It’s true. You have to produce something the world wants. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or rather, there is, and it’s called welfare, and it sucks.

This is the major difference between childhood and adulthood. When you are a child, society and your parents support you without requiring anything of you except good grades. These grades do not have to compete in an open market. They do not have to be something someone will trade for money.

But once you are an adult, you have to produce. You need to produce something you can trade.

Note that I am not saying everyone needs to be an artist, an artisan, or a craftsperson. What most people produce is labour, broadly speaking. The point I am trying to make is that merely being a good person is no longer enough. You have to contribute to the society that has carried you this far.

Modern life in the consumerist democracies does an excellent job of disguising this fact. Every single one of us benefits ftom the labour of thousands of people evety moment of our lives, and yet we will never see these people, let alone know them. This quasi-magical existence leads to a potent and compelling illusion of autonomy and independence. Because the modern consumer/citizen cannot see the intricate web of interdependencies that support them, it is easy for them to believe what they are told, which is that none of it matters as long as they pay for what they get, either directly or through taxation.

Given this pseudo-autonomy and the atomistic individualism that accompanies it, it is easy to lose sight of the existence of society entirely, and fall into the trap of thinking oneself as self-generating and self-sustaining. From that egocentric point of view, both paying taxes AND contributing labour to a society one takes entirely for granted like it is a natural phenomenon like gravity, seems intolerable and insane. One might as well work hard and pay taxes for the turning of the tide.

Nobody set out to make a society which produces such shortsightedness. It was the result of the honest pursuit of individualism.

Because of this blocking of our collective vision, people reach adulthood, step off the escalator they have been on without knowing it for their whole lives, and have no idea what to do with themselves. We train people for jobs, and for citizenship, but not for life.

That’s always seemed like a rather larger oversight to me.

I think every high school should teach a course in basic life skills, maybe with a faux-apartment somewhere in the school so you can show people how to do things like mop a floor, cook spaghetti, and pay a bill.

But I digress.

So yeah. You have to produce. That’s another thing kids should be taught. Sooner or later, you are going to have to give the world something in return for what you get. The free ride ends. You end up on your own.

Now, I am not saying any of this in a punitive or cynical way. Having to work for a living is not a punishment. Acknowledging the truth that adulthood happens is not cynicism.

What I am saying is that you don’t just need a job to pay the bills. You need to contribute to society in order to be a happy and fulfilled. Deep within every human being is the need to contribute. It is as much a part of us as the need for romantic love and the desire for the recognition of our peers. We need meaningful labour.

A lot of people waste a lot of their youth trying to avoid this truth. It does not help matters that our culture is saturated with an immature “work sucks, school sucks” message. Everything in the culture makes it seem like anyone with any sense should hate work and long for the so-called “life of leisure”.

This sentiment is understandable. But it’s ultimately destructive to people’s life. They go into the world of work with this attitude that work sucks and it’s something you just have to endure, just like school, and it keeps people from making the best of their situation and find what pleasure and fun can be found no matter how low-status their job is.

Admit it… if you met someone who said they loved their job at McDonald’s, you would think there was something wrong with them,. wouldn’t you? Like maybe they’re mentally special, or crazy, or just plain the dullest person on planet Earth.

But why? They’re happy. Why is that so wrong? Why is it only permissible to enjoy a tiny, select percentage of jobs? And for the rest of us, it’s mandatory misery?

It’s because we view work as punishment, even imprisonment. The only jobs that we are allowed to enjoy are the ones that seem, at least from afar, like they would be so easy and/or fun that they are not even really work. More like getting paid to play.

But like I have said before, no such job exists. For anyone. No matter what job you get, even your dream job (like, for me, writer for TV), it will cease to be play the moment you have to do it when you don’t feel like it.

There is no such thing as mandatory fun.

Instead of letting the “work sucks” message go unchallenged, we should send kids the message that work can be fun and there’s nothing wrong with that. I am picturing something like the old Sesame Street bit about “who are the people in your neighborhood?” with an emphasis on people who enjoy their jobs.

That way, they can grow up to be adults who can be happy with their life even if they didn’t get to be a rock star, astronaut, or even the guy who works the crane on construction sites. Even if they never get to be on TV.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I swear I will catch up. It’s inevitable. Especially because I have not been making videos at all lately.

First, we have one of my experiments in gratuitous mellowness :

I love this piece. Definitely one of my better ones. I love how it manages to be relaxing and funky at the same time. It’s very relaxing without being totally dull. Relaxing for people who need a lot of stimulation to relax.

I have fond memories of going to sleep listening to Metallica when I was a teen. Somehow, I found the power and aggression inherent in heavy metal soothing. I suppose it externalized my own feelings as a hormone soaked teenager.

I was ready for the horniness. But I was not ready for the feelings of aggression and rage. Someone should tell boys on the cusp of puberty that one of the things to watch out for is that you may get way, way madder than you ever have before. You might go from being a pretty peaceful kid to wanting to smack people who contradict you into next week.

It happened to me.

And now, I talk about nerds like me :

That was my first and last experiment with arm’s length camera work. It was tiring, it was awkward, and the results didn’t look good. It did avoid the “severed head” problem I got when I recorded with the tablet on my chest, but it was not remotely worth it and it still made me look amazingly lazy.

Which I am. But there’s no need to make it that obvious.

Next up, more music, this time with the added bonus of a really lazy title :

Like a lot of creative types, I hate coming up with titles. That’s why the titles of my pieces are so random. I will use the first usable thing that pops into my head. This tune seemed pleasantly thoughtful to me. Hence the title.

Hence, the title. I must say, that’s pretty damned good too. Another mellow yet funky tune. Perhaps that’s my calling.

And yup. Still more music.

Also pretty darn good. I am too hard on my own music. The main melodic element, once it shows up, is a tad rough, so it is not as good as the previous too. But still, not bad.

Once more, I am sleepy for no good reason today. I got plenty of sleep. Most of it with the CPAP on. But still… I am le tired. There has to be a way to get out ahead of this sleep thing an enjoy the rare luxury of being sleepy when I want to be sleepy and alert when I want to be alert.

Preferably, an answer that does not involve a whole lot of Diet Coke.

And now, for those of you who don’t like music, there’s music.

Erf. The music is kind rough (I know what I was going for and I did not succeed) and those slides are going by WAY too fast. I was trying to match the slide changes to the beat of the song, which is fine, but the song is faster than the slides should go, and I should have used half as many slides and changed them half as often.

Oh well, they can’t all be gems^[1].

Continuing our theme, we have yet another piece of music, along with an apology.

I was going to say that the apology was unnecessary and I am too hard on myself, but no, that was not a great piece of music. I probably should not have elaborately apologized for it, but still. Not one of my best.

I still haven’t made that goddamned other thing work. Grr.

And now, the music… of my voice!

Glad I finally (eventually) got this bit of thinking out of my head. It has been in there for a long time. I have had the phrase “dynamic input” floating around in my head connected to that idea for years now.

So in a way, it really is a choice. Not the kind you make consciously, but the kind that nevertheless ends up being foundational to who we are and who we become. At some point in our early childhood development, we develop a preference between abstract thinking and concrete realism, between thinking things through or going with our gut, between deep processing or realtime reaction. And those choices determine whether we are a chess champion or captain of the football team.

Another talk and it’s a big one :

It’s the day before I started at Kwantlen. The person talking in this vid seems like a fond acquaintance now. I recognize him, I remember being him, but I don’t feel close to him any more.

Life is so much better now, and the nearly two months that have passed since I made that video seem like a dozen lifetimes. I am quite confident in my ability to handle Kwantlen, and I have had my academic acumen confirmed by two exams, so I am happy. I still risk being a victim of my own absentminded cluelessness and my courses are not super easy (which is good because it keeps me from getting bored) but I am, overall, a happy camper.

We finish our journey on the other side of Day 1.

You can see that I am already feeling more confident. The Big Event had happened, I was still there, I had survived not one but two boring first-day syllabus reading classes. and I was ready to relax.

And, thank goodness, I still have not been asked to actually work with others. I am getting used to the group discussion thing, and while I still say things that are too weird and/or original and/or unusual for people, I am very slowly learning to not take it so seriously, and to not going around thinking everything is my fault.

So people don’t “get” me. So what? That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me.

I am just more than the average person, even the average college student, can handle.

I will talk to you nice people, who take the time to understand me, and I love you for it, tomorrow.

Waiting for the bus to take me to Kwantlen for Creative Writing class.

I added some fake comments to that WordPress site I am working on now. I am still not happy with it. It is so had for me to create anything visual that meets my artistic standards. I want it to look exactly like a conspiracy based blog, but I keep hitting roadblocks.

I thought I was so clever when I decided to make the story sections blog posts instead of blog pages. Voila, instant comment section? But that only works if I can, as I assumed I could create users and post under their names, like I can do on this site.

But no, WordPress.com blogs don’t let you do that. Bugger. So I improvised. The result looks more like a chat log than comments, but it gets the idea across.

Luckily, only a rough version is due tonight. It will be the NEXT week where I have to knuckle down and make it look presentable.

(—)

In class now.

I am going to find a way to work in video. Video I can do. I certainly can put together some kind of “unanswered questions” conspiracy video. I might be able to do the “mysterious” anonymous audio clips. The one for the lady social worker will be… tricky.

I just need to get over my voice-acting stage fright. Or is that microphone fright?

There must be other things I can do with video. Something spooky.

It was very nice to cash my chech and get ALL of the money yesterday. Oh, the joys of being a bank customer. I will never pay Money Mart their “three dollars on the hun” any more.

Otherwise, today had been groovy. Did the therapy thing. Proud of myself for FINALLY remembering to skip the biographical update and head straight for the deep seated issues. That is a far more fruitful approach. Biographical updates yield no insights, just small talk.

And I don’t go to therapy for chitchat.

We ended up talking about Dad. It was that or Mom, and Dad won the mental coin toss. Normally I don’t talk about him much because I don’t like even thinking about him. And I think that, on some level, I decided that because I had mentally severed all connection to him (or thought I had), he wasn’t important. This seems childish and petty to me now.

I mean sure, when you are really angry with someone, the last thing you want to do us admit they are important to you. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t. In fact, if they are not important to you, why are you so damned angry at them?

And we are all born with a need for paternal emotionsl input. The competency and even the suitability of the actual father has no bearing on that. If there is a father in your life at all in your childhood, they are a vety big part of you, whether you accept them or not.

And my relationship with my Dad is… complicated.

I find myself wondering how my relationship with him would be now if he had not taken me out of college. That is something I find hard to forgive, and you can’t get over something without forgiveness. So many people get hung up on that.

Forgiveness is for you, not them.

So I am working on forgiving him. It seems impossible, but I can look back and see that I am far closer now than I have ever been before, so I must be doing something right. I am getting there.

It was such a petty, thoughtless, selfish act. Wrecked the life I was building. Pretty much threw me back into an adolescence that I am only escaping from now. All these years of depression started with that act.

I suppose he didn’t know that would happen.

(—)

Back home now. Walked. I decided that, since the bus I usually take, the 405, only takes me as far as Richmond Centre at this time of night, meaning I would have to walk two blocks anyhow, I might as well get some extra exercise and walk the 4 to 5 blocks from school to home.

Yes, I live that close and I take the bus. Shut up. It’s a fat guy/emotion security thing.

So I had a pleasant enough walk home. It was a clear, cold night, so my ears and hands got a little cold, but the air was clear and clean, and I am slowly teaching myself to stroll in a leisurely fashion instead of trying to get home as fast as I can so I can rest as soon as possible.

That, as it turns out, is counterproductive. When you push that hard, you adrenalize, and an adrenalized body is a stupid body. It burns up all its resources rapidly, it tenses your muscles in a way that makes any sort of movement short of sprinting after a gazelle painful, and it raises your heart and respiration rates regardless of whether it is actually necessary.

If you stay relaxed and calm, the body does not adrenalize, and activities become much, much easier because you are no longer fighting with your own body. And all it takes is finding that sweet spot where you are moving forward enough to feel like you are getting there, but not so hard that you have to push yourself to do it.

I was in no particular hurry tonight, so I strolled home at a pace I could maintain. And halfway there, I rested. When you are taking things easy, resting seems quite natural, and your brain is no longer screaming at you to KEEP GOING because somewhere there is DANGER.

There’s no danger. Relax. Stroll.

It also makes resting easier because it’s way, way less of a contrast to moving. This makes both stopping and going easier.

I really feel like I have discovered an important secret with this strolling thing. This could be a big help to fat people who want to exercise without agony.

Go only as fast as you can without pushing yourself. A rule for walking and possibly for life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I finally did it. My master student loan document has been submitted, processed, and approved. Finally, I will be able to receive my student loan.

Ten business days from now.

I wish I could say that I am surprised, but I am not. This whole ridiculous circus has been one face-palming disaster after the next, and by now, I am completely numb to it. I have surrendered to the will of bureaucracy and will plod through however much senseless labyrinth they put before me until they deem me worthy, like a Kafka protagonist.

But with better results, one hopex.

The important thing is, it is entirely out of my hands now. My role is complete. All I need do is wait, and while I have done a lot of that lately and it caused me a lot of tension, it is a lot easier to wait when the matter is beyond your control.

So now I am as serene as a cloud. It will happens when it happens.

The only part that really bugs me is that it means a further delay in getting my freaking textbooks. I am starting to wonder if I should bother. We will be well into November when the money comes through. And I got 83 percent on two exams without them.

Took another one today, this one for Ideology and Politics. I think I did okay, I know I got some of the “match the quote to the philosopher” questions wrong due to my well established trouble with names. But I know I nailed the “define five of these words” section, and I am pretty sure I did a good job on the essay question, despite it throwing me for a loop at first.

See, when I first read the question I thought it was asking how capitalism enabled liberal political reforms, and I know tons about that. I could talk about mercantilism, the rise in currencies in both size and role, how the free flow ofnbsp; capital enabled the middle class to grow exponentially, how the flow if capital is the flowof power, and so forth and so on ad nauseum.

But no, the question was how liberal political reform enabled the rise of capitalism, and that was… harder. That, for me, was flipping the telescope around and looking through the other end, and it took some doing to adjust to it. I had never thought of it from that POV before. I guess I had, without knowing it, thought of capitalism as the dog wagging the tail of politics.

But of course, it is not that simple. The relationship between economic and political reform is far too intimate for such a simplistic directionality. The two forms of reform enabled one another. It is meaningless to say one led the other exclusively.

So I had to do some mental heavy lifting. But I got my three points to support the thesis, and did my best to relate them to ideas we had covered in class. This, despite the fact that while we have talked a lot about politics in class, we have talked very little about economics.

So in a way, the question was unfair. I have a very deep feeling that the average grade on that essay will be quite low. I was lucky in that I brought it a lot of knowledge (42 years worth) into the exam. But for the kids who only have what we learned in class to go on, it is going to be a total brick wall. I would not be surprised if the prof ends up facing the angry buzz of a nest of helicopter parents over it.

I could be wrong.

More on this when I get home.

(—)

Home now. I could have blogged while I was waiting for the bus, but I decided to give my brain a rest and just watch the traffic go by with mind and eyes unfocused.

Today involved a lot of walking around. I went to the post office before I went to school, void check and picture ID in hand, only to be told I needed a third thing, which was some way of proving that the SIN on the document was my SIN.

So, either a SIN card, last year’s tax return (who carries that around?), or some form I got from some place called Services Canada at Ackroyd and Westminster. I didn’t have the first two.

Fine, I thought. I will come back after class and go to this Services place I’ve never heard of.

So I finish my exam at around 3:30 pm, catch the bus to end up at 3 Road and Westminster Highway just before four, and go looking for this government building that was supposedly at Ackroyd and Westminster.

Nope. It was actually at Ackroyd and Buswell. But the nice gal at the Post Office gave me the nearest MAJOR intersection, so I will cut her some slack.

So I get to the Services building (awesome place, totally antique, beige and clear black plastic style) and take the elevator to the third floor (awesome elevator too), and ask the nice people at Passport Canada which way to Services Canada.

They said A) thataway but also B) it had closed at 4 pm, which was like five minutes ago.

That is, I suppose, where things turned Kafka-esque.

Luckily, by that point, I had figured out that I actually did have my SIN card. It’s very old and fragile, but it has my SIN and my name on it, and that was what the Post Office needed : proof that my SIN did indeed belong to Michael Bertrand.

So I wandered over to the Post Office, and sure enough, everything went through this time.

I was tempted to just give up, have dinner at White Spot, and then go home and deal with it tomorrow. But I am proud of myself for persevering and getting it done today, and only then rewarding myself with White Spot.

So all in all, it’s been a pretty good day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Blogging in class. Everyone else is learning how to use Audacity. I already know how to use Audacity. So, this is me time.

Audacity is an audio editing program, and I have used tons of those, going all the way back to a program that came with my Sound Blaster sound card (remember those?) called Master Blaster. The great thing about Audacity is that it is open source, ergo free, and yet it is as powerful and as packed with features as anything Adobe wants to charge you 1000 bucks for.

So I have used Audacity a fair bit over the years. I am no power user, but I can do basic cut and paste work, and that takes you pretty far. Plus I know a little bit about the advanced stuff, like filters and tone generation. So, no worries.

Glad about the election, if not exactly overjoyed. Justin is PM now, and that is that. I voted my conscience and that is all any of us can do.

Harper did manage to do one decent thing, and that was to lose gracefully. He said that “the people are never wrong”, which is a pretty classy thing to say when you lose. It’s almost as though he knew he would lose and was ready for it.

Part of me wishes it had caught him by surprise and he had gone weeping and wailing to the press about how unfair and mean the Canadian people were.,.but that is not a very nice part of me.

That is the lizard brain, schadenfreude, crush your enemies, see them driven before you part of my brain, and while I accept it as a natural part of being a human being – we all have our primitive id lurking beneath the mask of civilization – I also know that the definition of civilization includes the degree of control we have over it.

Dammit, why am I so sleepy? I got plenty of sleep last night. I hate this shit. I was hoping using CPAP would fix this mysterious sleepiness I get for seemingly no rational reason and which makes my life far more tense and draining than if I had solid and dependable islands of wakefulness.

It could be a temperature thing. It is pleasantly cool on this classroom, and maybe that is having the same effect as it does when I sit in front of my computer. This would suggest that if I was able to get my entire bedroom to just the right temperature, I would sleep a whole lot better.

Hard to manage without AC, though.

It can’t be poor sleep habits, because mine have improved greatly. I hardly ever nap during the day any more. I would love to say that this is due to my will of iron and swami-like level of self control, but in reality, most of the time, I couldn’t if I tried. I have been doing a lot of hard coding cognitive work ti separate “I physically require sleep” from the bed-seeking “I could sleep, probably, if I wanted” . And I think it is paying off.

It’s a lot like the difference between real physiological hunger and the emotional desire to eat, fueled by “cravings”.

It helps to remind myself that I don’t want to sleep through life. I want to live it. I want to be a real person, and endless dreaming destroys that.

Corn nuts makes a poor classroom stealth snack, person behind me. They are like, the loudest food in the world besides ice cubes.

My mom crunches ice cubes. She also likes corn nuts. Hmmmm

(—)

I am in Psych 1200 now. We are dealing with Freud. Poor old Freud. People scored a lot of cheap iconoclast points off him by pointing out that the man who invented modern psychology was not the best in the world at it. Do we expect the guy who invented the surfboard to be the best surfer of all time? Of course nit. In fact, he probably was not very good at all.

So yeah, a lot of Freud’s theories have not stood the test of time, and some of them seem downright juvenile, but he was the first. Cut him some slack. He invented psychotherapy. He invented the entire idea of helping someone by talking to them.

We hug and cuddle because it reminds us of the pressure of the womb. That is why autistics are comforted by pressure. My professor and I just figured that out. Man, psychology is cool. Autistics reject human touch, often violently. So a good hug will only horrify them. But if people press them on all sides with nice soft cushions, it can have the same effect.

Being claustrophobic, that sounds like Hell to me. But whatever goats your float.

Repression equals overexpression. It must be true, it rhymes. Luckily, it actually IS true.

Got exam back. 83.8 percent. Not bad for someone who didn’t even know there was an exam that day. For Kwantlen, that is an A-. Which means I have been an A- student most of my life.

Check out 72 bpm for music – unuversal baby rocking rate!

(—)

Back home now. I’ve eaten, I’ve watched an episode of Bones while doing so, and now it’s time to blog.

Luckily, I actually managed to write like 850 words while in class. Not bad. So this won’t take that long.

I did not manage to get to the post office to get my student loan today. A number of factors led to me not getting out of the apartment till 12:20 pm, and by that time it was too late to get to the post office to do my thang and still make it to class at 1 pm. So, no dice there.

BUT, I did go to the library and get my student card. I am now a fully authorized student, so to speak.

I will try for the post office again tomorrow. I don’t have to be in school until 2:30 pm, so it should be easier to get a jump on thing like I did Monday.

And then…. I will actually be able to pay the university! And from there…. onwards to victory!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Look at me! I am starting a blog entry while on break in Creative Writing class. Aren’t I emcool?/em

Just had a presentation by Deanne Achong, a pretty groovy modern visual artist who does cool modern art like installations, online metafiction, and even apps. For some reason,nbsp; I was expecting an older, somewhat matronly woman. But no, she seems to me to be around my age.

Cleary, my mental file image for “respected female artist” needs a radical upgrading.

(—)

Now it is the next day and I am waiting for the bus that will take me to Kwantlen and Psych 1100. Yay, Psych! I love Psych. Plus, I will get my results from last week’s exam and find out just how clever I really am.

I a m hoping for “fairly”.

(—)

On break. I got 96.15 percent on that exam. Holy crap.

Now it is a “scaled” grade, because the average was so low that the prof decided to boost grades in the directiin of the average she had previously projected, but still. Not fucking bad for someone without a textbook.

Unscaled, it is nowhere near as impressive : 84 percent. My usual.

So… Thank goodness for low average grades? WTF, I will take what I can get.

I only got 70 percent on my first assignment though. Fair enough. Looking back, I did a really half-assed (and arrogant) job. I am ashamed of it now.

(—)

And now I’m home, I’ve had supper, I’m full of caffiene, and it’s time to blog.

Great new : my Photo ID arrived in the mail today! w00t! My long personal nightmare is finally over. I will be able to get my student loan, pay off Kwantlen, pay back Joe, and get my goddamned textbooks.

God I hope this never happens again.

Actually, it’s an embarrassment of riches, because I actually got two envelopes from ICBC today. Turns out, I now have a BC Services Card with my photo on it as well as a BC Identity Card with my photo on it.

They are practically identical apart from what it says at the top. I don’t think I would ever use both of them at the same time in some sort of “two forms of ID” situation. I know that if I was the gatekeeper in that situation, I would be thinking “yeah, and I bet you have a stack of these back home that say you’re anything from FBI to George Lucas. ”

Still, what the hell, it’s good to have two. That way if I lose one, I still have the other. Not that I plan on losing either of them. I am going to hold on to these like they were the Pot of Gold and its best friend the Pot of Pot. If anything, I will become an ID evangelist, telling anyone who will listen or doesn’t get away fast enough that they have no idea how bad your life can fall apart if you you are missing that precious little card, so take care of it.

And I have to say, on a purely existential level, I feel more legitimate now. Like I am a real person because I can prove I belong here. It’s the sort of thing most people don’t think about, but then again, most people don’t suffer from depression.

Not yet, anyhow.

I am feeling pretty good. I am having certain attention deficits (for example, I find it hard to concentrate on my writing, my mind keeps wandering. Did you know cigarettes suppress the appetite for carbs?). This suggests that I am running a sleep debt of some sort and I need to catch up. Luckily, it’s the weekend now, so I can catch up all I like.

I have one thing that I need to work on, and that’s the fractured fiction project I have to do for Creative Writing class. I am not super keen about it because we are supposed to take the previous piece of fractured fiction we did and turn it into a website, more or less.

You know, something cool and arty and metafictional. And I have no objection to doing something like that. Heck, I am glad for the excuse to try it. But I would much rather start over with a fresh idea more suited to distributed storytelling.

You can see the site for yourself if you click here, but there’s not much there yet. I will build it up over time.

Probably will restructure it, too.

So far, the idea is that I will turn that story into a conspiracy-type website, where people come together to find out what really happened that night, on the Skytrain.

There will be the original five story sections, each on its own page, but the real fresh content is the fictional comment section I will add to each page in order to make it seem more like a real website as well as giving me a space to add details to the fictional world the story takes place in.

And there will probably be some gentle fun-poking at Internet culture and the bickering it engenders as well.

The problem is, we’re not supposed to go over 1000 words, and this is the sort of thing where I could keep adding content for a very long time. It’s exactly the kind of thing that I have been looking for without knowing it, a way to tell a story bigger than what can told with traditional storytelling.

So what I really want to do is just go to town on it. Invent layer after layer, every detail supporting the story and making it world more real. I could see me investing a lot of time and energy and invention making it something truly amazing, the sort of thing that gets a person recognized as uniquely talented and maybe leads to bigger and better things.

Or at least makes for one weird and enchanting discovery after I die.

But how am I supposed to do all that on a lousy 1000 word budget?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The sad thing is, it’s all about control.

I have figured out one of the main reasons I don’t send my writings to publishers or the like, and it is because I am afraid. Afraid that if I send stuff out and it is accepted, I will end up being pulled out of my cozy little socket and dragged out into the light without the option to retreat any more. My life would gain more momentum than I can control and carry me off into the dreaded unknown whether I wanted it to or not.

And that level of uncontrolled exposure is the worst fear of an agoraphobic slash socially anxious person like myself. Even though on another level, escaping this inane life of mine is what I want the most.

Just on my own terms. And in a way that somehow isn’t scary.

Change without change, freedom without risk, autonomy without separation. It’s all the same impossible dream. No matter how hard we try to dance around the issue, sometimes we have to face the fact that we want two mutually exclusive things, and the only way forward is to choose which onenbsp; to persue…and which one to abandon.

And the thing is, the most likely outcome of sending my stuff out is nothing. If I am lucky, I’ll get rejected in some kind of timely fashion, but otherwise, all that will happen is I will, over a long period of time, gather a collective of rejection emails that proves I am a writer.

Otherwise, very little in my life will change. No runaway train. Not even a skateboard rolling downhill.

So the fear is entirely irrational. Yet it persists. I don’t want to lose control. I just don’t trust the world enough to think I can be safe without remaining in control of the situation. Nor do I have the faith in my ability to cope with things that would let me feel like I can handle whatever comes along.

So I am left with a life I control so hard, little happens in it.

School is a great first step out of that. I have had to expand my comfort zone considerably in order to go back to school, and yet, I am relatively comfortable with it because it’s school, not a job. I have done school before. I’m good at school.

It also provides structure and extrinsic goals. I need those. I can’t generate them myself.

This fear of being torn from my comfort zone and ending up in a situation where I am fully exposed and I have no escape route and I am forced to deal with things in realtime informs a lot of my attitude toward life. It makes me fear novel situations, and cling to the very life I am also eager to escape. I suppose when I am dreaming of escape, of having a life with more content and meaning and purpose, I am not truly imagining myself in the situation. Not realistically. Not with my fears and anxieties entered into the equation. And certainly not with any thought as to how the heck I got there and what steps along the way would be especially scary and difficult for me.

Like (I suspect) many others, I dimly imagine that somehow, I will get to the Moon without passing through space. That all the steps towards my goals will be easy and fun, and that any minute now, I will finally get around to trying, and then, fame!

After all, I am just so darn talented, how could anyone resist? No need to prove that by sending stuff out. I’ll just sit back an enjoy the feeling that I am totally going to succeed some day in the future without feeling any pressure to take any of the steps that would actually lead to that happening.

Those steps are hard. And scary. And I might lose the comfort of entirely unearned ego and faith in my own specialness.

Well, not entirely unearned. That’s another good thing about school, I am getting some much needed positive feedback. People in my creative writing class, including the professor, seem genuinely amazed by my writing. So I guess writing a thousand words a day for five years or more, plus the million words, plus a novel a year, has done me some good.

Keep at anything for long enough and you’ll get good at it. I should apply that to more areas of my life.

As for my other forms of brilliance, those depend on how well I do on my two exams. I am totally viewing them as tests of whether I am still the academic whiz I used to be, who just naturally remembers enough from class to get good marks on the test without having to study at all.

Like I have said before, I am kind of hoping the answer is no. It would give me something to strive for. If I get those exams back and find out I got my usual 80-90 percent like usual, part of me will be genuinely disappointed.

And I have to admit, I have this fantasy that, somehow, just by showing up and showing off how gosh darn smart I am, some grownup (ha) in the hierarchy of Kwantlen (the education mill) will recognize my talents and take me under their wing, or at least take it on themselves to offer me some solid guidance.

This does not seem likely, true. After all, it’s never happened before. Presumably, this is because I am brilliant but somewhat unpleasant to deal with, and it’s easier just to ignore me than to deal with my strange thoughts and clueless challenges to their authority and general oddness.

I am still that big dumb clumsy dog who everyone loves but nobody actually wants around because it’s just too stressful.

But I am trying my best to be a better dog. Easier to handle. Better housetrained. Less likely to break your fine china.

Maybe then, I will be able to find somehow to take me in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Be glad it’s this. I was originally going to teach you people about brain structures as a form of studying.)

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Wow, did I sleep well. Turns out that, at least this one time, alcohol and sleeping pills made a wonderful combination. I got eight solid hours of peaceful, blank, dreamless^[1] sleep and woke up feeling fine.

And normally, even with my CPAP and my sleeping pills, I am lucky to get six hours of mildly restless, dreamful sleep.

So while I would not recommend mixing your rum and grapefruit juice with quetiapine and trazodone, it worked for me. The only downside was that I slept so well that I completely missed the panel about Marvel movies at 1 pm.

Therefore, the first panel I made it to was at :

2 pm : Vcons Past. I went to this panel for a number of reasons, the foremost of which was, of course, genuine interest. I am an old person’s dreams in that I am always eager to listen to their stories. Formal history has never interested me deeply, but personal history fascinates me. So I was quite happy to listen to tales of yesteryear from Them What Was There. Another reason to go was to support my friend R. Graeme Cameron, who is a wonderful fellow and a spellbinding raconteur. And thirdly, I was already feeling guilty because I knew I would not be there for his always dryly hilarious Elron Awards because they were scheduled against the only force in the universe that could keep me away from them : The Turkey Readings.

I am sorry, Graeme, but the Turkeys are literally the most fun I have all year.

And speaking of which…

3 pm : The Turkey Readings. People read the worst books they can find. Volunteer weirdos (like me) act out the action. People pay to stop the reading. Others pay to keep it going. Money goes to the Canadian Unity Fan Fund, dedicated to sending West Coast fans to the East Coast and vice versa. When someone bids “stop” and nobody outbids them to “start”, you switch readers and the whole thing starts over.

Oh, and while the madness is busy ensuing, my dear friend and roomie Joe Devoy and the radiant and fabulous Felicity Walker are attempting to illustrate the stories being told, as told. At the end of the proceedings, the illustrations are auctioned, and this year, one of Felicity’s went for $25!

It’s the most fun thing ever.

Seriously. I laugh so much it counts as aerobic exercise. The whole room shakes with laughter. Bad fiction is a natural source of comedy, and getting people being all silly acting it out only amplifies the effects. The beauty of bad art as comedy is that bad art is so much more unpredictable than good art. Good art follows rules. And there are always a lot more ways to break a rule than there is to follow it.

In fact, bad art is a great way to learn the rules of effective storytelling because it will break rules you never even knew existed. Learning by counterexample is a powerful tool.

But mostly, it’s just funny as hell.

4:30 pm : The Elrons and FanEds. The Turkey Readings went till 4:30, so like I said, I missed the Elrons half of it. But I did get to see my dear friend and avatar of awesomeness Felicity Walker receive her FanEd award for activity in the world of fanzines (look it up), and I could not be more proud.

5 pm : As is the tradition at Vcon, the final panel was the Closing Ceremonies. As is my personal tradition, I didn’t go. My roomies did, though, so I just went back to the room and relaxed till it was over, then it was another trip out of the cozy confines of the con in search of food.

A lovely dinner was had with my usual cohorts and some local fans, then we wandered back to the convention for the quite horribly named but harmless Dead Dog Party, which is the party that marks the true end of the convention, where all us fen get together to drink, talk, and delay the onset of reality as long as we can.

This year, however, there was a planning SNAFU and the original base for this all-fen party was just someone’s room, right in the middle of a bunch of other rooms filled with people who had the wacky idea that they should be able to sleep at night. And parties have a minimum volume directly proportional to the number of attendants, so while we tried to be quiet in response to a noise complaint, it just wasn’t happening, even after the second complaint.

So we were booted out of that room, and had to find another. At this point, the majority of partygoers simply gave up and went to bed. But some kind and swift-thinking con staff were able to sneak us into a conference room that had one of my favorite things to see at a party, a big huge round table.

Thus began one epic and well populated game of Cards Against Humanity. At maximum, we had 14 people playing. The game is designed to manufacture hilarity, so despite the fact that it was materially the worst Dead Dog Party I have ever been to in my many years of Vcon-going, I had a wonderful time and didn’t end up going to bed till 4:30 am, all laughed out.

And thus ends another wonderful, magical, marvelous Vcon. I had a grand old time, as I always do, and I can’t wait till I get to do it all over again in 2016.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.