Daily Archives: January 10, 2012

Oh, a little of this and a little of that

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In an attempt to at least partially break the streak of dull diary entries, I decided I would share some of the way kewl stuff I have cluttering up the browser right now while also, of course, droning on about my sepia toned kind of life.

At what point does self-effacing wit because public flagellation? Because I would really like to know what that line I passed a couple of hundred miles ago was. I hope it was nothing important, because I passed it a long time ago as a pretty good clip and I forgot to read the road signs.

First thing to share : this rather marvelous little bit of wordless cartooning that manages to, more or less, explain how love works.

Warning, it’s a tall image, so you will have to scroll a but to read it. But I promise, I will be right there when you are done, continuing my post.

Yup. That's it, more or less.

See? Here I am!

Isn’t that wonderful? I am normally mildly averse to wordless comics, because often the artist is simply not good enough at sequential storytelling to get across what they are trying to get across. It becomes like interpretive dance, where the audience is left thinking “Well that sure seemed like it meant… something?”

But this one tells its story clear, at least to me, and uses the elegant and eloquent language of cartooning, with its ready access to visual metaphors, to show us a description of love which is both charming and apt.

I particularly like the depression after he is rejected being depicted as magnetic lines of repulsive force. I think that captures both the tendency of depression and loneliness to push people away, and the passive nature of this often maladaptive defense, where the person does not even know they are pushing people away. They are just feeling how they feel, and probably wondering why they are so alone.

And the way his true love uses her heart to deflect the repulsive waves until she finally gets through to him… that is absolutely beautiful. I love a good metaphor, and that comic is full of them.

Meanwhile, back in my life, I got some of my Xmas gifts today. That’s the thing about getting gift cards for Xmas, you end up not actually getting your gifts until the middle of January!

Anyhow, the most exciting one is clearly my new kitchen timer. It has four separate timers and a clock! I can’t breathe, it’s so exciting.

Seriously, though, like I mentioned, I just want it for timing meditation, or exercise, or whatever. It was ten bucks on Amazon and for that price, it’s quite adequate for my needs.

The other gift that showed up is my copy of the Wii game Super Paper Mario. As you can see, it’s gotten quite good reviews, and I absolutely love the previous two games in the series (Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario). They are loads of fun and often quite funny and weird, and are not too terribly difficult, so you don’t get hair-pulling frustrated too much.

Speaking of which, I am at the point of crisis with the game I am currently ‘renting’ via GameAccess.ca, an eccentric and colorful game called de Blob.

I have enjoyed the game a lot up until this point, but the final fight is really annoying and hard, and I have this wonderful shiny brand new game calling out to me called Super Paper Mario… it is really tempting to just give up on de Blob and switch to the new game, but I am tired of not-quite-completing games and I would feel guilty and stupid giving up and letting the foul Comrade Black win the day.

So I will hold out as long as I can. Wish me luck.

Oh, and unrelatedly, did you know Canadian is a gender?

But then what do I put under "Nationality"? "Male"?

At least, according to this amazingly clunkily programmed and designed web form it is, anyhow. I mean seriously, who the hell embeds a completely unrelated selection like whether or not the applicant is from Canada in the gender selector? It kind of sticks out there.

And what, do we Canadians have no gender? Or is it that we have genders, but you just don’t care to know them?

“Hey, ladies. a/s/l? Unless you’re Canadian, that is, in which case, God, just keep that shit to yourself. ”

And finally, we have this little gem of “unclear on the concept”, or possibly just “in too much of a hurry to worry about little details :

You can turn me from a fat white guy to a totally ripped black guy? Sign me the fuck up!

Color me cynical, but I am having trouble believing that this image represents a genuine result. I am pretty sure that no weight loss product or workout routine at the gym could turn a big fat white guy like me into a sexy hunky black guy like that. It would take something akin to an Act of God, or at the very least, some kind o Freaky Friday type mind swap.

Hmm, maybe that would be a good idea for a movie. An athlete and a fat nerd swap bodies, and learn what it is like to live in one another’s worlds for a while. Sort of Freaky Friday meets Drop Dead Gorgeous.

The jock learns just how tough it is to be fat, weak, mocked, and sexually dismissed. The nerd learns that while it seems like the jock has the perfect life, there’s a lot about it that is very tough to deal with, including associating with other asshole jocks, and at the end of the movie, they are both happy to get their old lives back, and learn to really appreciate the other person’s point of view, and learn warm values.

Sounds very Disney, doesn’t it? Hmmmmm. 🙂

Dark and stormy knight

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Today was a therapy day, a rare Monday session as opposed to the more usual Tuesday.

My therapist assures me that we will be able to settle down to solid Tuesday mornings at 8:15 for the foreseeable future, come February. Good. I like predictability in my life. It lets me settle into a routine and focus my energies in the right place at the right time. I am not the kind of person who does “sudden” very well.

Heck, even the fact that I got my ride to and from said therapist’s appointment from my dear friend Felicity instead of my roomie Joe threw me off far more than it rightfully should. Don’t get me wrong, I am very grateful to Felicity for stepping in when Joe was just too damned tired from work to do it (damn graveyard shift work) and I always find her company extremely enjoyable. We have great conversations full of wit and wonder and it’s a pleasure to be around her.

But still, there was a part of me that sullenly resented the disruption in my expectations, and felt like Joe had somehow abandoned me, which he very clearly did not. He discharged his responsibility to me by arranging for Felicity to take me, and even giving her some gas money for her trouble.

But that is the rational truth, and the inner world of our inner children is not a rational place. Emotional logic is the only governing principle, and as unfair as it was, part of me thought “oh, I’m not important enough to bother staying up go, he has to fob me off on someone else. Lovely. ”

That’s a pretty big sore spot, isn’t it? I am one tightly wound artistic type under the affable and laid back exterior. I get the feeling that if I ever get into a relationship, I am going to be kind of a high maintenance handful to deal with. I can take offense at or be hurt by what are objectively tiny things because I am so god damned sensitive and fragile.

Oh well, comes with being such a hothouse flower, I suppose. And like a hothouse orchid, I am very delicate and sensitive, but rare and beautiful as well.

Well worth it, to the right gardener.

Right now, I am feeling down. I think I am just a little behind on my sleep, as I am feeling rather sleepy and am looking forward to curling up in bed for a long nap on this cold and blustery night.

Dealing with the sort of things stirred up during therapy probably is not helping my mood either. We talked a fair bit about how hard it is to live with depression, how I often feel like I am barely keeping my head above water in the sea of my self-loathing and depression and pain, and how sometimes I get these surges of frustration and rage and feeling trapped. The sort of feeling that might make a person do something crazy just to escape, just to change something, to feel something, to make the world feel real again.

Plus, there’s the whole caffeine thing. The main reason I didn’t sleep that well during the day is that I had a liter of diet cola last night, and so I was feeling kinda perky earlier.I really want to start getting my work done while I am up instead of doing these writing jags when I am arguably at my lowest.

And the weather. All cold and dark and windy and starless. Very goth weather, great weather for interminable brooding on the parapet of your Gothic mansion while staring down at the jagged rocks on the seashore way down below and asking them silently for permission to leave this terrible void called life.

Did I say goth? I meant emo.

But for whatever reason, I am feeling sort of blue. All dark and lonely and darkly contemplative. Times like this, I just want to hide from the world.

I am currently around half an hour into the movie Cold Souls, starring critical favorite Paul Giamatti as himself in a world where you can have your soul extracted and stored, thus relieving you of its burden of emotional difficulties, bad memories, neurotic complications, and so on.

It is an interesting premise and I am quite curious to see where they go with it. It’s kind of hard to define exactly what attributes of person belong to soul as opposed to heart, mind, and so on. But the idea of leaving the part of you that has all the bullshit in it behind is intriguing.

Of course, it’s not that simple. Getting rid of one’s soul because it hurts sometimes to have one is kind of like getting your arm removed because you have tennis elbow. Sure, it solves the problem, but it creates a heck of a lot more of them, especially when you try to serve.

Still, that is probably also a thing contributing to my broody mood. Thinking about the whole notion of souls and problem and feeling a great burden of pain and trauma and anxiety and just how much bad shit I am hauling around, and how deep this hole is in which I live, and which I deeply want to escape while also being crushingly dependent on it as a means of escaping my mortal enemy, the real world.

So yeah. It’s a dark and broody night of the soul for me right now. Hopefully, when I am done writing here and get my chance to nap, I will get some good deep sleep and wake up feeling less down and more perky.

I have great energies stored within myself, and I just need to learn to trust them and follow them and let them be expressed instead of listening to the voice of dysthymia which harshly penalizes even the thought of action and instead tries to force you to do nothing, and tells you that is the only way to be “safe”.

But you can’t be safe in Hell.