these people draw near to Me with their mouth, and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. and in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” Matt. 15:8-9
not that i’m better than anybody, but they all seem to think they’re better than me.
my church is under a rock homeh.. cuz if God said He’s there, He’s there all right!
there was a time when i was so alone i lacked human interaction to the point of dementia. i thought it was my mind fucking with me but this study may prove otherwise.
Skin hunger is a documented physiological condition recognized by medical and psychiatric organizations. I don’t recall the formal Latin name.
Essentially it’s the adult version of failure-to-thrive syndrome. Early in this century, social workers at city orphanages discovered that babies who received no physical contact — cuddling, rocking, kisses, tickling — beyond the bare minimum of daily maintenance became withdrawn, sickly, and finally died. The conclusion seemed to be that human beings require a certain level of daily skin-to-skin contact in order to survive.
Skin hunger is the condition that applies to later life. Older children and adults may have received adequate contact as babies but, for various reasons, no longer receive that same level of touch. They become isolated and defensive, suffer intense feelings of loneliness, and may develop a number of neuroses and personality disorders such as schizophrenia or multiple personality disorders (Remind you of someone?) They’re also hypersensitive to temperature changes because their blood circulation deteriorates; also, loss of tactile sensitivity is common.
In sedentary subjects, skin hunger also causes muscle damage, particularly in the shoulders and back, in theory because the subjects are always tensed in order to ward off either a harmful touch or rejection of their need. Physically active subjects seem to suffer less of this, simply because a regular exercise routine keeps the muscles from becoming atrophied and teaches them how to work off the emotional stress locked in their bodies.
Skin hunger is very common in victims of physical and sexual abuse — for obvious reasons, I should think. The most effective therapy so far is a regular schedule of full-body massage by a monitored, licensed masseur in addition to mental health counseling. Therapists usually have to prove their trustworthiness before any progess is made; trust is a BIG issue with skin hunger patients.
The condition also occurs in people who have suffered a major accident or contracted a communicable disease that requires quarantine. Ever been in a full body cast and felt like nobody loves you? Social isolation can also trigger it. If you’ve broken up with your loved one and withdrawn from the world, and suddenly you feel as if there’s this aching void between your empty arms, you’re experiencing rudimentary skin hunger.
there.. maybe all i needed was some touch. and now that i’m with someone, i’m overall more balanced.
enter public relations.
unlike self-promotion, in which you have to talk about yourself, public relations leave all the talking to someone else. when you shut up about you and let others talk about you, you’re allowing your personal brand to come to birth.
but how do you get people to talk about you? do something genius, or.. do something stupid. mock a celebrity, or outsmart a president. i honestly don’t know. i’m still experimenting myself. i have blogs i need to promote, but all these years i’ve been promoting them as me. instead i should get other people to promote my blogs for me. maybe my readers?
so the question is, how do you create a hype that people will talk about? how do you make it so interesting that when people talk about it people who hear about it will go on and talk about it too?
how?
solve a problem. that’s a great start. everybody wants a solution to a problem. and everybody has too many problems to solve. so if you come up with a nice and easy solution, believe me, people will wait in line to hear it.
which brings me to my next question. what’s your problem?
inspired by neil.
i was talking to a friend about a certain individual in my past life and the quote popped in my head:
laziness is the assassin of genius
which when i think about it is very true about all of us. believe it or not i believe we each were given our own “genius” but most of us are too lazy to realize them or even do anything about it.
so if you want to do great things in life, work hard for it.
part of the dilemma of running a blog network on your own (yes no more partners now except for my lovely vie) is that you tend to micromanage and end yourself with a stack of endless “chores”. of course you only have 24 hours a day and if you’re like the rest of us you spend 1/3 of that time sleeping. that leaves us with only 16 hours left but then there are those long meals in front of the tv and going out to the beach, walking the dog, playing with the dog, swimming in the pool, et cetera et cetera. life such we call it. so most of the time you end up with only a couple of hours left for this thing i like to call money making (read: work).
of course you can hire people to blog for you. but you still have to edit every post unless you hire professional bloggers with top dollars. but what if you can’t afford that? even if you can afford that, you’re still stuck with wordpress upgrades, plugin updates, tweaking the design, seo, social networking, and so on. that’s definitely something you can never outsource, right?
wrong.
it all comes down to one question. do you want perfection (which has many different definitions, different for each individual) or do you want success? i like to think of perfection in terms of art. if you want to treat your blog (or blogs) as art then extending your arms by hiring others can be a tricky thing. over time the blog will not be so “you” anymore. it will be a group identity. you can never call it your own anymore. but if you want success, on the other hand, think of hiring others as leverage. leverage, as many would agree is “doing more with less” or in my simple terms “getting somebody else to do your dirty work”.
you can view it any way you want, but in my case i think it’s the motive that counts. if you realize that you want something bigger but at the same time find yourself incapable of expanding your own efforts, why not hire people who can. yes you will lose money, but that’s priceless freedom you’re purchasing there, buddy. and if your motivations are good you could be helping another right at the same time. you could be feeding a hungry blogger, or a designer, etc.
so, do you leverage yourself? i’m curious to find out.
I write random stuff and like to experiment with extreme sports, photography, martial arts, psychology and philosophy.
Between the dojo and the beach you will find me at home watching movies, drinking too much coffee and green tea, devising a world domination plan. Read more »
