depersonalization.  Going to sleep can remove you from the universe in a way, so it doesn’t matter if the world seems off at that point: you’re leaving it anyway. But if I feel off, it intrudes on my very sense of self, and I’m not comfortable or at ease anywhere doing anything.

Now this has nothing to do with brain-altering substances; I don’t drink alcohol or partake of anything more than temazepam certain nights. No, this was probably brought on by a number of issues growing up, which I won’t bore anyone with here, although I’ll bet I do before this series is over.

Suffice it to say, my sense of identity and place in the universe is a little odd at times.

I’ve often spoke of myself as an alien, as if I wasn’t human. I based that on how I perceived “normal people” behaved, and realized how WAY DIFFERENT I was. This got worse in time, simply because I found myself meeting lots of folks from many different walks of life, and I still never felt that I was quite like them. I felt like I was Different.

Eventually this was joined with a sense at times that what I was experiencing around me wasn’t quite real. I’ve read that some compare it to the sensation of watching the world around them as if it were a movie or a television program. Some describe it as a hazy, gauzy, dreamlike state. For me it was not really like that. I won’t say it was more profoundly disturbing than how other people perceive it, because everyone’s experience disturbs them. But I will say that, to me, my experience is supremely freaky.

Let’s look a little deeper, shall we?

Allergic to Anxiety?

When you have allergies, certain foods or times of the year can make you miserable. It isn’t so much the things or the times, but the fact that your body’s immune system overreacts to certain things, and you have a reaction to coming into contact with them.

If you go to an allergy doctor, they can identify your allergic triggers by watching how you react when brought into contact with certain known triggers. Then a strategy is devised, often a mix of medicines that help suppress the body’s immune overreaction coupled with removing the triggers from your environment (or removing yourself from triggering environments where possible).

Anxiety works a lot the same way.

Things trigger your anxiety reaction in a mental cascade effect similar to how the body reacts to allergens. And your strategy for handling it looks very similar as well.

Medications

For example, Xanax is prescribed for many sufferers of anxiety reactions. Xanax has become the mental/emotional equivalent of an allergy patient’s Benadryl. It’s almost a standard for treating mild to moderate cases of anxiety.

Many in the world don’t like the fact that Xanax exists, seeing it as a crutch. However like anything in the world that relieves anything unpleasant, it is not a crutch out of the box but can become one if the person begins to rely on it to escape regularly rather than deal with the things causing the anxious reaction.

There are other, more intense medications for severe anxiety, but they should not be taken lightly or often. Like an allergy patient’s epinephrine injection, these medications act like flipping an electric breaker closed in a house. In an extreme case it is necessary to shut the whole mechanism down to prevent catastrophe. Just as epinephrine can shut down much of the immune reaction process, these medicines can shut down much of the associative reaction process. Good for emergencies, but not to become a common tool.

Get away from them triggers!

If you are allergic to nuts, you learn to read ingredients and avoid nuts.

But if you have environmental allergies, it can be a little trickier.

Let’s say you are allergic to cats. You can find ways to live with it, such as keeping your kitty clean, reducing shed hair all over the house, and so on. But if that doesn’t work, you may have to make a decision: have cats and get used to sneezing, or learn to live without cats.

If you have huge allergy problems with spring, you might have a tough life for part of each year. Pollen from a hundred different sources can help you break world records for sneezing. While certain medicines can help, the strategy tends to be “Stay indoors when possible, and use filtered air conditioning to help alleviate symptoms.”

Environmental triggers are similar with anxiety.

If you are particularly bugged by a co-worker or a classmate, you can try and adjust environmental factors related to that person. Sometimes they are having a tough life themselves, and your unilateral kindness might be just the thing that helps you both. Learning what sets them off can help you mitigate their reactions, which in turn will alleviate yours.

Unfortunately it may be necessary to just stay away from them. Some folks are too toxic when combined with you, and they will never be safe in your world.

Likewise, if the home or workplace is the source of the anxiety, a hundred different triggers might be slamming into you from all directions. In cases like that you may have some hard decisions to make. Moving to another job or home might help, but often we move only to find ourselves besieged again by the same triggers that only look different.

Often it takes the same adjustments we make for allergy season: you can’t entirely avoid the triggers by staying isolated, but you can spend far more time in an “air conditioned environment” by removing as many triggers as possible from the other places you spend time in, or varying the places you spend your other time in.

If your workplace just crushes you with anxiety but you can’t reasonably just quit or change duties, maybe you can employ strategies for making it through so that you can go home and leave that junk behind. You may have to get home and figuratively “decontaminate.”

If home is where the triggers are heaviest, the workplace can become a haven. But rather than try and spend more and more time at work, maybe spending time going for walks, shopping, hobbies, or other diversions can help reduce our contact with our triggers.

De-sensitizing treatment strategy

When you want to really work on overcoming allergies, there are therapies for that, often in the form of allergy shots or other methods.

For example, a shot can be formulated to introduce very small amounts of allergen triggers into your system. This trains the immune system to not totally freak out every time it encounters these things.

The immune system sees the pollen come along one spring and suddenly it’s saying, “Oh, white oak pollen, huh? Yeah, I found out that stuff isn’t as dangerous as I thought.” It reacts less over time until it hardly reacts at all and you stop dreading springtime.

Anxiety triggers can be dealt with the same way. Through mindful acceptance you can co-exist with the triggers by training your mind to have less of a reaction to the stimuli. Small exposures to a trigger can help you see them as being less dangerous as previously thought. Gradually-increased contact with the trigger can help you gauge your reaction improvement.

In the case of both the physical allergy and the mental/emotional anxiety response, we gradually desensitize our systems to the triggers. The less sensitive we are to the things that cause that heartbeat to turn into a gallop or start us sweating even if we aren’t warm, the less anxious our overall lives will be.

The Benefit of Nightmares

As a Dreamwalker, I can control my dreams. Sometimes that means maneuvering a bad dream into better waters. Other times it means stopping a nightmare dead in its tracks.

But mindfully? It often means choosing intentionally to face into the darkness and deal with what’s there. Because there is a tremendous benefit in having nightmares.

It shows you where your weak spots are.

Nightmares: some mechanics

Fears, attitudes, and most every anxiety trigger you have will likely show up at some point in your dreams. When they do it’s no different in the Dreamlands than it is in the waking world. You have the exact same reactions based on the same mental and emotional conditioning.

So why are the nightmares so doggone intense?

Your fears and other triggers are under the jurisdiction of your subconscious mind. That mind has full expression in your dreams. So the trigger is amplified to cause the biggest response in you. You are on its turf.

Afraid of spiders? Suddenly you’re in a room full of them. Scared of falling from heights? You’re at the top of the Eiffel Tower and it’s stupid windy. Don’t like being humiliated? Probably should’ve got dressed before giving that big speech at work; oh that’s right, you didn’t get that luxury: this is a dream.

Whatever your anxiety trigger is, it will be given the overblown IMAX 3D THX sound Director’s Cut treatment in a nightmare. (By the way, IMAX 3D and THX are trademarked brands that I do not in any way claim or own, but are super awesome.)

So we experience that anxiety or panic or anger or whatever, and we wake up wishing we hadn’t eaten that jalapeno ice cream so close to bedtime. The next day we can feel drained or even have lingering flashbacks that re-trigger the emotional responses.

This is good stuff. No it doesn’t feel good. You’d pay to have the effects and the dreams that cause them go away.

But you may not need to pay anyone. This is a fantastic Do It Yourself project.

Get the hammer and caulking gun honey!

By hurling disturbance at you while you sleep, your subconscious mind is hoping you’ll take charge and help. Your mind doesn’t want to torture you with nightmares: shoot, it suffers right along with the rest of you. All those brain chemicals and stress reactions don’t do it any favors. It doesn’t want you to hurt; it’s asking for your help.

Whatever is causing you anxiety, you may be in Avoidance Mode while you’re awake. Hey, that’s not always a bad thing: sometimes just doing your best to stay out of triggering situations or environments is your best strategy. But if your mind won’t let the matter drop and brings it up in casual dreamtime conversation, it’s probably time to square your shoulders and face the challenge.

Will it be easy? Not usually, no. It may take many tries, most of which will probably be unsuccessful. But so much of what you accomplish in life rarely takes only one try unless you have done a lot of preparation beforehand. Like fixing something in your home, it might take hammering on this, caulking that, and generally troubleshooting the problem until you find it and make sure it's really fixed.

Dream Control (called Lucid Dreaming by some) just means that you get to make conscious decisions and take an active role in your dreams. Your subconscious mind gets to intrude on your conscious thoughts all the time. Why not return the favor and consciously, intentionally dream?

However you get to that point, you will notice the need to really apply Mindful techniques. (I know these strategies have different names in different philosophical and psychological realms. I’m just sticking with Mindfulness because she’s the one that brung me to the dance.)

Acceptance comes into play because much of the anxiety you’re feeling has to do with struggle. As you struggle to avoid the feelings or the triggers, you develop an anxious response that can take on a life of its own. So learning to accept that the trigger will occur no matter what you do will free you to choose a healthier response.

So you struggle not to get too close to the edge of the cliff, then you struggle to maintain your footing, then you struggle to not fall over the edge, then you struggle to hang on to the thin thread of hope that keeps you from dropping. Motion pictures use this kind of tension builder so often I’ve started laughing at some of them. Filmmakers know that people have an anxiety reaction to this kind of inexorable edging towards disaster, so they use it to get you on the edge of your seats.

Of course, like any tool, it gets overused. And if a filmmaker turns the screws too tightly, it crosses the line from tense to ridiculous, and I laugh. (Hey Hollywood: if you don’t want me laughing at crucial tension-filled moments, get a clue and stop tightening it beyond that point. Thank you.)

Accept and dare

So if I’m struggling so hard to not fall over the edge and it seems that no matter what I do I get closer to the edge, there’s my first moment of enlightenment. By accepting I am going over the edge regardless, I stop the unwinnable struggle. You can’t prevent it, so trying to do so will deplete your mental energy and deprive you of rest and peace. You’re going to plunge; as comedian Christopher Titus said once, if you keep struggling “you’re just gonna die tired.”

Now that you’ve accepted you can’t change the situation, develop a strategy to face the inevitable and unavoidable. “Man up,” as a certain generation says. “Grow a set,” as another generation is fond of saying. Or “Put your big girl panties on”: same generation, slightly different gender.

The point is to know the difference between what you can change and what you can’t. Once you recognize you can’t do anything about a situation, you are free to not keep wasting resources struggling and save them for dealing with the consequences. Not only will you have more rest and peace, you will be in a way better frame of mind to deal with what comes next. The best news: the consequences are often way less horrible than our imagination led us to believe.

Dare yourself to confront your fears and doubts. Identify your triggers and figure ways to accept and deal with them, whatever that will mean. Have faith that you can do this.

And remember the value of the nightmare. It may have scared you and woke you up at 2:30 in the morning in a sweat, but it was also a cry for your assistance. Be a superhero and answer this distress call from your subconscious mind. When you do, you will learn more about yourself, along with practical strategies for reducing your anxiety reactions to certain triggers.

And that particular nightmare will probably be gone for good.

Now to tackle the one about being lost and late for an appointment.

The Hill

It was around 1969, maybe in the early or late summer. My parents and I were driving back from somewhere but I was too young to really remember for sure, but I know we were in a dustbowl part of Western Kansas.

I only recall fragments of trips back then; a lot of driving with the windows up and both parents smoking which often made me nauseous. My dad had family in Colorado who we visited to ride horses (I was a little bitty thing then, but I rode for a moment), and he also had relatives in Hayes, Kansas. So either of those could have been where we were returning from.

At some point in the early afternoon, we were driving through an arid patch and there was some discussion in the front seat that didn’t sound overly promising to me. We pulled over and we got out of the air conditioned car and stood on hard dirt in the hot sun. I asked my mom why.

She told me something about my dad wanting to go climb a mountain.

There were tall hills and I seem to remember buttes around, and apparently my dad felt the siren’s call of one of them. So we watched my dad head off towards adventure, and finally he disappeared into the distance. He said he wouldn’t be gone long.

I don’t know how long he was out there, but I recall at some point the sun began to sink, and my mom became more and more impatient. Soon she started calling out for him to come back, but of course all she did was make herself hoarse. Finally she just told me to stay there with the car because she was going to go get him.

I was probably 4 at this point, and the distance was too far for me to walk in the heat and too far for her to carry me. So I stood by the car watching my mom disappear into the distance that my dad had already disappeared into.

All alone, in a hot deserted part of Kansas, I stood crying. I eventually started calling for my parents, but I do not recall them coming back. At some point I must have crawled into the back seat and cried myself to sleep.

Fast forward to some point in the late 1970s and my mom and I lived in Independence, Missouri which meant occasional road trips to Nevada Missouri where we had been living until recently. My dad’s mom and grandma lived there, and so did my mom’s parents. We made the long trip down highway 71 quite a lot.

Going out 71, just outside of Butler Missouri, there was this hill. It was a two-level affair to the side of the road. With half the hill, then a plateau, then a steeper part of the hill to the top, it was captivating to me.

I asked my mom frequently if I could get out and go climb it. I was always told no, but I never lost the pure desire to climb it. I felt the hill before we made the curve and it came into view, coming and going. I stared at it as we past it each time.

On August 4, 2012 I was driving back from Nevada in the mid-afternoon. My dad had passed away earlier in the year and my mom had been gone since 2008, and this would be the last time I would drive down to Nevada with any real purpose. I felt the siren calling as I approached the curve. As I rounded the curve, I found myself pulling over and stopping.

I never intended to stop and climb the hill. It never entered my conscious mind. I now found myself preparing to answer the siren’s song.

The experience wasn’t all good. I lost my cell phone somewhere on the hill, and because a Missouri State Trooper had stopped to figure out why my car was sitting to the side of the road and what I was doing on the hillside (a passing trucker had reported a potentially stranded motorist) I ended up falling down the hill and tearing some tendons in my right ankle. Long story.

But the exhilaration of climbing that hill was worth it.

I could not explain why I climbed the hill. People call it a bucket list item and I found that insulting, because I don’t have some list of things I want to accomplish before I die. I didn’t plan this consciously, although apparently I was planning it most of my life subconsciously.

I now see the connection. In a sense, I followed my dad’s path, heeding the seductive song and climbing the hill that called to me. I also set out to find my parents figuratively, something I couldn’t do in 1969. I needed to make the trip, conquer the hill, and prove to myself that I really would be okay, just as my mom said I would.

No other challenges beckon me. I had finally made peace with The Hill.

New content is up at A-mindful-guy.com

I just added three posts dealing with Mindfulness and Dream Control over on my site.

Controlling dreams is somethign I learned to do pretty early in my life, but it came in stages. First I learned to decide what kind of dream to have, shifting the tone from darkness to a lighter mood.

In time I learned to fly, face fears, even change the dream to my liking or walk out of a dream altogether.

In this series of posts I'm going to look a little at how the subconsious mind, as the seat of your dreams, can be consciously directed. It's a dreaming form of shifting the way we think in the waking world, away from unhelpful views and behaviors towards more beneficial patterns.

Sometimes you can control your dreams, and sometimes you can't, and sometimes you just choose not to.

Like life, it often boils down to choice.

Check it out, comment if it feels right, and as always thanks for reading.

David W. Jones
A-mindful-guy.com

The new site is up and running

I have moved over to the new Wordpress site. You can see it at

www.a-mindful-guy.com

So far I have a general welcome, an About Me page that's still needing some adjusting, and my first Mindfulness post, a parable about a teacher trying to reach a student who is so preoccupied with keeping his serenity that he ends up losing it....

Also, I'm still publishing articles on Yahoo Voices under the Health and Wellness heading. Tying in with the new site is a series of short articles that share the basic title "A Mindful Guy" and the premise of the article.

Times have been challenging lately, which have given me ample opportunity to practice my Mindful resolve.

As an IRS employee, I have watched scandals rock the service while the sequestration ensures that I can barely make ends meet. While the media may bring attention to big money, I can assure you that they aren't reporting on the many Federal employees who are not making nearly as much as you hear about. On that subject...

My car got repossessed. It wasn't a fancy car and it was about 5 years old. Couldn't make the payments anymore. Life's perspective changes when you can't just go anywhere you want when you want without either taking the bus, finding a friend who will come get you, or walking.

But hey, I'm getting more exercise!

Life is what it is. I can be frustrated all I want, but it doesn't change anything.

As we've seen, emotions come and we can manage them. It's acceptable to be angry, or sad, or happy, or neutral. Emotions are part of our make-up, and sometimes they get the better of us.

So long as I accept them and deal with them rather than letting them rule me, I'll be fine.

*************************************************************

I'm grateful to have the new site. It's going to be Mindfulness, but with a Midwest twist. It's what is referred to as my Writer's Voice. It's just who I am. It's going to be fun.

I'm also grateful to everyone who has taken some time to read this blog. I'd love to have you stop by the new place and check it out!

David W. Jones
Independence, Missouri, USA

Faith - No Sex Does Not Mean No Love

This is going to be short and quick.

Okay, settle down.

Simply put, sex is the big paradox in the western world. It’s everywhere and yet we are afraid to deal with it unless we can hide behind jokes or blushing cheeks.

I know folks who thought nothing of going through life engaging in regular bouts of leisure with any number of others, yet they couldn’t bring themselves to tell their kids a thing about the Facts Of Life.

Well, you ain’t gonna read about it here neither. So don’t get your hopes up.

Since this is a blog about my personal journey, I will use this post to deal with a major battle I faced, based on misunderstandings growing up: what does sex mean in a relationship?

Sex Does Not Mean Love

It’s not that I thought sex and love meant the same thing. I know that sex is merely one possible expression of love. However, without proper personal Boundaries and Acceptance, I believed that if sex existed in a relationship, then gradually changed and sort of stopped, it meant that I was no longer loved.

Many therapists have said that one of the earliest signs a relationship was in trouble was when sex stopped.

If sex is the ultimate intimate expression, then when sex falters it must obviously mean that the very foundation of the relationship is falling apart.

Well, I mean that’s how I basically reasoned.

Here’s the thing: if you do not have faith in love, in the person you love, then you are forever insecure in the relationship with that person. The insecurities are always there, just under the surface, but in an intimate relationship they are open and in plain view (yeah, even if we try really hard to hide them).

So I had no faith in the permanence of relationships, largely because my parents divorced.

I also had no faith in myself as being worthy of being loved. If a person was making love to me, then it was proof that I was loveable. (Okay, I know that was a myth. Bear with me here.)

I was raised to view sex as obligatory. It was the responsibility of both people in the relationship to have sex. That’s a rural thing I think, although it’s pretty much everywhere. If the woman didn’t want to, that was fine. A woman’s mood was not a prerequisite to sex; she just had to be there and submit to it.

It’s not a unique view, no matter how much we are unaware of it. Do you know how many legal statutes exist to allow a marriage to be annulled if the marriage isn’t “consummated?”  It’s pretty sad.

So let’s sum it up:

A woman’s expectation and responsibility and obligation in the marriage is, among other things, to do her Wifely Duty and have sex when the husband wants to; sex is an expression of love that dwindles and goes away when a relationship is in trouble; marriage can be considered invalid if one party cannot or will not have sex to consummate the relationship; insecurity of being unlovable is relieved temporarily when sex occurs, due to it being viewed as proof that someone loves me; sex is seen as a need.

So basically things are just too jacked up for me to be balanced.

Oh wait, I forgot to add to the problem! Let me fix that…

Growing up I was bombarded by the simple judgment against me simply because I was male: all guys think about it sex.

Man that ticks me off no end. Just because all the guys you associate with do, doesn’t mean they all do. It’s a generalization that weighed heavily on me. I was treated as a second class citizen by women because the men in their lives had stupid views about sex. They wanted it a lot but they were so selfish about it, so there were a whole lot of dissatisfied women and clueless men. But lump me in with them?

It would be the same as me saying all women are treacherous witches just because all of my experiences with them to a point ended up with me getting hurt.

If all the fish you catch have the same drawbacks, maybe ya ought to fish in a different pond some day. Just sayin’….

Okay. Breathe. Let go.

So here’s this mess that works against me. I can’t begin to have faith in the stability of a relationship because if sexual expression stops then I resent the woman for not upholding her end of the relationship, I feel threatened because I feel she has stopped loving me and the relationship is on its last legs, and I feel guilt because I then try to force the issue and put on the pouty face: “If you loved me then you would.”

I shudder when I examine myself. No wonder self-examination is so scary. But it’s also healing, because once I see what I do and why, I become more mindfully empowered. I free myself to choose to see things differently, to react differently.

I Am Loved With or Without Sex

I needed to develop faith in relationships, women, and even myself about a lot of things, including sexual matters.

Communication is key here. If sex is viewed as proof that you love someone, then a lack of sex represents a lack of that love. By communicating my concerns to my partner, I can let him or her know that I will need their help in fighting the doubts and shadows. They can, in turn, reassure me that I am indeed loved and we can focus together on all the other ways we express love to each other.

So Boundaries help me stop relying on this other person to provide my self-assurance and security and peace and happiness. I recognize that if he or she doesn’t want to have sex, then it’s not a reflection against me but a reflection of their own sovereignty to make decisions about themselves and their bodies and minds.

Acceptance is another tool to be used. Sex is only a need based on the importance we place on it. Place less importance on it, and it becomes less of a “need.” Accepting that there are other ways to express love, accepting that sometimes sex just isn’t possible, frees me up to enjoy my partner more fully because I’m not all hyper-focused on this one thing.

And if I accept, then I won’t try to manipulate my partner to get my way. No heaping on guilt, no pressure or coercion, no whining and begging and threatening and tantrums and ultimatums and angry demands. Certainly no undermining junk like accusing my partner that he or she doesn’t love me because he or she isn’t showing me they love me by having sex. That’s childish, unfair, cruel, and irresponsible.

Been there.

Faith vs. Expectations

So I have found my way out of another morass from my past. Sex is an aspect of a relationship that, when kept in balance and perspective, can bring much comfort and joy. What it takes is willingness to abandon preconceived expectations and accept that I am loved and lovable. I can be free to enjoy the expressions that someone else can give me.

I can stop hyper-focusing on what I don’t have and focus my attention on the things I do have. That’s actually a good balance that Mindfulness has allowed me to have in a lot of things.

I have found faith that I didn’t know I had, because I have let go of some of the old views and teachings that I grew up with. When you grow up with something, it’s natural to assume that the thing reflects truth and reality, when it really only reflects a small corner of those things.

So that didn’t take too long. And you didn’t fall asleep on me! Yay!

And with that, I think I’m done examining some of the main pillars of Mindfulness in my experience. I’m going to keep posting personal matters relating to Mindfulness on this blog, and I will expand the topics and examinations on my new blog at a-mindful-guy.com.

Well, as soon as I can figure out how to get the thing to work. Lol