Daily Archives: September 15, 2013

Meh bleh argh.

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Feeling kinda bleh today.

Good day to just throw some links at y’all whilst I diarize.

Like check out this extremely clever bit.

I love this kind of meta-comedy. For one, the skit starts with an excellent bit of misdirection. You have no idea what the joke will be because you accept subtitles as a natural thing when talking to brown people, so you don’t even consciously notice them.

So to then have them become central to the bit is brilliant. And then to have a character get mad because he is subtitled and feel it is an insult to the quality of his English is doubly brilliant.

All in all a genius bit.

So yeah, today I have been feeling crappy. But then again, it’s the afternoon. I always feel like crap in the afternoons. And today, I have to do both parts of my day’s labours in the afternoon because tonight I will be going to the monthly BCSFA meeting.

At least, that’s what I should do. I honestly do not feel like it. I am tempted to just skip it and stay in and rest and stuff so I can be bright and perky when I hang out with the gang watching videos tonight. I just do not feel like pulling myself together to go out and be social today. I want to fall apart instead, like I usually do when I feel down. Just melt into a puddle of squishy good like I am Odo in his bucket, and regenerate.

Later, when I have my strength back, I can pull myself together and form a coherent shape and stick with it for a while. But right now, I just feel so dissolute and dissolved that just having it together enough to type these words to you wonderful people makes me feel like I am balancing a nail on my nose.

But I think I will go. I will go specifically because it will be difficult to do so. I am sick and fucking tired of the path of least resistance. I need to start building some strength of character. Put some muscles on my wimpy will and straight out this spineless soul of mine.

Sure, remaining formless maximizes options and minimizes commitment. If your resting state is shapelessness, then you can always take on whatever shape is needed at the time and can never, ever, be caught in the wrong shape at the wrong time, which somehow seems like the worst thing in the world.

Like if that happened, part of me will screech “See! You should have stayed formless, you idiot! Then you could have taken the shape you need instead of being stuck in the wrong one!”.

But maybe true adaptability means being able to handle things whatever shape you’re in.

And the thing about having formlessness as your default state is that it means that to actually take a useful shape requires energy, and maintaining that shape requires a constant input of energy. And that means you have this drain on you all the time you have to keep your shit together, and that limits how long you can do it and how stable any given shape can be.

Whereas with some investment in permanent structure and strength, you will have a shape even when you have no energy. Sure, you might be a little less adaptable, and it definitely means deciding on a shape and committing to it, which is very very hard for liquid types like myself.

So many possibilities… how can you possibly pick one? I saw one of those “find your passion and follow it” speeches recently via TED, and it all sounds very good and is no doubt true. I do feel like I have hidden behind excuses and cowardice for a long time. I have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of, and amazing talents and abilities, so in theory there is nothing stopping me from just going out into the world to stake my claim and leave my mark on the world.

Nothing except abject terror, that is. The excuses and lies and self-delusions might be holding me back, but they are also my shelter from a world I feel to be cold and hard and unfeeling precisely because I have protected myself from it so effectively for so long.

I am a very old caterpillar.

Chief amongst these excuses, and the bigger one that I can’t seem to imagine how to overcome, is that issue of selection and commitment.

I have so many talents, so many interests, so many passions…. I can never choose. Having to choose one and commit to it truly feel like Sophie’s Choice to me, and like Sophia’s Choice, not choosing is easier, and involves less guilt, but leads to a far worse result.

And I’m all about outcomes. Aren’t I?

So I must dream into being some form of compromise that keeps my options as open as possible while also letting me actually go out there and actively explore some of them, and accept that said exploration will necessarily involve the possibility of some options being chosen and some discarded.

Time to man up and become a firmer, stronger species of goo.

Oh, and today’s vid is another piece of music.

I feel kinda bleh about that, too. I get the feeling that I will have to keep hammering away at the music thang for a while before I can make stuff that actually satisfies me.

Oh, and speaking as I was many words ago of TED, I found an amazing website via a TEDx talk by its creator.

It’s called DuoLingo, and it offers you high quality language training absolutely free. And not only that, by just using the website to learn to speak French, German, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, you are also helping to translate Web pages from English into those languages.

So I am totally going to be using it to learn French. I started at the beginning, even though I do remember some of the French I learned over twelve damned years of taking it in school, because I figure I need to learn it all again if I am going to develop any sort of fluency.

And man, is it a pain in the ass dealing with gendered language again. Argh.

Oh well. Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

Wassup wit me

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Time to catch you all up on what is happening Chez Moi.

Yesterday, I went to therapy, disability form in hand, and me and my therapist made a very good start on completing the darn thing.

Which reminds me, I haven’t done my section yet. Need to do that before Wednesday, when I will be going back to see him again to hopefully finish the goddamned thing.

It’s 28 pages long, so… it ain’t easy.

I have been foot-dragging on doing my part because I don’t like filling out forms, and that goes triple for scary-long and complicated government forms. If it’s just a matter of checking off boxes and filling in my vital statistics, that’s one thing.

But this has long sections where I am asked to describe this or justify that, and this is going to determine whether or not I get a major lifestyle upgrade, so there’s kind of a lot of pressure.

Plus, my therapist advised me not to come across as too smart to need help. I am to keep it simple or maybe even come across as a little stupid.

It seems unfair and inaccurate for the people who assess these things to associate a high level of intelligence with not needing any help, but whatever. I will try to keep it simple.

My brilliant plan is to do the whole thing in pencil, getting everything as humble and convincing as I can via the magic of the eraser, and then trace the final version over in pen.

That takes a lot of the pressure off, honestly. I don’t have to get everything perfect the first time.

I also went to see my GP yesterday, and he told my my sugars were bad (no duh there), but also that my hemoglobin count is abnormally and unhealthily low, and that combined with my complaints about sour stomach issues led him to think I may have an ulcer.

I am a little skeptical. If it’s an ulcer, it’s pretty mild. I have problems but not brutal fucking agony. Just a tendency to develop acid indigestion when I haven’t eaten in a while.

Still, it seems like my gut has been producing way too much acid for a long time and that definitely could cause an ulcer. And we have no other explanation for where that hemoglobin is going. I have not been bleeding anywhere that I know of. No nosebleeds, no cuts, nothing. So where is the blood loss happening?

He also mentioned anemia. I might be iron-deficient. That is distinctly possible… I don’t eat much meat except when I eat out, and I eat out only once a week these days.

And as far as I know, the only other sources of iron are a lot of nasty green leaf veggies that I am not keen to embrace. I was supposed to ask the pharmacists about iron supplements (which they keep behind the counter for some mysterious reason) but I forgot.

Speaking of the pharmacists, I will soon be taking Tectra, aka Pantoprazole (which sounds like a form of medieval Italian puppetry), which is an acid blocker like the Ranitidine I am already taking, but stronger.

Why is it stronger? because is belongs to a class of drugs with the most awesome name ever. Drugs like pantoprazole are know as proton pump inhibitors.

Is that not the most Star Trek thing you have heard today?

“Captain, I dinnae know how much longer I can keep this tub together. That last shot took out our primary proton pump inhibitor. Another one like that and we’re space dust. ”

“Five minutes, Scotty. I just need five more minutes. ”

“Aye… I’ll see what I can do. ”

Oh, and one last thing about my GP visit : I had to wait one and a half hours past the time of my appointment before I actually saw my GP. That’s bad.

But the good part is, I complained about it to him the moment I saw him, and that is quite positive for me because I usually have trouble expressing anger even in that mild a form and have even more trouble asserting myself on my own behalf.

He claimed not to know things were that bad, which is plausible. Doctors are often quite clueless about the non-medical aspects of their practice. That is understandable, after all, they are basically Talent and Talent has to focus on what it does and leave extraneous details to others.

He says he will look into it. I sure hope so. That shit is crazy-making. I ended up watching the tail end of some Breakfast TV type program, an entire episode of The Young And The Restless (it’s like two thirds nonwhites now, which is awesome), and some highly obnoxious Oprah-style female-oriented show with makeovers and recipes and stuff. God daytime television sucks.

I miss the days when I could watch game shows all morning and cartoons from noon to three!

And then more cartoons from four till six, then supper, then back for Wheel and Jeoprady at night. And when they are over, it’s prime time!

God I had a sad and lonely childhood.

Which is probably why I make videos like this.

It is more or less a short theater-style monologue, the sort of thing one might do if one was asked to bring something short for an audition.

Watching it now, it feels…. incomplete. The ending is too abrupt. It needed to be developed more somehow. I was trying to keep things lean and efficient, and so when it seemed like it was done, I resisted my usual tendency to want to cram things full of elaboration and just say “OK, then… it’s done.”

But I think I went too far. I should have at least said, right before the last line, “So… best country, best part of the country, best town, best job, best race, best religion, and best family!”

And only THEN say “How lucky can one guy get?”

Oh well, learn and move on!