Monthly Archives: May 2013

Two videos and something you will not believe exists

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Had a very productive session with the therapist today.

We refocused on anger (my least favorite and hence most important thing to talk about) then ended up talking about a related issue, which is arrogance and intelligence.

I won’t go into it in great detail yet because I am still processing it and I have links to share, but the gist of it was that one of the biggest blocks to my becoming a more integrated person is my inability to really deal with just how intelligent I am.

More on that later. Now, for some cool links from today’s web wanderings!

First off, the sweetest and most awesome thing you will see today.

A dear sweet old granny wrote a song about her granddaughter’s upcoming lesbian wedding, and GLBT marriage in general, and it will make you feel all full of sunshine and happiness.

Isn’t she just adorable? I totally want to give her a big hug. She also manages to sum up the gay marriage date with remarkable clarity and simplicity. And to think, she did it all out of love!

When sweet little old grannies are on the side of gay marriage because they correctly understand that it is about love and family, you just know the opponents of gay marriage are doomed.

Not that we need any more evidence. Senior citizens are the population most rapidly switching sides to the pro gay marriage position, presumably because they all have children and grandchildren who have come out of the closet and want to get married, and love of your children and their children is far, far stronger than any stupid and hateful political position.

And all over the world, country after country, and state after state, are joining the modern world and embracing gay marriage with absolutely no ill effects. That slender thread of plausibility to the notion that gay marriage might do some vague sort of harm has been snapped.

And now the opponents just look petty and mean, which is just and proper, because that is actually all that they have ever been.

Next up, a lady with some damn good ideas stated well.

I love this video because the speaker does such an excellent job of making the clear, nuts and bolts, logical case for liberal values like investing in early childhood care because it actually save the system money in the long run.

And I completely agree with her. I think there should be a better system for making sure that kids are looked after from the day they are born than what we have now, where right when childcare is at its most expensive, parents have the financial drain of having to pay for childcare, either via a babysitter or some kind of child care center.

Either that, or have an even bigger financial drain from having one parent quit work.

We need to face the fact that raising a child from infancy to school age is an incredibly demanding job, and yet the truth is that the two parent income family is here to stay,

The only way to reasonably resolve this problem, in my opinion, is government subsidized child care. I would be open to the notion of it working on a voucher style system, with the rider that if you take government vouchers, you are not allowed to charge any more than that.

I would also, however, be open to it being completely government run, like the school system.

And yes, I do have some doubts about creating a system where kids are raised by the State even more than they are now.

But as long as the little ones go home to their parents every night and on the weekends, I don’t see this as a big problem.

After all, with both parents working, they would not be seeing their parents anyhow. It would be a babysitter or some for-profit childcare center either way.

The main change would be the freeing of young parents from financial strain.

Finally, the thing you will not believe exists.

I have two words for you people : EDIBLE. ANUS.

I dare you to click on this link (NSFW, technically)!

Yes, somewhere in this big old world, someone decided that what this big old world really needed was big old assholes made of chocolate.

I say it’s only “technically” NSFW, because while it is a reasonably reasonably facsimile of a butthole, it really does not look like much.

If you saw it out of context, it’s at best a fifty-fifty chance that you would even recognize it as what is was. You might just think it was an interestingly textural bit of abstract art.

Still, hats off to this company for making something so breathtakingly fucked up. I have no idea what the thought process that went into creating this product was, but I bet it was disgusting.

And here’s the kicker : they have been in business since 2004. That means that this business model is successful and there is a real market for chocolate bungholes out there.

I wonder how they advertise. Hell, I wonder where they advertise. Brown Eye Aficianado Magazine? Better Homes And Stinkeyes? Bed, Buttholes, and Beyond”

Or is this the sort of thing that spreads entirely by… word of mouth?

Maybe it all started with a very unusual special order. And the person who ordered it loved it so much that he told all his anally fixated friends about it and suddenly the chocolatiers in question had a very unusual but lucrative business on their hands.

I can only assume that the largest portion of their custom comes from people looking for that really special gag gift to give their otherwise unflappable target.

It would also make for a really classy way to tell them you think they are an asshole.

And the card read “Saw this and immediately thought of you, dear! XOXOXO!”

I suppose it could also work as a “dare you to eat it” Fear Factor type challenge.

Either way… you have all learned something today.

That the world is full of assholes… but some of them are made of chocolate!

Wandering through the forest

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Wandering through the forest
Afraid and alone
No fire for comfort
No place to call home

No path to follow
No place I can rest
Just wandering, wandering
On unending quest

I walk all alone
In the darkness so green
Don’t know where I’m going
Don’t know where I’ve been

I have no destination
Though the hour grows late
But I cannot stop searching
The tension’s too great

In this endless unwinding
Of spider-thing thread
While it lasts, I will wander
When it ends, I’ll be dead


Bout time I actually wrote a damned poem.

See, it’s not unusual for my head to be full of fragments of poetry that come spilling out of my hyperactive and ever so fertile imagination, and often poems (or songs) will spontaneously begin in my mind, and sometimes develop quite a ways purely inside my skull.

The unusual part is that this time, I actually did something about it. I was pondering what to write about tonight, and the first stanza came to me, and I thought “You know what? For once, I will just go for it.”

And it feels good to get it out there. Usually a hell of a lot of creativity is bouncing around inside my skull looking for a way out that it never finds.

I am not sure why this is, although my theory that I use all these ideas of mine as a kind of hoarder’s insulation against the world deserves a good look.

But more broadly, I think I just compulsively keep everything in. At some point in my life, I became obsessively retentive. I buried nearly every emotion I had, and very little ever passed through the door between the world inside and the world without.

That creates a terrible tension inside because all those repressed emotions are still in there, trying to express themselves in the world, and as this awful energy potential grows, it takes more and more of your energy just to hold everything inside.

Hence, depression. It drains your energy to the point where even the basic mood maintenance routines that healthy people have to keep them up and going and interacting with the world fail, and your mood spirals downward until all you can do is give up on everything but the absolutely minimum required for survival and the few activities you can still manage to do without waking the raging, screaming demons inside.

It’s no way to live, but sometimes, it is all you have left.

As you might have guessed, I have been feeling a little down today. Still pouring the positiveness into myself as fast as I can, and still determined to push myself upwards with every ounce of my strength for as long as I can, and to never ever give up on myself again.

But today, I was feeling restless, bored, irritable, and just crappy in general. I think I am reaching another peak in my feelings of frustration and boredom with my sad little life, and that means another period of emotional crisis as all these latent energies strain and push against the thick (but thinning) clog made of dirty ice between my emotions and actual action.

Not to be gross, but it is a lot like constipation. Emotional constipation. And catharsis is like relief.

And to delicately continue this potentially very disgusting metaphor, I am not sure what it would be like to be emotionally regular. A certain amount of repression of emotion is normal and healthy and even necessary in order to be a civilized adult.

But it has to be matched by expression. That emotional debt must be paid regularly in one way or another. Those emotions must be regularly expressed, or you become very ill inside… even toxic.

And to go to the previous metaphor for what I swear will be the last time, odds are that you can’t become healthy until the blockage is cleared, along with all that was blocked.

And as much as part of me wishes I could just blow up the dam and let loose the entire flood all at once, the irritating truth is that it can only really be done a little at a time, all the time, with the occasional uptick to speed along the process.

So no big dam burst. Just opening the sluice gate wider for a while.

And I know there will be ups and downs in this process. There will be days when I feel like crap and the old demons will start clearing their throats and offering me their fell services once again.

But I am determined to keep the upward pressure constant and relentless. No retreat. No surrender.

And if the upward pressure is constant and relentless, and the downward pressure intermittent and variable, then the upward pressure has to win, especially as more and more of my mental resources are recovered and added to the power of the upward pressure.

So from this point onward, the only way to go is up. I might not rise in a straight line like a rocket (or maybe I will!), but I will rise, reach for the stars, and grow.

I am sick and tired of this cramped little life of mine. I am not a small person on any level. I am a big guy with a big brain, a big heart, and a big personality, who thinks big and loves the big picture.

I deserve so much more than this sad little life of mine. I have so much to contribute to the world once I fully evict the unwanted guest of depression from the premises, that at times it feels like I am going to burst from the sheer potential of it all.

It’s that, more than anything else, that makes patience so difficult. I have so much eager enthusiasm bottled up inside me, waiting for me to figure out how to harness it, that sometimes it is like waiting for a sneeze to finally happen.

Soon, I tell myself. Soon.

I am so very eager to bloom.

The new groove

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Still working on cutting a new channel for myself, a new container for my ever so liquid self.

After all, if a liquid takes the shape of it’s container, the only way for the liquid to change its shape is to change the container. Right?

I have been passive for too long, and while I do not expect to be able to make myself into a new person by sheer force of will (that way madness lies), I do feel that by working at it a little bit, all the time, I can change the shape I am in.

That shape being “round”. Ha ha ha.

But I am staying positive and fighting off the demons of self-hatred and self-destruction. It;s tough going sometimes. It would be so easy to let go and resume my previous passive, self-hating shape.

Because that’s the thing about all that self-loathing nonsense : it’s easier. After all, I have been pacing back and forth in the same groove for a bloody long time. My tireless treads have worn away at the floor of my psyche until this groove of mine is mighty tall and steep on the sides.

And I spent a long time thinking that I had to climb those sheer steep sides in order to be well, and that was clearly impossible, so I figured I was fucked.

But that is the classic kind of all-or-nothing thinking that depression uses to defend itself, and I am not my depression. I am a wonderful, talented, intelligent, sweet-natured fellow who happens to have let an unwelcome house guest called depression vastly overstay its welcome and take over the whole household, and I am damned good and ready to kick it out no matter what it takes.

Even if it can only be done by steady, focused erosion, rather than the earth-shattering volcanic explosion that part of me would prefer.

Just get it the fuck over with already! Yank that Band-aid off, scream like a motherfucker, then get on with your life.

But no. While there might be small landslides like my recent fox based emotional meltdown, for the most part it will a process of filling myself with the good and thereby displacing the bad, pushing it to the borders where it belongs, and then out of myself entirely, never to return.

It’s about letting in the good things. Look around your life for the things that are good. Friends and family that care about you. The music, television shows, and so on that you like. All the good parts of your personality and your abilities. Reach out across depression’s chilly void and touch them. Defy the little voice in your head that says it is dangerous to embrace the good in life, that everything that brings you up will only lead to a bigger, harder fall, that to do this is to change everything in a frighteningly unpredictable and uncontrollable way. Better the devil you know, right?

Wrong. That voice is the voice of depression and it is not you. That voice is a cheater and a liar and does not have your best interests at heart. It merely wants to maintain the current fascist state of your soul, with depression and fear in total command of your capital city.

So reach. Stretch. Connect with the good things in your life. Let their warmth fill up that dark and terrible voice inside. Ignore all other voices. Let the goodness push the bad stuff into the darkness beyond where it belongs.

And it might take some doing. You might have to drill through a lot of layers of habit and lassitude and fear of change before you truly reach the mother lode.

That is why it is so important to reach and stretch towards it. Once you can feel the warmth of these things, even if it is very faint, it will provide the motivation needed to keep on drilling. Every inch closer becomes another inch warmer. The activity becomes inherently rewarding.

That is how I feel about what I am doing now inside my head. Filling myself with as much of the warm pure light as I can, and letting it illuminate the path out, the path I must make myself, but which beckons me ever onward toward a better, brighter future.

A future without depression, where I am free to simply live my life joyously and freely, unencumbered, able to translate all of my inner energies into outer action on the world without the constant deadening echo chamber of self-doubt and hesitation caused by the eye that tries to see all directions at the same time. A future where I accept whatever comes along, and accept both the intensity of my personal power and the limits of it.

You are not responsible for every single thing that happens to you. That is a naive and ill thought out New Age notion that sounds good and empowering at first but is actually a recipe for insanity.

Some things, in fact, a lot of things, you can control. But there is a whole big bad world out there with its own idea of what to do, and you only control your little piece of it, and that, imperfectly.

Accept that there are a lot of things that have happened to you that were not your fault and that you could not have possibly done anything to prevent with what you knew then.

The past is over. It cannot be changed. You do not live there and never will. Life cannot go backwards. It can only go ever forwards and choosing to look backwards all the time merely makes it much harder to avoid the obstacles in your path.

And that is as true for dwelling on the bad things as it is for dwelling on the good. Nostalgia or trauma, both can be easier than facing the uncertainty of the future.

The past, after all, is quite certain and entirely predictable.

But it’s over. Time to wake up, and move on.

Remember the 80’s?

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Tonight’s entry is all about this fun list: 50 Things Only 80’s Kids Understand.

Being mostly an eighties kid (ages 7 to 17, and it’s not like I remember anything from the first two years), I enjoyed perusing this little list.

Some of things I remembered fondly, other things I remembered but didn’t really care about, and some of the things I flat out do no recall at all.

Well, the culture is rarely evenly distributed and not everybody gets every update.

I don’t think Muppet Babies is the greatest cartoon of all, although looking back, it was high quality kiddie entertainment. I watched it, but only because it was the Muppets. The Muppet Show was a huge part of my childhood (70’s kid!)and I was Muppet deprived.

But looking back, it had a great deal of warmth and imagination, and had the very comforting message that you can go anywhere with your imagination, but if things get too scary, you can stop and instantly be back at home, safe and sound.

If you had asked me at the time what the greatest cartoon of all time was, I would have said “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends” without hesitation. It’s kind of hard to watch as an adult, but when I was a kid and that show was on, the rest of the world just plain ceased to exist.

And unlike other children’s shows, it didn’t treat me like an idiot. That was a very big deal to me.

As for “Team Madonna” or “Team Cyndi”, I was never aware I had to choose, but if I had been asked at the time, I would have chosen Cyndi hands down. Madonna has done some great music and some extraordinary things both with her public persona and her business sense.

But I love Cyndi. She just seems like such an awesome person.

Looking over the list, I remember 24 of the fifty things. So, not quite a pass. For instance, I didn’t even know what “pegged” jeans were until I saw the picture.

And I sure as hell don’t remember kids going to 50’s-themed parties. Honestly, I am pretty sure I would have thought that was totally lame.

I mean, it’s not like those were my Happy Days. But I guess it was kind of like the kids with their 80’s parties today. Somehow, they inherit our nostalgia for a while.

We had a bunch of Disney Book and Record sets, though I listened to them on the family stereo, not my own Fisher Price model. Between that and my Disney Encyclopedia (seriously), I was indoctrinated into the world of Disney quite early.

Maybe that is why I still consider myself a Disney fan even though they have behaved quite badly over the years, and why I still admire Uncle Walt and the empire he built on the feeling of magic, despite knowing some of the ugly truths about the man.

Disney has a place in my heart that nothing can replace. Ditto the Muppets.

Oh, and speaking of movies (kinda), I was definitely traumatized by one of those movies, namely The Dark Crystal. My Dad took me to see it. The whole movie was a trip and I was absolutely rapt throughout the whole thing.

But at the end, when (spoiler alert!) the Skeksis and the Mystics merge into one race of beings, I was absolutely blown away. Mind went PING. It was so unexpected and so, well, wrong to my young mind that it threw me for a lot of loops.

I mean, the Skeksis were horrible, horrible creatures. I still think of them as some of the most disgusting, vile, detestable, awful villains ever. I spent the whole movie waiting for them to get their righteous comeuppance. After all, that’s what always happens, right? The good guys beat the bad guys in the end.

And I wanted the Skeksis dead, dead, dead. Not just defeated. Dead. No mercy, no negotiation, no hesitation. Children can be quite bloodthirsty, and I wanted those fuckers dead.

So to have them actually merge with the good guys, the Mystics, was a total mindfuck and I spent a long time trying to come to grips with it. You can’t merge with them. They’re EVIL.

That movie really expanded my little mind. I had to reconcile myself to a more Taoist and less Zoroastrian view of the world. Balance, not victory.

What else… I sure as heck loved Scratch and Sniff stickers! I had a teacher who gave out stickers if you did well on a spelling test, and so the sticker collection in the back of my spelling notebook was not just fun, it was a trophy room.

And I had a lot of stickers, bright lad that I was. But you had to get a perfect score, 10/10, to get a Scratch and Sniff sticker, and that was rarer for me because I always made some little dumb mistake on one answer, like not forming my letters right or mishearing the word or the like.

So my Scratch and Sniff collection was my Gold Medal trophy room. And they were just plain fun, too. You got a little reward every time you scratched one.

I scratched my strawberry one so much that I basically shredded it.

A lot of the stuff on the list passed me by, though. I never played Oregon Trail, presumably because I was a Canadian kid. I never had a Trapper Keeper. I never wore British Knights or L. A. Gear sneakers.

And I watched Double Dare exactly once, and thought it was completely horrible. A total nightmare. So I mostly ignored it and all its clones.

But I definitely watched 3-2-1 Contact (but not for the Bloodhound Gang, they were lame) and Square One Television (yes, entirely for Mathnet, the rest of the show was laaaaaaame). I played in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and watched a ton of the Cosby Show. I drank New York Seltzer (though I preferred Koala)and blew on my NES cartridges to get them to work. I remember the dark day of the Challenger explosion (I watched it happen on Canada AM, poor little me) and the phenomenally awesome day the Berlin Wall came down. I remember trying to figure out why everyone was watched the Baby Jessica rescue (not that it wasn’t important, by why her, why now? That kind of thing happens all the time) and being extremely impressed by the idea of Hands Across America while also being pretty sure they could not pull it off (and they didn’t, but it was still a wonderful and amazing thing to see). I collected Garbage Pail Kids cards and got told to Just Say No, or something a lot like it, so very, very, very many times.

I am serious. If you grew up in the 80’s and you didn’t know drugs were bad, mmmkay, then you lived under a very large rock.

And the only reason I don’t remember being traumatized by the death of Optimus Prime in the eighties was that I didn’t get to see the movie until the nineties, and it traumatized me then.

It still does, honestly.

And you know, looking over the list, while I was only directed involved with 24 of the things, I was aware of all but 7 of them at the time.

So maybe I got a passing grade on the 80’s after all.

The slow burn

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Today has been quite unpleasant. Something is definitely “up” with my health. I am not well.

First off, I have been going through one of my sleepy periods lately, which is never fun. The usual crapola, super intense dream filled sleep which leaves me more tired and drained than I was before I slept.

But today, when I woke up around noonish, I felt just awful. I had this terrible ache throughout my body which made me feel like every muscle was pulled tight and yet every joint was rusted in place.

In addition to that, I had a splitting headache and was feeling distinctly dizzy and disoriented.

So far, my self-diagnosis is that I was experiencing a combination of sinus pain from blocked up sinuses (and ears), and being pretty badly dehydrated.

Which brings up another thing. I am going through a lot of liquids (and peeing) lately. I think it is mostly attributable to it being hotter now and thus I am going through a lot of sweat. (Eww.) But when you are a diabetic like I am, you learn to watch for things like unusually high thirst levels.

And I have just not felt healthy lately. A lot of little things, like my wrists getting stiff and sore (really messes with my sex life), chronic headaches, my back hurting more than usual, that kind of thing.

God damn it, I might just be getting old. Apparently, my plan to be so unhealthy that I wouldn’t even notice getting old is not working.

That was a joke, folks. Relax.

And I have had this little periods before and I always pull out eventually. Even this afternoon, I felt a lot better after throwing myself into my Facebook games for a while. I think the effort involved helps use up some of the excess energies left in my brain by all that dreaming.

Who knows, that might just become my motivation to exercise. Long term plans are one thing. Just plain trying to not feel so fucking tense is quite another.

We fucked up human animals respond a lot better to immediate rewards than long-term ones, even when we know better. That’s why I think the difference between people who succeed and people who end up in the wastebasket of life like me is that the successful people learn to take immediate pleasure in all steps required to achieve their long-term goals.

It is all about what you find rewarding. “Willpower” is a myth. If you can quit smoking when others cannot, it is not because you have a will of steel, it is because you find knowing that you are on your way to being smoke free pleasurable enough that you do not want to disrupt it by smoking.

It is about the ability to find pleasure in life, not willpower.

But to the midnset of a modern consumer capitalist, raised to use consumption as the cure of all ills, this seems like cheating somehow. You are not supposed to have to find more pleasure in things. You are supposed to find more things to give you pleasure!

But really, wouldn’t it be better to be a happy person no matter what the circumstances? Or are we such slaves to the consumer mindset that we would turn down eternal happiness if it did not also come with a large cash prize?

What else. Oh yeah, today is the big day : Arrested Development Season 4 Day, which I am choosing to call Frozen Banana On A Stick day. The much delayed and almost desperately anticipated new season of Arrested Development is available on Netflix, and my friends and I will be getting together tonight to watch an episode or two.

Needless to say, we are stoked. We are huge, huge fans of the show, as all right-minded and intelligent people are (try it, it’s a very good test!), and we were pretty bummed out when the show was canceled all those years ago.

So the fact that Netflix is using some of the boodles of cash it is making to produce their own content (wow, what a great new business model for TV!), and some of that content is an all new season of Arrested Development, has got us all pretty excited.

But because we are also fairly neurotic, we are also pretty worried. What if it sucks? What if it’s not as good as the original three seasons? What if they ruin it? And so forth and so on.

So going in to this experience with a high level of anticipation and dread. In other words, we are going into it like all neurotic people go into potentially positive things.

No wonder I get so tense. It’s like a freaking neurosis farm in this skull of mine.

In order to buffer ourselves a little against the potential risk tonight’s Arrested Development debut entails, we are going to get some treats. Some fried chicken, a cake, other goodies. That way we can either use the food to celebrate or to drown our sorrows, depending on how it goes.

Regardless, I hope that having Season Four of AR on the service draws tons more people onto Netflix. The more subscribers they have, the more money they will have to either purchase or produce content, and that sounds great to a dedicated Netflix fan like me.

I mean, it’s eight freaking bucks a month and you get access to tons of awesome content, all available almost instantaneously and in as large a quantity as you can watch.

And yet, from Netflix’s point of view, a million subscribers is eight million bucks per month. That is way, way more than it costs to maintain the robust Internet presence required for such a service.

If it wasn’t for the fact that content owners are now charging them through the nose for content, Netflix would be a massively profitable business.

Then again, that’s what created the opening for them to create their own content. If AMC is going to charged them up the yingyang for Mad Men, it might just be cheaper for them to produce their own shows.

And if they are the right shows, it will work.

Next show I hope they resurrect : Better Off Ted. After that : Greg the Bunny!

A shot to the heart

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I felt fine. I was in a pretty good mood, actually. Life was proceeding in the usual way.

But then…. I see a certain image from a certain Disney movie and it all comes tumbling down.

I won’t link the image that was posted to my Facebook (quite innocently). I “hid” the post it was in (something about how this image is the real deal for making you cry at a movie) and that means I deleted it off of my own timeline.

And I definitely will not go look for it elsewhere. That would damn near kill me.

But I will describe it, and I hope you will understand it well enough to get why this one image is enough to bring on an attack of the blues in yours truly.

The image is from the Disney move The Fox And The Hound. The plot of the movie is that a fox named Tod (voiced by Keith Coogan) and a hound dog name Copper (voiced by Corey Feldman) become the best of friends when they are both too young to understand that in the human world, hounds are used to hunt foxes and kill them, so the two species are mortal enemies.

This already sounds damned sad, doesn’t it?

Tod is the pet of a sweet little old lady named Widow Tweed (voice of Jeanette Nolan), and so is a domesticated fox. Late in the movie due to complications I won’t get into (and barely remember, for reasons I shall explain), the Widow Tweed is forced to leave her home and leave Tod behind.

And so the screen shot that has had me crying for fifteen minutes now is Tod as seen by her through the back window of the car, looking at her all confused, frightened, and betrayed.

(In her defense, she does this to save his life. But he doesn’t know this. )

Many of you reading this will already know the main reason why this movie and that scene has such a powerful effect on little old me. I love foxes. I identify with them strongly, so much so that if something has a fox in it, I am that fox. I can’t help it. I just am.

And right now, with tears in my eyes, I am having trouble remembering the positive side of that. Right now, I can only see it as a bad thing that has only led me to be incredibly upset by things that other people take in stride.

Like fox hunting, for instance. Do not get me started.

But it’s a lot more than just the fact that Tod is a fox and I identify with foxes. That is the trigger but that is not all that is going on inside me.

My lonely childhood left me with a profound feeling of being left behind and abandoned. Nobody was there for me when I was a precocious child who was too smart for his own good and getting violently bullied nearly every fucking day.

My parent didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I was the mistake, the accident, the extra child who was left to fend for himself because I had three older siblings and they took all my parent’s time and attention, and I was just supposed to fade into the woodwork and disappear.

My teachers didn’t care and didn’t want to care. To them, I was a serious pain in the ass to them, at once too bright to need help and desperately emotionally dependent on them because I had no friends. I had a smug and dismissive attitude towards the schoolwork they gave me (it’s really hard to value something you find so easy), I tended to be somewhat slovenly in appearance, and I was very wimpy.

I think most of them wished I would go away too, and be someone else’s problem.

My siblings had their own world, too, one that did not include me. No malice intended. But I just fell off everybody’s radar as a kid.

Add in just how damned sensitive I am, and you can maybe see why the image of a fox being abandoned to fend for himself in the wild by the people he loves just might resonate me in a way that is completely, totally, and immensely devastating.

It’s like my entire sad childhood summed up in one image and that shakes loose a lot of very old, very bad stuff inside of me.

That’s why I don’t remember the movie that well : because I haven’t watched it in a long long time. I just can’t. The emotions are too damned intense. I identify with Tod way, way, way too much.

And the thing is, I know the movie has a happy (ish) ending and everything turns out fairly okay at the end. Nobody dies or anything. Tod is OK.

But that doesn’t matter. I don’t know, maybe a lot of things have been building up in me for a long time and this was just that one last push to make the dam break and the flood occur.

And I know that, after this is done, I will be better off. As unpleasant as it is to cry, it is also very important. It is one of our most profound sources of catharsis, and for someone like me who has suppressed so emotion over the years, catharsis is a blessed thing.

Only when we stop fighting our inner demons and instead let them have their say can there be peace within. When you let yourself experience the emotions, as painful and negative as they can be, and finally get around to processing them, you will find your feel more like yourself now than ever before.

It’s not something you can just “do”, though, or at least I can’t. Something needs to set it off.

And I guess for me, the key is foxes.

Note to self : do not read that entry again. That’s the last thing I need.

I am gong to go lay down now, and try to pull myself back together.

Being sensitive sucks sometimes.

Friday Science Tintinabulation, May 24, 2013

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Another week has flown past like a flock of tiny birds in a heck of a hurry, and that means it is time once again for our weekly dose of the Friday Science Whatever.

It was rough, picking just six to do, but I did it, and here they are.

First up : you know that old trope, seen mostly in cartoons, about elephants being afraid of mice?

Well of course, that is absolute rubbish. Not a word of truth to it. Pure fantasy.

It’s bees that scare them.

Research has shown that elephants are hella scared of bees, so much so that they have developed a very specific “OMG BEES” noise they make when they want to warn the rest of the herd that they are on Bee Alert Status for the foreseeable future.

This discovery has lead to speculation that bees might be the solution to the frequent conflicts between elephants and humans that happen in places like Kenya, where farmers sometimes kill elephants for trying to eat their crops, and elephants in turn sometimes rampage and kill people.

The idea would be to deploy enough beehives around your farm to keep the elephants way, which really sounds like the punchline to a joke to me.

Next up : News about printing your food!

The news is that NASA is looking into the idea as a way to provide astronauts with a compact, light, and multifaceted food supply while on long space voyages.

The idea is that the basic “building blocks” of food would be stored as powders in canisters like the various colored inks in an inkjet picture, and when you wanted something, you would just tell the printer to print it, which it would do just like any 3D printing process, a layer at a time.

I have my doubts. For one, I would be real real curious to know what those “building blocks of food” are. The idea that you could get meaningful variety in foodstuffs out of a limited number of powders seems inherently flawed to me.

Our food is made of highly complex organic chemicals that take more than that to “replicate”.

Next up, an extraordinary finding from the world of human optics : scientists have found a woman who can see 99 million more colors than the result of us.

The typical human eye contains three kinds of cone cells, and that gives us the ability to see around a million different colors.

But this one has four types of cones in her eyes, giving her a whopping 100 million colors. Compared to her, we are all colorblind.

For decades, people have theorized that people like this, called tetrachromats (you and I are trichromats), might exist. But this is the first time one has been found and verified.

The obvious question for us thoughtful types is : what on Earth does this woman see? The world must look radically different to her than it does to us. And yet, nobody can imagine a color they have never seen. So we will never know.

Now we get into the really good future-y stuff! Like how about this : scientists have found a way to get human skin cells to revert into embryonic stem cells.

If this can be developed and applied on a wide scale, it might just be the breakthrough that throws open the gates for the regenerative medicine future we all hope to live long enough to enjoy.

With enough pluripotent stem cells, in theory, we could patch up absolutely any damage to the human body by removing the damage tissue and flooding the void with stem cells, which will then turn into whatever kind of cell is needed to fix the damage.

Spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, organ failures, you name it. We could ifx literally everything. Not to mention the role stem cells can play in the future of tissue engineering.

These are exiting times!

Next up, let’s talk clean hydrogen.

If you are like me, you are saying “WTF is that? How do you get hydrogen dirty? Hydrogen is so clean it doesn’t even have protons!”

What is meant by the term is hydrogen that is produced by clean methods. Traditional ways to get hydrogen are messy, expensive, and have a big carbon footprint.

But a new method might change all that and give us a practical way to make all the clean, cheap hydrogen we need for a hydrogen future.

I am still not sold on a hydrogen future, mind you. I can’t see adding hydrogen to the equation as being a practical solution when we are doing modestly well with just plain old electricity. Electric cars grow more efficient every day, and do not require a massive infrastructure investment either.

But still, this is the sort of development that might, some day, change my mind.

Finally, the most mindblowing scientific newsbit of the week : this invention.

Yeah, sorry, it’s a video, not a news story.

If his machine can do what he says, that is nothing short of earthshaking. If you can turn plastic back into the oil from whence it came, then suddenly all plastics are not just recyclable but infinitely recyclable, and the future could be powered not by hydrogen or electricity but plastic.

What I would really like to see is his invention scaled up to refinery size and set up next to a landfill, where you offer to buy plastic from whoever brings it to you.

Pay them half of what you will get for the crude-ish oil you will produce (or even better, filter on sight and sell gasoline) and you will get a lot of people recycling a hell of a lot of plastic.

Of course, in terms of global warming, the ideal thing would be if it was simply turned right back into plastic. In that sense, the oil produced would be like the stem cells of the process, ready to be turned into whatever else we need.

That is such a huge jump in efficiency, it gives me goosebumps.

That’s all for this week, folks!

The usual Thursday breakdown

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All diary today. Well, OK… one link.

You would think that seeing a grown man (with stubble!) act like a 2 year old girl would be creepy. But somehow, it just makes it all the more adorable.

I admit, that is probably not everyone’s reaction. Damn, I need a boyfriend.

Anyhow, I thought it was a brilliant idea for a fairly unique brand of comedy. It gives us insight into the strange and magical world of the two year old, too.

At that age, we are still more animal than human, and yet we are taking our first steps towards becoming human, and that is fascinating.

She seems fairly advanced for 2 years old, actually. She uses language like a three year old. Full original sentences in the proper context, and all that.

But anyhow, enough about her. What about me? (Imagine that said by James from Pokemon).

I had a fairly productive therapy day. I unpacked a lot of the thoughts I have been sharing with you folks about being more positive, seeing turning 40 as the end of the previous chapter and the beginning of one that is fresh and new, and hunting down and ejecting those nasty negative thoughts.

I am coming dangerously close, in fact, to positive self-esteem.

And that is sort of scary. You would think it would be something someone would eagerly embrace as their salvation, but I have hated myself for a long damned time and liking myself would mean a lot of changes.

In fact, I seriously suspect it might lead to… you know… doing things. Eek!

Not that I want to stay forever in this sad little world of mine where I do very little that is productive and I spend all day fucking around playing Facebook games and the highlight of my day is when I eat.

In fact, in good news (trust me, this is good), I felt my anger and impatience at spending my days like this rising this afternoon. In fact, I came very close to some kind of emotional crisis.

That’s a good thing. You have to let go of the old before you can embrace the new sometimes, and I know that in order to make room for a more productive and fulfilling life, I am going to have to make a break with the sort of mindless (but stimulating) activities that I have used to fill all those big empty spaces where my life should be.

And I think that I have grown so ossified in my ways that it will take some sort of large emotional breakthrough to grind through all that rust on my bones and set me free.

Some things, despite my fondest wishes, cannot be done slowly and incrementally. Sometimes, it takes something puncturing your equilibrium and scrambling all the eggs in your little basket for you to finally be able to grow.

And growth is life. Lack of growth is death. We must grow to live. I believe that from hat to socks.

So hopefully, I will have some kind of emotional apotheosis soonishly and that will be, of course, bloody unpleasant but it will also open the doors for me to rearranged myself into a more content, calm, solid, fulfilled, and above all happy version of myself.

Happiness is definitely the target. That is the absolute top priority in life right now. Become happier. I have only recently pulled myself across the finish line of “thinking I deserve to be happy”, so I am not expecting spectacular results right away.

One recent realization that is helping with the happiness trail : I find dating/matchmaking sites depressing because all the guys on their are either shallow, skeezy guys looking for a “discreet” hookup, really fucking boring people.

I am telling you, I am getting so sick of profiles that start “I am just a normal guy… ” or “I am as regular a guy as they come… “[1]

I am SO ready for one that starts “I’m a freak of fucking nature… “.

I mean, why are these guys so eager to advertise how dull they are? It’s things like this that make me realize that I am actually pretty damned picky about the people with whom I associate and the odds of finding my Man of Life via some dating site are fairly low.

Because the thing is, I don’t really get along with normal people. Even when they are gay. I am a rare and exotic breed of weirdo, and I need the company of the same.

At the very least, I need another intellectual. And that goes way beyond intelligence. There are a lot of quite smart people who are nevertheless not intellectuals, and some people of fairly normal IQ who nevertheless make the grade because they have active, curious, deep minds.

That alone means I am choosing from like, 20 percent of the 10 percent, so already I am dealing with only 2 percent of the population right there.

Of course, there are alternatives to dating sites… like actually going out there and meeting people. In places outside this apartment. Places full of people I don’t know.

That sounds super freaking scary. But if I choose my venues properly, I should be able to cut down on just how uncomfortable I am.

So whenever I am ready for that step, I will look for the sort of thing that attracts intellectuals like myself, and go there. Should improve my odds and my anxiety levels.

Hmm, anything else to say about today… oh right. Picked up the magnetic clip-on sunglasses that were supposed to come free with my new glasses, but there was a mix-up and I only just got them today.

They are the right strength, and the magnetic part is kinda neat. But it adds weight to the glasses and makes me feel like they are always slipping down my nose.

Still, I have wanted something to fight glare for a long time, and these ought to do the trick.

And…. that’s about it!

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. At least they have stop saying “straight-acting”… yeah pal, we will see how straight-acting you are when you are sucking my dick. ↵

Wet gay rich people in bondage!

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Got a few things to share with y’all.

Like this : Guess what city in the USA has the highest number of same-sex couples raising kids?

New York City? San Francisco? Some gay commune in the Florida keys?

Nope, it’s Salt Lake City, Utah.

Turns out, when you raise people with family values, they raise families.

As counterintuitive as this factoid may be, it makes sense when you think about how same-sex couples raising kids tends to happen.

Usually, it is after one part of a heterosexual couple with kids comes out of the closet, they get a divorce, and the homosexual person ends up with custody. They meet someone new, and bam, Heather Has Two Mommies, or Daddies.

After all, lots of place still ban gay adoption, so that’s not going to happen much. And without that, gay men have no avenue to get children. (That’s why so many of us spoil our pets.) So that eliminates half the homosexual population right there.

That leaves lesbians, and while they have the option of opting for artificial insemination, I can’t see that happening nearly as much as the divorce scenario.

But why Salt Lake City? I think it’s precisely because it’s the sort of place most gay and lesbian people would flee for a bigger urban center which will be more understanding.

Young homosexual people will take that option in droves. But people old enough to have kids already are going to have lives, jobs, mortgages, friends, and most importantly, the kids themselves.

In other words, they have roots, and can’t just pack up and go. So they stay.

All the young, unattached homosexuals end up in the big cities, and the older ones stay where they are and make do, and so the percentage of gays and lesbians raising children goes up.

Next up, we have some rich people being extremely silly.

I mean, very very very silly. I particularly like the completely deadpan way Olivia Wilde said “I only got in because I’m an android from the future. ” That made me LOL big time.

And yeah, Sir Richard Bransen can’t act. It doesn’t matter. He is such a megastar of awesomeness that he can get away with not being a super good actor.

I mean, nobody gives a shit if Einstein could golf.

And obviously, talking about not going to the bathroom is just their way of mixing in potty humour with a very simple and important message about water. It is physically impossible to keep from going to the bathroom for very long.

Eventually, it just happens.

Of course, if you take the phrase “going to the bathroom” very literally, you certainly can avoid going to the bathroom. It’s easy to avoid entering a specific room. No problem.

You will still urinate and defecate, just… somewhere else.

The best spin I can put on that is rich people squatting behind bushes somewhere. Or wearing adult diapers. Or some kind of horrifying “Rudy will await your foundation” kind of scenario.

Next up, we have a very delightful and fun to read subreddit called Shit Cosmo Says.

On it, people lambaste and ridicule all the crazy garbage that lurks inside the pages of Cosmo magazine, especially the really mindlessly sexist and patronizing “advice” to women.

It was a real eye-opener for me as a kid when I suddenly realized that women’s magazines were incredibly sexist. They reinforced this idea that women are vapid, vacuous, silly creatures who only care about fashion and makeup and how best to please a man. Nowhere do they give women credit for having brains, ambition, concerns, and a life completely independent from men and what attracts and pleases them.

And for a few years, I just kept this thought to myself. I mean, surely I was wrong. I couldn’t imagine that millions of women bought these things and eagerly devoured the degradation like it was chocolate. There must be something I am not getting.

And then, I read an article that said that most women’s magazines are in fact written entirely by men, and suddenly it all made sense.

This was the patriarchy feeding women a version of themselves that was acceptable to the patriarchy. Men were very unlikely to write things that would challenge or confuse women. Instead, they get empty intellectual calories designed to make them feel they need to constantly be focused on their appearance or they will die alone.

I am sure that this is not consciously in the minds of the men writing and editing these rags, but it is still there. It is the same sort of thing that makes shows like The View and (forgive me!) Ellen make my skin crawl and my soul scream.

I am very lucky to have a mother who was quite liberated before it was even cool. My mother went to college to learn, not just to bide time and hunt husbands. She took courses where she was the only woman there and endured a lot of sexist abuse from the male professors thereof. She worked for all of my childhood, with an income equal to my father’s. She is an intelligent, inquisitive, deeply intellectual woman, and is therefore nothing like the women such magazines are aimed at.

And that is probably why they horrify and enrage me. My mother isn’t like that. Neither of my sisters are like that. Any time I have met any woman like that, I have found it profoundly irritating, to the point of taking me dangerously close to displaying my contempt to them.

And I am a very polite and sensitive fellow, so that is something I simply Do Not Do.

So my point (and I do have one) is that I hate women’s magazines and their ilk, and so I am happy to see a home for ruthlessly mocking their sexist horribleness.

Oh, and finally, the bondage. Normally I download pictures and rehost them, but this is furry art, and I feel like that would be stealing from the artist.

So I will just (Warning : NSFW, boobs)link to it.

Now, bondage does nothing for me and females do almost nothing for me, but I felt like sharing that image because I find her facial expression absolutely enchanting.

Sweet, naughty, inviting, shy… it’s all in there. She is just plain adorable. It makes me want to give her a big hug.

Although presumably, that’s not what she has in mind.

But she’s so darn cute!

Memories and sandwiches

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Time for another life update!

My birthday was quite pleasant. We had a pleasant dinner at one of our favorite local eateries, ABC Country Kitchen. Great good, reasonable prices, and they are willing to turn the music down to a level where we can hear what each other are saying.

That has been a dealbreaker for us with restaurants before. We eat out together to enjoy one another’s company and that means conversation at a less than shouty volume.

Plus, we are all quiet and bookish type people, and those kinds of people tend to dislike loudness of any sort. That certainly applies to me. Even as a small child, I hated loud noises. They scared me.

So me and my friends bring our custom only to quiet restaurants. And seeing as we are the sort of people that keep going to a place if they find one they like, that means a fair amount of business for the places that meet our standards.

So I had a nice meal of a club sandwich and fries. The club sandwich will always hold a special place in my heart, and not just from the cholesterol.

See, when I was a child, I was a typical Taurus child in that I was what they used to call a “fussy eater”, although “conservative eater” would be more accurate.

It’s just really hard to get us to try something new. We are risk-averse to a fault, and incredibly stubborn, so getting us to try something new can be an absolute nightmare.

This came to a head, more or less, when in the summer of 1977 or 1978, my mother and father packed up all four of us kids and took us on a peregrination to go see my father’s family, otherwise known as the Ontario side of the family.

You know how most family sedans have seating for five? Well basic math should have told you by now that we were a family of six. My parents’ solution? Have me sit in the front seat in between them.

Now just picture that. There’s my parents in both fronts seats and there I am, a wee tot, sitting between them on the bench seat, with no seat belt, no child carrier, no airbags, no anything between me and the dashboard and/or the windshield.

Nowadays, people would absolutely flip the fuck out if they saw a child being transported in such a clearly unsafe and insecure fashion. They would probably all grab their cell phones and the police would get a rush of calls and the next thing you know, my family is getting pulled over by the cops by some cops with no sense of humour at all.

But it was the 70’s, and we were wrapped up in a warm cocoon of happy ignorance.

So there we are, trekking across the country from Prince Edward Island to Ontario, and eating three meals a day in restaurants.

And no matter where we went, I wanted the exact same thing : a hot dog and French fries.

See, even back then I loved wieners!

And my siblings kept trying to encourage me to try new things, and I was having none of it. A hot dog and French fries. Over and over again.

But one day, my sister Catherine saw club sandwich on the menu, and said something like “You’d like this, Michael! It has bacon, and chicken, and lettuce, and you like all those things!”

And I frowned dubiously, but I really had no basis for objection, and so I grudgingly agreed to try a bite of hers to see if I liked it.

And it was love at first bite. Of course it was. Club sandwiches are awesome! I had found a new thing to order and I have loved club sandwiches ever since. And ordering it made me feel grownup. This was not kiddie food. It had lots of ingredients and was all colorful and pretty, and even came cut up into four pieces with toothpicks in them. That, to me, said “grownup food”.

In fact, I am fairly sure that for the rest of the trip, I ate nothing but club sandwiches. Well, one step at a time. It had taken a lot of effort to get me to try one new thing, and it was a lot more nutritious than a hot dog. No point in trying to push it ever further.

Hmmm. This is turning into more memoir than update. Where was I? Oh right, ABC.

So we had a pleasant meal, and I had a dessert, which is understandably quite rare for me. But as a compromise, I had a small dessert. No need to go crazy with it.

And ABC was nice enough to give me my dessert for free because it was my birthday. And Felicity paid for the rest of my meal, so I ate out for free.

And that’s always fab.

Oh, and I should mention that in addition to the usual gang of me, Joe, Julian, and Felicity, my friend, former roommate, and regular reader William “spuug” Graham was there. And I am always happy to see him, because he’s a very sweet guy and we have marvelous conversations about science.

Afterwards, we all went to the BCSFA meeting, which was very fun as usual. Kathleen was nice enough to make a tiny birthday cake out of a brownie and a match for me. It sort of looked like the brownie was asking for an encore.

So how does it feel to be 40? Pretty good, to be honest. I feel better about myself lately. I am learning how to accept myself for what I am, and refrain from torturing myself over what I am not.

I am a wonderful guy. Sure, I have limitations, but who doesn’t? And the things I do have are pretty impressive, when you think about it.

I might just be ready to declare myself to be “enough”.

And then I would be all out of excuses for not being awesome.

And that’s a scary thought!