Processing child abuse has inflicted a number of very irritating behavioral patterns on us, patterns we're acutely aware of yet have been too weak or fuddled to avoid. Among the most annoying and heartbreaking is...how do I put this? we now have painful memories about stationery.

I went through a period of youthful explosion of interest in self-organization that achieved NOTHING, but at least I got a lot of pencil cups and little plastic clips I never used for anything. I'd have big plans for the system I was going to impose on myself, only to be undone by my erratic behavior.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I have tried to remember...the before-time. So far I can't. We can't. Going backwards, our sense of continuous memory craps out around 1981. There are curious lacunae and details that don't quite make sense. I thought I remembered watching a lunar eclipse in December 1979, for a long time, but no such eclipse exists; the nearest match is 1982. I distinctly remember news of the Pope getting shot in 1981, but not Reagan getting shot a few months earlier.

My RL parents, in their frequent arguments, occasionally alluded to past events that I should have remembered. Apparently I was injured in some sort of...incident that my mother held over my father's head for long afterwards, a la The Shining. Frisk, who's about two and a half years older, ought to remember more but I think they'd rather not.

What am I even trying to recall? If I could put it into the best words I have...I suppose I'd like to remember if I was happy at some point. I remember mostly being confused and baffled by the world, not hopeful or trusting. Surely there was some time, some extremely youthful time, when I experienced what "normal" children supposedly experience, the innocence that all the reactionaries scream about protecting. Those people's notions of childhood are a mystery to me because I cannot remember ever feeling that way.

But I must have...right? Nobody is born miserable, right?

~Chara of Pnictogen

I am tired of feeling, week after week, that we are on the pitch of some crucial breakthrough, some convergence or completion, without ever arriving. plainly we are missing something—some obstacle, some unfulfilled duty, something. ~Chara

Contemporary American society, if no one else, has been generally taught that there's no sensible danger to being surrounded by consumer electronics and continually bathed in artificial electromagnetic fields, spanning a vast range of wavelengths, from 60 Hz house-current radiations to the extremities of microwave communication. We put microwave transceivers in our bedrooms and hold them next to our heads. We spend hours a day staring at unnatural sources of visible illumination as well. I daresay that humanity still hasn't quite adjusted to the sudden explosion in computer-display technology. I still remember when it was a novelty to put forty lines of text on a TV or monitor. In my early college years, an 800x600 monitor could still seem a bit extravagant. Then I put my head down for a bit, lifted it back up again, and suddenly there was 2400x1080 on a pocket telephone. Most of us, if we're privileged enough to have free access to such equipment, fearlessly spend a majority of our lives in close proximity to it, drinking it in.

The standard line, the word of public scientific authority, is that there's no significant danger. The energies involved are small, not enough to risk danger of tissue damage through thermal heating, and such low-energy photons scarcely interfere with chemical reactions. All the same, the human body does function as an antenna. It's a mass of material with certain electrical properties; it's bound to have a certain specific cross-section for electromagnetic radiations, an absorption spectrum. So where does the energy go? It's small, apparently not grossly harmful, but...what's it actually doing?