she eats alone in her room, as she got in too many fights with her brother and sister and told her mom she "couldn't eat" with them around,

That sounds like classic eating disorder behavior to this non-expert. Not to say that family dynamics can't be pretty fucked up and a teenage want their "own space" even at dinner time. However, hiding your food consumption, one way or another, is a primary sign of an eating disorder.

I hope the therapist can do some good. In the absence of any concrete advice, though, I'm sending lots of {{}} to Robin and her family.

See, but it's not that 3 queens were beheaded there that would've gotten me.

Oh, I don't think the 3 queens part gives the place any extra-special cachet -- I just mentioned them as a point of reference, so that people who know the Tower would know what spot I was talking about.

And Robin, ugh. I'm sorry. Coke is pernicious. I hope everything works out.

Speaking of lizardbrain fear, someone walked into our house last night. We were sitting there watching MI5, the dog ran to the door, and this guy just walked in. Mr. H was yelling at him, and then pushed him outside. It took me a few minutes to even realize what was happening, and by that time Mr. H was on the phone with the cops.

Argh! Heather, that's so fucking creepy. Did they find him? Who was it?

Ew.

And my first case of "looming vertigo"--that is, the weight of tall things, skyscrapers when I'm at ground level and can't see the sky, for example--was in the Dom cathedral in Cologne.

Huh, opposite reaction from me. The German churches were the first ones that didn't feel like the roof was going to come crashing down on me despite the height. Spanish churches felt like coffins. No matter how tall the ceiling, I felt like I was walking into a box and they were going to shut the lid on me. Could be because there was a lot more wood in the Spanish churches. The German churches I went into were more predominantly stone. English churches made me feel like I was in a specimen jar or a diaroma on a museum shelf. Another closed-in feeling.

It has nothing to do with the architecture. It has nothing to do with what religion the church may be assigned to, or its history. It's more to do with the intangibles, the resonance with personal feelings left behind by the congregations.

It has nothing to do with the architecture. It has nothing to do with what religion the church may be assigned to, or its history. It's more to do with the intangibles, the resonance with personal feelings left behind by the congregations.

No, I get that, and I envy it. I think my thing is purely architecture. I'd never had it happen before, and the Dom is immense. It just goes up and up and up, and the stone is black with age. The next time I felt it was at street level in Philadelphia, which is not a particularly vertical town. I've been in large churches, since. One was of a pale creamy stone, Duke Chapel, and it's neither as immense, nor the stone as dark as the Dom, so the comparison really isn't fair, but I didn't have the same reaction. I think mine is purely psychological and physiological. My receptors for psychic awareness just don't work.

"I've never been to England/ But I kinda like the Beatles"

My receptors for psychic awareness just don't work.

Or not about that particular environment. Museums don't do that for me. Even walking the remaining foundations of Roman ruins in Spain didn't do it for me. Churches, though? Yup. As an anthropologist/archaeologist it would be much handier to be able to tune into residual psychic vibrations at digs/historical sites. Churches, NSM with the handy.

French Cathedrals are where its at. I thought everybody knew that. As one ex-GF said, "I like the French approach to Catholicism. They're only in it for the beauty."