All the way to next door and back! Truly, if this does not impress those doddering old fools at the World Adventurer’s Society, nothing ever will!

I am pleased with myself because I did, in fact, manages to motivate myself to actually get dressed, get into my outerwear, and go next door to Shopper’s Drug Mart to pick up the various diabetic supplies I needed, including the most important one, the insulin.

And, as if to reward me for my finally getting off my ass and doing something, they had my favorite sale on, where the boxes of snacking crackers like Ritz Bitz Sandwiches (oh how I love those!) were on sale for $1.99 as opposed to the usual $3.50 or so.

This is faboo for me, because normally I don’t get the cracker type snacks because they are too expensive and I can get something like chips a lot cheaper.

But when they are on sale, well, I yust go nuts. Well, a little nuts. I bought three of them, one of those Ritz Bitz Cheese Sandwiches (I am such a slut for artificial cheese flavour), one of Swiss Cheese Crackers, and one of… hmmm. I don’t recall, actually.

Oh wait, Vegetable Things, that was it.

And I will probably end up buying more, because I will be back there tomorrow. Turns out, when I went to get my diabetes stuff, I only scored 80 percent on the mission.

I knew there was five things I needed (this is one of the tricks we forgetful types use to cope, numbers) but when the pharmacist only gave me four things and said “Is this everything?”, I could not remember what the fifth thing was, so I ended up with only four.

Turns out, it was the lancets for my blood sugar meter. They are the little disposable pokey things that do the actual job of making me bleed for the machine.

Let’s just savour how marvelously overdramatic that phrase is, shall we? Bleeding for the machine.

It is both a literal description of what blood testing involves and incredibly emo. I love it. I am totally going to be saying that when it is time to test my blood now.

“Well, time to go bleed for the machine. ”

Sometimes I amaze myself. Anyhow, where was I… oh right.

So I could not remember what I was missing until I got home, so tomorrow after therapy I will be back for more lancets and then I will probably take further advantage of the lovely sale and buy even more snacky cracker type things.

Might as well take advantage of the sale while it is on and I am going to be there anyhow.

Normally, I resist the pressure of sales. I used to live with someone who was more or less a slave to them. She just kept buying worthless little doodads because they were on sale and it was a good price.

So that made me painfully aware of how the whole concept of a “sale” is just a way for retailers to create a false sense of scarcity and manipulate the “gatherer” side of our hunter/gatherer instincts, and blled poor people of their cash.

But still, a deal’s a deal, as long as it was something you were going to buy anyhow.

And I need the extra snack power, because one of the side effects of having my blood sugar down to the normal range is that my appetite is through the fucking roof.

This will be, I hope, temporary. Diabetes literature seems to agree that once my body realizes that way lower blood sugar than usual does not, in fact, mean that I am starving, my appetite should level out.

Until then, it is a seriously pain in the ass, though. A healthy one, one that means I am actually doing quite well, but still. Waking up feeling like I could gnaw on passersby is getting to be a serious drag.

I am serious. I get so hungry I feel like smacking somebody. Thank goodness I am nearly always alone at the time, I imagine I could get pretty grumpy.

Oh who I am fooling. I am never grumpy, not really. But it feels good to pretend I might be.

But I have an incredibly pervasive and powerful sense of responsibility for my own actions coupled with a high level of empathy, and that means that I cannot knowingly behave in a way that harms others, no matter how I feel.

Then again, I suppose that presupposes everyone is as delicate and sensitive as I am. Not everybody is, and I suppose if I was around people a lot tougher than I have every been, a little grumpiness might be morally justifiable, if not downright necessarily to deal with the rude bastards.

That has been my theory of New York City for a little while now. Looking at how pop culture depicts NYC from the point of view of a polite and reserved Canadian, it makes you wonder how on Earth anybody can live there without becoming a spree killer.

The answer must be that it is easier to handle people being rude to you if you are not required to be polite to them back. They are rude, you are rude back, maybe you both get a little heated, but then it is over and you go on with your lives.

Seems like madness to a Canadian, but for them, it sort of seems to work. Who knows, maybe the ability to vent some of your life tensions in the bump and hustle of NYC life actually makes some people calmer.

Certainly, holding everything in all the time is no kind of solution. That just leads to depression, stress related illness, and a high level of background anger that can erupt in seemingly senseless acts of violence or even riots at any moment.

So who knows? Maybe passionate cultures like the Italians could teach us “reasonable” types a thing or two about how to live right.

But I will always be the polite Canadian that I am.

Might have to modulate the insulin dose a little.

This morning, I woke up feeling pretty bad. I tried just drinking water and catching up on Facebook till it passed, but it only got worse and I eventually came to the conclusion that my blood sugar was too low.

I had all the signs. I felt cold all over, I had tingling in my extremities, and most importantly, I had a wobbly, unsteady feeling when I walked that I tend to use as the core sign of low blood sugar.

It is highly distinctive to the hypoglycemic state in me, and hence easy to recognize even when blood sugar issues are making it hard for me to concentrate.

So I wobbled by way out to the living room and ate basically a double meal and now I feel better and can think about what it all means.

One conclusion is that I definitely need to stop skipping meals. I have to return to being quite assiduous about eating every six hours like clockwork, no matter what. When my blood sugar was high all the time, I got out of that habit and now it is costing me. When I had my little attack, I had not eaten for around ten hours and that is clearly too long.

Lowered blood sugar caused by more insulin has sped up my metabolism and I need to respect that.

Secondly, I need to wonder if I am taking too much insulin. No point in ending up with dangerously high blood sugar instead of dangerously high.

So I am pondering lowering my daytime dose (the 11:30 AM one) to 40 units and seeing if that still does the trick re: keeping my sugars from being too high.

Just to be on the safe side, I skipped this morning’s dose. Well, safety and laziness, to be honest. I only have one dose left, and when it is gone, it is time to go for a big resupply trip to the Shopper’s next door. I will not only be out of insulin but nearly out of all my other supplies as well, like the needle tips and alcohol swabs I need for my insulin injections and the test trips and lancets for testing, and some of those I will have to pay for myself (sigh), so cheapness enters into it as well.

Sadly, I cannot be absolutely sure that I was experiencing low blood sugar this morning because I could not quite get it together enough to actually test myself.

I was in Feel Bad Must Eat mode, and in that mode, I am practically a zombie.

All this while I am also enduring a period of troubled and complicated sleep as well. As usual, it was easy to be philosophical and relaxed about it in the first few days, but the longer it lasts, the harder that sense of detachment is to maintain.

This shit really wears down my emotional coping resources, and right now, I feel tired and worn out and depressed and deflated.

Which, of course, makes sleep a perversely attractive prospect. My sleep might be wearing me down and wearing me out, but it is a lot easier than staying awake when I am so damned tired.

And there is always the hope that the more I sleep, the sooner I will catch up and/or burn off all the excess creative energy and be done with this particular period of deep dark disturbed slumber.

But mostly, it is about being really sleepy and deciding to just plain give in to it.

Meanwhile, let’s listen to Q singing about bronies.

Seriously. That is John De Lancie, beloved amongst fans as the lovably petulant and flamboyantly omnipotent (ish) being known as Q from Star Trek : The Next Generation and subsequent shows.

And yup. He is singing a Gilbert and Sullivan-esque tune about bronies, the adult male fans (some of whom are female) of My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic.

The Internet is truly a strange and wondrous place. Apparently, the animated sequence is from a documentary about bronies coming out soon. Whatever.

I find this “some bronies are ladies” thing pretty interesting. You take a show clearly intended for little girls, and it turns out to be so wonderfully good that it attracts a huge number of adult male fans who instantly form their own unique “brony” culture around the show, and this culture attracts the attention of the mainstream media, who understandably think adult men water a girly cartoon is news.

This attention comes at just the right time to only further cement and expand the culture’s reach, so that “brony” becomes the word for all adult fans of the show, necessitating the female adult fans to have to clear their throats and remind everyone that they are still there and that “brony” culture includes them too, although they are clearly not, well, “bros”.

And so someone came up with what I will spell “pega-sister”, which does the job, sort of, but is clumsy and does not exactly trip off the tongue easily and so I can understand why only some adult female fans of the show choose to use it.

And all because a show aimed for little girls and with a mostly female cast, through the power of the Internet and its own innate quality, attracted such an enormous adult male fanbase that they quite innocently ended up kind of co-opting the whole thing.

I say this without sarcasm or snark : clearly, there was a lot of adult men out there with a strong need to get in touch with their feminine side and reconnect with simple, childlike virtues like friendship, caring, compassion, understanding, and teamwork.

The fact that such a thing as My Little Pony : FIM should come along to fulfill that need seems just a little magical to me, to be honest.

It’s the sort of magic Disney used to have, and that Pixar still has, and that I hope to put into my writing some day.

Writing is Magic.

Today’s diary entry has a soundtrack, and you can find it here.

Today has been pretty nice, overall.

But let’s back up a minute. First, old business.

I did go to the BCSFA meeting last night. No big psychological apotheosis or amazingly illuminating decision point necessary. I just found that, when the time came, I felt like going.

And what more do you need, really? I am doing a lot of hard thinking about simplicity lately and I think my brain is moving from the “ripping out old plumbing phase” into more of a “sorting through what is left and figuring out what to do with it” phase.

It is just like cleaning a room. First you throw out all the garbage, and that feels really good, because eliminating waste always has a clearly Freudian pleasure to it. You look at those big bags of garbage and think “Wow, I am getting rid of this much stuff! And the room is so much cleaner and nicer now! I am really making progress here! Yay me!”

And that lasts for however long it takes to take the garbage to the curb (or dumpster, or whatever), and then you come back and see all the stuff that now has to be sorted and put away, and you realize that getting rid of the garbage was the easy part, the cheap thrill, and now you have to do the hard part.

You have to figure out where everything goes. Dammit.

And I don’t know about other people, but I always have way more stuff than places. I might get more into the whole cleaning and organizing your life thing if I had enough places.

Then again, that would just lead to another kind of option paralysis.

But back to the mental thing. I do feel like recovery, for me, is a long cleanup job. A slow and thorough process of cleaning out the garbage, deciding what is necessary and what is just getting the way, and moving things closer to one another so they can be connected again.

And so every day, I become more whole, integrated, connected, and intact, and less.. broken.

I am putting myself back together. Feels good, more often than not.

Had a pleasant evening with the people of BCSFA. I sometimes tell myself, tongue in cheek, that I only go there for the free food (and when I am feeling socially anxious, the prospect does help), but really, the food I seek there is food for thought. I am highly motivated by intelligent conversation, and I can always find it there. The local nerds are all intelligent and interesting people, and talking with them is always a treat for an intellectual manque like myself.

I hope that does not make me sound cold. I like these people too, and enjoy their company. I do not just see them as sources of mental stimulation.

But I am extremely intellectual in nature, and as such, always looking for mental sustenance. Our cerebral metabolism is extremely fast and demanding, and so mentally speaking, we are restless and easily bored.

Speaking of sustenance, I was a terribly bad boy when it came to the dessert offerings at last night’s meeting. I had been such a good boy since Xmas, but last night, the easy access to a stimulatingly wide variety of sweet things shattered my self-control and I had quite a bit of it.

So when I tested my blood sugar this morning, I expected the worst. How badly had I shattered my hard won progress over this last month? Was I redlining?

Imagine my delight when the reading was not just normal, but 7.0^[1], which is the definition of normal. Greater than that is diabetic. Less than that is hypoglycemic. It was not just normal, it was hilariously normal. I laughed out loud.

So I really feel like I got away with something last night. And being a prudent type person and not a risk taking type, I am going to count that as a blessing and not press my luck, as opposed to seeing it as a signal to throw caution to the wind and eat whatever the hell I want from now on.

But it is a sign that 50 units of insulin twice a day is doing the trick, and as long as I do not start to have hypoglycemic incidents or other ill effects, I will just keep it up.

It does mean, however, that I will be going through those tubes of insulin rather fast. One tube holds around 300 units of insulin, and therefore, one tube will last me three days. There are five tubes to a pack, and so one pack of tubes will last me fifteen days.

So twice a month I will have to go next door for more. Big deal. I need more reasons to move. Healthy blood sugar or no, it is still damned unhealthy to be almost completely sedentary like me.

Besides, I am tired of being fat. Perhaps healthy blood sugar will help me lose weight, which would be awesome. But moving more would be nice too.

Oh, and lastly, I am still exploring Stencyl. Right now I am looking at all the neat pre-made stuff they have out there for it. The people making the program quite wisely included a fully integrated content sharing system in the program, so there is a large library out there of bits and pieces other people have programmed just waiting for me to snap them together however I like.

I just want to make sure I understand the program well enough to use other people’s stuff to make the sort of thing I want, and then I will be happily downloading this and that to play with.

I have absolutely no pride as a programmer. I am a creator. I want to make what I want to make with as little fiddling about as possible.

If I can make fun, catchy little games entirely out of other people’s work, fine by me.

The final product will still be mine, mine, mine.

Seeya in the funny papers, folks!

I have pockets full of sand from the land of dreams today.

I have been having one of ly sleepy days and it has been fairly arduous, to put it mildly. I am bloody tired and I have been sleeping all day, two things which should never coincide. I have been dreaming like crazy as well, of course, and I have also been sweating like crazy and waking up all fried in the head.

Overall it’s a drag, although I am try not to let it get me down too much. These things happen. And if I really need a cute, I have generic diet cola in the fridge to help burn off the cobwebs.

I finished the second Stencyl tutorial, Crash Course 2, which took a long time because there are a lot of steps and I had to stop a lot to let my brain cool down. Like I said before, it really reminds me of why I did not continue in my programming education. I get serious headaches just from trying to deal with the stuff.

Not the sort of thing that fits into my brain shape easily, I guess. But the sort of thing I am perfectly capable of learning. It’s just not easy for me.

And I have been a spoiled intellectual getting away with only doing that which comes easily to me for far too long. Having academic subjects come easily to you is one heck of a gift. It let me sail through school without even trying very hard.

But by the same token, it is one damned effective shield against having to gain any character. Regular people have no choice but to learn how to overcome obstacles, how to keep trying even when things are difficult and stressful and there is no certainty of success, and thus they learn to have faith in their own ability to triumph no matter what.

If they did not develop this ability, they might never even make it out of school, and thus, it is grow or die. But for the “gifted” like me, we can afford to refuse to do that which is hard for us because we have the main things the school system cares about down cold.

And so we have magnificent minds and no grit at all. The tiniest things are huge obstacles to us because we have never had to learn to overcome adversity.

And boy, have I been good at that. I have successfully avoided all the things that might have forced me to grow up, get over myself, grow a pair, and learn to deal with things.

When it comes to dodging growth, I am the champion. What do I win? Oh right… a Big Loser crown.

Of course, to be fair, it is easy to achieve this lofty goal. All you need is to have no standards, ambition, dignity, shame, or support network.

And then you, too, could find you are pushing forty and have never even had a job or a relationship!

Welcome to the party! Have some cake. It’s… terrible.

Honestly, all I really want to do right now is go back to sleep. But that would be unwise, as I have a BCSFA meeting tonight and sleeping now would be silly.

Of course, I might not go. With how I feel right now, that sounds like a mighty tempting option. Just stay home and sleep, sleep, sleep.

Sleep seems so perfectly lovely when you are as tired as I am right now, like a gentle and all embracing paradise of relaxation and abandon.

Of course, in reality (or at least, my local instance thereof), it is often a strange and confysing dreamscape which leaves me drained and burned out and thoroughly messed up.

But at this point, that is like reminded a starving man that he might get gas from a feast. It’s like warning a junkie that heroin tends to make you vomit. Not only do I not care, I am even sort of looking forward to the side effects.

Anything can look good if it is connected to something you want bad enough.

Oh well, I will be done this writing thing soon enough and then I will decide whether I will go to the BCSFA thing tonight or stay home and catch up on those glorious Zs.

If I decide to stay home, I will be sacrificing my one time guaranteed each month to be in a social situation not containing the same three others that I always hang out with. Plus, I will have to go tell the guys I am not going, and I will have to endure not being in the notes for the meeting when they come out in the next BCSFAzine.

But I would get to sleeeeeep. Precious, lovely sleeeep.

On the other hand, if I decide to go, I will get to spend a pleasant evening with my fellow nerds. I will skip having to tell the guys I am not going and the inevitable feeling that I have let them down. I will be in those notes.

And all it would take is a good 1L of diet cola to put off that whole “sleep” thing for now. I think. Caffeine is not always reliable for me, and sometimes it just makes me sleepier, perversely enough.

Right now, I gotta admit, I am leaning towards the fagging out and skipping the meeting option. I have made it to a bunch of them in a row. That means I am due to skip one… right?

At least, that is what my loser talk instincts are telling me, and they have always been right enough to keep me ‘safe’ so far!

Meh. We will see. Maybe I will go, and maybe I won’t. Either is fine.

What I will not do is drive myself crazy by putting a lot of tension and anxiety into the decision.

It never helps and it always hurts, so fuck that.

I am done with the whipping yourself until morale improves approach.

Today, I went to see my doctor about my right foot, and the results were… unsatisfying.

In order to explain why, first, I will transcribe what went down while it is still somewhat fresh in my mind so I can save it for posterity.

First, I told him about my symptoms. I told him about the coldness and numbness all over the sole of my foot, and how my hands and feet always seem to get cold easily but how in the last week or so, it had gotten a heck of a lot worse. I also told him about how my own research had resulted in my concluding that it must either be vascular insufficiency (poor circulation) or diabetic neuropathy (nerve damage).

Then he had me take my shoe and sock off and sit on the end of the examining table. He squeezed each of my toes and noted that the color came back to them right away, and that my foot looked nice and pink, and that convinced him that circulation to the foot was fine.

Then, to check the nerves, he got a medical tuning fork (seriously, those are totally a thing) and tapped it and hald it against my ankle then at another part of my foot, and asked me how it felt. It felt the same in both places and I said so.

Then he did the same trick compare ankle to knee, and the result was the same. Based on this, he decided it was not diabetic neuropathy either.

I told him that the problem was the sole of the foot, which he had yet to examine, but that did not seem to make any difference. He said it was probably a monopathy, which meant just one nerve was affected, and that there was a good chance it would fix itself over time, and ushered me out of the office.

Almost immediately, I realized I was not satisfied with that result. But I have a serious problem asserting myself with doctors. I don’t know why. A Freudian might say that I have a deep unconscious need for a strong male authority figure, and all my doctors have been men, so my desire to believe in their authority is so strong that I automatically submit to them.

And there may be some truth there. Certainly I do not relish arguing with a doctor. I respect knowledge and they know a lot more than I do, so doing what they say seems sensible.

But what patients’ rights advocates will tell you is also true : nobody cares about your health more than you do, not even your doctor, and so you have to be willing to strongly advocate for yourself in order to make sure that your doctor(s), however well-meaning, do not just brush you aside.

Easier said than done for the likes of me. But I am seriously considering making another appointment and going in to see him again to try for a better result.

I mean, I still have a foot that constantly feels like I am wearing a leaky boot while trudging through the snow. I do not think I got across to him just how wrong I feel that is. When he asked me how bothersome it was, I stupidly but honestly said that it was not that painful, which it is not.

But it is distinctly wrong and it worries me terribly. It really does not feel right and it does not seem to me like the sort of thing one just ignores and hopes will go away.

I am a diabetic and something is wrong with my foot. I really expected that to set off alarm bells. I thought it would result in a referral to an endocrinologist or at the very least a podiatrist. Someone higher up the specialist food chain who would have the high powered knowledge to handle this.

Instead, I got the brush-off, just like so many times before with so many other doctors.

And Occam’s Razor would seem to dictate that the theory that “I have assertiveness issues with doctors” is somewhat more likely than “all doctors are pricks”.

It is easy for people with my sort of issues to decide that the other people are the problem. Many other unassertive people have done so. But at the end of the day, whether it is them or it is you, your behaviour is the only one you can control, so the ball is in your court either way.

As a result of today’s events, I feel kind of angry and restless and unsettled. I seem to be having trouble concentrating too, which might be because of the emotional issues or it might be because my brain wants some caffeine to help it focus.

I hope it’s not that I have developed a caffeine habit. I hate the thought of any sort of chemical dependency that is not medical in nature.

On the other hand, between tea, coffee, and cola, the entire world is addicted to caffeine, so who am I to hold out? And a strong case can be made that anything that helps a scatterbrained, absentminded dreamer like myself focus has got to be a good thing.

So I am thinking of switching my monthly Costco beverage from the very nice fruit mixes that I normally get to a flat of cans of Diet Coke, and see if adding more caff to my life is a net gain or not.

It might help me be more focused and productive and help chase away the kind of sludge that accumulates in my brain space from bad sleep and whatnot.

Or it might just raise my blood pressure and make me a lot less healthy in the long run and give me jittery caffeine nerves to boot.

Then again, another thought I have had is getting up every morning and getting fully dressed and sitting at the computer like I have a job.

Diet Coke might help with that.

Either that, or I have to start drinking coffee…

Today has been somewhat unpleasant.

Basically, the issue has been sleep. (Big surprise there.) I got to sleep a little later than usual, then got up at 7 am or so, which should have still been plenty of time to sleep but that is the thing with sleeping pills. They do not instantly evaporate when you want to be awake.

And I have no diet cola left, so I could not take the caffeine cure. Dammit.

So I was sleepy while watching Daily Show and Colbert with Joe and Julian. We were quite far behind, so even watched three episodes (well 2 and 5/6 but who is counting) did not quite catch us up.

Then I tried to get back to sleep, but I could not quite seem to just get to sleep and stay asleep. My god damned bladder kept waking me up. Isn’t there supposed to be a switch in the brain that is flipped when you sleep that slows down the production of urine so that you can get some goddamned sleep?

Well mine is busted, apparently, because I could not sleep more than an hour and a half max without being woken up by a full to bursting bladder.

And when this happens, I am always left wondering : where the hell was I keeping it all? In my bloodstream, I guess, and sometimes, my system just suddenly clears a backlog of urine production all at once and suddenly it is like I pee for a living.

It really bugs me, especially when it disrupts my sleep. It begins to feel like one of those Greek punishments for pissing off the gods, cursed to always be sleepy but never be able to sleep because you are always having to pee.

Of course, it is not just the whole “I am but a bend in the river” business that is making my little pond ripple with the tides today. I am also still worried about this whole deal with my right foot.

It is still getting super cold fairly often. Now that I am scrutinizing it, I notice that it also tingles sometimes like it is falling asleep. That suggests the vascular explanation to me, but it could just as easily be a nerve issue. Who knows? That is why I am going to see the doc.

So that worry is lurking in the back of my mind all the time, disturbing my peace and making relaxing enough to get some solid sleep difficult. That is not even including the actual physical discomfort from the issue, which is not severe by any stretch of the imagination. It is nothing like when I had that mega nasty finger infection. But it still sort of drains the happiness and calm from my consciousness, and I am a pretty ill person so it is not like I have a lot of that to keep me afloat in the first place.

Notice how water imagery permeates my talk of my emotional state? Pretty weird, right?

Been meaning to share this lately, so what the hell.

That is a super effective PSA to me, because it puts its point across extremely well without being preachy, angry, weepy, or accusatory.

The guy really bares his soul and that just blows me away. It got me right in the heart and really articulates why it is wrong to claim you are a nerd when you are not. I was not really sold on why people decry “fake nerds” until I saw this.

I am a highly inclusive person, so I figured if people wanted to join out little club, good on them. And I hate the kind of “not one of us!” divisive identity politics that lurks within the zeitgeist of any marginalized group. I tended to assume it was just people overcompensating for their own feelings of inadequacy by turning “oppressed minority” into “persecuted elite”, and that is offensive to me and goes against the real humanist goal of a place for everyone to feel good about themselves.

If your feeling better about yourself requires someone else feeling worse about themselves, then that is some evil zero sum bullshit and you are a bully, even if you do not do the bullying in person.

The idea is to increase the love and peace in the world, not just move it around!

But the guy in the PSA makes a very good point. Being a nerd is a lot more than just another subculture. A lot of us have suffered enormously from what is basically our handicap, and so for someone to just come along and put on our label because they think it’s chic or cute is as offensive as pretending you are a blind in order to panhandle.

Or to take it another metaphorical way, it is like pretending to be black. We need a word like “wigger” for these fake nerds. Something that makes it clear that they are phony people who are slumming for cred.

But the thing is, if you can stop being a nerd (or blind, or black), then you are not one of us. I am a socially awkward nerd with crippling social phobia due to (among other things) childhood bullying and I can’t just change clothes and leave it behind.

I am not ashamed to be a nerd. We are our own tribe, and I consider nerds my people. The happiest period of my life when when I was in college and had fellow nerds as friends for the first time ever.

But when someone just puts on fake Tiny Fey glasses and pretends to be klutzy and doofy just as a romantic ploy, that offends me terribly.

I understand why some people, mostly gals, might be tempted to dip a toe into a dating pool which still has very few women and the men will treat you like a goddess (for both good and ill) because they are not used to getting any positive female attention whatsoever.

But just remember, you are walking with the wounded, and you can hurts us a lot if you are just slumming in the ghetto where we live.