Here I sit, at the beginning of Hour One of my wait to see my GP.

And I mean that. I am expecting a one hour wait, minimum. My past history with my GP supports said expectation. It could be a lot more. I am settled down for the long haul.

For some reason, I am sleepy. This seems to be happening a lot lately. I am going to have to get a lot more serious about the CPAP. No more failing to put the thing back on after getting up to pee in the middle of the night.

At least I don’t nap very much any more.

And then there is the issue of the muffins. I seem to have developed a muffin habit. I suppose part of me thinks it is okay because they are healthier than donuts or Timbits, and tgat would be true if I stuck to whole wheat and/or bran muffins. In those, the complex carbs easily outweigh the sugar content.

‘:But I don’t limit myself to those. I eat them all, including ones with chocolate chips. And those might as well be cupcakes.

This is just the latest in a long series of total degenerations of my willpower versus sweets. I was so good for so long, but starting early December, my willpower broke apart like flotsam in a flood.

Water imagery. Yup.

I never wanted to return to a life where I turned to food for solace. But I suppose addiction doesn’t give  a shit about what you want. It wants control and will do whatever it takes to get it.

And the thing is, food works. It improves my mood. It makes me feel better about the world. Most importantly, it gives me something to look forward to, something concrete, reliable, and very rewarding. Something that makes this meal different than the others.

Something  FUN, god dammit.

So I am torn between what my body needs (normal blood sugar, stat!) and what I need for my mood (happy making foods).

(—)

Wow,  made it in only 45 minutes after my appointment. He must be improving.

(—)

Home now, rested, fed, and ready to blog.

Been having those moments where I can’t remember why I do anything ever lately. I feel so lost and pointless sometimes. Even though my life has clear momentum now and I can just ride along without worrying too much about things, sometimes I feel like I am just a meaningless conglomeration of carbon and goo with absolutely no purpose in life, and it makes me feel so alone.

That’s probably just the depression talking, though. Slowly I am wrapping my brain around the fact that it is the illness that cuts me off from the world, and that the world is still out there, warm and solid and true, with everything I want from it out there waiting to happen, and people who truly love me who want to see me do well and be happy.

One might call it emotional object permanence : things are still there even when you can’t feel them.

It’s a sobering thing to realize and a tough pill to swallow as well. My entire view of my life is colored by my perception of having been abandoned and neglected and left out on the cold.

And that is still fundamentally true. Nobody I ever reached out to was able to be there for me. Not my parents, not my teachers, not the school administration. Everything who was supposed to protect me let me down. I was all alone in the world.

And while some baby animals abandoned by their parents learn to strive and thrive and do things for themselves, some of us just give up and wait to die.

But even given that, I have to look back and wonder how much of my isolation was the result of my own damage. I was a pretty messed up kid before I ever set foot in school (and skipping kindergarten sure as fuck didn’t help), though nobody knew it at the time, least of all me.

I was the walking wounded due to getting raped, and I was far too young to be able to understand what had happened to me, let alone put it into words, let alone say those words to someone who would care.

It was the 70’s, after all. A less enlightened age. Most people had never even heard of child rape. They certainly hadn’t heard of it happening to the products of normal middle class families.

And they sure as hell wouldn’t have imagined it happening inside the family.

To be honest, I don’t think children had been less important than they were in the 1970s at any point after the passing of child labour laws.

Anyhow, I was a broken kid. And yet, I have a sort of self-righting personality that keeps it from showing. No matter what happens, I can always manage to smile and say everything is fine and make it believable.

And the thing is… for a while at least, I believe it too. That’s the real problem. I want to be that guy who is always okay and who can handle anything. It’s a very tempting delusion. For a little time at least, I can convince myself that everything is okay and things will be fine from now on.

But like they say, despair is a constant. It’s the hope that kills you.

And there is certainly nothing anyone outside my skull can do about it. What can an average person do to help someone who insists that everything is fine?

I dunno. Maybe if someone was really persistent, I would share the dark stuff with them, though honestly, I would be doing it to shut them up and make them go away. I don’t want my darkness poisoning other people. It’s bad enough that I have to deal with it.

I couldn’t handle someone getting sicker because of me.

I guess that’s it for today, all you wonderful people who read me!

I will, of course, talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So my loan for this semester came in, and I now have $4500 in the bank.

By my standards, that makes me rich. It is a strange feeling. I am so used to subsistence thinking that any change in that feels bizarre.

On the one hand, I feel more emotionally secure. I feel like the world is, at last, smiling on me a little, and that makes me feel far less vulnerable to the whims of fate in this cruel world.

On the other hand, I have to admit that I feel less connected to others. Only a little, but it is weird and offputting. It is like we are all socialists when we have nothing, but once we have something, we shift into thinking MINE MINE MINE! And the further along the scale of ownership we go, the more we go towards that end of the scale.

It kind of makes sense from an animal psychology point of view. In the animal world, there is no such thing as passive ownership. You only own what you can defend, So ownership includes the possibility of having to fight off other animals, including members of your own species, in order to keep it, whether utter is a banana, a fresh kill, or a mating territory.

And the less civilized parts of the human mind still feel like that. No matter how safe and secure society becomes, there is still a very loud voice in our beads saying that They are coming for our stuff and we have to be ready to defend it.

This manifests itself in many ways. In one person, it drives them to become a survivalist in order to justify taking wildly extravagant measures in home defense. In another, it drives anti-immigrant sentiment because she feels like that “They”  are taking “Our” jobs. In still another, it fuels Psuedo-libertarian paranoia about the government taking “my money”.

You will notice that all three forms represent strains of conservative thought. That is no coincidence. The very core of conservatism is the primitive mind rebelling against the higher mind. And this paranoia of which I speak is very primitive indeed.

If there are liberal examples of this phenomena, I would very much like to know.

Back to my money.

I already know a few things I will get with it. New shoes for sure. Mine are so old their soles keep trying to get into Heaven (groan). And I eagerly await being able to buy a three hole punch and some hole reinforced paper.

When you are an adult, the smallest things make you happy.

Other than that, I dunno. Maybe a new tablet.

(—)

I am now sitting in my favorite Whites Spot, blogging, waiting for my food.

Everything before this section was typed as I waited for several buses to take me homeward.

I missed the first one, but it was a huge longshot in the first place. History class ended early and I thought there was a tiny chance I might be able to make the 6:41 bus instead of waiting for the 7:13.

And I might have made it if I hadn’t stopped to pee. Damn my diabetic’s bladder!

Instead, I trudged back up the stairs to wait for the next bus inside, where it’s warm.

The next time, I was on my way back down when disaster struck. My trick ankle buckled and I went a tumble down the concrete steps.

Luckily, I was only two steps from the bottom. It could have been so much worse. But still, I fell, and landed right on my bad knee.

Didn’t expect this kind of pulse pounding excitement, did you?

So there I am, in serious pain, lying on the cold winter pavement. And freaking out, saying “Oh god, no!”  over and over, because all I can think about is that my full weight just came down on my bad knee and probably broke it in a much more serious way.

Basically, I thought I wouldn’t be able to walk.

Luckily, no serious damage was done. That’s why I am blogging from my favorite White Spot and not Richmond Hospital. I have some form of through the fabric scrape on the affected knee, but otherwise, I am shaken but okay.

Today’s Canadian History Since 1867 was rough because the middle section was all about how horribly racist tge West Coast was between 1890 and World War One. The Chinese, the Japanese, and the East Indians all had discriminatory and extraordinarily racist immigration laws aimed at them, including the dreaded Head Tax, and they were all the targets of mob violence from which tge law provided no protection whatsoever.

It was pretty fucking harsh. And depressing, considering the same shit is going down regarding Muslims today.

It is like people love the idea of “good things for everyone” when they think of it meaning good things for them, but lose grip on the concept when someone points out that “everyone” includes people they don’t like.

“When you said everybody, I didn’t know you meant like… EVERYBODY. Just, you know…everyone who counts. You know… real people. Humans.”

This is the sort of thing that tempts me toward misanthropy. But you can’t be both a humanist and a misanthrope. They are diametrically opposed.

It is weird how many people don’t get that. More of that “everybody but not EVERYBODY” thinking, I guess. You can’t love humanity and hate people, and if you think you can, you probably have some serious interpersonal and logical issues to work on.

Well, time to head home.

(—)

Home now. Took a cab. How decadent! At first I was thinking I would walk or maybe wait for the bus, but when I was done eating, I noticed it was raining, and I said “Nope! Taxi it is. ”

And I tried to tip the cabbie. I really did. The fare was $5.60 and I handed him a ten. I told him twice that he could just give me three bucks back, but each time is replied with something completely incomprehensible to me (either because it was not in English or in an accent so thick that it was effectively not in English”, and so I shrugged as he handed me back exact change.

No tip for you tonight, I guess.

That’s enough from me now. It’s been a pleasant day (overall) and I am going to flop out.

I just wish every day could like this.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But I am going to talk about panic tonight. Come on, it’s Therapy Thursday, you knew we would be diving deep.

In therapy today, I talked about my proclivity for panic. Not just in the large and obvious way, like the anxiety attack I had last week in Creative Writing. But in many little ways every day all the time.

The example I used was a recent incident in which I momentarily could not find my wallet. And I mean momentarily. I found it within two seconds, and yet, in that short time, I began to panic.

No pause to consider, no cognitive delay, no grace period. For those two seconds, panic rose within my heart. And there was nothing I could do about it. It happened too fast to trap cognitively. Sure, if the situation had persisted, I probably would have gotten a grip on myself and started to think about where I had it last and so forth, but the fact that my mind defaults to panic so easily really worries me.

I mean, even if I had, indeed, got hold of myself and searched rationally, another part of my mind would have been freaking out and leaping to the conclusion and actually planning out what I would do if it really was gone forever.

All that in two freaking seconds.

So what is behind all this latent panic? Why am I so easy to freak out? How comes I panic with such alarming speed?

Part of the equation, I think, is my old and familiar problem with blocked energy. My mind produces a lot of nervous energy. Mentally, I am practically hyperactive. But the depression (and, to a lesser extent, my poor physical health) blocks most of that energy before it can be expressed. Thus, I go around in a hypercharged state, like I am full of static electricity just waiting to discharge at the slightest opportunity.

So it discharges via miniature panic attacks. Probably through depression as well. It’s a sad state of affairs all around.

Another factor in the panic equation is that other standby, my lack of a fundamental feeling of safety. I’m still a scared little animal inside most of the time, and that makes it impossible to ever fully relax and leave that panicky state. A very, very deep part of me is always terrified and paranoid and feels like if it ever relaxes enough to let down its guard, it (and me) will die.

That’s what happens when your life makes it clear to you that there is absolutely nobody there for you at far too young an age. My parents weren’t there for me… if I brought them a problem they dismissed it without thought because they preferred to pretend they only had three kids. Reminding them I existed was bad enough, but for me to actually want anything from them? Now that’s just too much.

And the school sure as hell wasn’t there for me. All the time I was being tormented, no teacher ever lifted a finger to prevent it or even address it. They just could not be bothered. They thought I deserved it.

So when that happened I lost any sense of safety I ever had. I entered school with a wound in that area from being sexually assaulted when I was not even kindergarten age, but school sealed the deal. I was alone, abandoned, and worthless.

That’s not something that is easy to recover from, especially when it happens at such a young age.

So, deep down, I am panicky. I do a reasonably good job of hiding it because on the surface, I am a calm, reasonable, and sometimes even cheerful person.

But deep in the ocean, a storm is raging. And it never stops.

But maybe I am going about this whole thing wrong. Maybe instead of worrying about my mini-panics, I should embrace them. Embrace the fact that I am a highly emotional person who feels things very strongly and that the important thing is not to stay calm but to let my emotions express themselves to their fullest.

It would mean going in the opposite direction of my usual rationalist, calm, reasonable, in-control instincts, but that’s probably more of a recommendation than a condemnation. All that rationality and reasonableness might help me see the world more clearly than others, but it doesn’t make me happy. In fact, today in therapy I referred to it as a “rationalist gulag”.

It’s like this prison that I can’t escape because I can’t find a flaw in its reasoning. And that’s the trap right there. It’s attacking the problem with the wrong tools entirely.

The only way I will escape the cage is if I break its rules and refuse to be defined by them any more. I want to make it okay to be unreasonable, and emotional, and even childish sometimes.

I really admire some people’s ability to simply act out of raw emotion without doubting themselves. Sure, they might not be being reasonable, helpful, or even a good person. But they have the courage of their own emotions and do not spend life curled up in a ball trying to sniff their own navels and choking on the fumes of their own decay.

God damned I’m emo.

So maybe I just need to accept myself, hysteria and all, and learn to love everything that I am instead of trying to control every little thing about myself in order to force myself into an artificial mold of some impossible ideal person.

Maybe all I really need is to be human and live my life. Follow my emotions sometimes. Do what feels right.

It is hard for a hardcore rational materialist like myself to interface with my deeper self. I don’t have easy access to the religious/mystical circuit of my brain. I was never taught to use it.

But somehow, I will find a way to, as my therapist put it, talk to my emotions in the language of emotions without constantly trying to interpret myself.

Maybe I’m not actually all the complicated.

Maybe I just have to be me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

AKA your economic “it’s only…” line.

This zone is easy to define numerically : it is the maximum amount of money a person can spend without thinking about it. The maximum amount they can spend without it “counting”. The most they can spend without it meaning they have to go without something else.

For the very poor, this zone is either nonexistent or measured in pennies. That is the root of what makes poverty so stressful. Every purchase means less money for something else. There is no purchase, no matter how small, that can be made without stress and worry.

A pack of gum can make the difference between eating every day or having to skip a day.

Add in the stress caused by a world full of ads exhorting you to buy things you know you can never afford and the acute awareness of how low your status in the world has become, and the fact that you cannot afford any luxuries, and it’s no wonder that poverty and depression are so intimately linked.

They both cause the other.

Moving up the economic scale, you have people getting by on minimum wage income. It’s very tough, and there’s not a lot of money to go around. But small pleasures can be afforded, or rather, the cheapest of everything is no longer mandatory and small high-yield pleasures, like big screen TVs or video game consoles or a trailer for camping, can be contemplated.

But you have no choice but to rent. And your job is humiliating, frustrating, and possibly even depressing as hell, and you too are acutely aware of your low status in society, and how people in your position are held up as examples of the biggest losers in society :

“Do that, and you’ll end up flipping burgers at McDonalds!”
“He came on to me like he was a big shot, but it turns out he’s just a barista at Starbucks. Lame. ”
“Well who are you going to believe, me or some office temp?”

At this point, your Economic Comfort Zone is probably around five to ten dollars. You can get a sub from Subway for lunch every day and it’s not that big a deal.

Things get murkier from here on up the ladder. As income rises, your economic comfort zone grows, and that has the effect of lowering your stress levels because you worry less and less about money and you can afford more and more pleasures to sooth the stress that remains.

Research shows that this begins to plateau at around forty thousand dollars a year. At this point, your economic comfort zone is between twenty and thirty dollars, and that’s enough to cover the basic consumer-level indulgences like shopping, eating out, going to see a movie, and other similar things. Disposable income as a percentage of income has never been higher and that makes you feel good.

It also means that you can afford to buy things which are at the top of the middle class quality scale. This both yields superior results (that $10,000 TV is way better than the $2000 we had before) and assures people in a thousand ways every day that they have the highest status in society and that society is, in most ways, designed by and for people like you.

Past this point, the amount of happiness increase per dollar of annual income decreases, and by the time you reach an income of around one hundred and eighty dollars a year, the curve is nearly flat.

So while the person or family living on forty thousand dollars is twice as happy (or more) as the one living off twenty thousand, the person with an eighty thousand dollar income is not twice as happy as the one at forty, and a person making three hundred and sixty thousand is nearly as happy as the person with one hundred and eighty thousand.

This is highly counterintuitive, because most of us will never get anywhere close to that one hundred and eighty thousand dollar plateau, and most of us have experienced some form of poverty even if it’s the poverty of a freshly graduated college grad or a lawyer who just passed the bar.

And if your entire economic journey takes places between minimum wage and something like forty grand a year, then indeed, the system is true and you do get proportionately happier as your income rises.

So it is easy to think that this progression continues infinitely, and that someone making a million a year truly is twice as happy as the person making five hundred thousand. But research does not bear this out.

And when you think about it, it makes sense. If you ask people what they would do with a large amount of money, the answer invariably involves extravagant large scale purchases.

But those are not what make people happy in the long term. Once your economic comfort zone is big enough to support doing whatever you like on the everyday consumer level, what you have does not change much. Only the superficial quality level. That $10,000 TV might give you way more happiness than the $2,000 model, but the $20,000 gold-plated version with slightly higher resolution and a fancy remote does not produce twice as much happiness at all.

In fact, pretty soon, it’s just the TV. Just like the other one.

But people don’t know this. They reach a certain level of financial success and expect that it will not just make them happier than before, but proportionately happier than before.

And when that doesn’t happen, they feel like something has gone horribly wrong. Maybe they blame themselves, maybe they blame their partner or their kids, maybe they blame the poor, but there must be a problem because they are not nearly happy enough.

Imagine that. Happy, but not happy enough.

If only people could accept that past a certain point, it doesn’t make you proportionately happier and past a higher point barely makes you happier at all, they would know the solution to the “problem”.

But that would mean everything society tells you about wealth and the wealthy is a big fat lie.

People would rather be miserable than face that.

I will talk to you people again tomorrow.

Today, I am going to explore my model of how functional psychological trauma leads to mental illness.

Briefly, my model treats functional psychological trauma as analogous to physical trauma, and posits that the psyche reacts to traumatic events by producing a kind of numbing effect that suppresses the pain of the trauma much like an anesthetic. In the case of relatively minor traumas, the numbing effect fades as the injury is healed and eventually the psyche returns to normal functioning, leaving behind nothing but a little bit of psychic scar tissue.

But with major traumas, the mind cannot heal itself on its own. Left untreated, the psychological injury continues to produce the numbing effect, and severely dulls the injured person’s ability to feel emotional input from the world, and thus numbness makes the injured person numb, clumsy, and out of sync with the world. This can and often does lead to more psychological trauma as the person finds themselves unable to cope with the world without understanding why.

In that way, it is analogous to a person with paralyzed legs who can’t figure out why they have so much trouble walking, and blames it on their own personal inadequacies instead of simply being injured.

The numbing effect also leaves the person emotionally isolated. Regardless of how much love and support there might be in their environment, they can’t feel it, and therefore they, perhaps erroneously,conclude that it must not be there. That those who claim to love them are not sincere, that people who say they will be there for them won’t be, and that people in general view them with contempt.

After all, if people truly loved them and respected them, they would feel it, right?

Alas, no. The numbing effect is blocking those signals. And it is the nature of the human mind to deny the truth of that which does not feel true, regardless of evidence, even in the highly intelligent.

For an extreme case of this phenomenon, I refer the reader to Capras syndrome, a condition in which the part of the brain that associates emotions with individuals is not working, forcing the individual to conclude that everyone they know, from the mailman to their closest loves ones, has been replaced with an exact replica.

That’s the only way their lack of emotional response to their loved ones can make sense to them. The truth, that these are the same people as always and the lack of emotional response to them is on the part of the Capgras patient, is simply too big and too painful for the individual to bear.

But I digress.

Over time, the emotional isolation caused by the numbing effect of the untreated and unhealable trauma causes a kind of emotional starvation to set in. The human mind requires a great deal of emotional input from others in order to remain healthy and functional, and the wounded person is receiving far too little.

This further damages the wounded psyche, and over time, it makes the wounded individual less and less functional, and the feeling of emptiness caused by the emotional starvation grows more and more intense.

This manifests itself in many different ways. In one person, it might express itself as depression, as the emotionally isolated mind turns inwards. In another, it might express itself as anxiety, as the wounded mind recognizes on some level that during an adrenal response from anxiety, the pain of its wounded state temporarily abates. Similarly, another person might seek that same adrenal response from anger. In still another person, it may be the self-soothing capacities of repetitive behaviours that lead to obsessive compulsions that soothes the wound.

But in all cases, the cause is the same : a wound the mind cannot heal on its own causing the mind to produce a numbing effect that never ends.

The most important effect of this is anhedonia. This lack of pleasure translates into a lack of activation in the reward center of the brain, and the reward center of the brain is the root source of all motivation. In the end, all we do in life is seek to activate our reward centers. When that is not happening often enough, the brain goes into reward starvation mode, and the person becomes extremely conservative about what they choose to do. Only the activities with the highest reward for the least effort – in other words, the most reward-efficient – will be done because the demand for reward is so high and hard to meet that the individual is unwilling to take any risk, however remote, that an effort might not receive sufficient reward. To this individual, that would be unthinkable.

Someone who is starving will choose burgers now over steak later every single time.

Thus, all these wounded minds will self-medicate along the lines of whatever provides the person the most efficient and reliable source of reward. And once the pattern of reward is established, it is very hard for any other pattern to established itself, no matter how superior that pattern may be in the long run.

So whether it’s overeating, alcoholism, compulsive behaviours, or just plain being mad all the time, the individual will stick to that pattern until the source of the problem is dealt with.

Currently, we favor a combination of drugs to deal with the symptoms and therapy to deal with the root causes in the modern world. And that is effective in the long term. But due to the problems described above, long term solutions will not be as efficacious as more immediate measures.

Ideally, future drug therapies will focus in directly on the problem of the numbing effect, as that will provide the most effective relief of symptoms. In a sense, it could render the person biochemically sane, which is not exactly a cure (the wound persists) but would surely allow the healing process to proceed at maximum speed, and with the least suffering for the patient.

Thus ends today’s exploration of my theory of functional (as opposed to structural) mental illness.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just got out of History Of Popular Music, and man, I am walking on air, because I am sure I am going to love the fuck out of this course.

So thanks, Glouberman. Your total incompetence led me to, like, the best course EVER.

Perhaps I should back up and explain.

Last night, I bit the bullet and De-glouberman’d my school schedule. That meant dropping two courses and finding replacements.

So essentially, I had to do the Fifth Course Quest TWICE. Oy vey!

After many dead ends, I came across this course called History Of Popular Music. I read the course description and it sounded too good to be true. A whole course about the history of rock and roll? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

And miracle of miracles, it fit into my schedule. Yay! The only catch was that it was on Fridays at 10 am. Oh well, I guess I will survive getting up earlier one day a week.

Only later, after signing up for it, that this meant I had to be up for 10 today. Whoopsie! Oh well, go with the flow. I set an alarm on my tablet (ended up not needing it… story of my life), got up, got there, and settled in.

And it was awesome. The prof is way cool. Totally a music nerd like me (except she has like 25 years of experience as a jazz bassist, dancer, and songwriter, and one of her songs got nominated for a Juno). I feel very simpatico with her. She rocks.

And she is adorkable. Kwantlen seems to have a never ending supply of petite, perky, adorkable lady profs. I must say I approve.

And as I suspected, the course is extremely groovy. She went to lengths to explain that she wasn’t interested in being the all-knowing authority figure we have to please in order to win the approval of the system. She said it’s an easy course and she is fine with that. She is more interested in “provoking” us into self-expression as we have fun while learning about the history of popular music.

So like I said… very groovy. I feel slightly stoned just from typing it. I wouldn’t want all my courses to be like that (I kind of like focus and discipline at reasonable levels) but for just this one course, it seems like molto fabuloso to me, compadre.

Something something PIZZA!

As if to cement how simpatico we are, she asked us to write down our five favorite bands, which would be impossible for me, but then she said it was cool if it was just five bands we thought were great, and that I could handle. In order to further cut it down to something manageable, I decide I would stick with Canadian bands. Here’s my list :

1. The Rheostatics – because of course
2. The Tragically Hip – Ditto
3. Moxy Fruvous – my furry namesake
4. Arrogant Worms – my Canadian comedy entry, and
5. Bourbon Tabernacle Choir

And she claimed she had heard of all of them… even the Bourbons! I had unintentionally created a five question hipness test, and she passed with flying colors.

And that led to us talking for like half an hour after class as she packed up and such. It was exhilarating. I don’t think I have ever had such a good discussion about music with someone I have just met in my life.

Plus, she and I are roughly the same age, I think. She talked about her parents playing their Steely Dan records when she was a kid, and that would make her a child of the 70’s just like me.

So I think I am going to really enjoy the course. Be at school for 10 am on Fridays? No freaking problem.

The other course I signed up for as a part of the de-Globermanification of my schedule is, oddly enough, the same Linguistics course that was the first one I dropped ages ago, after the first edition of the Quest for a Fifth Class. Somehow, this time through, I was able to fit into my schedule no problem. So I will be taking what amounts to Linguistics 101 this semester.

Oh, and I had the presence of mind to call up the bookstore and tell them to cancel my orders for the Gloubermanthing’s texts and add the one for my groovy new music course.

Relatedly, I ended up arranging to just pick up my books at the bookstore, no shipping, totally by accident. I got a phone call saying that my books were all at the Richmond bookstore (because I am only taking classes in Richmond and bookstore only stock the books for the courses taking places in their schools), and they could ship them to Surrey then ship them to me, unless I would rather just pick them up….

And of course, I would. I could have done it today, but I didn’t feel up to it. I will do it Monday.

One weird thing : on the phone, the bookstore employee assured me that they would not actually charge me for the books till I arrived to pick them up.

I didn’t say anything at the time, but it dawned on me later that when I ordered the books, the money left my bank account right away. So from my point of view, I’ve already paid them.

And I sure as hell ain’t paying for them twice. We are talking about $300 worth of texts here.

Oh well, the girl I talked to today said she will get it all sorted out before I come to pick up my books on Monday. And I believe her.

It could be that the money is still sitting there on my credit card. Due to the incomprehensible fact that the website for my credit card has been down for months, I have not checked out the balance lately.

So this could all me much ado about not much. (Psych!).

I am looking forward to my semester one hundred percent now. Assuming the linguistics prof is more competent than Glouberman (which is setting the bar so low you’d need ground penetrating radar to find it), the next four months are looking fabulous.

And what more can you ask for?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy shit, is this guy a dingbat.

I am on break in my Philosophy, Culture, and Identity class and I am extremely unimpressed with the prof.

All he has done us babble, ramble, and wander off on tangents. I am having trouble believing there was ever a point, I get a distinct feeling that he had absolutely no plan for today’s class and us just winging it.

Plus get is a huge fan of Kant, and Kant was an idiot whose only qualification as philosopherwas the ability to say stupid things in fancy enough language
that it makes stupid people feel smart for thinking like stupid people.

I can only hope that things get better when the course itself starts. I assume he will have a lesson plan at that point.

(—)

Now I am on break in Creative Writing. Looks like it is going to be wacky and fun. In a minute, I will be writing a postcard to my future self. I will try not to be too judgemental and pre-guilt trippy. Like, not too “I sure hope that you have finished your degree and made something of Yourself!

(—)

Home now. As I did yesterday, I am writing this blog entry before supper instead of after, so that things are still sharp in my memory.

Creative Writing was fun, except for the very end. At the end, we were supposed to “catch the eye” of a fellow student and read bits of what I had written in the previous exercise. That is something I cannot do. I managed to do it once because I only thought we had to do it once, but when I learned we were supposed to do it over and over with different students, I had a full blown social anxiety attack and had to sit down.

That ended up working out, because then people approached me, and I am fine with that. It was the whole “catch someone’s eye” thing that threw me. That took my already high level of social anxiety with this exercise and multiplied it by the sudden increase of difficulty times the sudden increase in social variables and the result was TILT. Operation override. System crash. Must reboot.

It was a different kind of anxiety attack than I am used to, as well. It felt like sudden stabs with an icicle in various parts of my body. Nomrally my anxiety attacks are more of a general thing – depression, self-loathing, fear, all happening at once and as a single thing. This felt very specific. Almost like an allergic reaction. It was very odd.

I think that means it was primarily anxiety and nothing else. Which is progress, in a way. It means that while the anxiety is still there, the depression and self-loathing connected to it have retreated, and that makes the anxiety seem more like something I can overcome with repeated exposure.

The key, I think, is to simply ignore awkward moments instead of internalizing them deeply, like I do. Take, for example, the event I just described. Part of me, an unhealthy part, views that incident as crushing and humiliating and blah blah blah.

But it wasn’t. It was unpleasant for me, but I ended up getting the job done anyhow, and after class, I explained to the prof that I have depression with social anxiety and that sometimes there will be things I just can’t do.

At first she seemed sympathetic, but then she said something about how this was a participatory class and I would have to do certain things. But then she listed them, like getting up and moving around, reading things aloud, and participating in discussions, and none of them were a problem for me.

She had no way of knowing what a strikingly atypical social anxiety case I am. I have no problem with a lot of the assertiveness type things other social anxiety victims find hard. I have no problem speaking my mind, participating in conversations, or arguing my case.

Just try and stop me.

But throw something at me like having to catch people’s eye and I am helpless.

Oh, and she and I also got into it a little over that whole “abstract versus concrete” bullshit because I still don’t get it. It’s can’t be as stupid as it sounds, can it?

When I brought it up, the first thing she said was “it just seems like you are looking to start an argument’, which is the exact same thing Nicola, my creative writing prof from last semester, said when I got into it with her.

It must be something they are trained to say when a man seems to be escalating. And I often forget that I am a large male human who projects very well, both vocally and emotionally, and I can seem very scary to people who don’t know me and know what I kitten I am.

Anyhow, this whole “use concrete language based in the five senses not abstract language” thing is received dogma now, and it honestly doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. If we were limited to our five senses, we would be primitive creatures like clams or barnacles.

But we, like all complex lifeforms, have minds. And what goes on between our ears is abstract. We were talking about a funeral and she was saying you shouldn’t call the deceased “dead”, you should say things like “was still” or “was pale” or “had dark lips (??)”.

To my mind, that just leaves the reader thinking “but are they dead? Why are they being so coy about it?”.

I asked her what to say instead of “His death concerned me” and she didn’t have an answer. I wish I had asked her what death smelled like.

They really seem to be fixated on smells.

Oh, and when I mentioned that I had the same argument with Nicola in the previous semester, the prof said “Well if Nicola said it too, maybe you should consider it!”.

I didn’t say anything at the time. But later, in a case of esprit d’escalier, I thought of replying “Ask Nicola what she thinks of my writing. ”

Because she thinks I am awesome.

Anyhow, in the future, I will remember to keep the anger or annoyance banked and to ask questions in a friendly, non-judgy manner.

After all, it produces better results. And I am all about the results.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One of the primary tragedies that humanity seems doomed to replay endlessly involves the difference between what attracts a mate and what makes someone a good mate.

Other animal don’t have to worry about that because they are not pair-bonding species. Mate attraction is all the matters because after the sex, the two animals part ways without another thought. So these species are free to develop their sexual attractiveness independent of any other attribute. That’s how we get such absurdly inefficient creatures as the male peacock.

It’s not survival of the fittest and it never has been. It’s survival of the sexiest.

But we naked beach apes are a strange breed in more ways than one. Our reproductive strategy is to have a relatively small number of children and invest very heavily in their upbringing. That means that we have to be a pair bonding species that forms lasting partnerships stable enough to survive for long enough to split the heavy burden of child rearing.

And thus, the problem : our sexual attraction system is still the animal one that operates on sexiness, as defined by our inner gender templates. But our pair-bonding system is only loosely connected to that attractiveness system. Individuals who are terrible candidates for a lasting relationship can nevertheless specialize in attractiveness to the point where their attractiveness signals overwhelm those of non-specialists and therefore they get far more chances to make a baby while remaining extraordinarily bad at caring for or raising one, let alone making for a suitable life companion.

And if we could separate the two systems, it would not be that big of a problem. But sexual attractiveness and romantic attractiveness are irrevocably linked. We fall in love with the people who turn us on, and that often leads to ruin.

Thus, you have the heartbreakers of the world. We have all met them. Those people who are undoubtedly extremely attractive, but who use it irresponsibly and just take people for what they are worth and then move on when the other person dares to have needs of their own.

This all comes to head in those heady years between the ages of 18 and 15. This is when we are primed to go find a mate, get pregnant or get someone pregnant, and settle down to raise the kids.

And that used to be fine. But one of the most consistent trends of modernity is the upward trend in the definition of adulthood. In a relatively small amount of time, we have gone from adulthood and reproductive maturity being virtually identical and people getting married at 12 years of age to a society in which people don’t even consider marriage and family until they are in their late 20’s and where anyone who considers settling down with a life partner before the age of 25 is considered foolhardy and irresponsible.

So now our prime sexual pair-bonding years are off limits. But our instincts haven’t changed one bit. We are still driven to mate and pair-bond with the sexiest creatures around, in other words, the ones who put out the strongest sexual signals around.

This creates many problems. The first and most obvious is unwanted pregnancies. These happen far too often, especially in areas where information and education about how to avoid pregnancy is scarce.

This leads to far worse than abortions and awkward family discussions. It leads to children raising children, and often by only a single parent. This is not the best thing for children. The best thing for kids is two stable and loving parents. But too often, men get women pregnant and then leave them behind, and single motherhood is thrust upon women whose only mistake was doing what their biology told them to do.

When the father does stay around, there are still a lot of problems because neither parent is mature enough to handle taking care of a baby. So the child’s upbringing starts off bad and doesn’t get much worse.

But everybody knows about the problems with unwanted pregnancies. There’s another consequence of the biology and society being out of sync, and that’s Friend Zoners.

There are a lot of people in this world who are smitten by very attractive people and who would make excellent mates, but they can’t get their foot in the door because they don’t give off nearly as strong sexual signals as the object of their infatuation.

Unfortunately, sexuality is the gatekeeper to romance in the human species. Pair bonds don’t form without that initial impetus. So while the person in the Friend Zone has both sexual and romantic attraction to the object of their affections, said object has at best only the compatibility half of the equation for the person in the Zone, and when you are a compatible companion to someone but not sexually attracted, you end up as friends, not lovers.

But remember, both the heartbreaker and the Zoner are operating by the same criterion : be attracted to the sexiest person around. In that sense, it is perfectly fair.

Compounding the issue is that the Zoner, sensing that they are not the sexiest person in the heartbreaker’s life, try to compensate by demonstrating what a good mate they would make. They listen, they help out, they are supportive, and they are there when the heartbreaker needs them.

This should work, but it does not. What they are doing demonstrates their value as a mate, but without the sexual spark to set things in motion, there is no chance of true pair-bonding. They think they are demonstrating their value as a mate, but all they are really doing is demonstrating their value as a friend.

So the person in the Zone, because they don’t know that sex is, sadly, the gatekeeper, feels ripped off. They are demonstrating all the qualities that people say they want in a mate but it is not getting them anywhere close to actual mating.

And the heartbreaker can be the nicest person in the world, but they are still going to attract far more people than they can possibly be with, and so they will break hearts whether they want to or not.

This is one of the many tragedies of the human condition.

The final problem is one of role switching. Specifically, knowing when to switch off your sexual attraction mode and switch to companionship and partnership mode.

Many of the behaviours and attitudes which make a person sexy are extremely wrong in the context of a relationship, and it’s hard to know when to make the switch.

People get an idea of what attracts people to them, and if they want to keep that person in their life, they think they have to keep doing that thing, even when there are very clear signals that it’s not working any more and is, in fact, threatening the relationship.

And all because people don’t understand that this transition exists and must happen.

I guess that’s all for tonight. I really seem to be writing about gender lately, don’t I?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am in the Old Spaghetti Factory at Riverport, about to dig in to my minestrone, fresh from seeing Star Wars : The Force Awakens, anticipating a lovely Italian meal. I feel great.

Warning, I AM going to talk about the movie, but only in a very general sense, so there will be no spoilers. Being a spoiler hater myself, I would never even dream of doing that to someone else, let alone all you nice people who read me.

I loved the movie. It is what a Star Wars movie should be : lots of cool shit like space ships, battles, chases, droids, planets, aliens, and so on, but with a strong and compelling plot driving it all.

Anyone who thinks Star Wars has ever been deeper than that is deluding themselves. If you cannot get over the fact that the thing you have loved since you saw it as a kid is not exactly high in intellectual content, that is between you and your inner child.

I am just glad that my feeling about JJ Abrams turned out to correct. My feeling was that everything that made ol double J wrong, wrong, wrong for Star Trek movies would make him perfect for Star Wars. His love of effects laden battles, his penchant for overwrought drama, his disinclination to be bound by the laws of science and nature, his skill at spectacle, his essentially just being a nerdy kid at heart…. all of that is toxic to the somewhat more adult and intellectual, thought, science fictional property like Star Trek, but perfect for the adventure story nature of Star Wars.

And I loved the 3D aspect of it. It made it feel far more real. Within the first ten minutes, I knew that the extra seven bucks for 3D was TOTALLY JUSTIFIED. Like others have said, it make it feel more like a live performance than a movie.

It is still what I would call multiplanar 3D. You can clearly see that everything is in layers just like in animation. So it is sort of like watching an extremely high resolution paper puppet show.

But the eye quickly learns to fill in the rest. After that, it look very real.

Actually, one of my favorite effects was one of the simplest : on screen text looked AWESOME.  Like it was hovering right in front of your eyes. Both the subtitles from when characters who are neither cute droids or Wookies spoke Not-english AND the end credits looked amazing.

Figures that a text biased person like me would be impressed by something like that. What can I say, words are my friends.

On the bus home now. Will continue when I get home.

(—)

Back at home. Notes on my meal at the Old Spaghetti Factory.

I was reluctant to go to the OSF because I find pasta to be not very filling, and I didn’t want to walk away still feeling hungry. So I looked over the menu, and had just about decided to order my usual – the Spaghetti With Meat Sauce – when I saw my salvation.

Lasagna! Nature’s most perfect food.

So I ordered the lasagna, and man, am I pleasantly full right now. Phew!

Plus I had forgotten one of my favorite things about the OSF : their “everything’s included!” policy. All meals come with a cup of soup or a salad (soup for me, minestrone), dinner bread (very nice mini loaves with whipped butter), a scoop of ice cream for dessert.

You can have vanilla ice cream or spumoni. For those of you who don’t know, spumoni is like Neapolitan, only instead of strawberry or cherry, it has pistachio.

So instead of the Brown White and Red, it’s the Brown White and Green. I actually like it better than Neapolitan. I have always found that the red component (especially if it’s cherry) is too high and bright a sweetness to go with the more subdued flavours of vanilla and chocolate. Pistachio blends right in.

I am sure you were all dying to know that.

Outfoxed myself a little on the way home. I was fine being on the 404 (page missing) with only two other passengers on the bus. ^[1]

But then a stop marked Buswell came along, and I thought “Buswell? Great, I will save myself a block!”

And that would have been true – if I had gotten off at Buswell and Cook. But this was two blocks away from that, near Value Village. D’oh! If I had stayed on the bus till we reached Brighouse Station (aka The Skytrain), it would have been a two block walk. Instead, it was three.

Oh well. It’s a very pleasant evening out. Cool without being really cold, moist without being wet, are clean and fresh. So the walk home was quite pleasant.

And my knee handled it well enough. Perhaps the time off really has been good to it.

Oh, and I had another encounter with my beloved Lulu Island Bunnies on the way. That was worth the extra block of walking right there. There was a medium grey one, and at first I thought they were alone.

But then I realized one of the shadows nearby was actually a jet black bunny, with only a few bits of white here and there to give it visual definition. Otherwise, it was a creature of darkness and night.

So, a goth bunny.

Sadly, I got no footage of it, because my tablet was being super freaking slow and I really needed to pee and couldn’t wait for it to finally load the camera program. So I had to say bye bye to the cute lil bunnies and keeping walking, because the urinary pressure was way less severe when I was moving.

Made the ride up in the elevator seem longer than usual, though.

And that’s my Xmas Eve, folks. It’s been great sharing it with all you nice people. I hope you all have a very merry Xmas and a phenomenal New Year.

And I will, as always, talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Everybody knows the burdens faced by assertive women in society. They are bucking the very basics of our conception of gender roles, and all of society resists that. The same behaviours that show that you are a go-getter with drive and initiative as a man are punished with labels like “bossy” and “aggressive” and “not a team player” if you’re a women.

But rarely do you hear about her opposite number, the receptive male. He too violates all our gender norms, and the same behaviours that would get a woman called “sweet” and “kind” and “maternal” are punished with labels like “wimp”, “loser”, and “pussy”.

Funny how nobody ever calls an aggressive woman a “cock”, isn’t it?

The receptive, passive, “womanly” man has a very rough time in society. The expectations of aggression, assertiveness, and above all performance on a man are far more severe than those on a woman. And the judgments from society are extremely harsh. Just as society ignores and scorns the unbeautiful woman, so does society loathe and deny worth to the underperforming man.

Notice how even ugly women don’t get told that they are “good for nothing”?

Men are supposed to know what they want and go for it. They are supposed to go out into the world and fight, and when the chips are down, they are the ones expected to keep it together and handle things. Men lead… being a follower is never fully acceptable for a man. Every man is supposed to, at least in theory, want to be the leader. Men are supposed to fight each other for what they want, not sit around and wait for it to come to them. They are supposed to pursue, not be pursued. Nearly all emotions are penalized if expressed by a man. This is doubly true of any and all tender, gentle emotions. A man is not supposed to go all gooey over a box of kittens, or cry at a movie, or fret about how the babysitter is treating their kids while they are away. Men are supposed to be strong, decisive, in control, and to never show weakness.

And some of us just plain can’t make that grade.

And I would argue that, at this point in time, the penalties for gender nonconformity are much harsher for men. Women have made great strides in conquering their gender stereotypes. Nobody looks twice at a women for wearing men’s clothing, being ambitious at work, or doing whatever job suits them. Even today’s realities of pushback and resentment for certain male like attributes like aggression and having a strong opinion are being addressed, and clearly, the momentum of history is on their side.

Women support each other, cheer each other on, get together to wear red hats in public, and in all ways the message is clear : we can do or be whoever we want!

But there’s no such movement for men. The closest thing we have is brony-ism, and you can see the contempt society has for them.

Receptive men face two major challenges in overcoming this problem. The obvious one is that the very nature of this subgroup means they lack the kind of assertive nature that is required to organize and maintain a movement. The passive, receptive, sensitive people rarely self-organize.

The less obvious reason is that in modern society, men are simply not supposed to need help. This is why it is so hard for us to support one another, especially in something as dangerous to your male status as challenging gender norms for men. A lot of men might agree with what I am saying in this article, but most of them would not agree with it in public for fear of being thought to be a wimp.

So the gender nonconforming men suffer in silence, or join the modern Men’s Rights Movement and get mad at all the wrong things. Those men should be fighting for their right to be gentle, not complaining because they think the world owes them pussy just for not being a bad person.

So we are not currently in the position to do this all on our own. We are going to need help from women.

And women, you have skin in this game too. A lot of the complaints you have about men, like them being insensitive, unsupportive, and too aggressive, stem directly from the deep conflicts inherent in male culture. The more you help resolve those conflicts, the better quality of men you will get.

The first step for women who want to help is to simply be aware of the problem and the part they play in it. Gender conformity is enforced by both genders. Be aware of your own thoughts on the matter as you react to things involving men. Did you think a guy was a loser because he had a low status job? Would you be mortified if you were seen with a man who was crying in public? Are there certain things you just assume men will take care of, and would you judge a man to have failed if it doesn’t automatically do them?

Once you have mastered this form of self-reflection, you are ready for the next step, which is to recognize these things in others. Once you take the blinders of modern society’s gender roles off, you will begin to see the effects of these restrictive rules for men everywhere. Take it in and think about what it means for you and for others.

Then, if and when you are ready, you can act. When you hear or see men being treated unfairly and/or held to a very inflexible gender standard, speak up. Support the victim. And most importantly, make a political statement by clearly and distinctly valuing men for all their attributes, not just the one society says you are allowed to value.

This is how women can bring feminism to men, and when that happens, both genders reap the benefits, and the world becomes a saner softer safer place.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P.S. I am not saying it’s all up to women. Men have to do their part too. I am just saying that there is only such much men can do on their own.

Remember, feminism needed male allies for a really long time.