OK, let’s go through this vid looking for gold.

Deep, cleansing breaths. Here goes.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I am not going to suddenly be yanked out of my comfortable yet stultifying life just because I am watching a vid.

1. Meter reader analysis : I don’t really have the temperament for that kind of work. I could probably handle the number analysis – I am pretty good at spotting patterns – but the work would give me a headache. So, maybe, but probably not.
2. Remote hotel reservation specialist : The job is remote, which is keen, and I love customer service, but I imagine I would have to learn a heck of a lot about whatever hotel I worked for, and that seems like it would be hard to do remotely. So I rate this as a solid maybe.
3. Content moderator : I think I could be content as a content moderator. ^[1] I would have to give myself a crash course on the popular social media platforms – no biggie – and I’m a weirdo who enjoys making lots of judgement calls, plus I’m fairly thick skinned when it comes to content, so this one is a solid lead. Yes!
4. Social media manager : Hmmm. I could probably craft witty tweets, although it might take me a bit of time to get into that particular groove. But managing a company’s entire social media presence sounds overwhelming to me. So I rate this a maybe, but probably not. Plus I don’t have much social media presence.
5. Online tutor : I don’t know if I would make a good tutor. I think I might. Like all nerds, I love sharing knowledge, and I am a kind and sympathetic person who is good at seeing things from other people’s POV. I have no qualifications though and I have no specialized areas of knowledge. So I rate this one a maybe.
6. Customer service representative : I could probably handle this. I’d have to learn everything I could about whatever I am representing, because my biggest fear would be someone asking me a question I don’t know the answer to. But like I said, I actually enjoy customer service. I’m so weird. Put this on the plus side of maybe for me.
7. Transcriptionist : I don’t think I type 65 WPM, though it’s hard to say, because for obvious reasons I type straight from my head as opposed to an audio source, so I have no idea how fast I would type for that. More importantly, though, I can’t see this as being a job with a future because AI is getting extremely good at recognizing voice accurately. So call this a negative maybe.
8. Online survey taker : That’s a job? Of course not. And I have done this gig a tiny bit and they ask a ZILLION questions for very little money. Um, no.

That’s enough of that for now. I will do the other seven in part 2 of today’s entry.

And you know what? It’s been no big deal. Once I got into the actual work of it, that absorbed me enough that I wasn’t anxious and I wasn’t thinking about pressure or change or all the other things my neuroses feast upon.

I can totally do this. And it would be so good for my mental health for me to have something truly productive to do with my time for at least a couple of hours a day.

The extra money would be nice too, and the ultimate would be if I could actually make a living at one of these things, but mostly I just need stuff to do and I am incapable of providing my own structure so I need someone else to provide that.

Online university is still an option too, of course.

---

Part two : the Jobening

Now where were we?

1. Virtual bookkeeping : Today I learned that being a bookkeeper is still a thing. I could probably get accredited as a bookkeeper. I’m the only person to ever get a 100 percent in my high school accounting class, after all. I know I have the aptitude. I would just need to take a few online classes to update my skills. And I suppose I could do the work. I know how to make a spreadsheet. I will put this one down as a positive maybe.
2. Medical coder : Yikes. I am sure I could do it but I’m also pretty sure I would hate it. Learning all those weird (and unnecessary) codes would be such a snooze. I might balance the books and I might even read your meter, but I draw the line at this kind of work. No.
3. Proofreader : I don’t think so. I have an extremely keen grip on the English language in all its minutiae, but what I lack is a fine attention to detail. I could be wrong, because language errors in stuff I read online do tend to leap out at me, but I would honestly make a better editor. I can improve your writing better than I can make sure everything is perfect. So…. maybe?
4. Virtual recruiting : Not sure how exactly this works. I guess it must be like outsourcing your HR work and paying someone to plow through all the applications for jobs till you find someone actually hireable. I don’t think I would enjoy that. Too much guesswork, because it’s not like there won’t be multiple equally qualified people for every job. And being responsible for whether someone’s kids get to eat would be way too much for me. Nnnno.
5. Online ESL teacher : The whole world wants to learn English because it’s now the lingua franca of the world. The internet gave us that. But I get very stressed out around people who don’t speak English well, making this about the worst kind of job for me. Um, nope.
6. Search engine evaluator : Hmmm. Another “judgement” job. I can see myself doing this. I am sure it can be quite tedious but like I said, I like exercising my judgement on large numbers of things. That’s why I used to enjoy sorting through my random acquisitions from Usenet so much. So, positive maybe.
7. Virtual event planner : Another hmmm. I’m not exactly one of the party people but I do have excellent organizational skills. I am not sure about organizing virtual events, though. That sounds like no fun. I suppose real world party planning would be really hard to do remotely though. Yeah, FedEx me those cake samples. I could probably do it but I would probably hate it. So no.

There! Now I can close one of my lurking tabs! Hooray!

Next I will sign up for SkillUp!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Being the half-born prince kinda sucks.

I can feel my half a life so clearly now. Perhaps that’s a good sign. I look back on my life and realize how much of me just wasn’t there at all.

But I didn’t know that. I though that was all of me. In fact I have only realized the bifurcated nature of my existence in the last few days.

And when you are half alive and think that you’re whole, of course you think there must be something terribly wrong with you because you don’t know why you can’t do what all the other kids do and grow the hell up.

It’s because half of me (at most) has been left behind for all these years.

That’s probably a big part of why I don’t feel like a real, legitimate person, too. I’m only partially present. I have lived most of my life half-asleep.

There’s a very sad, scared, and traumatized little boy asleep deep inside me, and I am still working up the nerve to wake him up.

He doesn’t want to wake up because then he’ll have to finish dealing with the horrible nightmare visited upon him by the cock of a stranger one horrible day in 1977.

He fled into sleep and the cerebral to escape that horror. Escaped into the depths of his mind and hasn’t come out since because he’s asleep in there.

Like Sleeping Beauty, complete with waiting for my prince to come give me the kiss that will bring me back to life.

Though given my reclusive ways, I’m not sure how the hell he’ll find me.

At some point during my grand awakening, I will have to stick my head out of this deep dark dank and deadly cave of mine and let myself be seen and known.

And that will not be easy. I have been stuck in “freeze” mode (as in fight, flight, or freeze) for a very long time and the overwhelming dictum of “freeze” mode is that discovery equals death and only going unnoticed can bring safety.

When forced into exposure. “flight” mode kicks in and no matter what is happening to me or how much I might be enjoying my time, the anxiety clock is ticking and urging me to go back into hiding and “freeze” mode ASAP.

Like a lot of scared little animals, I do have “fight” mode when cornered. And like the proverbial cornered rat, I can turn surprisingly viscous when defending my person and my territory, metaphorically speaking.

Of course, one thing I need to accept about myself is that I do have somewhat of a temper. It flares up at odd times and for what are quite frankly abstruse reasons, but I have one and it can very well get me into trouble if I let it.

And I should probably let it, if that’s what it takes to uncork my personality and let me live an intact life with the full range of human emotions.

And that means growing up, and that means waking that poor little boy up, and that is going to be heartbreaking.

At least I have found a way to have sympathy for myself. That’s a good thing.

I mean, I guess I do really care for that scared little animal inside me, as well as that sleepy little boy.

But I have been brutally unforgiving to the person they form, and I suppose that by extension I have been unfair to them, too.

This metaphor is getting complicated.

Perhaps if I can keep the boy and the fox in mind, I can learn to remain sympathetic to myself and gain a little bit of blessed mercy from the brutal machine regime within.

I do love myself, after a fashion.

Perhaps I need to let them know it.

More after the break.

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The Busy Friday Chronicles for Nov 1, 2024

Did the wound care thing today. Our appointment was at noon, which I think is the latest in the day it’s ever been.

There was a bit of drama beforehand because first I woke up to discover I was juuuust about to poop (turned out I had already started^[1]) and had to skip to the loo.

So that was not fun. I really wish I knew why sometimes the contents of my bowels liquefy while I sleep as it causes all manner of mischief.

Then when I staggered out of the bathroom (some bowel movements really wear you out), I checked the time… and it was 20 to noon!!!

That’s when we would usually leave!

So I had to get dressed real quick, and the ride to wound care at the CCC was a little more tense than usual.

But no panic, we were on time, no big whoop.

The nurse was one who has tended my wounds a number of times but of course, I could not remember her name.

I hate how bad I am with names. I’m always afraid people will think I don’t care about them or don’t think they are important.

Then it was home for an hour and a quarter before it was time for my weekly shower at Rosewood Manor with Albert.

And it was a clusterfuck from the get-go. First, when Julian went in to get me a wheelchair, they told him they don’t do that any more.

They’d done it two or three weeks in a row, but not any more I guess.

So I had to walk all the way to the shower room, and that was not easy because I had already done the walking for wound care.

So my legs were hurting by the time I got there. Luckily, we arranged for Julian to pick me up at the back entrance after, which is right next to the shower room.

The last time I did the trip back to the lobby, I almost took a fall because my legs gave out just as I reached the lobby and it was sheer luck that I was right in front of a chair when that happened.

Hence my asking for a wheelchair.

Then, once me and Albert were in the shower room, another group of people (patient and attendant) showed up and said THEY were booked for 2:30 pm.

To which I instantly said, “No you’re not!” but luckily nobody heard me.

You see what I meant about defending my territory? I can switch into Grump and Defensive mode in a heartbeat when provoked.

Most people never see this side of me because my life is so flat and mellow that nothing ever provokes me.

So then Albert had to go have a talk with the interlopers plus a lady I think is an administrator at the Manor while our appointment time is ticking away.

Luckily he got it all straightened out and things went on as normal.

But this double booking bullshit really burned my biscuits because it’s such a stupid SNAFU that shows that someone doesn’t know WTF they are doing and parts of the organization aren’t communicating properly.

In retrospect, I wish we had asked the other attendant who told her she and her client could use that facility at that time.

That’s our most likely culprit right there.

Everything else went fine. That was my adventure for the day.

And there’s always something perversely therapeutic about having something to get really irritated about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And it has nothing to do with ghouls, ghosts, and goblins.

For the last week or so, I have been dreading this day. To the point where any time I would think of it, my mind would immediately shy away from it like a horse that’s trying to tell his rider that the big spooky mansion is haunted, and as the day grew closer my sense of apprehension only grew stronger.

And now here we are on the day itself, and I hate it.

And while I was doing the Therapy Thursday thing today, I figured out why.

It’s because I know I will be all alone doing absolutely nothing to celebrate tonight and that will leave me feeling lonely and isolated and forlorn.

It will feel like everyone in the world is getting together and having fun tonight except for little ol’ me and that is going to depress the hell out of me and there’s nothing I can do about it now.

Oh, there was a period of time where I could have done something about it. If I were amongst the living, I could have ordered myself some sugar free treats off of Amazon and eaten them while watching something spooky on YouTube (glitch in the Matrix stories, perhaps) and maybe hung out with some of my fuzzy friends online and not felt nearly as lonesome and left out as I do now.

And it’s not even dark yet. It’ll be worse later on.

But no, I am a warm fuzzy critter who’s dead on the inside, and mustering the wherewithal and gumption to do those kinds of things is far beyond my mortal powers, so I am just going to sit here like a lump and be miserable until sunrise tomorrow.

I can’t even order myself some pizza because Joe and Julian aren’t here (they have actual things to do because they have lives) and the buzzer system in our building is broken (again!!) so I couldn’t let the delivery dude in the building and would have to go down and get the stuff at the front entrance instead.

And with my gimpy legs, that would be a very tricky prospect, and probably unsafe as well given that there would be nobody around to help me if the journey proved to be much too much for me and my legs gave out and I fell.

Still, there IS a love seat to sit on in the lobby. So in theory, I could order the food, then head down to the lobby with a book and wait for it to arrive. Then, after it comes, sit down on the love seat for a rest before heading back upstairs.

Broken into segments like that, it might be doable.

We’ll see if I can find the ambition.

It would definitely help me to not feel so bad, but it would still be a risk. If anything went wrong I might lay there for hours.

That would suck.

Barring that, though, I am going to feel crappy. Kind of like a victim of circumstance, but not really. Unless we take “circumstance” to include “being mentally ill”.

Being crazy sucks. It’s no fun at all.

Well at least I can try hanging out with my fuzzy friends. That should at least take the edge of the loneliness. I can spend some time hugging fuzzies.

And who knows, I might order in just for the adventure of it all. Sure, there’s a risk, but it’s manageable, and if I can pull it off, I will be so very pleased with myself.

I am trying to train myself to think in terms of solutions and things to look forward to instead of being so fucking negative all the time.

I can make things better for myself. I truly can.

I just need to rise up and take charge of my life.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

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The fox stayed home

`I didn’t order in.

Chickened out, I guess you could say. Couldn’t quite get myself to do it.

It was a good plan and it probably would have worked fine but when push came to shove, I fell over.

You know. From the shoving.

I told myself that I would rather just save the money up anyhow. But that was sour grapes. The truth is that I didn’t have the guts to do it.

Oh well. There’s always next time.

And there’s always a next time.

The important thing is not to take this night’s result as an excuse not to try in the future. That’s loser thinking and I am sick and tired of that shit.

Losers are always looking for the closest exit. They want that quick hit of relief their feel when they give up on something and suddenly all the pressure is off and they will choose that over the remote possibility of success every single time.

Well, there go the Halloween fireworks. Another thing I don’t get to enjoy.

Yeah, I know. That’s loser thinking too. Always wallowing in the negative instead of looking for a way to be happy no matter what.

I’m working on it.

I don’t know where to find the strength to be positive. All I can do is try to remove as much of what is weighing me down as possible in hopes that eventually my natural buoyancy will take over and let me float free.

I still feel like there’s something vitally important missing from me. Some fundamental component of living that I lack and that without that emotional nutrient, all I can do is languish in the doldrums of life and do nothing that means anything till I die.

Scary, isn’t it kids?

But I can learn to feed my soul. I can feel the lack but I can also feel what could fill it and soon, that sad little boy will wake up and rejoin the rest of me, and I will be whole.

Hmm. Maybe I have an idea of how to start my NaNoWriMo novel after all.

Remember my motto : I only have to know what happens NEXT.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m feeling sluggish and tired and hence a bit cranky. I feel a weak but constant burning in all my muscles and my head hurts in that spot directly in that “third eye” spot in the middle of my forehead and I feel foggy and confused.

So I’m not doing too great right now. But this too shall pass.

Until then, I will use this negative mood in order to vent some more of the toxic garbage that has accumulated in my soul and maybe ease my burden a bit.

Basically, the crux of it all is that I hate my life and how it’s slowly falling apart along with my aging and sedentary body and yet I feel utterly helpless to change my destination.

I know it doesn’t seem that way. On paper there are loads of ways I could improve my life. But they all require something I just don’t seem to have.

They all require me to stop crouching in the corner with my face turned to the wall. I need to finally stand up, turn around to face the world, and enter that big bad world out there in order to finally deal with things properly.

And I just… can’t.

Even thinking about it hurts me. It gives me this feeling like my frostbitten and snow scarred body is being dragged painfully over rough and dirty ice. Like something raw and broken in me is trying to come to life but I am just too damaged to complete the circuit so I fall apart instead.

I am very good at falling apart. It’s getting my shit together that I fail at.

And it makes it so hard to avoid my self-loathing. That anger turned inward is a hell of a demon to try to exorcize. I have so much bitter contempt for myself and the pathetic worthless trash heap I’ve made of my life that it makes it hard to remember that I have any worth to anyone at all, let alone that people love and support me.

There’s still a terrible gap between me and others. An almost total lack of connection with the rest of humanity. I live in my own little walled off realm where I don’t connect with anybody on any deep level and thus I feel very, very alone.

And I know there are people who want to get closer to me. But I can’t let them in. I may have opened up a doorway inside myself, but I am still standing in that doorway and not letting anyone in, like an overzealous bouncer.

The truth is that I don’t know how to let people in. Or rather, I have no idea what being close to people is even like, and that scares me.

That part of me is frozen shut and has been for a long, long time. Whatever capacity I ever had to open up and connect with people died of a thousand winters deep inside me a long time ago, when I just plain gave up on people.

I went through my period of trying to reach out. Trying to make friends, connect with others, be a part of things. Even trying to be normal in my extremely clumsy fashion.

But due to lack of kindergarten (among other factor) I completely missed the bus when it came to socialization and normalization. I have been locked in this frozen realm of mine for a very long time and in here, I can’t touch anyone and no one touches me.

And that’s not enough. My soul has been starving for what feels like forever. All my gaming and blogging can do for me is keep me busy and/or amused. They can’t feed my spirit or help me grow.

So I feel trapped. But I’m not trapped. Except that I am.

I am just trapped by very inobvious and deeply personal issues that make no sense to the world outside myself as I see it.

I am broken in a way for which people don’t even have a word.

And I don’t know how to fix that.

But venting like this certainly helps. Thank you for listening.

More after the break.

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The long dream

Been sleeping a lot today.

Must be time for the balloon payment on my sleep debt. It’s been a little frustrating because I’ve been only getting to play my video games in little 20 minute intervals and that’s an unsatisfying amount of play.

Feels like I am just getting started when it’s time to stop. Dammit.

But the real sleep problem that is on my mind right now is how a big part of me has been asleep and dreaming ever since I was raped at the age of 4 and how it has just occurred to me that in order to get better, I am going to have to wake that poor boy up.

And that’s not going to be easy. He’s been asleep for so long that there is no way that he is still healthy and whole as he slumbers away. He’s going to be a very sick child when he wakes up and that makes it seem like waking him is downright cruel.

And yet, awaken he must. In time, he will recover from his long, long nap and be able to truly wake up and take deep, cleansing breaths and then get up and face the day.

And on that day my psyche will be more whole than it has been ever since that terrible man raped me, and I will have all my faculties at my disposal instead of having to drag the dead weight of my sleeping self around behind me.

He doesn’t want to wake up. As far as he is concerned, there is still a horror beyond all comprehension waiting for him in the real world, and therefore waking up is the worst possible thing that could happen because then the monster will GET him.

And I don’t want to wake him up. It will not feel like I am doing him a kindness, at least not at first. Not only is he going to wake up sick, he will have to face a lot of very harsh truths when he does wake, including the horrible fact that he has been asleep for 47 years and most of his life has passed him by.

But somehow we will both get through it.

Because on the other side of all of that lies freedom.

And that make it all worth it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Those five tabs continue to haunt me.

They are : Notd, a truly excellent forum for writers which would make a great springboard for, at the very least, network with other writers and all I would have to do is summon the self-confidence to upload my stuff to it…

FlexJobs, a site specializing in remote work jobs which might be perfect for me if I could only pull myself together enough to page through the listings until I find one I am actually qualified for…

The March of Dimes Employment Services page, which has all kinds of resources to help gimps like myself find the employment we need to become more independent…

The March of Dimes Skill Up page, which would enable me to acquire the skills needed to actually qualify for stuff…

And this video, which promises 15 juicy remote work opportunities.

All five of these things are wonderful opportunities that could very well be the golden ticket I need in order to finally enter the magical world of employment.

And then I would be a real honest to goodness grownup! Golly!

And they all just sit there like wallpaper with me almost never even thinking about them and when I do notice them there, I immediately avert my attention from those terrible things that make me feel tense and scared and guilty.

Which is why these golden tickets go unredeemed. I am far too prone to fleeing things that scare me by diving deep into my distractions (video games) until I forget all about whatever it was that set me off.

And what sets me off in this case is, I suppose, fear of growing up. Fear of changing. Fear of entering an environment, however virtual, with which I am unfamiliar and therefore one that would be far more stimulating that my usual life and it’s that jump in stimulation levels that scares me.

I associate all such jumps with anxiety attacks, and that’s why I am still on this long smooth flat road to absolutely nowhere because when you can’t choose anything that increases your stimulation you end up at the bottom of a steep ravine.

If you can’t go up, your only choices are to go down or go nowhere.

And while my road seems flat, I’m actually going down a very gradual but fatal decline and at the bottom of this hill lies my early, stupid, pointless grave.

And ain’t that a kick in the nuts.

And I know it’s my own cowardice that is keeping me trapped on this long and lonely road. I am a hostage to my own extremely overactive fear responses and it does not seem like they will let me go any time soon.

So I find myself increasingly contemplating my own kind of “lean in” strategy where instead of trying to quiet my fears or somehow overcome them in a macho manly way (yeah right), I simply endure the terror.

Just walk right into it and let it wash over me. Let it discharge like so much static electricity. Wait for it to wear itself out, then go ahead and do the thing anyway.

And if that fails, pop a Xanax. What the hell.

Something has to end the chokehold my fears have on my every moment. There has to be some way to get past that massive wall of fear and it’s seeming increasingly likely that the only way out is through.

Maybe that’s how I teach my soul to fly. I keep talking about not being limited by the logical and the sensible, but I am still driving around looking for an exit.

When I know that the only way to get there is to fly. Leave logic and common sense behind and just go there even if it doesn’t make sense at all. Even if there’s no logical connection between what came before and what I want to happen.

Even if there is no road to that holy place at all, and the only way to get there is to fly.

It is truly a handicap to need things to always make sense. It can lead to a remarkably well integrated and robust understanding of things, but it’s no good for the soul.

Sometimes reality simply does not furnish what we need.

And then, we have to be able to make it ourselves.

More after the break.

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Leave this world behind

Perhaps it’s because my subjective world is so unreal, but I cling to what connection to reality I still retain with a fanatical deathgrip for fear of the vast and hungry canyon of total mental oblivion over which I am dangling.

Madness lurks below. Or so I’ve always thought.

But maybe that is all bullshit. Maybe I could let go and not only would I be fine, I would actually be way better off because now my mind can find its natural equilibrium and I could learn to relax and not be so freaking anxious all the time.

Ah, but can I afford to risk it? What if I’m wrong and I do end up utterly mad?

That is how paranoia always works. It sets things up so that the consequences of disobeying it just might be far, far worse than any benefit – might, in fact, be fatal, either literally or metaphorically, and thus makes it seem “not worth the risk”.

It’s the perfect scam, because it keeps you from ever testing whether or not it’s valid.

I mean, if there’s a real possibility that turning on your light will cause an explosion that will kill you and your entire family, you’re probably going to just get used to the dark.

But is that a real possibility? Or rather, is it in any sense at all likely?

And if it isn’t, why do you keep scaring yourself with the possibility? What does that cycle of fear keep from happening? What are you REALLY scared of?

Anyhow. This tight grip on my connection to reality might be partially to blame for why faith seems so impossible to me.

Because to have faith, I would have to let go. For the first time in my life, I would have to leave the tightly integrated structure of my rational model of the universe and enter a world of pure emotion and intuition, and that scares the shit out of me.

I can’t verify emotion. I can’t test intuition’s reasoning. I can’t examine their justification and see if it checks out. I can’t be sure of anything at all.

Or maybe I could be sure of all of it if I could just believe.

But I can’t, or at least, not yet. I can’t believe something (or in something) without having a reason to do so. It has to make sense to me.

But belief without the need for justification is the definition of faith.

And I don’t know if I can do that.

I just know that I need to.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Julian drove me to an orthotics center today so they could push my feet into foam.

In order to make a cast of my feet, of course. This is one of the many wonderful things my case worker Galina has put into motion for me, and should eventually result in my getting new shoes with offloading orthotics inside them.

The idea is to take the pressure off the wounds on my feet so that they can heal.

One surprising bit of info : going around in my socks all the time might be the very reason the wounds on my feet haven’t healed.

It makes sense when you think about it : when you go around barefoot or in just socks, the flexing of the muscles tears the wound open with every step.

Harsh, I know. But accurate.

That’s especially true with wounds like the one on my left foot, The wound is smack dab in the middle of the muscle right above the heel, and wounds like that do not heal well even in the best of circumstances because pretty much anything you do with that foot will flex that muscle.

I am pretty dang curious as to how orthotics will get around that.

Well, I will know in 2 to 6 weeks. I fully expected that. The wheels of government turn mighty slow and I most definitely did not think I would be leaving the orthotics place with new shoes today.

As always, I do what’s asked of me then forget about it till I need to do something else.

The orthotics place is in Vancouver, so it was a bit of a road trip to get there. Plus it’s located in this big rehabilitation center which is itself located in a cozy, tree lined Vancouver residential neighborhood, so it’s a tad off the beaten path.

Something occurred to me while we were in that neighborhood : everyone knows that people love those tree lined neighborhoods.

What struck me is that this basically means we like living in the forest. We want to be surrounded by trees. And then every lawn is like a little meadow of our own.

We’re still forest animals at heart. And I say this as a person who grew up on a tree lined street, and so that kind of thing is especially powerful for me.

I find it comforting to think that we complicated humans are basically forest animals who seek our natural climate.

Makes me think of those adorable British children’s books about anthro animals living in forest neighborhoods, like The Wind In The Willows.

The orthotics specialist was a very nice British lady who did the pressing my feet into the foam thing. The foam was firm but yielded when the lady pressed down on my feet with her hands, and voila, two remarkably high resolution impressions of my tootsies.

It was a very interesting sensation. Like stepping into crusty snow, only much warmer and drier. To be honest, it made me want to have a bunch of that foam to play around with and make impressions of various things.

Now the whole thing has to make a stop at my GP Doctor Chao’s office so that he can add the shoes to my prescription, then it’s off to the government to await their holy benison so the orthotics people can make my frigging shoes.

One thing that concerned me was that she was clearly implying that I should have the new shoes on all the time, and that would be a major adjustment for me.

But then I realized that there would be no reason for me to wear them when I was sitting at the computer or lying in bed, and that’s 80 percent of my waking hours, so I guess I would only have to slip them on when I stood up.

And I can live with that, I guess.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

More after the break.

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The long haul

I feel so damned tired sometimes.

Especially after a day like today, with an unusual amount of moving around. Right now my legs are aching. More worryingly, so are my arms.

I am terrified that my undiagnosed and hence untreated muscular degeneration is going to take my arms next. Having legs that don’t work right is one thing. It sucks but most of the time I am sitting or lying down anyhow, so it’s not that bad.

But if my arms become as stiff and weak as my legs, that could fuck things up big time.

If that happens, I am going to demand answers and a treatment, because that could make my life intolerable.

Just leave me the ability to type and use the mouse.

Anyhow, so I feel sore all over and that is not ideal because I still have wound care tomorrow where I will need to make another subjectively long trip via my walker.

I feel my destiny in a wheelchair looming larger and closer than ever before.

I get the feeling I might not make it to wound care tomorrow. Depends on how I feel when I get up.

I really don’t want to miss tomorrow’s appointment, though, because the orthotics lady had to remove the bandages on my feet in order to do that neato foam thing and then stick them back on again.

They’re not a wound clinic. They don’t do that kind of work. I have the feeling that she’s more of a medical technician, like a physio, then an actual part of the medical system.

And I was not super happy with that, but as long as I make it to wound care, they can change the bandages to ones that are put on there properly and all will be good.

But will I make it? I dunno. Right now it doesn’t seem likely but maybe if I lay in bed willing my legs to recover from their ordeal faster, I can make it.

I frigging hate my life sometimes.

It’s just so god damned stupid.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We introverts tend to generate our own energy.

As opposed to extroverts, who take their energy from their environment.

Now obviously I am not speaking of literal energy. Whatever energy you’re using to walk, talk, and masturbate as you read this comes from inside you no matter how you are wired because it’s a product of your metabolism.

So what we’re really talking about is the emotional side of motive power. This includes that magical, mystical substance called “motivation”, but also things like the elevation of one’s mood, inspiration, the urge to socialize, and so on.

Both introversion and extroversion have their pluses and minuses, and the world most definitely needs both kinds of people.

But both sides can also go too far, to the point of becoming pathological.

Extreme extroversion can lead to someone who is monophobic – in other words, they hate to ever be alone – as well as hyperactive and reactive and who simply cannot function without people to perceive them and react to.

Extreme introverts, like myself, can end up very depressed and unmotivated and anhedonic because when their internal generation of “power” isn’t enough, everything grinds to a gruesome halt.

And the thing about depression as a mental illness is that it creates a kind of friction that enormously increases the amount of “power” needed to do even the simplest of things, and that’s bad, bad news when you are limited to only what you generate internally.

The result is persistent depressive disorder as we know it, with the lassitude, lack of motivation, and dependence on whatever in our lives we have gravitated to as the activity that provides enough reward for the effort it requires.

All depressives are addicted to something, in my opinion.

All this leads to my own case and my thoughts about this whole energy deal. Clearly, I need a lot more of the stuff if I am to escape my own rather nasty gravity well.

Luckily, I know that it is at least possible for me to get some energy from external stimulation. For example, I often feel quite awake and alive when I have been hanging out with my friends at Denny’s of a Sunday night, as I will be doing in 2 hours and a bit.

But for the most part, I have been far too closed off and insular to get much from my environment except through screens, and screens are not enough.

I mean, obviously, in a literal sense, video games are stimulation from outside of my skull, but to me they are more like extensions of my mind.

But a good game can motivate me to play it for hours on end. So there’s that.

My catastrophic passivity is part of this equation as well, because it rarely occurs to me to actually seek the sort of social stimulation I clearly need in order to stop feeling so cold and lonely all the god damned time.

So what I clearly need to do is gather my meager motivational forces together and go hunting for greater social stimulation of a positive variety.

But more fundamentally, I need to open myself up to the world and all its potential stimulation instead of huddling in a corner with my screens and shutting the real world out as much as possible.

I need to become a real human being and not just a broken simulation of one. I want to find all my long neglected instincts, emotions, and drives, and enable myself to let them take me where they will no matter how unpredictable the journey might be.

Because the thing about healthy people is that it doesn’t matter how surprising life might be because they are confident that they will be able to handle it.

That is their form of predictability – confidence in themselves. And the more they successfully endure, the greater that confidence becomes because they now have the experience needed to make even better decisions in the future.

Seems like an impossible and distant galaxy from where I am right now. And yet I know the potential for that sort of self-affirming life lies within me.

I was a very open and optimistic and enthusiastic kid before the rape.

I can be that kind of person again.

I will find a way to get back to that.

One word at a time.

More after the break.

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Dig, dig, dig

And I will get back to that happy, positive place by swinging my psychological pickaxe and digging deep into into the substrate of my psyche in order to excavate all those old fossilized emotions and release the energy bound up in that deep black rock so that it can return to powering my actual generators again.

Can I work a metaphor, or what?

And I have seen little hints of light breaking through the clouds lately. Moments when I can feel a certain lightness and buoyancy threatening to lift me up and actually make me feel good about life and the road ahead of me.

A warm, sunshiny feeling is a-stirring, and so I am desperately tunneling through the rock still holding me down in order to become light enough to start floating again.

I don’t care if I float off into the stratosphere and disappear into the sky. Nice place, the sky. Could be a nice place to live.

And it sure as fuck can’t be any more cold and airless than how I feel down here.

So I am throwing every sandbag I got over the side of this hot air balloon of mine and I will keep doing that until I finally lift the fuck off.

To hell with having my feet on the ground. Staying firmly grounded in the here and now has always been a purely theoretical idea for me anyhow. I’ve talked big about it but the truth is that I can’t handle the here and now in the slightest.

I will always retain my fundamental pragmatism. That’s immutable. But I no longer give a shit if I am being “logical” or “realistic”.

I just want to be happy.

And absolutely nothing else matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a surprisingly slippery question.

I will always recall the moment I realized that there was such a thing as nerds and nerd culture. I remember I was sitting around playing D&D with some fellow students in junior high (in my school district, grades 7 through 9) and it suddenly occurred to me that I had more in common with the people there than just D&D.

Somehow, I knew that if they were into D&D, odds are they were also heavily into science fiction, heavy metal, and Star Wars.

The odds were also very good that they did well in school. That wasn’t a lock, because not every nerd is academically gifted – just most of us – but if you’ve the wit to play D&D at all competently, you’re no dummy.

Most importantly, I realized there were other people like me.

Of course, now, with the rise of the Internet and internet culture. we are all aware that there are millions of us nerds out there and that there is a vast and varied geek subculture that supports us in our nerdity.

But my revelation would have come in 1987 or so, so all of that hadn’t happened yet.

I imagine a lot of my fellow geeks went through a similar journey.

Eh, nerdy kids these days don’t know how good they got it.

Anyhow, enough biography. Let’s address the question : what is a nerd?

I don’t know, but I know one when I see one. Ha ha ha.

First off, we are a subset of the naturally occurring intellectual class. This is the percentage of the population that naturally develops a higher than average IQ and hence does well in school.

Nobody has to create this class of person. The human race seems to simply produce them without the need for any kind of intervention.

Now, whether any given society encourages and/or exploits this higher level of intelligence sadly varies wildly depending on culture, both societal and family.

But that’s outside the scope of this think piece.

Depending on how broadly one defines nerdity, it could be said that all the members of this naturally occurring intellectual class (NOIC?) are nerds of some sort.

But someone bound for law school is not just a “law nerd” by any stretch of the imagination. The line has to be drawn somewhere.

One of the defining characteristics of nerdity is a love for learning and the accumulation of knowledge. Nerds love to know things, and when it’s something they like, like Lord of the Rings, they will want to learn everything there is to know about their fave thing.

I’m not that kind of nerd myself. I’m a lot more omnivorous than that. I take in all kinds of information and it all gets sorted and formatted and reduced to its pure essence and that essence become part of my working model of the world.

There are lots of things I love. Like science and video games, both geeky. But I can’t imagine that making me want to learn everything there is to know about either subject.

I will definitely enjoy learning about them. An article or YouTube video about those subjects has a higher likely of attracting my attention than one about trains.

It’s the obsessive drive to collect that I lack, whether it’s merchandise or trivia. I love to learn and I enjoy having knowledge to draw on, but I get bored far too easily and I am far too restless to stick with even one of my favorite topics for a long time.

So I am more of a generalist. That’s my specialty.

More after the break.

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Topic what topic

You have to admit, I kept trying to return to the topic of what a nerd is.

But it’s so hard for me to make the words go where I want them to go. I can’t be restricted to a topic. My mind refuses to be constrained by even its own ideas.

There’s a lesson for me in there somewhere, I think.

Now, there are worse sins than not being able to stick to a point. All that really matters is whether a writer keeps you entertained (or amused or engaged or whatever) with whatever it is they wrote. Whether they prove their thesis or not is secondary.

This was true of some of the columnist of old. Like my hero Dave Barry (sp?). He managed to get to a point where all he had to do was come up with 750 funny and engaging words a day, and everything would be all right.

I want that kind of life. Sure, having to come up with those 750 high quality words every day would be way, way harder than producing 1000 words of my usual drivel, but I know I would be up to the task.

And sure, the fame would be nice, and the money would be very very nice. But what would be the most appealing thing about it to me would be the simplicity of it all.

No more infinite corridor of infinite doors. No more option paralysis. No more constant, gnawing feeling that there’s something I am supposed to be doing and I am not doing it.

Just 750 little words and you’re done for the day. And you know what you’ll be doing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and so on.

That would be amazing.

Piers Anthony, another hero of mine, also talked something similar. He said he got to the point where he felt he owed the word 1000 proofread and edited and polished words a day toward whatever he was working on (and it could be any one of several projects) and as long as he got those words done, all was right in the world.

I wonder if that’s where I got the !K words a day idea?

And most importantly, absolutely nothing could change that obligation. Even if he missed that target 100 days in a row, on day 101 he still owed the world those words. Failure was absolutely no excuse to quit.

And that might seem harsh to some. But to me, it’s genius. Because it changes the equation so that failure is no longer an escape from the problem. In that case, the path of least resistance becomes to just do the damned thing and get it over with so you can do whatever the fuck you want with the rest of your day.

It’s a way around the laziness and procrastination endemic to us creative type people.

Shit. That reminds me. NaNoWriMo is coming up in 5 days and I don’t have an idea for what to write about yet.

I could just improvise my way through it like I did with my previous November novels. There, too, what I ended up writing bore little resemblance to what I had meant to write.

But I still need a good, solid, inspiring point of departure.

Time to start brainstorming!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, frantic might not be the right word. But busy.

Wound care at 9:15 am. Had a “it sucks to be sensitive” moment when my nurse came to get me in the waiting area just as some other client, a rather confused old lady who did not speak English, and her care worker who barely? spoke English started a hubbub with my nurse about an appointment they thought was at 8:30 am but was in fact at 9:15 am just like mine.

There was much confusion and stress hanging in the air for me to walk into because of this, plus the disorder of it all upset me, and I was left walking into the Community Care Clinic feeling rather off kilter and upset.

It really sucks to be as sensitive as I am sometimes.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My nurse was a lady with an African accent and dark skin, and that was kind of fun. I love the interesting rising caDENCE of her acCENT and the unusual empPHAsis she placed on some sylLABles, see.

It’s not impossible that it was actually a Caribbean accent. After today, I can really hear how the Caribbean accent relates to certain African accents.

Her skin tone and bone structure said Africa, though.

The usual bandage change happened despite the occasional tiny language snafus (“You have wounds on both your…. legs, right?” My feet, actually, but I am pretty sure you know that. ), and then we were on our way to the bank for my monthly bullshit.

The banking bullshit went great. There was absolutely no line at all so the whole thing took very little time and I didn’t need Julian to be my placeholder in line or anything.

I made the usual withdrawal. I still need to deal in cash because Van City still does not have a way for me to spend money via Visa Debit so that it acts just like a Visa card but the money comes out of my account instead of accruing as debt.

If I could only get that service, I would never need to go to the bank again. The money would be deposited in the account and I would spend it from there too.

There’s probably a way for me to do that and I am just not clever enough to think of it.

I can be very, very clever like any good fox, but it’s sporadic. Inspiration either strikes or it doesn’t and I don’t really have any control over that.

One silly thing : after we left the bank, we headed home, and it wasn’t until we had pulled into our parking spot that I realized we had forgotten to get my credit card.

You know, the preloaded credit card I buy every month so that I can buy things online like a civilized human of today.

Without it, I could not order my groceries, and that’s a no go. So off to Sav-On we went.

I registered the card then ordered my groceries when we got home. The groceries were $87 this week, ouch.

Normally I budget around $60/week but I was out of a bunch of things, including canned pop, and I had decided that to jumpstart my canned pop supply I would need to buy two “fridge buddy” 12 packs, and those are like $9 each.

Plus I decided I wanted to get my hard candies, and that was another $10.

So, ouch, but I knew it would be a costly week.

Then later on came shower time. I am enjoying these little excursions more and more as Albert and I get along quite well and always have a pleasant chat as we get the job done, so to speak.

Well, mostly him. But I help.

More after the break.

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Permission to live

It’s what I am trying to give myself, more or less.

I could even go as far as calling it “permission to exist”. I have lived with the burden of subconsciously being ashamed to be alive for my entire life. Whatever recovery I can manage is going to require me to overcome that somehow.

No wonder I spent so much time alone in my room when I was growing up. Or watching TV by myself in the living room, when everyone else was busy.

I was such a nervous and timid little thing. Like an overwrought mouse.

I somehow need to learn to believe that my being around is a good thing. That means forever banishing that evil, evil voice inside me that tells me that I am a blight on all who know me and the world would be better off without me.

I know that voice is wrong, wrong, wrong.

But that doesn’t shut it up. For that, I suppose I would need to expiate whatever emotions that voice is expressing.

I am still working on being able to figure out that kind of thing. I know that all those evil thoughts come from a place of pain and rage – rage turned inward.

Depression makes us our own tormentor. We are the sadist and the victim. We are the torturer and the sinner. We are the plague and the stricken.

We feast on our own flesh.

This is getting pretty metal.

I guess the obvious solution is to find another outlet for all that fucking rage. And I agree with that objective in principle but I still shy away from it emotionally.

I’m afraid of my rage and where it might take me and what it could make me do. The urges it produces are absolutely psychotic sometimes.

I won’t go into details. I don’t want to scare you.

But I get how depression leads some people into depraved acts, I just know better and thus I can’t pretend like such acts are justified in any way.

I know the seduction of rage, and how easy it would be to follow whatever path leads to that rage being expressed.

And um, fuck that noise.

If it’s be miserable or be evil, I will stay sad, thank you very much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Some videos I have been watching and commenting on over on YouTube have got me thinking Gen X thoughts.

Every generation starts where the previous one left off, even though they neither know it or do it on purpose, and Gen X started where the Boomers ended.

And where they ended was bad. Very bad.

Their youthful exuberance started in the psychedelic 60’s but ended in the Age of Disillusionment. aka the 70’s, and that’s when a lot of us X’ers were born.

The 70’s saw the tie-dyed pie=eyed drug-fueled hippie revolution turn into the social apocalypse that followed. Drugs ran rampant and destroyed lives on an industrial scale , because much to the shock of the hippies, it turned out that drugs are bad, mmkay?

All those hippies came down from the high to find their lives destroyed, often along with their bodies, and many of them came out of it with crippling addictions to things like heroin or morphine.

And because of this explosion in the number of junkies, a tidal wave of crime followed as millions of former hippies had habits to feed.

Throw in Vietnam, Nixon, pollution, inflation, OPEC, poverty, and the stress of trying to start a family amidst all this degradation, and the hippies came to a very bad end. They saw all their great big psychedelic dreams turn into absolute dogshit, and their peace love and harmony turn into cheap thrills and street crime.

Oh, and the divorce rate also skyrocketed as the spoiled and cranky Boomers decided they didn’t feel like being married any more.

So they weren’t.

And that’s the milieu into which we were born. It’s like we of the subsequent generation absorbed the Boomer’s newfound cynicism and disillusionment with our mother’s milk and it became foundational to our entire worldview.

So we inherently distrust big dreams and grand schemes and societal machines. We have a natural immunity to hype and drama and idealism. We grew up with absolutely no illusions about drugs or music or anything else.

We had to deal with the harsh realities the Boomers had created by refusing to face reality for half a generation.

Remember, folks, reality always wins.

I will never forget the conversation I had on IRC with a bunch of ex-hippie Libertarian types where they couldn’t wrap their minds around the fact that I didn’t trust ANYBODY.

Not government, not religion, not corporations, not education, not charities, not the shining idiots on the TV, and definitely not our selfish Boomer parents.

The same parents that had kids without realizing that kids actually have their own needs and desires that could potentially impinge on the Boomers’ precious freedom and autonomy and prerogatives, and clearly that was unacceptable.

I’m sorry, but I didn’t know having kids would mean less for ME.

So instead of being real parents, they just did whatever the hell they wanted to do and us offspring had to just fit ourselves in whenever and often basically raise ourselves.

Hence being the latchkey generation. The first (and in many ways last) generation to grow up without a full time parent. To come home to absolutely nobody and be left to fend for ourselves at least until suppertime.

To never have anyone to turn to when you needed a parent because they were busy and what they were doing was far more important than you are and really, they’re doing this all for you, so just shut up and leave mommy and daddy alone, OK?

And we did. And then they wondered why we grew up to hate them.

Maybe that’s changed now. Maybe it can no longer be assumed that kids will grow up to hate their parents, at least for a while.

After all, kids aren’t raised by Boomers any more.

I’d like to think we did a better job, at least a little.

More after the break.

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The Therapy Thursday Report

Today’s session was pretty good.

We talked about how I have spent most of my life staying in my bedroom most of the time because that’s the only place I felt “safe”.

When I was a kid, it meant I was “safe” from my family and the pain of being ignored or feeling like I wasn’t even there or the anxiety of dealing with people in general, which I now recognize as stemming from feeling like everyone was always at least a little bit pissed off at me.

Back then, that was normal. I lived with a constant background of people’s annoyance. And that extended from my mother through my siblings and all the way to my teachers.

Nobody really wanted me around because I was such a gross pathetic mess. It is painful to be around someone like that. And disgusting.

The difference is that someone in my home life should have taken it upon themselves to get me to clean up and pull myself together so that I was at least inoffensive.

But I was the Christmas puppy, the cute kid who everyone got tired off and then nobody wanted to take care of me or bear any responsibility for me whatsoever.

Like a big dumb smelly dog who doesn’t know why he never gets pets any more.

Another thing that came up during today’s session was the idea of trying to fixate on my pre-rape self when I was a very happy, charming, adorable kid who was often the center of attention wherever I went without even trying and whom everybody loved.

I can be that person again. Well, an adult version of him, anyhow.

That’s the person I was supposed to be before that evil man raped me. And it’s the person I can be again once I rid myself of all these demons and learn to stand up and shake off my fears and face the grown-up world head-on.

Hopefully without whimpering.

I know that I have to rescue and resurrect that very large part of me that is still back in that shower stall where I was raped.

I need to heal him and the wounds he carries, and that won’t be easy or fun.

But I am working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.