Lost in the city of Ubar

They say that at any one time there are always five people who love us, and if this were frankly true, please would those five paramours of mine "put your hands up like you just don't care"?

I used to spend handsome portions of the day being preoccupied with this matter. In the end, I could never find those mysterious five. Just who were these teary eyed admirers, and where the hell were they?!

One day, I struck gold, oil and all of the frankinscence in the lost city of Ubar. All of this puzzlement and all of the lengthy periods of time with which I devoted with gusto to the subject left me jilted in a sea of constant brain activity, albeit confused brain activity, segregated from the rest of green mother earth, where the main mode of communication is not to dwell substantially within one's own brainwaves, but to make those brainwaves vocally explicit (but it is worth noting that audience and context are key). All this time I was focused so inward, I let "living" pass me by.

It has to be accepted that struggle with perceived notions of one's own self-worth will go on, like man-o-rexia or diabulimia, growing rampantly like a modern disease in these modern times (promoted by our media worship of the young, rich and beautiful, or perhaps vice versa? The chicken or the egg, which came first?)

But everyone has a chink in their armour as surely as everyone has two eyes (nota bene: they need not to be visible). A dominant mode of thinking that is not so introverted helps. Anything that provides a divertion away from intrinsic worries is surely healthy, right? In the end in retrospect, I chuckle with warm ridicule. All of the time I'd frittered away nervously pondering with uneasiness what others perceived of me, if I had a penny for every one of those minutes, I surely would be a millionaire now (... perhaps in Japanese Yen).