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.
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!