Yup. I am making you people read my homework again.

First, 150 words on this website

Please don’t judge, I can’t say I liked the site at all. Spending twenty minutes there was a trial. The whole experience was like dragging fingernails across the chalkboard of my nervous system. The art style, the writing style, the sudden sounds or speech, all of it irritated me for some reason. And I admit, the underage lesbianism makes me uncomfortable, even though my own gay history didn’t exactly start on my 18th birthday. I enjoyed some of the passages – for the record, they were called Lik-M-Aid, not Lick-A-Maid, although we call called them Lick-A-Maid so I can understand the confusion – and I really think I could have enjoyed this work more if it had been simpler and more pleasant instead of trying so hard to be avant-garde. Maybe that makes me a dull Philistine, I don’t know. But as a highly sensitive artistic type, I prefer environments that are more welcoming. I like the storytelling and the form. In fact I have pondered doing something similar myself in order to tell a story larger than what can fit in the human mind at any one point, but I can’t put up with the style. Sorry.

And now for my 750-ish words of fractured fiction.

Between Ten Eyes

P1 : Look, I don’t much care for the police, but that homeless dude totally jumped the cop. I saw the whole thing. I was right across from the homeless dude on the Skytrain, just chillin’, and this Skycop walks up to the guy and says something to him about taking him home, and the guy freaks out and leaps up like someone put a million volts through him and headbutts the cop. So the cop’s bleeding out a busted nose and trying to tase the guy. By then, people are screaming and this fat chick has her cell phone out and the next thing I know, the homeless guy is down on the floor twitching and foaming at the mouth. Then some huge gorilla of a guy is on the homeless guy’s chest, and then the homeless guy stops moving. Listen, is he going to be okay?

P2 : Don’t believe the media , I saw the whole thing, and the cop was the one who freaked out on the homeless guy. I was sitting right next to the homeless guy – I’m the guy in the Canucks jacket in the video – and that homeless guy wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was just siting there talking to this huge dude when some Skycop comes along and starts poking the homeless guy with his night stick and talking to him like he’s an idiot. I could tell the homeless guy was terrified of the cop and that’s why he wasn’t answering the cop’s questions. He was too freaked out. Next thing I know, the cop is tasing the guy over and over, and there’s blood everywhere, and people are screaming like the do in the movies. I’m telling you, the guy didn’t do anything wrong. That cop should be in jail.

P3 : I’m glad someone is finally asking me my opinion, because not only am I the person who took the now infamous cell phone video, I’m a professional social worker who deals with the homeless on a daily basis, and while Mister Driscoll is not one of my clients, I am well aware of how vulnerable they can be to abuse by the police. That’s why I was recording the scene. I was protecting Mr. Driscoll’s rights. That’s why I posted it to YouTube as well. They can confiscate your cell phone but they can’t confiscate the Internet. Although if I had known what was going to happen, I might have had second thoughts. What’s happened to Mister Driscoll is a nightmare and an outrage and people should be ashamed of themselves for saying what they have been saying about him. For God’s sake, Leonard Driscoll is a human being!

P4 : I think I can clarify a few matters, as I am Leonard Driscoll’s personal physician and therapist as well as being the person the Internet has dubbed “King Kong”. I tried to tell the policeman not to tase Leonard as his condition makes him vulnerable to seizures, but the policeman was clearly terrified of Leonard and not listening to me. Luckily, I always keep Leonard’s anti-convulsive medicine with me, and I was able to restrain Leonard enough to slip it under his tongue. Physically, Leonard will make a full recovery, The damage to his fragile psychological state will take much longer to repair. Knowing Leonard, I believe he reacted as he did because he thought the cop was going to take him “back home”, and for Leonard, home was never a safe or happy place. He never meant to hurt that policeman. He was only trying to get away.

P5 : Are you sure you’re from the government? It’s just that I’ve had a very hard day, and the doctors say I shouldn’t get too excited right now. But I guess someone has to tell the real story, right? Right. Right. It’s all kind of jumbled up right now, but I remember the blood… so much blood. Blood everywhere. And the smell of ozone from the taser. And the confusion. And people screaming, screaming screaming… the screaming was worse than the blood. (pause) I’m sorry, I’m sorry. No, I’m okay, I can keep going. I know what people are saying about me, and it’s not true. Not true. Not true at all. I’m not some violent, out of control lunatic. I’m a human being, just like you. The only difference between you and me is that you work in a big dance office, and I decided to become a cop.

Well, that’s it for tonight’s homework, due tomorrow. I hope you all enjoyed it. It is going to be weird sharing this stuff with a group of fellow students of various degrees of perspicacity to “workshop” it, but WTF. I need to learn to be more open and trusting. Tear down the wall, and all that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Friday, Oct 2

Due to a number of factors beyond my control (like having class until 4 then needing to reg and eat), I wasn’t able to attend any panels this day. I was, however, able to spend a few pleasant hours in Hospitality, grazing on munchies and chatting with fen, and an even pleasanter couple of hours sampling the various gin type products at the Montreal room party.

Saturday, Oct 3

12:00 pm : Politics of Science Fiction. After an unusually long trip from unconsciousness to wakefulness, I made it for the second half of this panel. Thankfully, it was not about any form of Puppies. Sadly, it was mostly about the politics in science fiction, rather than the far more interesting topic of the politics of science fiction. I personally think that there is an area of surprisingly broad consensus of opinion represented in both science fiction and its fandom, and that would have been great fun to discuss. As it was, it was still a very interesting half a panel and I enjoyed discussing books like The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Leguin.

1:00 pm : Future Was Then. A panel about retro futures. I love this subject because it provides such a rich bounty of perspective on how we view the world and how we look upon the future. Admittedly, we did not do the greatest job of sticking to the topic in this panel, but I have never considered that a particularly high priority. I did manage to bring up one of my well-ground axes, the one about how many very intelligent people were sure that we would all be standing in our government allotted three feet of space by now due to overpopulation despite the fact that basic mathematics would have shown that to be total bullshit. So that made me happy. And it was a good discussion overall.

2 pm : Free Period.. There was nothing on that I particularly liked, so I took this time to mosey on up to Hospitality and see what there was to eat. Pickings were mighty slim at 2 pm, after the lunch rush, but I was able to cobble together something vaguely like a meal and, more importantly, talk to strangers. I had a very nice discussion with two older ladies, one of whom was named Elizabeth (damn I suck with names), and went into my next panel feeling quite good.

3 pm : Pulp Movies. The basic jist of the panel was the question of whether or not it would be possible to make a good movie based on the old pulp heroes of the past like Doc Savage. That was the stated purpose, anyhow. I think it was actually just an excuse for some older fen to discuss the beloved pulp heroes of their youth. But the panel was well moderated and so we kept to the topic surprisingly well. I have no skin in the game, and hence no real opinion on the issue. Certainly anything’s possible, despite disasters like Jack Carter and The Lone Ranger.

4 pm : Handling Stress. I went to this panel assuming it would be about how to handle stress in your life, seeing as going back to school has put so much more of it into my life. And largely it was, but apparently, according to the con book, it was also (?) about how the characters you write about experience and deal with stress. I suggested we combine the two missions by talking about how to handle stress in your life by transferring it to your characters. That got a big laugh. And while I can’t say that I gleaned any valuable stress busting tips from the panel, that big laugh did me wonders.

5 pm : Justify The Science Flaw. The fifth incarnation of this panel, and I have been there for every one of them, and loved every minute of it. The idea is that the moderator shares examples of flawed science from popular media and challenges his panel, made up of actual scientists, to come up with an explanation of how that wasn’t really flawed science after all. These explanations are, of course, extremely absurd, and I always end up laughing myself silly (short trip) as all these high IQ people have a wonderful time being very silly about science. This time was no exception.

6:30 pm : Second Free Period. The previous panel went to 6:30, and my friends’ panel went till seven, so I had half an hour to kill. I pondered joining my friends at their panel (about Lovecraft), but decided I would be better off going back to our room, room 124, and taking a half hour Introversion Break in order to recharge my social batteries.

7 pm : The Quest For Food. My friends arrive, and it is time to venture out into the world to obtain sustenance. Being native to the area (this convention took place around 6 blocks from where we live), we were able to guide our friends from out of town to one of Richmond’s many fine eateries, and there, we feasted.

12:30 am : Having lingered too long chatting with my friends about various and diverse topics, I missed the room party for the HMS Calisto and was forced to once more entrust myself to the fabulous folks at the recurring Montreal party. This time, there was more than gin around, and I was able to try Kraken brand rum, something I had been wanting to do partly because of its name but mostly because of its inky blackness. It was surprisingly complex for rum, and tasted quite good, especially with a mixer. (What can I say, I am a cocktail drinker, not a ‘snap back a shot of this’ drinker). I had a fairly deep snootful of the various alcoholic offerings, then floated on back to our room, took my sleeping pills, and slept well. Damn well.

That’s it for the con report for last Saturday. Tomorrow, I will do one for Sunday, plus add whatever general marks about the convention I have floating around at the time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(This is schoolwork. I have covered this subject before.)

In her lecture on October 2, 2015, Doctor Dukewich expressed her feeling that there must be more to consciousness than proton flow, and noted that in a dish of electrically neutral solution, protons will pass through a permeable membrane just like they do in the human mind, but we would not consider the solution to be conscious. Ergo there must be something more.

I respectfully disagree. The awe we feel when our minds contemplate their own complexity is palpable, and gives us a feeling of irreducible complexity, but that is an illusion. The truth is, to my mind, even more awe-inspiring : that the most complex phenomenon in the known universe, human consciousness, actually IS just proton flow on its most fundamental level.

This in no way detracts from consciousness’ magnificence, any more that pointing out that Shakespeare’s plays are “just” strings of letters makes them any less brilliant, or that everything the device upon which I am writing this assignment does is “just” ones and zeroes make what it can do less impressive.

To quote a man I admire greatly :

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Albert Einstein

It is true that there is, in fact “something more” than proton flow happening in human consciousness, just as there is “something more” happening in a computer than ones and zeroes. But that does not preclude our understanding that complexity comes from simplicity. The mightiest star in the sky is made of nothing more than hydrogen, helium, and a little bit more.

In short, pointing out that complex things are made of simpler things does not in any way reduce the complexity of said things. Ergo, to point out that human consciousness is fundamentally proton flow does not, in any way, make the complexity of the human mind any less extraordinary.

(—)

And what the hell, here is my weekly journalism assignment :

Name of Student: Michael Bertrand
PART 1: READING REFLECTION
Question : As a general rule, should news organizations report on suicides? Why/Why not?
My Answer : Yes. They should cover them because the coverage both spreads awareness of the problem and because it will point potential suicides to the resources which may save their lives. Contagion is a possibility but we have no way of knowing whether those people would have committed suicide eventually regardless of the news coverage. Coverage could save many more lives than contagion takes. I say, do it.
My Question for the Class: If someone close to you committed suicide, would you want the media to cover it? Why or why not?
PART 2: NEWS STORY
Your day of the week (see chart in syllabus): Monday
Date: October 5, 2015
Headline: Flint, Michigan, declares emergency; high lead levels in kids linked to tap water
Reporter’s name: None listed
URL : http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-edition-1.3254263/flint-michigan-declares-emergency-high-lead-levels-in-kids-linked-to-tap-water-1.3254267
Why I think this is a noteworthy news story: (40 to 50 words): I think it illustrates the dangers of a certain shortsighted form of the cost-cutting mentality that seeks to make a number on a ledger go down without any understanding of the complexity those numbers represent. These people eschew complexity and hence are woefully inadequate for achieving concrete results.

(—)

And now, the actual blogging.

Had fun at the con. The night I forgot my sleep meds was not fun, but I got to sleep eventually, and slept decently well. Saturday night I slept quite soundly after drinking a significant amount of booze then taking my sleeping pills, which I am almost positive must be contraindicated. Best sleep I have had in ages, honestly. A peaceful eight hours, and all without CPAP.

Same for Sunday night. I didn’t have liquor in me, but I had stayed up till four in the morning playing Cards Against Humanity (damn, I love that game) with various con-goers at the deadest Dead Dog Party ever.

That was a debacle. The DDP started out in someone’s suite, but after two noise complaints from the hotel, we realized this was intensely stupid. Parties have a minimum volume and that number goes up for each partygoer, so there was simply no chance we would be able to keep it down.

After that broke down, most of the partgoers said to hell with it and went to bed, which was dispiriting. But a group of us went to a conference room with a nice big round table and started playing Cards Against Humanity, and that game is goddamned hilarious, so we entertained ourselves that way until the wee hours of the morning.

And this, after having gone to the Turkey Readings earlier that day, followed by a marvelous dinner with the usual gang plus Jax, Spuug, Dara, and Ana, wherein we amused the hell out of one another.

All in all, I consider it to have been a socially successful weekend. There were a few socially anxious moments when I was at a room party and nobody was talking to me and I began to feel morose and alone and some bad tapes about being forever an outsider started playing, but I powered my way through those and was mostly okay.

More importantly, I made a lot of people laugh over the weekend. My little jokes didn’t always work, but most of them did, and few things make me feel as good as making people laugh and thereby putting a little more sunshine into their lives.

I emailed in sick to my Ideology and Politics class today. I feel weird about that. But I was so damned tired from the convention that I had little choice. I will get back into the flow of things tomorrow.

It did make me realize that, if you strip away all the externalities of what gets me out the door and off to class, what remains is a very strong fear of missing out and falling behind. The idea of all my classmates learning without me fills me with a deep dread. I guess when you are the youngest of four, getting left behind is one of your worst fears.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, with a proper con report.

Well Martha, I done did it again. I forgot my sleeping pills at home again. And like I say every time it happend, the thing about my sleeping pills is that without them, I don’t sleep.

So I decided that I will use the only sleep aid at my disposal, and that is blogging. Hopefully, by blogging at all you nicenbsp; people, I can disperse enough nervous tension and mental energy to sleep.

It’s a longshot, but it’s the only shot I got.

Learned lots of neat stuff in Psych 1100 today. We are out of the basic neurology and into what I think of as real psychology. Today’s lesson was about one of the most fascinating subjects in psych : consciousness.

That ended up bringing me an important epiphany. See, the prof was talking about the whole stupid “but what is consciousness, REALLY? ” question, and how “it can’t just be protons moving through membranes” and I said “of course it can be… because that’s what it is!” and said people know what consciousness is, they just don’t like the answer. No matter how refined our picture of the brain becomes, people are going to say it can’t be “just” that. Even avowed materialists like my prof will insist it can’t “just” be that.

But it is. There is no magic ingredient, like Descartes believed. And breaking things down to their smallest part always makes them seem absurd. Shakespeare’s plays are “just” a string of letters. DNA is “just” a string of protein. A star is “just” a bunch of hydrogen and helium.

So I brought this all up in class (in fewer words) and she wrangled with it for a bit and then just dropped it and moved on.

And I suddenly realized how obnoxious I was being. Whether or not ny points are valid (they are), she didn’t want or need them at that time, and neither did the rest of the class. All I was doing was interfering with the learning/teaching process just to show off how smart I am. It was neither the time nor place to start an argument or attack what the prof was saying.

And yet, I was doing it to try and impress her, in a way. And this is hardly the first time I have done this. I have done it since grade 1, to be honest. And that made me realize that I have spent my whole life trying to impress teachers and profs in a way that is sure to piss them off solid, ANDnbsp; make the whole class wish I would just shut the fuck up already.

That… is a fairly harsh thing to realize about oneself.

I don’t want to make it sound worse than it is. Most of the time, I am not consciously trying to impress anyone (and that is good because I was REALLYnbsp; obnoxious today.. I cringe to think of it). I am just very eager and have certain boundry issues when it comes to arguing (I love it TOO MUCH) and it was not until today I realized how wrong I have been.

So in the future, I will restrain myself. I will pay close attention to the differebce between a request for clarification and an attack on what the prof is saying, and for the most part, STFU, listen, and learn.

And keep my wildly original thoughts to myself, for the most part.At least until I find the proper venue.

Like, say, this blog.

This doesn’t mean I will be silent in class. That would be asking too much. But I will ask fewer questions, start no arguments, and for heaven’s sake, pay close attentiin to the tone of my voice.

And keep in mind thst I want to help the prof, not bust their chops.

I am tempted to email her and apologize, but I am fairly certain she would just tell me that she appreciates my eagerness and interest in the subject matter, and not to worry about blah blah etc.

That is both the proper professorial response – they can’t very well tell a student “you’re right, you’re obnoxious, stop being so interested and engaged with the subject matter and STFU – and what I understand of her personality. She seems very sweet and shy, and hence probably not keen on confrontation. So she probably would tell me everything was cool even if I was pissing her off so bad it made her eyes cross.

So I will take it upon myself to improve. It was a painful revelation, but one which opens the doorway to enormous personal growth.

Plus, I kind of want to see what happens if I go an entire class without answering any questions. I am sure there must be other students who would love to answer who just don’t think as fast or speak as easily as I do.

I am being obnoxious again. Better rein it in.

Too clever for my own good, sometimes.

As my Dad would put it, I out-thought myself today. I thought it would be super clever of me to post my revised short stories to this blog, knowing we would be making a WordPress site in class today and figuring, being the Wordpresd stud that I am, that when the time came, I would just cut and paste.

Nope. You would think that would be the simplest thing, but I had forgotten how weird WordPress can be about pasted in text with HTML in it. I won’t go into the boring technical details, but I ended up struggling with the damned thing for the whole time allotted for it before I got it right and just stopped fucking with it.

Technically a victory, but it sure doesn’t feel like one.

Oh well. Now I am home (and cold… REALLY have to stop forgetting to wear my jacket) and now I can relax, blog, do my video, and maybe even HOLY SHIT, IT’S VCON TOMORROW.

I thought I was ready. I was ready on Wednesday, or at least I thought I was. Mentally, that is. But then today I ended up lounging around naked and sleeping a lot and such, so as a result, today went very very fast in subjective time.

You know your sense of time is seriously messed up when, for a moment, you can’t remember if it’s AM or PM, and you end up having to like, deduce the answer.

I swear, absentminded people must make the best detectives because we are constantly having to figure out WTF is going based on current evidence. Let’s see, I remember having lunch, and the light is a little dim, and evening comes after lunch, so it can’t be 5 am…. a ha! I have it! It’s 5 PM!

Brilliant deduction, Holmes. How DO you do it?

That is seriously the kind of process that goes on in my mind on a far too regular basis. The relevant memory isn’t gone, it’s still there in short term memory where it belongs, I just lose contact with my short term memory now and then, and I have to deduce things in order to fill in the gap.

That’s… not good, is it? Hmmm.

I can’t help but assume this has something to do with my dangerously high levels of interiority. Sometimes my inner processes demand so much of my mental resources that vitally important functions like temporally contiguous current memory break down, and because all of this goes on under the hood with me, consciously, I dunno WTF.

Sometimes I wonder how I dodged the serious, psychotic-level mental illnesses. I feel like they are always there, waiting for me to lose my grip. One false move… one step too far… and I will fall down the bottomless well of total madness and lose contact with the light forever.

That is, in and of itself, crazy. But what’s a fella to do? It’s what I have to work with.

I guess this is the price you pay for ignoring the walls that hold others and exploring the vastness of human thought without, as it were, any guardrails. The center-flock types might not be creative geniuses, but they are safe from falling over the edge, too. We philosopher types, on the other hand, blunder about blithely and act like we can’t get hurt.

Well we can. But we blunder own anyhow, because truth is our obsession.

And I wonder why. In my case, it might well be that I am driven to seek the truth because it is through that drive that I remain in contact with reality. Through all the chaos and madness of this mental neighborhood of mine, I can deduce that which is solid and reliable in the world and makes myself an amorphous island in the storm.

And the thing is, when done right, that amorphous blog grows more solid with time. Not everything you build up gets torn down again by new info. Some things stay, and resist all weathers, and it is those rocks upon which you build your church.

Damn it, you slipped into the second person again. I mean… I did.

I have been trying to get a better picture of this fanatical drive I have within me to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I intuit that it is intimately connected with my way of making sense of the world. That this truth machine within me is my way of conquering the chaos within by rolling over it with a mighty mighty steamroller of reason and intellect.

That’s how I force the world to make sense to me, so to speak. With that mindset, I could easily have become one of those narrow minded math fetishist who worship math and engineering and science and so forth because they represent a form of reality which responds to direct inquiry and produces verifiable answers.

But I could never accept such a limited framework for reality. My mind is broad as well as strong, and my search for the truth could never be limited to only the sorts of answers that can be described by mathematics.

I need a hell of a lot more answers than that. I will take whatever path will get me there.

That is why I am glad I am an intuitive intellectual. It means that I basically can’t pick one side of the brain or the other because I draw so heavily from both. I think I lead with my left, for better and for worse, but an awful lot of my seemingly rational processes are purely intuitive.

The rational brain just verifies the results. And if the results don’t hold up to reason, they are corrected and resubmitted, or if it’s bad enough, abandoned altogether.

It really is the best of both worlds, I think.

Except for the fact that it leaves fruitier than a nutcake.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow…. probably.

After all, I will be at VCON!

I demand to see the manager about the declining entry standards.

Well, it is 3:40 am, time to blog myself to sleep. Tomorrow, I will have therapy at one and class at 2:30.

Although that second part is not certain. I am not entirely well. I have been experiencing sulfurous belches all evening, and that tends to be an ill omen indeed for my digestive future. So I may be unwell tomorrow.

I will still go to therapy, of course. I don’t miss that for anything short of hospitalization. But I might miss Ideology and Politics.

Honestly, it is my least favorite class right now, anyhow. The prof does not seem to be good at putting together a coherent lesson plan and instead sort of bounces around a subject. Plus, like I said before, I find her voice uncompelling to the point of tedium.

I continue to hope she will find her feet and teach from a more grounded and linear point of view. I don’t need a Prussian style teacher, but she tries to fit too much material into too little time, and the result is that there is no time to think about things.

And thinking is what I do best!

(—)

And now I am sitting at Kwantlen, miffed, because TODAY’s class got canceled. And the email informing us of this didn’t even go out until 1:06 pm, and the class was supposed to be at 2:30 pm.

Funny, I seem to recall that we students are supposed to give our profs 12 hours notice before an abscence, and even then, we have to bring a doctor’s note. Maybe I will ask her for hers when I see her again Monday.

At 1:06 pm, I was in therapy. Joe dropped me off here after. If I had known the class was canceled, I could have gone straight home.

Creative Writing (tomorrow night at 6 pm) better not get canceled. It’s my second favorite!

Or tied for first. I could go either way.

If it got canceled, I would achieve Maximum Miff and might even experience a full blown Tizzy.

I mean, whatever happened to substitute teachers? I guess this is what you get with for-profit educational institutions. Why pay someone to substitute when they can just pilfer a tenth (well, a twentieth, in this case) instead? The professor gets paid either way, and it’s not like they will lose my business ar this point, so why spend the extra money?

If this was a public educational institute, they would be be legally obligated to educate me or die trying. But businesses are always looking to cut corners.

Fucking private-public partnerships.

Well, guess I will schlep on down to the bus stop. I may pick up some condolation donuts on the way.

(—)

At the bus stop now. No donuts. The line was too long. I thought about sitting down in the cafeteria and monitoring the line in order to swoop in when the line is at its shortest, as I have done once before. But I decided that was too much work just to poison myself with something I might not enjoy very much anyhow, what with my recent digestive issues.

Those seem to have quited down now, thank goodness. I probably just need some good hydration and maybe a hot bath now.

When you have Irritible Bowel Syndrome, you learn these things over time, mostly by trial and error. Like I have said before, my IBS doesn’t bother me much most of the time. I know the warning signs and can usually head off any major symptoms before they happen. Every once in a while, one gets through, and I suffer through an hour or so of nausea and pain, sitting on the bowl, until things sort themselves out.

Even then, I know I can just wait it out.

I might miss my youth and vigor and enthusiasm sometimes, but I sure as hell don’t miss how emotionally unstable I was back then, or how freaked out by everything I could get. I used to be such a mess!

(—)

On the bus now. I am liveblogging my life!

Oh well. An addiction to blogging as a stress release seems fairly harmless, as long as it doesn’t metastasize into full on hypergraphia, or whatever the modern equivalent would be.

(—)

And now I’m home. And, I just took my first ever ativan. This should be an interesting mental experience.

See, I talking to my therapist about how I felt like jumping out of my own skin yesterday, and we decided that was basically a panic attack expressing itself as a painful energy surge. So he prescribed me some ativan to use as needed.

I was tempted to decline the offer. But then I realized I had no sane reason to do so. And I think it will do me some good to know that if things get really bad, I have a “in emergency break glass” type solution.

Can’t say I care much for dissolving it under my tongue. That felt and tasted odd. It gets into the bloodstream faster that way, though, and that might make a big difference if I am freaking out big time, so… I dunno.

So far, I am feeling a mild calming effect. A nice, cool, relaxed kind of feeling. No side effects, at least not yet. If this is as weird as it gets, I can dig it.

My therapist told me to try one so I could “test drive” the drug and see how I react to it before I actually need to use it in some kind of emergency. I figured that made sense to me, so here I am.

Now I feel like it’s getting hard to concentrate. My consciousness is getting all melty around the edges, like a cheese pizza in mid-bake. Things are getting kinda groovy. Guess I better finish up quick before I forget what words are.

Yeah. I could see how people might get addicted to this. And how it might disinhibit people and make them “silly”.

Gonna go lay down and catch the ativan wave.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow and I would like to get some sleep, so I figured I would try some of that blog stuff that the kids are into these days and see what happens.

I can blog. I used to sell papers.

Re : identification, it has occurred to me that I might be able to use my birth certificate in lieu of the BCID I hoped to aquire today. It is a longshot, as most places specify “government issued photo ID”, but at the very least, it gives me something more than my hapless charm to rely on.

I should probably dedicate an entry to my hapless charm and learned helplessness some day.

Which reminds me : I think individualistic society creates a massive nurturing deficit. I think that, as human beings, we need to feel cared for (and about), and modern society, with its emphasis on self reliance, keeps interfering with the fulfillment of that need.

This is especially true for men. Restrictive gender roles keep men from both receiving and offering nurturing, or even asking for it. As a result, many a man harbors the kind of deep nameless resentment that comes from experiencing a deep pain from a source you can’t even acknowledge exists.

This can lead to lashing out in various ways.

(—)

In Journalism class. Blogging is becoming an all the time thing for me.

I feel so impatient today. I hate that. I wish I could relax. WTF? I am so tense! I Feel like jumping out of a window, whether it’s open or not. Man this sucks.

I have had allergy attacks lately, and those cause a body wide inflammatory response. That might be what is making me irritable.

LOL. Guy next to me at the simks in the bathroom, when the towel dispenser doesn’t work : “What a time to be alive.”

(—)

Hmph. Journalism class ended half an hour early, so now I have half an hour to kill. Gee, what to do….

There was some big dealie going on in the main corridor when I was coming inn. I have no idea what it was about. Just lots of people sitting behind folding tables covered in pamphlets, with earnest looks on their faces.

The people’s faces. Not the tables’.

If I had to guess, I would say it was the volunteer fair I vaguely remember reading about. I didn’t have time to chech it out, because on Tuesdays, the bus gets me here with only about six minutes to spare, so I have to get straight to class.

And hell, I am still adjusting to classes and homework. I am totally not ready to add volunteering to that.

Still planning to start a GLBT society though. And the comedy one. I just need to build up my endurance.

Speaking of which…. I am worried about my health. Just walking around Kwantlen tires me out terribly. I feel like I have a dark cloud hanging over me and it is keeping me from connecting with the healthy, wholesome parts of myself.

I am getting no bars on the cellphone of my soul.

I guess I will slouch off to Psych 1200 no. Yay, psychology!

(—)

Or rather, boo. Not boo to psychology, of course. Boo because the class was canceled!

I am getting pretty freaking miffed over these canceled classes. That’s a whole week’s worth of education down the drain! And a semester is what, ten weeks? So that is ten percent of what I am paying for gone without a trace.

Honestly, the university should give a ten percent refund whenever this happens. Fat chance!

And I was looking forward to today’s class, too. This is the psych class that DOESN’T go at an insane rate, and therefore I can fully enjoy it. And we get to talk applied psych, which appeals to a potential future therapist like myself.

I still have not emailed the prof from my other psych, Psych 1100, about the whole speed issue. I suppose I could do that today. i certainly have the time. Grr.

And someone needs to give her the skinny on what is going down. I cannot just assume someone else will do it or has done it.

(—)

Well the 405 FINALLY showed up, and now I am home. Still miffed… but miffed at home.

Oh, for the record, I feel a lot better now than I did before, miffedness aside. I think I was experiencing a low level panic attack, possibly with an inflammatory component to it. All I know is that I was feeling like I was ten pounds of energy in a five pound bag, and about to freaking explode.

But then there was a break in class and I had a chance to go to the bathroom and poop, and afterwards I felt a whole lot better. So maybe it wasn’t energy in that there bag.

Disturbs me to think that I could ne so out of touch with my body that I could mistake full bowels for an anxiety attack, though. Perhaps that was the avenue of escape without actually being the cause.

Whatever it was, I felt a zillion time better after, and was therefore only slightly tempted to jump out a window. That is to say, no moreso than usual.

I am not a well man. But I mean well, and I think that counts for something, especially in times like these.

Oh, and thanks to Felicity, I have had this song stuck in my head all day :

Heard it Sunday night. Oddly enough, was not stuck in my head yesterday. Perhaps my mind needed time to process it.

The opening part is meh, but once it gets going, it’s such an excellent piece of yacht rock that not only does it get stuck in my head, I actually kind of enjoy it being there.

It’s just so pleasant. Repetitive, but weirdly, that doesn’t bother me. And it speaks from that very headspace of the time, deep and yet aloof at the same time. Romantic, but not realistic at all.

And it’s about a chick.

Anyhow, enough from me. I will see you nice people again tomorrow.

It is 4:21 in the morning, and I can’t sleep.

Took my sleep meds. Zero effect. Nothing. Tried to tire myself out with a low stimulation game. Dumb idea, no game is low stimulation enough to relax me more than itnbsp; stimulates me.

I lack the skills needed for slow, gentle, gradual relaxation. It is always a top speed crash into a brick wall. Actually, no. It’s always a top speed drive over the edge of a cliff into the void between the light of the mind and the deep and beautiful darkness of sleep.

No wonder I need drugs to sleep.

Admittedly, I have never tried writing as a way of getting my excess energies out so I can sleep before, or at least, not since high school. Maybe this will become a regular thing for me. Emptying the contents of my fevered mind onto the page in order to give me space to lie down, at least.

I get pretty poetic at this hour. Cool.

The theory is sound, at least. And I am glad that it is the not-sleepy kind of insomnia, not the sleepy-but-can’t-sleep kind. The latter is the sort of thing as like to make a man lose his senses and end up in Bedlam.

That sentence was fun to write.

I have not had the crazy making kind of insomnia for a long time, knock on metaphorical wood. Admittedly, this is mostly due to having very little to do and almost nothing requiring an alarm click, but still, I am grateful.

I had a terrible time with insomnia when I was a teen. I would lay there staring at the clock, compulsively calculating the ever-dwindling hours and minutes until I had to get up for school.

It took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize the clock was the problem.

Well, this seems to have done the trick. I have become quite sleepy. Part of me wants to keep blogging and see just how sleepy I can get, but I am fairly certain that line of reasoning is neither wise nor sane.

I will see you nice people again in the morning.

(—)

And I am back.

I have had a good long sleep, and yet, I still feel like napping. I don’t know whether this is a physiological need, or whether I am just experiencing some depression and it’s manifesting itself as bed-seeking.

I do know that something is a bit off with me lately. I feel like I am not getting back all the energy that I put out. I keep having these moments of screaming anxiety and tension. They are brief, but…. memorable.

Then again, maybe I am making too much of this. Maybe the real culprit is simply having nothing structure to do. My mood is usually pretty good on weekdays once I have been to class. This suggests that it is the activity (and maybe the fresh air and sunshine to and from) that keeps me buoyed up. Food for thought.

At some point this afternoon, I am going to go to the local postal outlet with Joe to pick up my birth certificate. Hopefully, this will be the last time I ever have to drag him along.

See, they won’t give you a delivery unless you have photo ID. I won’t have photo ID till I have the contents of said delivery. This would be a total catch-22, but luckily, someone whose photo ID lists the same address as the delivery can also pick it up, and that’s where Joe comes in.

It’s a good thing that I tracked the package. Silly me, I was thinking that because the “courier” was Canada Post, the package delivered would show up in our mailbox. But apparently, Canada Post is just like any other courier company, where they pretend they tried to deliver it then made you come pick it up.

The tracking info says they tried to deliver it on Thursday, but I don’t believe it. Julian was home most of the day on Thursday, so it’s not like nobody was here to sign for it. And I find it hard to believe that a package containing my birth certificate was too big to fit into our mailbox.

The tracking info even said they had left a card telling us where to pick it up. Bull shit they did. As you can imagine, I was monitoring our mailbox, and there was no card.

So yeah. If I hadn’t entered the tracking number into the Canada Post website to see WTF is going on, I would be still waiting for the damned thing.

Once I have the birth certificate, I can get photo ID, and I can get my student loan, and so forth and so on. Once I have all that taken care of, a huge burden will be shifted off my shoulder and that will go a long way towards helping me relax and focus on my education and not be so tense.

While out and about, I will also need to stop in at Money Mart and put some more money on my card. I totally forgot to put money to pay my bills on there when I cashed my cheque, and it’s that time of year when I have to pay for my domain so the bills are a skootch higher than usual, and honestly I am just glad I have a website to type into today.

Usually when this happens, they cut me off, and I can’t access my blog till I pay up. And that sucks.

Anyhow, when I am done here, I will go see what Joe is up to, and get the show on the road. Hopefully, that will wake me up enough to let me resist the urge to crawl under the covers and hibernate.

Plus I still have a video to do. It never ends, really.

If I worked any harder, I’d practically be employed!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am, at the bus stop, right on time, but I am not on the way to class.

That’s because the prof is sick, so class is canceled. I found out via email when I was almost ready to head off to class, and the moment I read it, I felt all the air go out of me.

And since then, I have been really depressed.

Just totally dragged out. I have never handled disappointment well and I hate sudden changes of plans and this was both. I was building up my energies towards going to class et al when somebody pulled the plug. Now I have a whole day’s worth of hours to fill and the thought of it sickens me.

Not that I have nothing to do. I have at least three homework assignments to work on. I have let them sneak up on me… Something yo avoid in the future.I will return to my intelligent habit of doing my honework as soon as I can, so it’s done and I don’t have to think about it any more, and I can take my time doing it without feeling rushed.

Procrastination is a disease. It makes life pointlessly worse. Better nip that in the bud.

So I know how I will fill all those hours. That is not really the problem.nbsp; The problem is that my day lost it’s tentpole, and left me in the dark under all this tent. To have my purposeful focus taken from me when I was almost ready to launch really hurts a guy like me.

But I’ll get over it. I am already beginning to feel excited about tackling all that homework. Let me at it, I’ll pulverize it.

I wish I could afford to drown (smother?) my sorrows with a meal at White Spot, but I can’t, quite. I only have around thirteen bucks, and even a consevatively ordered meal at White Spot costs fifteen.

And that doesn’t include the tip.

I suppose I could lower my sights and just get an order of fries and a drink. But meh.

Or I could stop in at the little sandwich shop in the Chinese mini mall near here. But also meh.

So I will just head on home and sit meself down in front of the computer with a giant cup of Diet Cokenbsp; and finish this blog entry then get cracking on all that homework I need to do.

Oh that’s right…. I haven’t told you why I am out and about yet, have I?

The boring story goes like this : in my seemingly endless quest to get government ID and hence be able to actually get on with my fucking life, I got Felicity to print off the requisite form for me to fill out and fax to the appropriate minister back home in the Island of Edward the Prince.

Then I figured out that you could actually do the whole thing online. They had just hidden that capacity three or four screens down on their “online services” page, hence my previous inability to find the fucking thing.

So, yippie, I don’t have to get Felicity to see if she can fax anything, and I can pay with my credit card, and everything is hunky dory. I borrowed $100 from Joe (this shit is expensive), put it on my card, then filled out the online form last Saturday, and submitted it.

Aaand the transaction didn’t go through. I had been worried that would happen. The total of my order was very close to the balance of the card, as I remembered it So I was nor surprised it was not quite enough.

I swear, though, I wasn’t off by more than a dollar.

So today, despite my having no class (ha), I had to go out and put a little more money on the card. It would have been no big deal if I had not been depressed. But depression classically makes everything harder. So it was not an easy thing to do, to go out and wait for the bus, go there, and make the deposit.

That’s why I made my way back slowly. I walked part of the way, but I made frequent stops. Basically, I would walk a block, find a place to sit, blog till I got my strength back, and then go on to the next block.

The last two blocks I covered by bus. What the hell, I have a bus pass, it’s not like it costs me anything.

The good news is that I just finished doing the whole online form for birth certificate thing and it went through just fine. Some time this week I should get that freaking birth certificate, and be able to get my BC Services With Photo (or whatever) card, and then be able to get a bank account, and then be able to receive my student loan, and get my student ID, and be able to use the printers at school, and all that good stuff.

So much time and effort and MONEY just to prove I am who I say I am. Where’s the trust? Where’s the… love?

Oh well, at least I got the process moving again today. By the this time next week, God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, I will have all that shit sorted and all this dreary drudgery will be behind me.

And hopefully, my math re the amount over tuition that I am getting is right, so I can pay Joe back, get myself a nice new tablet isn’t of the clunky and inadequate current model.

I mean, that thing came out in 2011. I didn’t know they even HAD computers way back then! (kidding, folks, relax!)

And maybe, just maybe, I will get some shoes that actually work for my big ol’ feet and my gravity-defying weight.

I might even order some of those really expensive ones made just for fat people.

Imagine a fat person actually being able to walk without pain! In the feet, anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.