Had a rather stressful afternoon.

How stressful? This video was the best I could do for you folks today. Sorry.

Be glad I got rid of the background music.

As the video says, I got myself into this mess. I wanted to get the webcam working with YouTube and after Googling the problem, it finally dawned on me to see if the living room computer could read that mini-DVD-R that came with the webcam and presumably had the proper drivers for it.

And yay, it did! So I tried to email the file to myself. Woops, gmail doesn’t allow executables as attachments. A sound policy, that. Must cut way down on the spread of viruses to the computers of the hapless and the trusting.

But being a non-idiot, I just changed the extension from .EXE to .LOL and lo, it had no problem with it any more. Hey, it’s still keeping your grandma from double clicking on something that says it is kitten pictures and getting a computer full of virii. The policy still works.

It’s just not meant for clever types like me.

Well, semi-clever. Clever enough to get myself into trouble, anyhow, and this time at least, eventually clever enough to get back out of it.

Once I had the right file on the right computer, I changed it back into an .EXE and ran it, and then checked to see if I had fixed the problem with YouTube.

Nope. Absolutely nothing coming through. Damn.

So then I checked to see if the webcam itself was working, and the answer was NO. And then I knew that very special kind of panic you feel when you realize that you may have just fucked up big time.

And so it all began. Eventually, I invoked the nuclear option, which is to uninstall absolutely everything to do with the errant hardware, do a cold boot with the device disconnected, then install the drivers again and only THEN plug the motherfucking thing back in.

And that worked. But man, I have a lot of respect for the people who do this sort of thing all the time. You know, the sysadmins and maintenance workers and repairmen (and women) and all those other people who troubleshoot and fix things all day long.

Frankly, I don’t think I could handle the stress. I would much rather troubleshoot a joke. Those I can almost always fix.

The day’s drama aside tho, I am feeling pretty good lately. I think that Wellbutrin I have been taking for two months has finally reached its full effect. I have more energy, more drive, more focus, more persistence, and just plain more life in me.

I feel a lot more solid and complete inside as well. Partly that’s the drugs, and partly that is the progress I have made in dealing with my anger lately. Just going ahead and letting myself hate my father has been a huge step for me, one of many to come, I hope. And it had released a lot of emotion in me that I now have to deal with, and that is proving… fun.

Don’t get me wrong, I would never go back. The effects of relaxing the suppression of emotion are far to pleasurable and beneficial to even consider it. But now I have all that anger bouncing around inside me and it’s not something I am used to dealing with, so I do sort of get the feeling like I am picking my way through a minefield sometimes.

It is not exactly that I feel angry all the time. Far from it. But the anger is very close to the surface at all times and it has made keeping to my usual very high standards of behaviour much trickier than before I let some of my anger roam free.

I still refuse to take my anger out on others. Hence the high standard. This makes finding a “safe” way to express all this rage inside me rather difficult, but I am managing okay.

My record is not spotless and I know that there have been a few times lately when I snapped at people close to me with a sarcastic comment or two, and for that I am truly sorry.

But I think I have it under control for now. It is just a matter of getting used to a higher emotional power level than before. It makes it harder to control oneself and I have definitely been more impulsive than ever lately, but self-control is still possible.

Largely, of course, I have been pouring all this newfound voltage into making videos. It keeps me busy for a good chunk of the day, and it’s an absolute joy to be able to just take an idea and run with it and keep flogging away at it until it is done.

I could do with more strain in my life, and making videos provides it. Living an idle life sucks big time. You have to find something you like doing and then just pour yourself into doing it. Then you can reach the zone where you are completely absorbed in your task and that leads to great happiness.

Humans need to work. We are born to strive. I have felt that way for a long time. I have had almost twenty years of uselessness, idleness, disconnectedness, and loneliness to teach me just how badly human beings need work they can do and get a sense of accomplishment, as well as a feeling like they have a place in society where they have status and a sold identity.

Every day, you have a certain amount of energy to spend, and the goal is to spend it all, knowing that with sleep and food, it will all be back again the next day.

The more you spend, the less the stress (up to a point), and the better you will feel.

At least, that is how it looks from where I am right now.