Hmph. This shit has got to stop. Here I am again, banging on the keys through the daze of sleepiness, with too little time between now and when I will be socializing with my friends and in this case, I will also be doing the cooking tonight. I do not need this kind of stress.

But it is my fault, or at least, my problem to solve, because the problem is that now that I have stopped napping, I just do not know how to time my day so that I get the eight hours of sleep without it taking up time when I should be writing.

Clearly, I need to start getting my writing done before I go to sleep for the entire afternoon, at least on social days, and that would mean breaking my aforementioned habit of not writing too early in the day because the rest of the day I will feel depressed and purposeless.

I suppose that it is possible that if I know I am basically going to go to sleep right afterward, that will not be a problem. In fact, I might feel good about myself because I am getting things done in the intelligent and thoughtful way, instead of this random scrambling shit that leaves me typing words slowly through the haze of stress and Zopiclone.

Had therapy today. Let out some of my recent revelations, talked about how I am feeling different lately, more solid, more emotionally fluid, more natural. It is good to feel my emotions flowing through me instead of getting clogged up inside me and making me bloated and confused and weighed down.

Basically, I have had a bad case of emotional constipation for a long long time, and I feel like lately I have been finally clearing that out. It is a matter of both opening up and letting go, and I am increasingly willing to say that everything is on the negotiating table. Everything is up in the air. There is nothing in me that I want to keep if it is going to get in the way of my growth. I am tired of holding myself back from life. I am tired of pretending like I am in charge around here. I just want to go forward with my life and live it.

It feels cool to have my emotions flash through me so rapidly now. They are more intense, which takes some getting used to, and I have no doubt that I have some embarrassing emotional outbursts and other unfortunate fine tuning elements in my future as I learn to handle this kind of turbulence.

But I am never going back to suppressing nearly everything and living life squashed flat under a rock. Fuck that. I will take whatever comes at me and deal with it however, and be a real, live, three dimensional, realtime person, even if it kills me.

The other way of living was killing me anyhow. Right now I am willing to try anything.

Last night I made Loaf 4. It was an attempt at a French style bread. It turned out…. weird. The top of the loaf was all knotted and curled and uneven. Something obviously went awry in the kneading process. But other than a bizarre and misshapen appearance on type, it tastes fine, and so I consider it to me mostly a success as a bread. Just a success with a mystery attached.

Part of that mystery has to do with the fact that there appears to be many definitions of “yeast” in the bread machine world. The recipe for Loaf 4 called for “quick rise” yeast. I have no idea what that means. I have “active” yeast and “bread machine” yeast. Do I seriously need to buy yet a third yeast in order to have my bases covered?

Dammit, when I was a kid, there was Flour, and Yeast. The flour was Sheriff All Purpose White Four, and the yeast was Fleischmann’s, and that was it. Now everything is so complicated, with so many options, and so much knowledge needed to just go shopping. Oy.

See, it is not that I do not see how people become cranky conservatives. I feel that way myself sometimes. But that does not make it true.

Let’s see. I will be making supper for my friends soon. Chicken burgers broiled in the oven, and a nice vegetable pilaf via the rice cooker. Isn’t modern technology wonderful?

I made the pilaf once before, and it was pretty good. We got these cartons of vegetable broth from Costco, and while they are not quite what I would consider an ideal broth, they are still pretty darn good, and make a good base for a pilaf. Just replace the water for the rice with broth, and voila, you got yourself a pilaf.

This time, I will also add a few veggies and some extra spices for flavour. Last time it was nice, but a little subtle for my tastes. “Nice” is not good enough dammit. I want “yummy”.

Of course, in order to do the cooking, I will have to be awake. That has always been my problem with sleeping pills. There’s no off switch! They don’t go away when you need them to so you can be awake and alert and get on with your life. No, they have to hang around and hang around like a socially clueless guest and make you uncomfortable and nervous. But you can;t just kick them out. You have to just keep checking your watch and clearing your throat and making comments about how late it is.

I am sure at least some of that metaphor works.

Well I had better stop writing and start cooking. At least the cooking is largely automatic. Once I load up the rice cooker, that works all on its own, and once the chicken burgers are in the oven, I just have to flip them every ten minutes.

So this is me, signing off. See you tomorrow, everybody!

Well, here I am again, banging out a blog entry in too little time because I have still not figured out when to do what given my new sleep regime.

Clearly, I have to stop leaving things till the last minute. But there is only so early I can do this blogging thing. I know from bitter experience that if I do my writing too early, then after a short period of feeling good about “having the rest of the day to myself”, I will become very depressed because now, the rest of the day has no purpose and I am just marking time till the next time I write.

And sure, I know that I could just keep writing, thousand words per day be damned. It might, even, be a good thing. Use the blogging as a warm-up exercise and then go (SFX record scratch!)

SOME TIME LATER

Or something else could happen. Namely, Joe appeared and told me we would be leaving in ten minutes. Once more, I completely forgot that we leave earlier than usual on BCSFA meeting nights so we can hit McDonald’s before the meeting.

So I had to pull myself together and make a decision, and I decided that, seeing as I was barely an eighth into my daily blogging, and very tired from my Zopiclone, I would do the McDonald’s but skip the meeting, and come back here, finish the writing, and then get some more sleep.

Of course, now that I am home again, I realize that I could have skipped McDonalds, finished my writing while toute la gang was eating, and then made the meeting. Which sounds a lot better, honestly. But I think my social anxiety was pushing buttons and pulling levers behind the scenes and causing me to make less than stellar decisions.

Face me, dammit.

I’m not even that sleepy now.

Oh well. I am trying very hard to purge myself of regret, second-guessing, and might-have-beens. Fuck it. Life offers many options but time is but a single track stretching between birth and death. You only get to ride this ride once, and no amount of regret or second-guessing will make every choice perfect and without flaw, so just make the best choice you can and move on. Live with the consequence, and stop trying to live in more than one timeline at a time. You are here now, and you will always be here now. Learn to be good at that.

I think that is part of the wisdom of the whole New Age “be here now” dictum. It is not a total abandonment of memory or forethought, that would be insane. It is more about developing one’s ability to enjoy the present moment and to truly savour it to the point where memory and forethought can be integrated back into the consciousness, creating a single fully integrated awareness that covers all three modes, past, present, and future, at the same time, smooth, powerful, and efficient.

A lot of the stress in our mind comes from handling the present while also dealing with the past and the future, both of which are imaginary modes. We remember the past kinda of like it is happening now, we imagine the future sort of as if it is happening now, and handling the switching between these two imaginary modes while also maintaining focus on what is currently happening, all the while making sure it is clear what is happening now and what is only our “dreaming” of past and future… all of this is a seriously large component of our cognitive load.

Especially for us modern humans, who live in a world with so many different layers of abstraction, of things which in some ways seem real but which are not, like pictures in a magazine, images on a television screen, fictional characters in the book we are reading, or even just the ideas and facts we heard about on the news. All of these abstract layers of meaning and representation have to be sorted and filed appropriately, and it puts a lot of stress on our poor overworked frontal lobes.

Then there is the issue of what in computer circles is called “garbage collection”. In dealing with the many layers and demands of modern life, we end up suppressing, delaying, or redirecting a lot of thoughts and impulses, and that leaves our minds cluttered with incomplete processes, half-completed thoughts, suppressed emotional potentials, and other detritus.

Thus, our mindscape grows ever more cluttered and weighed down by junk, and is forced to take more and more circuitous routes towards the necessary ends of the day, and if this goes on long enough and bad enough, the person’s mind becomes like a hoarder’s home, with just tiny paths of functionality, the bare minimum for bare existence, remaining.

And like a hoarder, the victim does not see their own clutter. To them, it has always been like that, and they do not see their part of the problem at all. They keep adding to their mental hoard, pushing all the things they cannot deal with onto it (which is a LOT of things) and burying themselves further and further under the massive pile.

There has to be a way out. Emotions do not disappear simply because they are pushed out of the conscious mind. Everybody needs an outlet, some way of emptying out the garbage and freeing up those mental resources for dealing with the here and now.

Me, I write. That is my outlet. That, and therapy. As therapy does an increasingly good job at reaching me and putting me in touch with my own emotional landscape, I find I have more and more than I have to work through and express. Stirring up old emotions and letting them loose is a wonderful thing to do once you have done it, but the doing it can be pretty rough.

And it can seem like chaos, like madness, like self-destruction. But if you keep going with it, you begin to feel the incredible joy of reclaiming parts of yourself and becoming more whole, and for that, you would walk through Hell blindfolded.

And I guess that is what spiritual growth is all about.

As we speak, Round 3 of my battle to get my bread machine to produce a decent loaf of bread, and while the outcome is not certain, at least this time, if it does not turn out right, I will know why.

But first, let’s back up our story a bit. Loaf 2 turned out exactly the same as Loaf 1, in other words, a dry crumbly mass of parched dough sprinkled with marbles of same.

So clearly, my previous scientific theory, that it was the whole wheat nature of the flour used for Loaf 1 that was to blame, was false. Regular white all-purpose flour produced an identical result apart from the exact coloration of the Loaf of Doom that resulted.

So the line of inquiry then turned to the exact nature of the flour used, specifically, its freshness, and whether or not it was “bread machine flour”. Freshness was a serious issue, because the Spaghetti Monster only knows how long that flour for Loaf 2 had been in the dark depths of our cupboards. As spuug pointed out, flour does not last forever, even if it is kept in the dark in a big clamshell style style tupperware container. This stuff was probably deader than Disco.

So last night, I bought some new flour, and for good measure, made sure it said “bread machine flour” on it. I also bought new yeast, even though the yeast we bought at Costco is still fresh. But it does not say “bread machine yeast” on it, and plus it is from some obscure brand I have never heard of, so to heck with it, I am covering all the bases.

Plus, the new yeast is Fleishmann’s, a brand I trust because they made basically all the yeast I used in my life before using Prince Edward Island, and the jars are cute. And it says bread machine yeast right on it. So I got that covered.

So I was all ready to make my third attempt tonight. I was feeling good. The ingredients were fresh, the mood was right, I cleaned Loaf 2 and all its remnants out of the pan, gave pan and paddle a good rinsing out, and started over again.

And let me tell you, as soon as I touched the new flour, I realized how dead and wrong the previous flour had been. This is what flour should be like, I thought, all soft and silky and bright bright white. Clearly, the energy was rising. I added the yeast and the rest of the ingredient, put the pan back in with the little twist to lock it in place, and started the sucked up once more, and eagerly glanced in through the plastic window to see what was happened.

And stared dumbstruck as absolutely nothing happened. The motor spun, but nothing moved in the pan.

It was then that I had one of those terrible moments in life when you realize you have done something very, very stupid : I had forgotten to put the stirring paddle back on after cleaning it.

So the machine had nothing to use to stir the ingredients together, do the kneading, etc.

So I yanked the pl;ug from the wall, freaking out a little bit and of course feeling extra strength retarded. First I tried to just sort of push the ingredients out of the way to try and wedge the thing in there, but that was made of fail. So eventually I just dumped the whole sticky mess into a bowl, cleaned out the pan and paddle again, stuck the paddle onto its little pivot in the pan, dumped everything back into the pan again, and let it go.

In theory, it should go more or less fine. After all, the ingredient merged prematurely by only a few minutes, and most of the pre-dough stuff went back into the pan, and so it should go fine.

But if it does not, I will certainly know why, and I will never ever leave the paddle out of the equation again. In fact, I predict that in the future, it will be the first thing I check before I hit that START button, every single time.

We all make stupid mistakes. The smart thing is to learn from them.

Of course, the really pesky thing about these bread machine experiments is that it takes a bread machine three hours to make a loaf, and so between starting the machine up and finding out if you did it right is 180 minutes of potential trepidation and worry.

So to stave that off, I decided now would be a good time to stay busy, and what do you know? To do that, I sat down at this here computer and started talking to you great people about my bread adventures.

Funny how that works out, huh? It has a circular ecology to it that is either beautifully full and round and eternal, or horribly autophagous and pointless and incestuous, depending on whether you favour the sword or the pentacle.

Other that my struggles with breadness, not a lot going on. My desire to succeed in Facebook games continues to cause me to seek other players of said games via “Add Me” threads on the games’ fora, thus causing me to add random strangers to my Friends list for the purposes of gaming.

And yet, even though my goal was single minded pursuit of success in a video game, these people are still my Friends now, and we help each other out in the games and see one another’s Status updates, posted links, and so on, and so I am, in a very timid and techno-mediated asynchronous non-realtime way,
making new friends, or at least, Friends.

It is an odd way to come out of one’s shell, but it is the only way that I know of that is low-stress enough for me to handle easily, and so what the heck.

Hi there all you fellow Facebook gaming addicts!

Pleased to meet you.

Second day with a full Zopiclone dose in the morning, and still no radical effects, although I am not normally quite this tired at just before 8 PM.

But then I did just eat a big bowl of rice, and that is a heavy carb laden meal, and those have been known to make a person need a bit of a lay-down. So who knows.

So far, though, the drug’s effects are pretty mild. Pleasant, though. After taking it, I get this slowly growing feeling of warmth and relaxation spreading through my body. It is not entirely unlike my favorite part of being drunk, when you are just loose and relaxed and everything seems just fine and dandy from where you are sitting.

The only even slightly odd side effect so far is that I get this curiously warm feeling in my feel, like I have come in from the cold and propped my feet up before the fire and they are just about to the point where the warmth stops feeling good and starts to hurt a little bit.

Next time, in the interests of science, I will be sure to take my socks off before I take the pill, and see if that has a noticeable effect. I suspect that it is something simple to do with circulation. Perhaps the drug increases blood flow to the extremities, and what I am feeling is simply my usually semi-deprived cold feet getting a much needed circulation boost.

Otherwise, the drug just makes me somewhat drowsier, but not in any heavy, overwhelming way. Just a gentle hand on the shoulder pushing you ever so politely towards bed. Fine by me, although again, part of me was apparently looking for a little excitement out of this drug.

And after Doctor Costin’s dire warnings about the side effects and needing to lie down right after I take it even though the effects are supposed to kick in slowly over an hour, and then my own ill-conceived research into the drug on Wikipedia, who can blame me? It all suggested that this was some kind of heavy duty drug that was going to knock me on my ass and that I should be well and prepared for before I let it take me to town and back.

Instead, I get the effect from it that most people get from those over the counter sleep aids, which historically have done absolutely nothing for me but make it very irritatingly hard to wake up when the time comes. Talk about having the wrong end of the stick. I don’t want to make it even harder to get out of bed because I am still tired. I want to be refreshed and alert when I get there.

Regular over the counter sleep aids just make things worse.

Whereas the Zopiclone, so far, just mellows me out and makes me feel warm and relaxed, and that does indeed make it somewhat easier to get to sleep. I do not get much reading done before I go to sleep, which is no big deal. Sure, reading before sleep is a habit I have had since I was a preschooler reading from our enormous compendium of children’s literature.

I was raised by books, television, and video games. More or less.

But what the hell, I can read less if it means sleeping more. I still read in the bathroom, after all, and who knows, a better rested and relaxed me might just have it together enough to actually schedule times to read what I want to read.

That would be a radical innovation in life organization for little old free-form me, and they say that the ability to conceive, set, and attain goals is a key practice for recovery from depression, so that would be a good thing.

But I dunno. Just thinking about it makes me roll my eyes and groan “Boring!”, so clearly, any increase in organization in my life would require considerable amounts of conference and understanding with my inner child and the rest of the committee.

The idea of an organized, schedule, measured, precise, and completely predictable life just makes me wanna roll over and puke. So dull and rigid and lifeless! Where is the esprit, the elan, the joie de vivre? I may not be some kind of freewheeling free spirit looking to suck the marrow out of life, but I still find the very prospect of that sort of hyper-controlled life to be one that gives me the same sort of feeling I get when peering over a very steep drop : nausea, dizziness, and the feeling that it is trying to suck me in.

But clearly, one can take that shit too far. Surely I could make my life a little more organized without it meaning the death of my vital inner self? I like to think of myself as at least somewhat practical and sensible. After all, when you have nobody to rely on but yourself, you always suffer the consequences of your own actions, and so you are always performing without a net.

And for me, at least, performing without a net makes me extremely cautious. Because you can only fall to your screaming horrible death once, ya know.

But a part of me deeply wants to be released from the tyranny of that iron caution. Part of me just wants to do whatever seems right (or fun) at the time and not worry about the consequences until they happen. It wants to just turn itself free, to run and jump and frolic and play and just plain enjoy being alive. I have never done that in my life, even when I was a little kid.

Even as a little kid, I was far too sensible and intelligent for my own good. I grew up in the icy realm of thought, which is great for theoretical knowledge but sucks raw turds when it comes to adding experience to your soul and helping it grow.

So I guess I should change.

Don’t count on it, though.

Well, I gave my brand new bread machine its virgin trial today, and it was a total bust.

It was supposed to produce a nice loaf of lightly crusted white bread, and instead I got a little bucket of burned, scorched, brown marbles with some smoldering crumbs as a base.

Not attractive, not good, and certainly not bread. Not even food, sadly.

Play the sad upper range piano music here. Plus cello.

And the thing is, I suspected something was wrong. I followed the directions in the bread machine manual, and then I looked at the result and said to myself “There is no way that is enough liquid. ” All my baker’s instincts told me this. But I shrugged, figuring the book knew better than I did, and pushed the start button and walked away.

Turns out, my instincts were perfectly correct. And I knew it before I even opened the lid.

See, I took a nap (bad boy, me) while the machine was running its course, and so when I woke up, it was done. And while I was lying there in bed with sleep still in my eyes, not quite awake, it smelled like I had succeeded in making my first loaf of machine bread.

But once I got up and headed toward the kitchen to check things out, I knew something had gone terrible wrong, because my baker’s nose detected a very sour note to the fresh bread smell, and I know that not, it is the Smell of Doom, and so even before I lifted the lid, I knew what was inside would be Not Good.

So right now, the Horror that Lay Within is soaking in the sink, and some time soon, I will go, clean the gunk out gently, dry it out thoroughly, and try again.

Luckily, I am almost positive that I know what the problem was and so the next try should go a lot better. The flour we happened to have around has a slightly brownish tinge to it, and I suspect that it is not, in fact, the nice white wholesome all purpose flour that our mothers used to make our favorite cookies when we were kids, but actually some evil foul hippie dippie whole wheat flour, suitable only for extreme vegans and people who truly enjoy constipation.

So when I said it was not enough liquid, I was entirely correct. Whole wheat flour absorbs more liquid than white flour, so you need to put more in. Also, you have to knead it longer and bake it hotter. Otherwise, you end up with burned brown marbles in a bag of crumbs like I got.

So next time, I will use a whole wheat bread recipe, and end up with good whole wheat bread, I hope. But the key thing is to fight my tendency to be easily discouraged, especially when trying something new. Quash those over-vivid negative emotional impressions that form when I am doing something new and therefore unfamiliar, and refuse to listen to the voice that says “Run away, run away, go back to doing the familiar things, this can only lead to more pain!”.

A radically hasty assumption based on a single data point, don’t you think? Extrapolating the entire nature of an entire avenue of human experience based on a single experience? The first time always sucks for a lot of things. You have to just keep trying.

And seeing as I paid $75 for the damned bread machine, I am going to keep trying.

Plus, I still want the results bad enough to keep going. I want to have a fun kitchen toy that makes bread, so I can make tasty breads and hopefully even make tasty desserts for myself. I am willing to keep experimenting with it till I make that come true.

In other news, took my first full Zopiclone today. No dramatic results. Just made me fairly sleepy, so I slept. That is more or less what I wanted to happen, I suppose, but part of me is terrible disappointed that it was not something more exciting. Like I got super sleepy and slept like a log for sixteen hours then woke up all super rested, or something.

Then again, I did feel pretty good when I woke up from that nap, and that is fairly radically different from the majority of my wakening, so that is actually a pretty good sign.

Just plain decent sleep might not be a dramatic result, but it might make a big difference to my life if I keep it up. And I see no reason to stop now.

I have not even experienced the nasty metallic taste upon wakening, which is the most common negative side effect from Zopiclone. It still might show up, of course. But if it does, I will find some way of dealing with it. Get some super strong mouthwash, perhaps, or pay for Mentadent, which is the most powerful toothpaste I have ever used.

That stuff is awesome. Using it is an experience of Zen intensity, not unpleasant but kind of a trip, and afterward, your teeth are so clean that they feel like you just got a new set. Kerpow. Clean.

Heck, I might get some of that anyway, now that I am thinking about it. It’s expensive but it just might be worth it to someone like me.

So, that has been my day of experimenting with drugs and baking. The drugs went better than the baking, although the baking results were certainly more dramatic.

I might just have my meaty paws on a sleep drug that just gives me lots of good quality sleep with no side effects. Not even extreme drowsiness. Just better quality sleep.

I really do not know what sort of person I am without the buzz and crackle of mental hyperactivity due to disordered sleep keeping me awake all night, never entirely alert and awake and certainly never entirely relaxed either.

Hopefully, I will become a really relaxed, mellow, groovy guy.

You know… moreso than now. 🙂

… but I have around an hour to get this blog entry written (ideally), and that is not a lot of time.

You see, I finally got around to going and picking up my Zopiclone yesterday. After all the hassle with getting the government approval, I decided to wait a good long time before I inquired about it again, and yesterday was the day I decided to give it another shot.

Turns out it was in, finally, and so I wandered next door at 3:30 PM or so, and picked it up, still quietly seething with resentment about how I will not be getting Shoppers’ Optimum points for my drugs any more. Just another small mercy snatched away from us on the boot heel of society.

Anyhow, I picked the stuff up yesterday, and today was my first time trying it out. The pharmacist recommended trying just half a pill the first time, and so that is what I did. I took it somewhere around 10:30 AM and waited for the effects to kick in. It’s supposed to take about an hour.

And with all the hype and anticipation around this pill, I was expecting something extreme, I suppose. But all it did was make me sort of drowsy. Nothing radical there.

Still, the result was that I slept all afternoon, and that meant I had no time to write my blog entry until now, which gives me an hour or less to talk to you nice people.

So I might not finish on time. Or I might. This writing thing is not an exact science and the amount of time it takes me to bang one of these things about is fairly variable. Sometimes it take take me a whole evening, if it is a tricky subject or I am just too tired to make the words come easily. Other times, it all flows out so easily that when I am done, I say “That’s it? Weird. ”

Tomorrow I will try a whole Zopiclone and see how that pans out. It might be that the effects were so mild because I am such a big fellow that it was simply too low a dosage. What I am hoping for is a nice eight hours of sleep from which I awake refreshed and energized and happy. I am not sure I have ever had that in my life. My mentally hyperactive and physically hypo-active life precludes it. All the thinking I do, and all the mental stimulation I seek, creates so much energetic chaos in my mind, and stress in my body, and without regular exercise (or really, any exercise) to act as a release valve, it is hard for me to simply relax even while I am asleep.

The result is the sort of knock down, drag out, REM crazy sleep that I have. Throw in my bad habit of napping throughout the day, and I have pretty terrible sleep hygiene. I am not good at sleep.

I hope to use the Zopiclone as the cornerstone of my attempt to change that. I will take the Zopiclone, sleep through the late morning and afternoon, and then (and this will be the hard part), resist the urge to name in the other sixteen hours of the day.

I have actually pondered moving my computer into the living room so that my bed would not be so enticingly close to me, saying “Dive in and escape reality for a while!”. But that would involve an extraordinary level of hassle and disruption to my own life and my roomies’ lives. So perhaps I will just pile objects on my bed during the day, so that taking a nap would require taking the stuff off again, and thus make it just a little less easy to nap.

Rely on my laziness to fight the rest of my sloth. It works, in a way.

The other major pillar of my attempt to get my sleep into something like a normal pattern is, oddly enough, my Facebook game addiction. With so many games offering so much stimulation and distraction, they can fill the “well, if I don’t nap, what will I do with my time?” gap for a while.

In the long term, I hope to grow tired enough of them as a whole that I end up doing actually productive things out of sheer boredom.

It sounds like a weird plan, but it is a very “me” plan, and I am coming to accept that I am a highly idiosyncratic person who just has to do things his own way.

Other people’s ways just do not work. I am a one-off model with a distinctly non-standard operating system. Other people’s programs do not run. They crash.

Of course, that means my only guide in live is my somewhat intermittent common sense, and my intuition as to what course I should take, and that would be a pretty big step away from my more rationalist, heavily left-brain dominated lifestyle so far.

I tend to be the sort of person who looks down on people who are ruled by sudden whims and who act out of pure emotion instead of thinking things through like their human brains are built to do.

And I doubt that will ever change. That is just too fundamental to my personality to alter in any big way. You can’t go from bookish, shy, world-avoiding intellectual to radical free spirit overnight.

But I can be a little flexible, and at least allow for the possibility that sometimes, my emotions might know more about what is good for me than my tired and overstimulated rational brain can figure out.

And that sometimes, the best thing you can do is to listen to that persistent and nagging inner child voice that wants what it wants and does not want to have to submit everything in triplicate to the slow and tiresome committee of influences that make up the rational mind before not getting it.

Maybe sometimes, the smartest thing we can do is ask ourselves “If I was myself as a kid on summer vacation, what would I do right now?”

The answers may surprise you.

Yup. That is what this post will contain. Three fun video clips that I have come across lately. Just what it says on the label. That is the kind of honesty and integrity that people have come to expect and rely on from the find people here at Bloggeridge Farms. When you read the subject line of one of our fine, hand-crafted premium blog posts, you can rest assured that it relates somehow to the contents. That is our guarantee and we stand behind it one hundred percent. We are regular, hard-working, ordinary, God-fearing people just like yourselves, unless you are some kind of hippie pervert freak.

Our first clip is one of those collaborative high school videos that I have come to love because of the energy and enthusiasm that they radiate, and because they are just plain fun to watch.

It is from the yearbook club of Walt Whitman high school and it shows you that some nerdy looking guys can really dance.

Love the music too… that is the good kind of dubstep to me. It uses the tight volume envelopes, reverse dynamics, and filtered beats to make something that is pretty damn funky, and that is hella cool for a thick bodied curly haired dude to dance to in a music video.

Plus I love the kind of visual impact you get from these increasingly ubiquitous film tricks that show a person apparently doing a single thing while the background changes around them. All it takes is the subject moving at some kind of even rate, being very careful to frame them right in each shot, and then some simple clever editing, and you get a very cool effect that really leaps of the screen.

I suppose I will get tired of that eventually, but for now, I think it looks fantastic. Such an attractive balance of static and dynamic elements!

Way to go, kids of Walt Whitman High School, class of 2012!

Next up, we have a sweet little animated monologue where a man talks about the extremely hard working and strict father that raised him.

First off, I love art dedicated to telling people’s stories. As a writer, I always want to hear people’s stories, the narrative of their lives, the substance and texture of their lives. Like the Desiderata says, “listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.” Everyone has their own tales to tell and their own experiences to share, and there is no person’s perspective that will not enrich your own if you can just stop thinking of others as sources of entertainment and think of them as sources of enlightenment and understanding. You can learn a hell of a lot from people who are absolutely nothing like you.

So bravo to the people at StoryCorps for taking this man’s story and giving it visuals, thus givng it greater wings to fly, especially in this YouTube era.

And speaking of the visuals, I love that animation style. It is clear and somewhat realistic without losing the basic charms of the color and simplification of cartoons, and I particularly like the animation’s timing in relation to the story. Things happen pretty much exactly as our narrator is saying them, with very little slippage, and I think that kind of sync between words and images really makes the story resonate in the mind. Makes for very powerful storytelling, and I am all about the story.

Plus, the animators add just the right amount of little animation flourishes and gags to keep things going. You could watch the video without the voiceover and still more or less get what is going on. That is using animation right, in my opinion.

And I love the story of his father making the narrator walk home with his silent, angry father right behind him. Poor kid must have been terrified. But it made an impact.

I bet that guy grew up very honest, because the moment he thinks of doing anything dishonest, he feels his Dad’s heavy disapproving stare on his back.

This is how people get values.

Our last video is a little number from Cracked.com with an interesting theory as to the origins of two of the biggest cults in the world.

Now just to get this over with, obviously this is just a silly skit and not meant to be even vaguely historically accurate, and the odds that Hubbard ever banged Rand are a million to one, and blah blah etc blah blah.

But it is a cute premise and I think the two actors pull it off quite well. I am always happy to see women in skit comedy and I think that the woman playing Ayn Rand did a particularly good job with her lines. Which is good, because she has the lion’s share of them.

And the script is decent. It is not as polished and slick as I would like, but it has enough good writing to make the whole thing work, and I particularly like the ending.

“I’m going to make actors think they have superpowers!”. That is a good closer.

In a way, it would be comforting to think that Ayn Rand was a cynical prankster who only wanted to make the world a worse place, because that would mean that she did not actually believe the crazy evil horrible shit she said, and that would mean the world had contained one less Objectivist.

And they are so damned slappable.

But no, she believed all that shit she said, and would no doubt be pleased that, many decades after her death, she is still making terrible people even worse.

As for Hubbard, it is hard to say how much of Scientology he actually believed. I think like most cult leaders, he had the part of him that believed every word he said, and then a little part of him that knew it was all bullshit fresh from his own ass and that kept track of reality for him so that he could protect his little empire.

And his boat full of little boys.