I feel somewhat better today.

I still feel sort of restless and caged and it takes a certain amount of concentration to keep my anxiety and/or agitation level down, but still, I feel pretty good, at least compared to recent norms.

I even woke up feeling good. That literally never happens. Generally, the best I can hope for in terms of a waking state is “pleasantly lazy”, and quite often it is more like “after three hours of light torture”.

To be honest, it’s a little freaky. But I am actively fighting my usual mistrust of happy moods and removing all the usual mood governors that I can in order to encourage this kind of ebullience.

Now today is quite sunny, and that might have a lot to do with my perkier mood. I really do seem to have solar powered moods, probably because I get so little direct sunlight that my circadian clock is absolutely starved for the stuff.

Make me wish my room had a balcony. I could sit out there and ready for an hour in the afternoon. We have a balcony off the living room, but it tends to be used mostly for storage and so there’s not a lot of room to just sit down with a good book.

Still, the idea of getting more sunshine to help power my happiness warrants some thought.

There has to be some way of making myself more active and outdoorsy without tripping my social anxiety too hard and too fast.

I am pondering asking for a bike for my birthday. But first, I have to shake off my fears of the bicycle being yet another thing I got but never use and at least give myself the chance to have some kind of acceptable form of exercise.

Then again, maybe I would be better off with a stationary bike. On the one hand, it does not get me out into the fresh air and sunshine, but on the other hand, I could get exercise without having to challenge my social anxiety at the same time.

But then again, I could exercise right now, no equipment needed. I could get plenty of exercise just doing leg lifts, push-ups, sit-ups, and all the other usual stuff. Leg lifts, range of motion, blah blah blah.

And yet somehow, I just… don’t. Like I have said before, there is a serious block between my intentions and action. A deep fear rests on my soul. It makes me afraid of investing effort into anything new. It demands an extremely high amount of reward per unit of energy expended. It keeps me down.

And I do not know how to break its grip. And as long as it has me locked away, I can’t make progress on anything at all.

But I do think that the Wellbutrin is doing… something. I definitely feel like something is shifting deep in my psyche. I still cannot really put my finger on it, but I know things are changing in me and it feels like I am struggling toward the surface of this deep dark pond I live under.

I am ready to struggle out onto land and at least become an amphibian, I think.

On the topic of depression, this list of 21 coping techniques is making the rounds online.

I agree with most of the points. This one seems relevant today :

10) Face a window as often as you can – at work, at home. Look out into the world. Watch. Observe. Try to find something you find pretty or interesting to focus on. And, handily remember that one in five of those people out there feel the way you do.

A lot of good stuff there. For one, facing the window will increase the amount of direct sunshine coming in through your eyes, and that will improve sleep regulation, and hence you will sleep better and that improves mood drastically.

That part I already knew. But I think finding something out there that you like to look at is a good idea too. It’s a simple, low-threat, low-effort way to develop one’s interest in the world outside oneself, and that can only help one’s outlook and mood.

I do not necessarily agree with this one, though :

17) Avoid fictional drama and tragedy like the plague. No Grey’s Anatomy, no to The Notebook, or anything that won a Pulitzer prize. You’ve got enough going on In Real Life. Comedy only. Or trashy stuff. Old episodes of WonderWoman? I’ve got the box set. Mindless drivel, like the latest CGI blockbuster. Or clever, funny books. David Sedaris. Jenny Lawson. Fiction exists to elicit emotion, and the emotion you need to express most right now is laughter.

It has been my experience that depression comes from suppressed emotion, and that sometimes something fictional that is somewhat sad or upsetting or scary can give a person a safe release of pent up feelings that improves their mood dramatically.

But that is not true for everyone, or for all things fictional. Some things are going to be too damned depressing to do anyone any good, and certain things are going to be triggers for the bad stuff inside and that is not going to help either.

Still, I think depressed people like myself need to at least be open to the idea that something that is maybe kind of sad or depressing might actually make them feel better in the long run.

You might have a good cry first. But there’s nothing wrong with that. It gets the sadness out. You trade a short time crying for a long time enjoying the benefits of less emotional congestion.

Oh, one last thing : check out this neat snack delivery service

You pay these Foodee people a fee and they deliver a box of healthy type snax to your door every week.

Pretty simple, and a great way to get around the problem of finding these products yourself. The makers get a steady market, you get neat healthier snacks, and Foodee gets a fee.

Totally the sort of thing I would get into if I had the $$.

Cosmos as my witness, I wonder what the hell is up with my dream life sometimes.

Been having another day where I sleep and dream a lot, and this time, it is not the nice kind of sleepy day where I feel nothing but relief at the end of the sleep fast and a pleasant relaxation and surrender.

No, this is the bad kind of sleepy day, where dreams completely kick my ass and I wake up feeling like I just ran a marathon through the desert with full plate armor on.

So here I am once again, freshly awoken from difficult sleep, covered in my own sweat like I have been marinating in it, and wanting nothing more than to just go the hell right back to sleep.

And there is something very discouraging about waking up from really deep and intense sleep, with dreams so intense that you feel lucky to have escaped them alive, and realizing that you do not have much choice about going right back to sleep soon and submitting yourself to more of the same.

So I guess that when I am done writing this, I will be laying back down to get my head kicked around like a soccer ball by my dreams some more. Yay.

One dream I had today deserves special mention.

I dreamed that it was my birthday and I was eagerly anticipating the party et al. It was sort of taking place in the house I grew up on, or at least, the bizarrely constructed version of it in my dreams.

So I was watching the preparations for my birthday party going on, and while doing that, I drifted off to sleep. (Sleeping in my dreams again. I am so lazy. )

When I woke up, I headed into the kitchen (the kitchen was our dining room as well when I was a kid) and found that I had slept through the entire party. I had missed my birthday party entirely. The food was all eaten, most of the guests were gone, the decorations had all been put away. It was all over.

Needless to say, I was incredibly angry. They had my birthday party without me? Nobody thought to come wake me up and tell me the party was starting? Nobody noticed that the birthday boy was missing? They all just had fun without me? Angry is not nearly a strong enough word. I was apoplectic.

And to make it worse, the people who were left were quite indifferent about the whole thing. They just shrugged their shoulders philosophically and said “Well, you weren’t here. ” They seemed to think that if they all had a good time, I had nothing to complain about.

So yeah, I was a might peeved. I stomped around complaining bitterly (and loudly), trying to assemble some kind of meal from the few scraps of food left behind by the hungry hordes.

The dream changed tenor, though, after I complained that people had not even left gifts, and it was revealed that actually, they had, and the people remaining had just been hiding them from me so they could surprise me with them.

That partially placated me, at least. Who does not love getting gifts?

I do not remember exactly what I got. I know that one of them was this bizarre gift card cum birthday card which was for $39.52 (why that number?), and somehow involved me having to peel off a sticker with a picture of lightning on it and stick it some other place on the card, like I was doing one of those crazy Publisher’s Clearing House contests with all the things to peel and stick various places.

Someone commented that this was a pretty unusual gift, and I said “Well, the person who sent it to me is.. unique. ” And I said it in a sort of blushing, pleased way, like it was from a secret admirer.

No idea who it was though. My dreams are disturbingly lacking in specific people. Just generic placeholders, without names or even individual personalities.

Well, I have always been more transpersonal than was good for me.

Oh, I also dreamed that I was working on a video game that was going to be some kind of virtual board game, and the computer I was doing this on was tucked away in a room off the offices of a municipal pool of some sort.

And there was definitely an enjoyably clandestine aspect to the whole thing. I was using this computer stealthily, like I was not supposed to be there, and from time to time I had to get up and move around so I would not get caught.

Though I had the feeling that I was doing this for some larger power. So I guess I was black ops?

And there was some confusing stuff about my using some enormous synthesizer that was laid out like one of those big electric organs with three keyboards plus foot pedals.

It had both a 3.5 inch floppy and a 5.25 inch floppy built in, and there was this stack of little cards that supposedly had the sheet music for various songs on it even though they were way too small.

So to sum up, in the dream world, I have been pretty busy, at least.

That dream about the birthday really sticks with me, though, because that totally seems like something that could happen to me in the real world.

It is exaggerated, of course, but the essence of it resonates with how I feel about myself, and how I feel about how others see me.

I have deep, deep feelings of unimportance and worthlessness, and a deep part of me is always paranoid that people do not really value my presence in their lives and honestly find life a lot easier and more fun when I am not around.

So that dream struck deep at some of my innermost fears.

That accomplishes something, I hope.

Hooray for catharsis, I guess.

Had a bad moment tonight. I was eating supper and watching a show about alternate energy sources on Discovery Science (awesome channel!) when I suddenly got this feeling like a giant invisible foot was pushing me down.

It was basically an amplification of that weak feeling that I have been getting lately. It was pretty frightening, to be honest. In additional to the squished feeling, I felt nauseous, my head was pounding painfully, and I felt a terrible heavy dread.

Luckily, it passed quite quickly, and I feel more or less normal now. But this is a worrysome development and I really hope it does not recur.

This incident only makes me all the more determined to hash this out with my therapist on Thursday. This shit did not happen before I went on Wellbutrin. I might be having a bad reaction to it.

Certainly, this sort of thing makes me worried that the additional strain on my no doubt extremely weak and deteriorated cardiovascular system, which already has to deal with my obesity, caused my introducing Wellbutrin to all my other meds is simply more than this unhealthy carcass can take.

It would be ironic indeed if the medication that is supposed to give me a new lease on life instead ends up making me even sicker.

But spring has also sprung, and it is getting hotter by the day (joy), and the air is filled with allergens, and so Wellbutrin is not the only factor in play.

Mood-wise, it is not been a great day either. I spent a lot of today feeling depressed and angry and feeling like just staying in bed because another day of my crappy stupid pointless and most of all unsatisfying life was just more than I could take.

Of course, I did get up eventually and drag myself through my usual sort of day. Spent hours this afternoon trying to catch up on my Facebook feed. I really ought to cut down on the amount of stuff that posts to my feed. But there is just so much interesting stuff out there!

In a sense, I was better when I could not have the most interesting stuff on the Internet delivered to my virtual doorstep every day. When I had to go find it, my inherent laziness kept me from getting run ragged by my various interests.

But with Facebook, it’s so easy that it actually becomes a problem. First world problem, I know.

And I am doing a lot of sighing lately. And dreaming.

Would you believe that twice today, I dreamed about cake? I had two dreams where I had access to a very large quantity of cake. And I was stuffing myself, like any fat boy.

And in the second dream, I actually said to someone “If I eat one more piece of cake today, I will turn into a cake. ” So I actually remembered the cake orgy from the first dream while having the second dream.

And the second dream had a whole crosswalk in my home town replaced with a vast cake that was supposed to be a memorial to someone (??), and that is getting into some surreal shit right there.

Reminded me of this infamous music video :

I think the video is brilliant but a lot of people, including Tom Petty himself, thought it was way too creepy. First time with a new video director. Last time too, I would guess.

Anyhow, the part I am referring to is at the end of the video, right here. Warning, nightmare fuel.

That video is widely credited with inspiring this famous sequence from Star Trek : The Next Generation, although it could be just a coincidence.

Anyhow, in the dream, shortly after saying the bit about turning into a cake (eep), part of my normal consciousness must have seeped into the dream because I said “I am going to have to take so much insulin after this!”

Honestly, after eating like twelve pieces of sheet cake, I would probably be dead. Or at least in the hospital. My blood would turn into maple syrup.

So there you have it, fat guy dreams of cake. It’s humiliating to think about. Of all the magnificent possibilities for spiritual growth inducing travails, soul cleansing nightmares, mind stretching surrealist hallucinations, or just plain old down and dirty fun, what does my mind come up with?

Dessert. How very sad.

I guess the lack of sweetness in my life has left a vast spiritual void within me that my dreaming mind is desperately trying to fill. I never thought, before my diagnosis with diabetes, that I was someone with a really strong desire for sugary treats.

But I guess you do not know how important something is to you until you have to go without. And given how often I dream of eating all the things I should not, it was really important.

And, to cut myself a little slack here, it could be that the sugary stuff in my dream is just a stand-in for all the other things, all the other pleasures that I want out of life but cannot have.

The unfulfilled desire for sweet things is simply the simplest route to connect my desires with their fulfillment. In the grand scheme of things, the desire for a chocolate bar would be the easiest for me to fulfill. It requires nothing but a store and the price.

That doesn’t make it a good idea, mind you. But I can see how it is the shortest bridge for my sleeping mind to cross.

After all, all human beings crave sweet things. Even tiny babies barely dry from birth show a preference for sweet over all things.

Still, I really wish my brain would come up with something else for me to dream about. Something a little less stereotypical of a fat guy.

Hey brain! What the hell is wrong with some good old-fashioned sex?

That’s nice and primal, right?

And vastly more entertaining.

Dumb joke : I am hoping that Wellbutrin will make me a Well Bertrand.

In the interested of squeezing out as much of my pain as possible out into these lonely pages of mine, I decided that today is the day that I will talk about my health, and my worries about it.

After all, talking out your worries is supposed to be good for you, and I could use as much wellness as I can get my fat, sweaty hands on lately.

What has me worried right now, what the current tense has me currently tense, is this vague but pervasive weak feeling I have been feeling ever since I started on my current dose of Wellbutrin.

It is tricky to describe, but I just feel sort of tired and weak, like my body is heavier and my head weighs twice as much and there is just not enough air in this old balloon of mine any more.

Now first off, don’t worry, I will tell my therapist all about this on Thursday, and we will see if this is a bad reaction to the Wellbutrin or what.

But it has me worried. When I first took the 300 mg dose, I had a reaction that mirrored the physical symptoms of a panic attack : pounding head, rapid pulse, profuse sweating.

Now Wellbutrin is of the stimulant class of drugs (technically), so that was not entirely unexpected, and I more or less dismissed it as an adjustment effect that would fade over time.

And so far, that has only recurred once. Normally, if I am already busy and active, I barely notice any kind of side effects at all apart from the faint sense of disconnectedness that I used to get when I was first taking Paxil.

And I figure, I am radically changing the very chemistry of my brain and hence shifting the very ground upon which my entire consciousness, and hence, my very being, rests.

That is bound to make me feel a little weird now and then. At the very least.

But this weak feeling is something different, and far more worrying. At first it came in waves, but now it is pretty much constant. I feel like someone turned up the gravity on me, and that is not a good feeling.

Now, I have had attacks of this sort of feeling before, long before I ever tried Wellbutrin, and so it might not be related to the new drug at all. It might just be one of the weirder stops on the long bus route that is my sleep cycle.

This could be part and parcel with the fact that I am catching up on sleep lately and that my sleep apnea has left me somewhat deprived of oxygen, and hence, tired and weak.

Heck, I might just be kinda dehydrated from night sweats. A lot of things can influence one’s energy levels and wakefulness, and so it is not necessarily the Wellbutrin that is to blame.

But still, I worry. I worry about my health in general, to be honest.

I don’t want to wind up a hypochondriac again, like I was in my early 20s. It was hard enough to dig myself out of that terrible hole the first time, and I did it all by myself. I was not well enough to seek therapy or even get some sort of useful answer from a doctor. I had no perspective on the whole thing as a mental health issue. I thought I was physically sick, and it took years to figure out that I was not, exactly, except for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

So I am working hard to maintain perspective. But I also don’t want to overcorrect for the problem either. The next decade of my life is going to be fraught with potential health issues, and I do not want to be one of those schmucks who ends up seriously ill because they ignored the signs of illness when they were minor and only end up getting treated for the illness when it forces them to pay attention to it by causing a very serious problem.

And I have ample reason to be worried. The years between 40 and 50 years of age are extremely dangerous for the morbidly obese like me. This is when that “morbid” part comes home to roost in a serious way.

It is when we start to die.

And before we die, we can end up in a very bad way. I am terrified of ending up debilitated to the point where I can’t even function at my current shitty level.

And that means that if I want to avoid such a terrible fate, I am going to have to find my way to losing some of this goddamned excess weight.

Maybe Wellbutrin will help me find the motivation to do that. Something has to heal this profound disconnected between intention and action that has kept me in the same place for my entire adult life.

I have seen little signs that the Wellbutrin is doing me some good. Doing things seems like less of an enormous effort lately. I sometimes even find myself doing things subconsciously, and yet doing them right. That must be how normal people do stuff.

And it would be very good for me if I could relax some of the hyper-vigilence that has been inherent to my mental state for a long long time. If I could trust the peripheries of my consciousness to handle small routine tasks instead of approaching every situation like I am a member of the bomb squad who does not know where the bomb is yet, that would do a great deal to relax my entire mental state and would presumably free up a lot of energy currently being wasted on paranoia.

And I am convinced that recovering that kind of energy is vital to becoming a happier me.

It takes a certain amount of mental horsepower to keep one’s mood aloft.

I am determined to get that kind of energy back from my neuroses.

Been having a sleepy day today, and it is a vast relief.

I have been having trouble with sleep lately. Even taking three Quetiapine was only buying me five hours of very unsatisfying shallow sleep.

And I could feel myself growing a little stupider as the sleep debt built up. It was getting harder and harder to concentrate, and my mental discipline was shot. Even just focusing enough to write a blog entry took an enormous effort. My brain just wanted to lie down for a while.

Luckily, the drought has ended. Most likely cause : taking my Wellbutrin in the morning, like I am supposed to do, as opposed to with supper, which is what I had been doing.

The most common side effect of Wellbutrin is insomnia, and so you take it when you first get up in the morning in order to make sure there is as much time between taking it and your going to sleep again as possible.

But I was being lazy and just taking it at the same time as my other daily meds, and that is suppertime. So I was probably causing my own insomnia.

Well, no more. It’s mornings for me from now on. If that means trudging through a few sleepy days in order to pay off that sleep debt, that is fine by me.

Now for evolution. I just watched a BBC documentary called Are We Still Evolving?, and it got me to thinking about evolution, which happens to be one of my favorite subjects.

Here’s an excerpt from the show. Can’t link to the full thing because the BBC wants to sell you the DVD.

That gives you the flavour of the thing, at least. Honestly, it was a little all over the map and dragged in things not entirely relevant to the question, so you are not missing that much.

But to answer the main question : yes, we are still evolving. There can be no doubt of that. Evolution is not a process which can be stopped. It can only be altered.

The next question is “How, exactly, are we evolving?”.

That is a far trickier question. Modern society is so complicated, with so many factors in play that may or may not lead to reproductive success, that it makes it impossible to plot even the vaguest trajectory for the evolution of the species, at least in those of us living in the modern world.

Certainly, the traditional pressures of Darwinian evolution are still in play. Chief amongst those would be classic good looks. A handsome man or a beautiful woman is still going to be more likely to get the mate of their choice than the baseline of the species.

And other things, like reproductive health, robust immune system, and some forms of intelligence no doubt lead to traditional “success” in the modern context, and also contribute to being able to raise children in a stable home with good nutrition and a full education.

But in the modern world, 99 percent of babies reach reproductive age, and the vast majority of those babies will grow up to have at least one child, so those pressures are not very strong, and probably do not matter much in the long run.

And we have accomplished this extraordinarily high level of reproductive success without needing to wait for evolution, because as human beings, we evolve via culture.

If a human being has to adapt to a change in environment, we do not have to wait for evolution’s slow cruel grind to select out the ones naturally better at survival in the new environment until, many generations hence, if we are lucky, our distant progeny is perfectly adapted to said new environment.

We just build tools. If it gets colder, we make warmer clothing. If the best food is high up on the tree, we knock it down with a pole. If the area floods, we learn to build our houses on stilts.

And because we have language and culture, we can teach other human beings to adapt as well. We are not limited to our individual successes. The innovation of one can become the commonplace tool of many.

Hence, the human species is the most widely spread single species in the world. There is no corner of this globe where humans do not live. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, humanity has found ways to adept to environments as diverse as Pacific islands, broad flat plains, jagged frosty mountains, and vast stretches of frozen tundra.

By any measure, we are the most successful species on Earth. And we have done it far faster than the glacial pace of evolution could ever produce.

So my real answer to the question of whether we are still evolving is “Yes, via culture”.

And on that scale, we have never been evolving faster than we are right now. With the advent of the Internet, the innovation of one can become the commonplace tool of the entire species. With economic globalization, the products which support the modern standard of living are available to more human beings than ever before in the history of humanity. Evolution via innovation goes faster every day.

And in an interesting spin on evolutionary pressures, most of the innovation is in response not to our environment but to ourselves. We are constantly shifting the playing field for ourselves, and that means innovation sparks innovation ad infinitum.

Some people worry that this will somehow lead to a rate of innovation and change that will be so blindingly fast that nobody will be able to keep up with it.

But that’s a ridiculous thought on the face of it. Innovation is not some abstract force that drags us hapless humans along without mercy.

It is a human force and it goes at human speeds. If an innovation is too early or too weird or otherwise before its time, it does not get adopted, and has to wait until the time is right.

It might start to change a little faster than us older people can keep up with, but it will never go faster than we can handle as a species.

So relax, and enjoy the bumpy but exciting trip into the future!

Something came up in therapy today that I want to explore, much as one explores the empty socket of a pulled tooth with one’s tongue after an extraction.

It has to do with a stark and desperate truth : that the chemical imbalance of depression renders you incapable of believing certain things, no matter what the evidence says.

I find that idea extremely offensive to my intellectual sensibilities, as would anyone. We all like to believe that we arrive at our beliefs through observation, insight, logic, and deduction, and that no matter what the truth is, we will believe it if the evidence supports that conclusion.

Certainly, I have lived a great deal of my life thinking exactly that. From my first philosophy course onward, I envisioned myself as a rugged philosopher, willing to examine anything at all in this mad reaction chamber of a mind of mine in my pursuit of the almighty Truth.

The idea that there are things I would be incapable of believing, no matter the logic, no matter the evidence, flies in the face of such conceit. And to face this hard truth is humbling indeed.

And yet, in a way, I have known for a long time. For many, many years now, I have been blithely saying that it was one thing to know something intellectually but quite another thing to feel it. I have even talked about the difference between knowing something and believing it.

But it has only been recently that this picture has taken on this new layer of clarity, and only today, during therapy, that I put it out there into the world in words which I cannot take back or suppress.

There are things I have no choice but to believe, and things I cannot believe, no matter the logic, no matter how much evidence, because of these goddamned chemicals in my brain.

It is a frightening thought to face one’s mental illness head on like this. Looking one’s insanity standing there, naked in the clear light of day, makes one feel small and helpless in the world.

If I cannot even trust this phenomenal mind of mine and its ability to reason, to observe, and to find the truth of things, what can I trust? Where do you turn when your mind is suspect?

In a way, I have been fighting this fight ever since I was a little kid. Like a lot of kids, I was afraid of the dark. I only conquered that fear with reason, namely, telling myself that, logically, there was nothing in my room when it was dark that was not there in the light.

In that case, I was able to conquer irrational fear with the power of logic and reason. Perhaps this is what set me on the path I have pursued ever since.

And to this day, when I am struggling with my inner demons, it is my mind I use against them. I push myself hard towards the truth as opposed to the filthy lies my chemical imbalance pushes me towards.

I told my therapist this morning that fighting against depression is like walking against the wind. It is this force always pushing you back, and it takes a lot of effort and determination to make any progress.

And that is how I feel about it now. For the first time, I see my struggle clearly as a fight to make myself believe the positive things about myself that I know deep down are true, but that depression has kept me from believing until now.

I am hoping that now that I have this better understanding of the nature of the problem, I can better steel myself for the fight and press onward towards not just the truth, but my own happiness.

Of course, this battle will not be won by reason alone. It is, in fact, a contest of will, and will and reason are not the same thing. Reason is of the mind. But will is an emotion, at its core. It can be shored up by reason or drained by false belief, but it is an emotion nevertheless.

And the truth remains that no amount of willpower or skulduggery will solve this problem by itself. The real healing is purely emotional, and in some ways out of my conscious control.

I don’t mean that there is nothing I can do to help myself get better. Not at all.

But it means that it cannot be done entirely under the power of this amazing brain of mine. I will have to walk past the edge of my reason and deal with the deep mystical truths of my own soul.

It means I have to let go of trying to rigidly control the process and the outcome via this overpowering brain of mine and thus force myself into a mold of my own devising.

Instead, I have to release control and accept that I have to walk whatever path is before me, without knowing exactly where it leads, and even just follow my heart sometimes.

Even the thought of doing something purely because I feel like it, without knowing if that feeling is “true” or “right” or “smart”, scares the hell out of me and makes me break out in a cold sweat.

But I have been taking the easiest path for way too long and it has gotten me absolutely nowhere. I want to build up my courage instead, and learn to fight the urge to try to hide from life until it goes way.

It is never going away until the day I die, and if I want to get some living done before that, and show the world just how amazing I truly am, I am going to have to learn to fight the current and get my ass upstream, no matter how hard I have to row.

Hopefully, with Wellbutrin’s help, I will find a way to get on with my life at last.

I can’t wait.

I just had an awesome idea for a business, and it sort of came to me in a dream.

I dreamed that me and two other people were going to go scare the crap out of some little thug who had bullied a kid we knew and destroyed the kid’s backpack. What’s worse, the bully had been taking food off his victim’s lunch tray for weeks.

So we decided to stage a little intervention, put a real scare into the little shit, and hopefully get the money to pay for his victim’s new backpack plus all the food he stole out of the bully.

Yeah, this is clearly illegal and a terrible idea in reality, but hey, dream.

However, when I woke up from my nap and the events of the dream were floating around in the as yet unset Jello of my mind, I suddenly realized that there was the germ of a great idea in there.

Imagine this ad :

Is your child being bullied in school? Is the school refusing to do what it takes to protect your child? Are you at your wit’s end trying to protect your child? Is your child afraid to go to school?

Then call Bullyguard. We will assign a trained professional to protect your child. Our professionals are adults trained in both child care and self defense. They will walk your child to and from school (or accompany them on the bus), and stay with the child all day, protecting them between classes and during lunch and recess as well.

This acts as a strong deterrent to anyone looking to harm your child. Most of the time, this deterrent alone is enough to keep your child safe.

But don’t worry… in case a physical intervention is required, our professional Bullyguards are highly trained in stopping schoolyard violence without any harm to any child.

So call Bullyguard. We step in where the school system fails.

We can keep your child safe.

Would that not kick ass? Ideally, this would be a volunteer service and therefore free to any parent who needs it, but I am realistic enough to know that to provide such a service would probably be expensive and it might just have to be a not-for-profit instead.

It would be hard to get enough people to be willing to stick with a kid throughout the entire school day without offering them some kind of financial compensation. Even with all the adults who were bullied as children as potential volunteers.

And it goes (almost) without saying that these people would have to be highly trained and extremely disciplined. The job is not to take revenge on the bullies that tormented you as a child and it would be absolutely unacceptable for them to strike or otherwise seriously injure a child in the call of duty, no matter how much the little cretins might deserve it.

The priority is protection, not schoolyard justice. Keep the child safe.

And honestly, if you are an adult of average size and strength should be able to easily restrain a child without harming them.

Also, every child would be given a standard lecture at the beginning about how this is not a license to be obnoxious and mean to other children, knowing they cannot retaliate.

If the kid gets too obnoxious, their Bullyguard would simply walk away (after giving them many warnings, of course) and then they would be left to deal with the consequences.

This would only be in extreme situations where the client child is completely out of control, of course. Essentially, when the client child becomes a bully themselves. The goal of Bullyguard is to end bullying, not end up protecting it.

Now, I am not sure what the legal picture would be for such a service. It is not impossible that schools, quite irrationally, would resent the implied rebuke of the presence of a Bullyguard, and would look for legal reasons to get rid of them.

And there are laws keeping adults away from schools and children, although those are mostly targeted at known sex offenders. But it is not impossible that a school would put in a policy that no adults that are not parents of children are allowed on school grounds, period.

You know, for the kids’ “safety”.

So our Bullyguards would have to be bonded and with full background checks and all that can possibly be done to assure parents they are safe around kids.

Even then, it would be likely there would be some schools that just would not allow them, and the service just plain would not be available there. There would be no way to legally force a school to allow the service there, although the Bullyguard organization could certainly advocate to be allowed access at every available venue, and accuse schools that will not allow it in of being “soft on bullying” and even, should it come to this, a “haven for bullies” or “the bully’s favorite school”.

The other legal angle to worry about would angry parents of bullies trying to sue you because one of your Bullyguards dared lay a hand on their precious little snowflake, no matter how gently.

I think the best angle of defense on that would be if Bullyguards all had lapel cameras that documented everything they did, and therefore have legal evidence of both the bullying and the response to show in court, should the need arise.

The bully’s parents would probably not want the whole world to see what a little shit their kid has been, let alone trying to plead their case in front of a jury or a judge with such clear evidence.

No uploading videos to YouTube, though. As bad as bullies are, you do not want to tar the kid for life.

They DO grow out of it, most of the time.

So what do you think? I think it would be a highly valuable service, and be a very strong force towards ending bullying once and for all.

First off, on my own personal level, I am feeling guilty right now.

I declined to accompany Felicity to Overeaters Anonymous for the second week in a row tonight, and I feel terrible about it. She sounded really sad and depressed when I talked to her and told her I was not going tonight, and honestly, I feel like shit right now.

I feel selfish and callous and petty and gross. I am so sorry Felicity. Next time for sure!

So that’s my own toxic behaviour. Lesson learned, I hope. But the main thrust of today’s entry is discussion of this very interesting article about the science of toxic behaviour in online gaming.

It’s from the wonderfully named blog Gamasutra, and it discussed, in some depth, the real science being done to study how this “toxic” behaviour that we hear about (verbal abuse, bullying, offensive language, etc) pervading online gaming comes from and how it spreads.

The science was done by Jeffrey Lin, Lead Designer of Social Systems for League of Legends, a massively popular online game where teams of good guys and bad guys vie for supremacy in a very fast paced multiplayer battle arena.

The first thing he and his team discovered is that this toxicity did not originate from a hardcore group of regular “trolls” that make life miserable for others all the time, and enjoy it.

I confess, this was a surprise to me. I just assumed there was a group of assholes peeing in the pool for everyone. Perhaps I was falling prey to the psychological error of attributing others’ behaviour to permanent attributes rather than temporary circumstances.

Well I was dead wrong. Lin’s team found that, instead, this negative behaviour originated most often in players with no previous pattern of toxic behaviour and who were not any more likely to be toxic later on.

Instead, the data suggested that the originators were otherwise nontoxic people having a “bad day”. This aligns with other social behavioural studies I have read about where a lot of the sorts of behaviour we think would only come from terrible people comes from, instead, normal people having a “bad day”.

So if the source is so intermittent, how does toxicity spread? Is there some kind of ripple effect, where one person’s bad day pollutes an entire channel of communication?

That would make sense to me. Often, one person’s angry, aggressive behaviour makes others angry and aggressive as well, both via empathy and purely in self-defense.

This led to an even more interesting result :

…investigate this idea the researchers conducted an experiment in which cross-team chat, as one of the main venues for negative interactions, was made optional for individual players. And indeed, they observed a significant decrease in all measures of toxicity (offensive language, obscenity, and displays of negative attitudes). Moreover, the total percentage of games using chat remained the same (only 46-47% included no chat, both before and after). Lin and team therefore concluded that shielding players from toxic behavior can in fact prevent it from spreading.

So simply by giving people the ability to turn the chat option off, they improved the standard of behaviour. Presumably, once everyone realizes that people can just stop listening to them at any moment, they realize that they had better behave or they will lose their audience.

There is a similar option in IRC, where users can “ignore” other users, but from what I have seen, that is only somewhat effective. The whole point of IRC is chat, after all, and people acting out only need one person listening to get the feedback they want.

Taking the social experimentation to a marvelous new level, Lin’s team then added a Tribunal to the game, where players could vote on whether or not another’s behaviour was worthy of being banned from playing the game, and for how long.

This harnesses the wisdom of crowds. It might surprise a lot of misanthropes, but most people are good people most of the time, and the thing about toxic behaviour is that most people can recognize it right away and most people will agree on what it is if given concrete examples.

Sure, there might be vindictive people who vote the maximum penalty every single time because of their own unresolved anger issues. And there might be softhearted people who vote the opposite. But those two minority groups will cancel each other out and therefore have nil effect on the final outcome.

I think this sort of research has implications far outside the world of online gaming. Bad behaviour is a problem throughout society, and while much has been written about the sorts of bad behaviour considered to be a breach of the social contract and therefore criminal, we know relatively little about the little crimes of manners, consideration, behaviour, and so forth that we merely call “rude”.

And it is very tempting, when you meet someone who is being very rude and unfair to someone else, to assume that this is a horrible person who is like this all the time.

It’s easy, it’s quite satisfying, and it’s very human. After all, we are making the judgment based on all the information that we have. The fact that this is not nearly enough information to make a judgment is irrelevant. We humans do not have the luxury of always waiting for enough information. We have to make judgments and decisions and act upon them in realtime, inferring as much as we can from whatever facts we have, and that leads to snap judgments of others based on very little info at all.

But maybe that person is just having a “bad day”. the sort of bad day that any of us might have when our lives are filled with work and stress and we are tired and cranky.

When it is us, we have all the information we need to know that an occasional sharp remark or outburst of temper comes from many complex situational factors, and not from a fundamentally rotten personality.

We should strive to show such understanding to others.