I’m so indie that my shirt don’t fit

More random titles from the songs playing in my head.

Today’s been decent. Did therapy. That went pretty well. When I mentioned that I want to go someplace where there is lively philosophical discussion, my therapist suggested that I look up the local Philosopher’s Cafe action, so I have done so.

There seems to be a number of them. The one here in Richmond, according to my doc, takes place entirely in Russian, which does not surprise me. Russians have a much better attitude towards philosophers, and intellectuals in general, than we here in the Stupid Lands, and there is a very large Russian population here.

Heck, the apartment complex I live in is half Russian. So while it sucks that there might not be one of those events near me that I could actually participate in, I am not surprised that it was the Russians who had the motivation to start one and keep it going.

Russia has a long history with coffee-house intellectuals.

There seems to have been a series of them out of Kwantlen College, which is also here in Richmond, but the latest info I can get on them is a schedule for Spring 2013.

Close, but not close enough.

Still, I will try to email the organizer and see if they are still going.

Here’s a feel-good story for your edification and illumination :

What a great bunch of kids! How many kids would even think of making up their own holiday? And I love how they sort of diss Mother’s Day and Father’s Day by saying “They get this extra day besides their birthdays, why don’t we?” Because they are raising you, kiddo, but I don’t expect you to understand that yet.

Of course, along with everyone else who watches that video and has a heart (not so fast, Republicans!), I hope the boys keep right on celebrating Brother’s Day until they are old and grey.

Also in the heartwarming category, we have a completely adorable white lion kitten who is working on her roar.

The stuttered sound. The fluffy white fur. The helplessness. It really makes it seem like someone crossed a lion with a sheep.

So THAT’s what happens when the lion lies down with the lamb.

I have a real weakness for squeaky little kitten mews, and the petite lioness’ vocalizations technically qualify, but are a tad more disturbing than most.

I have my budget for Vcon more or less worked out in my head. It’s good that it’s a little later in the month than I had anticipated, because I will only have to cover two weeks post-Vcon before my next check.

So I have around $233 to my name right now. Take out $60 for registration and that leaves $173. I have budgeted #100 for 5 meals of $20 each, and that should cover supper Friday night, and lunch and supper on Saturday and Sunday. Breakfasts I can skip, improvise, or cadge off of Hospitality.

That will leave me with around seventy dollars to see me through two weeks, which will be tight but it should be manageable as long as I keep a tight grip on the purse-strings.

Here’s a fun news story : optometrist tests female patient’s eyes by masturbating.

Doctor Emmett Deck the Third (what pride he had bought to his father and grandfather’s legacies) was fitting a 33 year old woman for new contact lenses when he suddenly invited her into his “private office”.

Alias his actual private office. Whereupon he proceeded to “polish his lenses”… alias spank it, alias shaking hands with the bishop, alias masturbate his privates.

The story does not say how old ol’ Triple Decker is, but my guess is that he’s between the ages of 45 and 55, and has led a perfectly normal, strait-laced, family-oriented, pillar of the community life until now.

But there is just something that happens to men of that age bracket that makes some of them develop a runaway libido that sweeps all common sense and rational self-interest out of the window and makes them a slave to the “Little Head” over the big one.

A lifetime of repression and always doing the right thing and being the right kind of man suddenly boils over, and they do something like go and have an affair, lead a double life, get smacked down for sexual harassment because they keep playing grabass with their staff, or even, in this dude’s case, just plain whip it out and jumpstart it right in front of someone.

My theory is that the really crazy stuff like Doctor Sausage Slapper up there comes from the really repressed types with very little sexual experience outside a very vanilla marriage and so they just plain do not know what to do with these feelings, and so they just keep on repressing them until the dam bursts and it’s your face next to a headline about your staff complaining about how much you lick them.

But I guess it’s not a surprise that so many men want to show off their thang.

After all, it’s worth a million bucks.

I won’t bother getting all frothingly angry over that. Take it as read that I am super pissed about such blatant inequity. Especially when there are far more single mothers (not by choice) than single dads.

I like the style they did the PSA in, though. I am not usually keen on the cutouts and markers style, but these folks did it with a good eye for visual presentation and really made it work.

Oh right. And, yet another song.

Still not the powerful kickass no-hole-barred heavy techno stuff that I keep failing to create, but still a pretty cool little bit of music, in my humble if not downright self-effacing opinion.

Someday, I will unlock the secret of how to make the kind of ass kicking music that I dream of. The kind of thing that blends the tools of sample based music with the style of things like heavy metal and industrial.

Stuff like that awesome Mortal Kombat theme. But more modern.

Some day, Gadget. Some day!

Dance hall days now!

That has nothing to do with my blog entry, it’s just the song that is stuck in my head right now.

Feeling relatively good the majority of the time lately. I still have a great deal of frustration, impatience, and sarcasm boiling beneath my friendly and affable exterior, but I think I am slowly learning to harness it for the good of all and hence it is losing a lot of its steam.

It’s nto fun that I have that feeling pretty much 24/7 now, I will admit. But it’s a good thing. It means I am getting more and more in touch with my passions and my emotions, and as that happens, I gain better access to the primal wellspring from which all motivation, meaning, and renewal flows.

And I need that renewal badly. I am a very old caterpillar and I desperately want to fly.

Nothing new on the personal front to report. Vcon is this weekend so I am quite stoked. Also nervous, but that just comes with the territory. I am not scared, which is the important thing. It is very helpful to be able to tell the difference between anxiety and mere nervousness. They both have the same physiological effects (butterflies in stomach, increased cardiovascular activity, and so on), so it is easy to mistake one for the other and think that if you have the symptoms of anxiety, you are having an anxiety attack, and off you go over the edge into hell.

That is especially true if you start catastrophizing the physical stuff, thinking a racing heart means you are going to have a heart attack and an upset stomach means you are going to throw up.

I know all about that, because that is the hell I lived through in my early 20’s, after I had to leave college because of parental funding withdrawal. I had a terrible mix of irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety, hypochondria, and depression, all magnified by the fact that the IBS was so bad that I could barely eat or drink anything, so I was malnourished and dehydrated as well.

So I was pretty much crippled. I spend my days on the couch in front of the TV, trying to distract myself so that I didn’t freak out over how sick I felt and how sure I was that I had some kind of horrible illness that was going to kill me. And when I started to freak out, that is when the IBS kicked in and suddenly I was physically ill as well, as if to confirm my fears.

Hell, I had these attacks of thinking that if I didn’t consciously keep breathing, I would forget to breathe, and die. Clearly, I was deeply ill on more than the physical level.

And that was life for around two years. Eventually, I began to slowly pull myself together. I learned to eat whether I felt like it or not. I learned to get a grip on myself and squash the panic with a steel-hard block of determination combined with fatalism.

Whatever happens, will happen, and I will not freak out about it. I will simply wait it out. It’s a philosophy that really works for me against all kinds of anxiety. So outright anxiety attacks are rare for me today, although a lot of that is the meds.

You know what cures anxiety almost as good as drugs? This video.

The boy’s name is Hernan and he lives in Buenos Aires. As you can see, he has Down’s Syndrome, and as a result of that does not like to be touched.

But that does not deter the dog, named Himalaya. She is determined to befriend the boy, and while she doesn’t quite succeed in totally breaking through to him, it melts the heart to see her trying so hard to reach him and make friends with him.

Basically, she is the Best Dog Ever. I can’t think of another act by a canine that has moved me so much. Even other hero dogs, like ones who rescue people or who catch bad guys, don’t touch me as much because I was once a lonely little boy somewhat trapped in my own world and it was animals, in my case cats, who were always there for me when I needed company and affection.

They weren’t big on conversation, but they made up for it in purrs.

Then again, you could just watch Gwar sing a Billy Ocean song.


GWAR covers Billy Ocean

First off, awesome to see Gwar again, the metalest band ever. And CANADIAN. And double awesome to see how good their costumes have become. They look fucking awesome even close up!

And bravo for the decision to mix in a way cooler song, Teenage Wasteland, to that sexist song from the 80’s. It’s not a terrible song musically, but its whole feel is sorta creepy to me now.

Oh, and I did another slideshow type thing.

I was going to do another talker but once more the camera was being a bitch and refusing to work as a camera, so all I could do was use it as a microphone and do another stupid slideshow.

Plus, my video editing software decided it didn’t like WAV files today and crashed every time I tried to use one in the vid, so the very cool musical thing I had planned for the background music did not happen.

Instead, I just had to grab an MP3 of an admittedly awesome song and use that.

So today has not been a good computer day. Grr.

Overall, I am still feeling creatively frustrated. I feel like I want to take things to the next level but I don’t really know what that level is yet.

It must be one of those frustrating but fruitful periods of artistic growth, where method fails you and you have to grow as an artist and a person in order to further your craft.

I want to do more with my videos and my music. I am just not quite there yet.

And until I get there, I burn.

But make way, world… the Next Big Thing is coming!

A question of intelligence

For whatever reason, I have mostly kept my introspective musings out of my YouTube videos, but today was one of the exceptions. Today, I wanted to ask a question.

So I did.

I suppose I keep them separate because, in my own weirdly sideways way, I am trying to entertain people with my YouTube videos, and by and large, people talking about their childhoods and their mental illness is not what most people would consider entertainment.

But I think it does me some good, and it’s not like my usual videos are all that great to begin with, so it’s not like I have a lot to lose by baring my soul to the whole Internet in a slightly more palatable form.

I keep telling myself that I need to find currently hot videos and then post video replies to them in order to raise my profile, but YouTube has made doing a video reply so damn complicated and hard to find that when it occurs to me to do it, I get frustrated trying to figure that damned thing out and end up giving up.

Not proud of that, but that’s just the kind of person I am. Low frustration tolerance.

It used to be that you just clicked a button that said “Leave a video reply” and just started talking to your webcam. But now they have hidden that option away somewhere.

I can understand why. I can only imagine what kind of abuses that function might have been subjected to by that cadre of Internet scumbags who ruin everything sooner or later.

But it still frustrates a person like me who wants to used it, scout’s honor, for what it is intended for : participating in fruitful discussion.

Or participating in public goofiness. I am cool with both of those.

But anyhoo, back to talk about my video du jour. Talking about my stuff out loud, on camera, does seem like it is a more potent form of the nostrum that is writing about them. So purely from a therapeutic point of view, pouring that stuff out in video form is a good thing and might even speed my recovery.

Might not be the smartest thing career-wise, but seeing as I don’t even have a career now, and I probably won’t be able to really make one for myself until I am mentally healthier anyhow and have more drive, focus, determination, and that long sought after ability to stick with things anyhow.

So what the hell. Maybe I will do more videos like today in the future. They don’t have to be knockout dazzling entertainment destined to take the Internet by storm.

Because that’s not what they are for. They are to help me feel better, think better, GET better.

I still go for long spells forgetting that I am a very sick person with a serious illness. It’s just such a depressing thought. It is so much more fun to not think about it and just float through life.

Well, maybe not more fun. But easier. So much easier.

About the video… I know that there was more than my IQ separating me from my fellow students. Looking back, I had a pretty maladaptive big mouth too. I said whatever popped into my head, and not necessarily gently, either, and that is no way to make friends and influence people.

But I knew no better. Before school, nobody had been there to teach me to be less unthinkingly blunt. If anything, I was mildly rewarded for it, because adults find smartass kids to be funny. And looks at all those kids on the sitcoms I soaked up like a sponge. They were smartasses too.

That’s fiction, though. In real life, being a smartass makes people hate you. And I was just too socially clueless to realize what effect a blunt yet barbed remark could have.

I mentioned Head Of The Class in my video, and I was really on the path to becoming like Dennis, the fat kid. Sarcastic, mocking, abusively, smug, superior. But luckily, I am too sensitive to end up there, and too dedicated to being responsible for the predictable effects of my actions.

I could never give in to my dark side because I honestly can’t stand to hurt people. Hurting others is like hurting myself because I know I will feel their pain. That’s why I love making people happy. I will get to share in that, too, and it becomes marvelously self-reinforcing.

But still, I know I did myself no favours with my big blunt mouth when I was a kid. And worst of all for a kid who could not get along with his fellow students, it turned my teachers against me too.

Sure, when a kid points out a mistake to a teacher, we all laugh because we love to see someone puncture authority and most of us like seeing someone representing truth, intellect, and knowledge score a little victory over the powers of conformity and the oppressive hand of The System.

I have even used some of the stories of my being smarter than the teacher as funny anecdotes for precisely that reason. They go over big time.

But right or wrong, good or bad, David or Goliath, that teacher now hates me. I humiliated them in front of their students, destroyed some of the sense of authority that is vital for keeping a classroom of elementary school students in line, and did it in a way that leaves them feeling helpless and betrayed.

And yet, they can’t do anything about it, because a) I am right, and b) if they sent me to the principal’s office for it, they would just end up looking even more foolish and then all their colleagues would know about it too.

Trust me… a teacher tried that and that’s exactly what happened.

And yet, at the same time, I was pathetically dependent on them because the students all hated me.

Talking about biting the hand that feeds you!

That’s all from me for today. More tomorrow!

Beating back the flames

This Facebook shit has gotten completely out of hand.

I spend three to four hours a day just keeping up with it. Just between I Fucking Love Science, Upworthy, and Cracked.com I get enough genuinely interesting and cool linked to choke a subReddit. Add in various cool famous people and all the things and people I have “Liked” without realizing that that gave them permission to spam me whenever they felt like it, then add in all the stuff from people I have “Friended” purely to get ahead in Facebook, and then add the cherry on the top of his spam sundae that is the people I actually know and care about and want to hear from every day.

And sure, that’s where I get the groovy links I share with all you nice people, but it is seriously beginning to wear me down. Checking Facebook is starting to feel more like a job than a leisure activity, and I am not even getting paid to do it.

And yet, I can’t seem to stop myself. There is just so much stuff out there that I want to see. My insatiable brain simply cannot resist gorging itself on the never-ending mind buffet that is the Internet and it is, as usual, oblivious to the toll it is taking on the rest of me as it runs pell-mell over rocks and brambles and streams at the speed of thought.

I could save myself a whole lot of trouble if I could just choose one of my news feeds to delete, but I can’t stand the thought of what I know I will be missing.

It is official. There is too much cool stuff on the Internet. Please delete half. I am NOT a crackpot.

Like check out this awesome article about slang from the Roaring Twenties.

This stuff is great! The 20’s were so snappy and witty, at least as seen from nearly a century later. It seems like it would have been a great time to be funny and quick with a smart mouth and a big brain.

I mean, take this one : telling someone to quit making out by saying “Hey you lovebirds, the bank’s closed!”

Or for the truly mindboggling, it says that in the 20’s, a “bimbo” was a macho macho man. I am dying to know hopw the hell it got turned into meaning pretty much the exact opposite by the time it got to us. I can’t help but think homosexuality is somehow involved. Some men started having “bimbo” companions who were muscular pretty boys or “rough trade” types, and the term became associated with them, and eventually to any companion of a certain type of macho man, then just the ladies.

Think about it. For a time, bimbo and mimbo meant the same thing!

And speaking of vintage homosexuality, apparently for some of the 20’s. being a “cake-eater” meant being gay. What, real men eat pie? What is it with straight guys associating women with pie, anyhow? Is this a Oedipal thing? Or is it just because pies are round?

Or saying “Excuse me, I gotta go iron my shoelaces” to tell people you are going to the bathroom. That’s hilarious! It has that right combination of cockiness and absurdity that makes for sizzling hot language. Very high context stuff, too. Implicit in talking like that is that only people as hip and with-it as you are will understand it and so it becomes a badge of community.

Now how could I pass on the opportunity to learn boffo berries hotsy-totsy stuff like that?

Hell, Facebook has taken over so much that I almost never check Livejournal or Tumblr, and Twitter? Forget it. Twitter might as well be happening in another dimension.

It’s the same old story. I have trouble choosing between things I like. I have a real issue with the murdering of my darlings, with picking what to focus on, what is important, what I truly care about, what I really want.

So I tend to leave all my options open so I am free to move in any direction in response to danger. And that is great if all you have to do is react.

But it is terrible for action. It makes decisiveness nearly impossible and ennui and lassitude inevitable. If you are lucky to have life momentum, if you are caught up in the stream of things and therefore don’t have to provide all your own thrust, then merely steering your craft is enough to keep you moving ever forward.

And that is enough for most people. They are only dimly aware of just how much of their life’s motion has not been their own. Things just seem to happen, one after another, and before they know it, they are so deep in the everyday work of life, career, friends, family, and church that they are only required to make a decision one in a very great while and for the most part, just do the next thing.

But when you are stuck in the doldrums like I am, there is no “next thing”. There is no wind for your sails, no white water to ride, not even a star to steer by. It’s nothing but possibility as far as the eye can see.

And that’s what you wanted, right? Unlimited range of motion? Able to master circumstance by being ready for anything at any time? Never be the rabbit with only one escape plan?

But if nothing ever happens, if indeed you have made it nearly impossible for anything to happen by paddling frantically into this puddle and cowering there for decades with your hands over your ears, trying to block out the roaring of the river and the crashing of the waves… if you have done all that, then what is there to react to? You have optimized for something that you have made sure will never happen.

It’s sad the things we do to ourselves in order to feel safe,