And other weird stuff.

Don’t worry, I will get to today’s video eventually, but today, I have decided to do the other stuff first and save today’s vid for la piece de resistance.

Yeah I know there’s accents in that but I am too lazy to look them up.

First, the local update. Not a lot to tell, really. Worked all afternoon on today’s video. Feels good to have a place to put all that energy. Despite the lies that depression told me, I have actually had a wild overabundance of personal energy for a long dang time.

It was just stuck behind a massive clog in my flow. So I went around self-sedated by routine and isolation in order to keep myself calm and keep the energy blockage from hurting too much.

But that’s the wrong solution. The right solution is to destroy the clog and get yourself flowing again.

Don’t worry, I am not going to go into any constipation metaphors tonight.

And the process is far for complete. I feel like the blockage is shattered but there is still all the rubble and debris to deal with. By pouring all my energies into making videos and writing blogs, I hope to keep the flow going and push all the rest of the stuff out as well, and maybe even finally become a healthy normal person instead of a cramped up energy miser wrapped up so tight around his pain that he can never be free of it because he cannot let it go.

You get attached to your pain after a while. It’s a constant in your life. But one definition of insanity is “trying to change everything without changing anything”. You have to make peace with the fact that there is no change without cost. At the very least, you have to be willing to give up the stability and security of your current terrible position.

You can’t make things better without making them different. Neophobia kills.

Hmmm. I should do a video about this stuff. Might help some people.

Anyhow, next thing is a darkly amusing bit of comedy for us boomers and Gen X’rs about those kids these days and what it’s like working with them.

More great stuff from Landline TV!

And yeah, I know, it’s an exaggeration, but I imagine there is a lot of truth to this. Every generation finds a new way to screw up their kids, and it’s often, at least on some level, the exact opposite of the way the previous generation did it.

The Greatest Generation made it through the Great Depression and World War II, and raised their children with a combination of strict conformism and previously unknown material comfort. They were giving their kids the childhoods they wished they had.

Their kids grew up to be Boomers, and rebelled against conformity and materialism, and chose self-realization instead. They raised their children with a great deal of personal freedom, especially for themselves. They were giving their kids the childhoods they wished they had.

Their kids grew up to be Generation X, who had (coporatively) little to rebel against, but instead became alienated by the lack of institutions, parental attention, and social connection that was the result of all that self-realization and seeking of freedom by their parents. They raised their kids with an overabundance of support, attention, structure, and praise. They were giving their kids the childhoods they wished they had.

Now we have the Millenials, who have been given a lot of support but not a lot of freedom, who grew up with heavily scheduled lives dominated by well-meaning helicopter parents driven to prove that they are there for their kids all the time, to protect them from everything. They were giving their kids the childhoods they wished they had.

Not sure how they will mess up their kids. Presumably by giving them enormous amounts of unstructured time, being very hands-off and always waiting to be asked for help, never ever putting their kids on meds, and raising a generation of kids wondering where the hell everybody went.

Okay, I have made you wait long enough. Here’s today’s vid.

As you can see, production values have gone up a tiny notch. Little bits of text have made their debut. Not sure if they are more entertaining or distracting at this point, but still.

Plus, some pictures to talk about. I was feeling self-conscious about how heavy all my discussions had been so far. I mean sure, I find myself fascinating, and there is definitely a market out there for heavy thinking type stuff.

But it’s no way to get rich and famous, and so for the next little while at least, I will attempt to nudge myself towards more entertaining and accessible content.

After all, I am a funny and charming dude with great writing skills. Surely I can work my way towards making really kickass content like the stuff Yahtzee and CPG Grey and Vsauce.

But the thing about guys like that is PICTURES. So very many PICTURES. Just the idea of having to find and/or make all those images makes my head hurt. I can create lots of verbiage either live or in text, no problems, but getting all those pictures and diagrams and stuff together seems insane.

Certainly not something I see myself doing on a daily basis, at least, not yet. Weekly, maybe. Then I can take my time finding images and whatnot.

But daily? Oy. I used like six images in today’s vid and it still took me all afternoon to make the thing. And most of that was just all the trimming and placing and stuff.

Maybe as I go, I will get better at those parts and be able to devote more energy to things like image hunting or grabbing video from other sources and so on.

Ah well. Sometimes it seems like the wheel of time grinds slow and fine, and other times it feels like life is a freefall towards the grave and I’m nowhere near terminal velocity yet.

See you tomorrow, folks.

First off, here’s today’s vid.

I had another idea and even recorded video chatting about it, but the video turned out to be badly out of sync, and then the webcam mysteriously stopped working, and so that idea died.

But that is OK. A full reboot of my computer fixed the glitches, and I think today’s little talk turned out better than the first one would have anyhow.

You will notice there are a lot more little jump cuts in this latest vlog. That is not just because I am doing what other vloggers do and putting little cuts in to make a talking head it more visually interesting.

No, that was just a happy little bonus. Mainly, it’s because I edited out more little imperfections like overlong pauses and stammers and whatnot this time.

The process is a tad crude as of now, but it will improve over time.

I also want to start writing some sort of outline beforehand, just to make sure I cover all the points that I want to cover. I don’t want to write it out like a speech. That would rob it of spontaneity, not to mention creating the logistical problem of reading off the screen and looking at the camera at the same time. I certainly don’t want to be one of those noob YouTubers who can’t stop looking at themselves on their computer screen and hence never looks straight at the camera.

That is terrible amateurish and very off-putting. Just imagine what it would be like to actually have a real life conversation with someone who never looked you in the eye!

So I won’t be writing a full script for the episodes any time soon. As things progress, I might develop the basic techniques to the point where I feel I can take the kind of time it would take to write a script, memorize and deliver it a sentence or two at a time, then stitch the whole thing back together.

But for now, I am going to keep using the “babble at the camera then edit it into coherence” method.

All will come about in the fullness of time. That is something I need to learn. Depression destroyed my faith in the future for many years, making it nearly impossible to believe in delayed gratification and hence making it very hard to have faith that things will progress nicely on their own if you just set them on the right path and get out of the way

It all comes back to building up your faith in the universe to the point where you trust it enough to stop trying to control everything, and worse, rejecting all things you cannot control enough.

That is the sort of thing that leads to isolation, and that only furthers the depression. The depressed person retreats into an environment where they can control the level of stimulation and where nothing spontaneous or unexpected can happen.

That succeeds in throttling down the stimulation level to a tolerable (very low and highly selective) point, but it kind of precludes the sort of connections to others that might well help.

After all, other human beings are inherently unpredictable, uncontrollable, and might even hurt you. They are certainly a very powerful form of stimulation no matter what.

So clearly, if the extreme low stimulation regime is to be maintained, people have to go.

Turns out, you need some damned stimulation in order to remain sane. You especially need connection with others. Study after study shows that the greatest predictor of happiness is the quality of your connections to others. Connecting to others is more important than job, income, social status, beauty, and all the other things we foolishly pursue, thinking they will bring us happiness.

And any of those things might help… for a while. Certainly they all can provide the sort of pleasurable distractions that the decadent often confuse with happiness.

But that sort of happiness is fleeting, and sooner or later you are left alone with yourself and that is when you find out just how lonely and detached you are.

Long-term happiness, the science says, comes from making solid connections with people with whom you share a deep appreciation and respect with one another. One can call it a peer group, but that does not convey the necessary richness and supportiveness of the connections.

Of course, the most natural source of those connections is one’s family, either biological or artificial. But there is something about modern society, a massive and pervasive centripetal force that pulls us apart from one another.

Maybe that is just what happens when you cut so many of the ties that bind and define us. The extended family is gone, the church is largely gone, faith in institutions is gone. We sought freedom to define ourselves and ended up with perpetual self-doubt as the booby prize.

I would have liked to at least had the option to believe in things. I look at more authoritarian cultures and I admire their sense of order. It seems, from the outside, that they work a lot harder to find a place for everyone. Nobody is simply left out of society because they couldn’t take the rat race.

Remember, even if you win the rat race… you’re still a rat.

But that doesn’t necessarily require an authoritarian society like China. It simply requires a society that does not treat people as if they were disposable. One that realizes that it is in society’s best interest to find a place for everybody where they can be productive.

But oh no, that would be the dreaded Nanny State!

Sounds better to me than what we have now, the Neglectful Parent State.

My parents gave me so much freedom. And freedom is lovely, right? More freedom is always good.

From an early age, I could stay up as long as I wanted, go wherever I wanted, do whatever I wanted, and my parents would not object.

They wouldn’t even notice.

It’s a wonder I didn’t act out more, honestly.

Today’s video started off with me just rambling on, and ended up being like four hours of work cutting, cleaning, and compiling clips.

And it’s not even very complicated. It’s just me talking for most of it. I forgot how much work it is to edit video. I am beginning to see why a lot of vloggers don’t bother, the lazy buggers.

But I could never just put my ramblings up there unedited. I am higher standards than that. As I get the routine down, hopefully the editing stage will take less time and I will have more time to add little bells and whistles to make my videos less “talking head” and more “something people would actually watch”.

In fact, after primary editing was done, I had planned to go through and see where I could add images, bits of text, and other frippery in order to break things up a bit, but I just plain do not have the energy.

I am tapped out for the day. I ain’t used to working this hard. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to have found something that absorbs so much more of my energies.

But right now, my gas tank is empty, so, talking head it is.

You will also notice that tonight’s video looks a little different. That’s because I rendered it in a lower quality format than before. Sorry about that, but I wanted to compensate for fairly low local upload speeds, so I thought I would give low-res a try this once.

If, after a cooling off period, I think it’s not good enough, I will discontinue the practice.

But for today, I did not feel like it taking several hours to upload the darn thing.

It’s odd thinking about things like bandwidth and hard drive space after staying so long “on the cloud”. It has been ages since I have downloaded anything bigger than an MP3 or uploaded anything… well, anything really. And it’s also weird to find that weird, because bandwidth and downloading used to be a huge part of my Internet experience.

But then the Flash game revolution came along and suddenly I had a lot less reason to download games any more. And the great thing was, Flash games worked just fine (for a while) on this computer, which is way too old to play any current games.

Couple that will getting the Wii and not being able to hack it, therefore no more game piracy, I just found that I didn’t download much of anything any more, apart from the amount of uploading and downloading that comes from using the Web.

Suddenly, though, I am a content provider (well, fairly content… ) and so I have to think about upload speeds and video quality and hard drive space and all that folderol.

What else… a few fun news stories. Like how male train drivers in Sweden are wearing skirts.

See, recently the word came down from head office that Swedish train drivers would no longer be allowed to wear shorts. Why? I have no idea. I suspect someone’s wife saw some ugly bony knees and was traumatized for life or something.

I mean, who even sees the drivers?

The train drivers responded by taking a careful look at the revised clothing code and noticed that skirts were still allowed, and there was no mention of gender.

So to get that cool sensations on their legs once more, in protest, 13 of them started showing up in skirts, which sounds comfy to me.

And the company they work for is fine with this. Well, they can’t very well protest without seeming transphobic, can they? Not to mention looking like they have no sense of humour.

And I imagine they surmise, quite correctly, that once the novelty wears off, these guys will go back to wearing pants and the company will have basically won.

That’s much more intelligent than the usual mindless corporate reactions, though, and so that at least impresses me. Most corps would have released some angry half-baked press release about how awful these men are and played right into the protester’s hands.

Instead, the company gets free, mostly positive publicity, and victory too.

Oh cool, the upload is complete. Here’s the video :

Astute readers of the blog will recognize the main points of the video as things I have talked about once or twice in this space. I have developed the idea somewhat since then, but it remains essentially the same idea, just elaborated.

I am still not convinced that you could actually get people started on believing in a non-physical, entirely spiritual God. Certainly it would be difficult at first. But if the initial conflict between wanting a spiritual God to be as real and present as you or I, and the knowledge that in all probability such a God does not exist, can be resolved this way, it could be enormously liberating.

People would know that their faith was absolutely impervious to disproof. By turning God into an idea, you put Him in the same category as love or art or freedom, all of which do not exist outside the hearts and minds of the human race, but which are certainly considered “real” by us nonetheless.

In fact, ideas are arguably the most powerful force in human existence. Ideas and the symbols we choose to represent them have the power to move millions of people, drive them to war, and teach them the value of peace. Love is the binding force of all human civilization. Freedom is the deep desire of all living, mobile things. And art… is art. Nuff said.

So saying it is somehow demeaning to consider God “just an idea” show an ignorance of just how powerful ideas can be.

But the question remains : can people worship the idea of God?

I think it’s possible, although probably not in those terms.

They could certainly worship a God who only exists within the hearts and minds of human beings.

We already worship a lot of things like that!

It’s been a good old day today. I have eaten pleasing foods, watched harsh but stimulating and enriching television programming, and I did another of my talking to the camera things.

Yup. There it is. Just me talking to the camera about what’s on my mind. I imagine things will get a little more ambitious as time goes on. This is, after all, only episode 2 of 60. And like I say in the video, breaking in a new habit is always hardest at the beginning.

So like I said, I did not feel like doing it. But I did it anyway, because I’m a grownup.

So there. Nyeah.

The harsh television programming I mentioned above is a BBC series called “Nazi Hunters”, and watching it can be quite rough because in order to show you Nazis being hunted, they first have to tell you all about what these particular Nazis did in order to deserve being hunted down and brought to justice.

So I have seen a hell of a lot of incredibly depressing footage of mass graves, concentration camp liberations, and so forth lately. So that is sad as hell.

And yet, it ends with the Nazi being brought to justice (usually), and it also has lots of stuff about the last days of the Third Reich and that frankly never gets old. What a time to be alive! You get to watch as the greatest monster of the 20th century die at the hands of the forces of good.

One of the strange truths about people like Hitler’s Nazis is that they make the moral situation very clear, at least on the front lines. Perhaps some pampered wealthy Berliner might have been able to convince themselves that the Nazis were the good guys, protecting the Homeland and all that, but even before the fall of the Third Reich and the liberation of the concentration camps (and the death camps… some of these places did nothing but kill people), the Allied soldiers had seen enough of how the Germans treated people in their occupied territories to make it very clear who was on the side of the angels.

Still, I wonder. I asked the question to my Facebook friends the other night : what would we think of the Nazis now if everything else had been the same but there had been no Final Solution? No mass killings, no murder factories throughout Poland, just the concentration camps?

They would still be viewed as villains, of course. Rhetoric alone would have put them in the same fascist camp as Mussolini and Franco. not to mention the way they ran their own country and those they occupied. The concentration camps alone were brutal nightmares. Romans treated conquered people better because they viewed them as potential slaves, not as filthy vermin.

And slaves have to eat.

But would we view them as the greatest villains in (white) history? Or just as some nasty bastards we’re glad we got rid of, but not a whole lot worse than any other historical group of bad guys?

Would the names Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco be more or less interchangeable?

What else…. well, I think getting the little video I did today was difficult ironically because I was in a fairly good mood. When I am in a good mood, especially in the summer, my self-discipline goes right out the window. I feel all happy and contented and that makes me feel extremely self-indulgent and hedonistic, and resistant to doing anything that isn’t fun.

But I want to make my actions reflect my ambitions and that means working hard even when I am feeling fine. I think a certain Ms. Poppins has the right attitude towards that.

After all, as I said in my video, life will inevitably involve doing a lot of stuff that you do not want to do. When we are children we can take the attitude that we do things which are not fun only under strong protest because we have our parents to take care of all of life’s little chores and therefore our laziness is unlikely to cause anything bad to happen to us, punishments aside.

But when you’re an adult, you are on your own. If you want clean dishes, you have to wash them. If you want clean clothes, you have to do the laundry. If you want to eat, you have to buy groceries. And if you want money, you have to work.

And once you grow up enough to accept that these things need to be done and you are the only one who will do them, it’s futile to keep fighting it.

After all, who are you protesting against? No matter how reluctantly or poorly you do the job, your parents are not going to show up and do it for you.

It just won’t get done, and you will suffer the consequences of your actions. You are only hurting yourself when you try to live like you are still a child as an adult.

Make peace with the fact that life is work, and then you can find a way to enjoy all those little tasks that before were getting you down. Whether it’s your job or your finances or your lack of a love life that has you feeling blue, there is no reason that you can’t invest the effort into making the most of your situation and finding all the joy in life that you can.

And that doesn’t mean that someone has “won”. Your parents are not going to show up and say “Ha ha, told you chores weren’t so bad! All that whining for nothing!”

The winner is you, and the prize is a much more fun and interesting life. Once you lose your middle class terror of “settling for less” and the connected feeling that it is somehow wrong to be happier than you are rich, you can be happy doing damned near anything.

And happiness is what it’s all about, right?

Ask yourself…. have I been turning down happiness because it wasn’t on the right terms?

How silly is that?

OK. No more of that link share shit. It’s blood on paper time.

I have undergone a deep shift lately. On the one hand, I am doing quite well in my war against self-hatred and negativity. I have been feeling its pull lately, but so far, knock on wood, I have been able to resist it. If those emotions want release, they are just going to have to find a new path.

Like this blog, for instance. Grr.

On the other hand, now that I have put up this wall to protect and support my self-worth, I am increasingly aware of just how much time I spend each day feeling like crap.

I mean, seriously. It’s like, before now, the physical ills and the psychological malaise merged into one continuum of crapitude, and now that I have walled them off I can really focus on feeling like shit a lot of the time. Yay me!

But as the song by Suicidal Tendenceis says, I’d rather feel like shit than be full of shit.

And it’s not like I feel deathly ill or anything, just that overall crappy feeling where you are tired and burned out and vaguely ill, with a headache and a bad taste in your mouth.

And it’s not like I don’t have a lot of potential explanations for feeling crappy. Sleep apnea alone is a serious bitch and something I really should be paying attention to treating. Throw in the diabetes and its resulting blood sugar instability, and the lingering and unavoidable biological aftereffects of the purely chemical aspect of depression, and the real wonder is that I ever feel good.

Oh, and one thing that is new : I am getting acid reflux symptoms now and then. At first I didn’t recognize them and thought of them vaguely as heartburn, but once I really examined it, I realized it felt exactly like acid reflux.

I have had acid reflux before, so I know what it is like. It’s this burning sensation that starts in your stomach, but extends up into your esophagus from there. It’a accompanied by a churning, bubbling sort of sensation in your stomach, like your gut is boiling. Very unpleasant.

And nothing to ignore, either. Your esophagus has no defense against the powerful acid in your stomach. Over time, you can end up with lesions of the esophagus (bad), a complete loss of esophageal sphincter function (very bad), and even heart trouble from the acid burning into your chest cavity (way badder than the baddest thing ever bad).

So if it persists, it will definitely be time for a trip to my GP, who will probably put me on yet another pill, this time an acid blocker. I will resent taking another fucking medication, but it sure as hell beats the nasty consequences of ignoring that kind of thing.

Hopefully, though, the whole thing will pass. I think it might be from my slowly and gently applying the brakes to my caloric intake lately. I have been cutting back here and there in order to try to bring myself to a state of sensible portion sizing, and it might well be that my stomach is producing enough acid to digest bigger and more carb-laden meals and hence, producing too much.

If so, hopefully that will fix itself over time. That assumes I manage to develop a higher degree of regularity (in more than one sense) in my diet, which is a dubious proposition, sadly.

Among the many contradictory axes of my complex persona is the one between planning and organizing, and more or less improvising my way through life.

I value both spontaneity and organization, and which one of those is dominant in a given situation depends a lot on the sort of situation it is.

When it’s the completely personal, I more or less wing it. I develop certain routines but they are not very rigid, although it still upsets me if they are seriously disrupted. Even within spontanaiety, I required a certain amount of predictability and order. Go figure.

But the more it involves others and especially the more it involves actually getting certain things done, the more my drive to organize and schedule and arrange comes into play.

In fact, sometimes I think that the main reason I am not a control freak of the classic mold is that I am just too lazy and averse to large amounts of responsibility and the restrictions they bring.

So I am an odd blend of free spirit and control freak. I suppose that would make be a pretty good liberal community organizer, especially if combined with my skills of verbal expression and vision.

Some day, perhaps, when I am strong enough.

Overall, though, I feel my mood has been pretty good. The freedom that I get from being able to feel bad physically without it dragging me all the way down emotionally is very refreshing. In fact, I had not even realized that this is what has been happening until I got outside the phenomenon to see.

That is often how it is with recovery. I did not even truly grasp that I had a disease called depression until I got some medicine that brought me partway out of it. Only then could I look back and wonder “What the hell was all that?”.

Since then, even little bit of recovery has meant waking up just a little bit more. All depressives self-medicate, and the most common way to do that is to withdraw from the world as a way to sedate yourself and keep your demons quiet.

Recovery, then, has to be the process of waking up those demons and dealing with them, one by one, and then in larger and larger groups, until there is no more separation between you and them, and you are whole once more.

Because you are they, and they are you. That can be extremely hard to accept because it means that you have to accept all the ugliness inside you as part of you as well, but wholeness and sanity are basically the same thing, and you have to accept the entirety of the contents of your soul before you be a whole, healthy, sane, stable, happy person.

Be who you are. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.