Yup. We are back to angst.

But less than usual. I have been feeling better lately and I think it is due to my new outlook on life. I am busily banishing negative thoughts, self-loathing, constant self-judgment, and all ambitions, plans, and goals besides this blog.

This is all in the service of my getting in touch with my pure, clean primal self. The person that existed before I was ever molested and bullied, the person who has been a part of me all along under all that ice and pain inside me. The real me. strong and clean and shining brighter than the sun.

My depression is not a part of me. It’s something that happened to me. And I will still be the same person if it is gone. Just a much happier and healthier version of myself.

And as I type these things, I can feel the old system protesting. The voices that say no, stay safe, stay out of the way, exposure equals danger are still there, for now at least. They are weak now, but they still have some power.

I am determined to sweep them out of my mind. To expand this new healthier self until the old bad programming is pushed out of my mind, and I am willing to take a mighty axe to whatever stands in my way.

I have even started saying to myself, “You know, the world is a pretty great place.”, or similar. The first time I did it, my inner voice shook like the legs of a newborn deer. It felt impossibly bold and wrong to say such a thing, as though by saying it I would be tempted to universe to prove me wrong.

Like I have said before, even staunch materialists like myself have superstitions.

And I can follow the chain of emotional reasoning back to its source now. If I think of the world as a good place, that will lead directly to lowering my defenses and relaxing my guard, and of course the very moment I do that, disaster will strike.

It sounds ludicrous when put like that. The universe, not being a person, cannot be waiting for me to let down my guard. No force in the universe knows or cares whether my guard is up or not. Objectively speaking, I have been guarding myself for a threat that disappeared twenty years ago, and these are not cheap defenses. They lead to constant fear, social isolation, a highly limited lifestyle, and all the other products of terrible depression.

The Wall must come down free the people can be free.

Speaking of The Wall, I have become far more aware of my own and how I use it than ever before. I can feel it now, and I am conscious of what I am doing with it. Before now, it has been a reflex, and an overused one at that. But now I have a strong emotional connection to it, and can control (to a certain extent) when it goes up or comes down.

And when I open myself up, I feel good. It is very important that I no longer feel that it is never safe to be truly open with people. I can let them in and it will be just fine. Exposure is not disaster.

And speaking of letting in, that is another big part of my new outlook on life. I want to let more things in. I have realized just how closed off I have been and how much that has suffocated me, and I am determined to stop it. I am slowly prying open that closed gate of mine, and becoming more open to others and to life in general.

The healing is not locked in here with me in my dreadful little keep. It’s out there, in the world, and I will not get anywhere unless I accept that happiness is something you find, not something you are or something you make yourself.

Even if it is just being more open to the unexpected (including my own creativity), I want to open the windows of my soul to let the sunshine and clean air in, and sweep out all the dust and detritus that has accumulated over the years.

And yes, the light will hurt my eyes… at first. But I will adjust, and I will greet with great joy the richer, more vibrant, more affirmative life that I can now see.

Another plank of my recovery is refraining from self-judgment. I am smashing the old thoughts with a hammer on a daily basis. So what if I lay in bed and played video games all afternoon? It is my life, and I live it as I please, and to hell with the ever expanding menu of life options that has kept me crippled all these years.

I will do whatever suits me with the resources, both inner and outer, that I have on hand. There are no wrong answers on this test. As long as I remain true to myself and my own desires, I am doing the right thing. Option paralysis is boring. Spin the wheel of options at random if you have to, but spin it, and to hell with whether it is the “right” thing to do.

It is what made sense at the time. That is the best any of us can do. The ability of our minds to create a list of options for us to choose from is amazing and highly valuable, but the idea is to choose something then do it, not look at the long long list of actions, get overwhelmed, and end up doing nothing.

What I do, or do not do, is really only important to me. I don’t owe the world anything, I am not going to beat myself up for not living of to my potential any more (It’s my potential and I will do what I want with it) and if I live the rest of my days as I am living them now, that is just fine.

I want more than that. But I will not use that as a cudgel against myself any more.

I am me, the only me, and I want to enjoy my life.

And that is all that really matters.

Just finished listening to this fascinating podcast and thought I would chat about it with all you nice folks.

Specifically, the part with the monkeys. For those too busy to listen to an hour long podcast just to understand a blog entry, some scientists wanted to the study how we perceive color, and so they took these color-blind monkeys (who lacked the cones in their eyes for red) (don’t ask me where they got them), implanted the gene for red cones in some virii, and then injected the resulting goo into the monkey’s eyes.

And sure enough, the monkeys grew some red cones. Now just think about that for a moment. When these monkeys woke up, they could see a color that was entirely new to them.

It is fascinating precisely because it is so difficult to actually imagine. We can’t really picture a new color. It’s a place where imagination absolutely fails us. Anything we imagine will be made of the colors we already know. It is quite rare to come across something so completely and perfectly unimaginable.

The first thing the scientists did after upgrading the monkeys was, of course, give them color tests. The monkeys were put in front of a touch screen (man, the rebirth of the touch screen has been good for behaviourists) which displayed what, to the eyes of the pre-upgrade monkeys, would have just been a uniformly grey screen.

But it wasn’t all grey. There was a purple blob in there somewhere. And if the monkeys pressed the purple blob, they got a reward : grape juice.

Twenty weeks went by, and nothing happened. No blobs were pressed, no grape juice was won. But then, suddenly, the monkeys started using those new rods and getting their rewards.

Why twenty weeks, I wonder. What happened to make it twenty weeks and not a hundred, or five. My theory is that there was a random element, possibly monkey attention span, and it took that long for the happy accident to occur.

After all, until one of them actually did it, none of them knew that the purple blob would result in grape juice. That might have been a near-fatal flaw in their methodology. Did they train the monkeys that pressing blobs results in juice before they presented them with the final test?

Anyhow, what really popped my rivets was when the scientist who did this experiment admitted that not only could the technique he used on the monkeys be used to cure colorblindness in human beings, the exact same technique could be used to give humans with normal vision a fourth set of cones.

Mind = blown. Either way, we would have a live adult human being experiencing a new color for the first time in history. They could tell us what it was like. We could find out if they could use those new rods right away, or after twenty weeks, or maybe even… never. (That would suck so bad!)

Honestly, I might sign up for the upgrade, just to find out for myself. It is the kind of unique experience that draws me.

And would there be any practical applications? Would the world suddenly look horribly wrong to you, with everything the “wrong” color, leading to nausea or other neurological symptoms? It would be horrible to have one’s color vision scrambled. Things thar were once uniform in color would suddenly become blotchy and strange looking. Food especially would be a hurdle. Who wants to eat a neon green steak?

Well, me, sort of. But not normal people.

But perhaps it would not take something as radical and frankly icky as putting viral goo in your eyes in order to give us the experience of a new color.

After all, if it is true that we cannot perceive a color until we have a category for it, and that is why the epics of Homer are devoid of all references to blue or colors with blue in them, then it follows that we could learn to see a new color just by exposing ourselves to a new category of colors in the right way.

Homer had the same rods and cones in his eyes that we do. The hardware is identical. Therefore it is a software issue, and it is the nature of software to be… hackable.

Could we really hack our brains to increase the number of colors we can see? Can we put ourselves as far ahead of our current selves as our current selves are ahead of the likes of Homer?

And if so, would we even know? And if so, how would we describe it? We only have words for the colors we know. We would have to come up with a word for the new color (octoroon?) and from that develop a whole new color naming system.

This all fascinates me in part because I fairly recently realized that, despite not being a visually oriented person, color has always had a strong emotional impact on me. Certain colors or patterns will fascinate my eye and I will find it hard to look away from them. This has possibly resulted in a few people thinking I was staring at them quite rudely, when really I am entranced by the color of their sweater or how the light reflects off their earrings.

All part of having the heart of an artist, I suppose. We don’t just perceive aesthetics, we feel them, and that feeling is an inseparable part of the primary sensory experience for us. It is just how we are wired. Thus, things which seem normal and/or indifferent to others are offensive as crime scene photos (or as wondrous as rainbows) to us.

Like I have said many times before, being sensitive isn’t for wimps. It is something we can learn to ignore, but it is not something we can learn not to perceive.

And in its own way, that makes us sensitive creative types like the people with the extra cones in their eyes.

I will regale you with my Netflix adventures soon, but first, misadventures.

Getting to this point, where I am blogging at ya, was trickier than usual tonight. Earlier today, the mouse for my desktop ran out of juice. That is the thing about wireless mice, their own real drawback : they require batteries, for obvious reasons.

After all, you can’t wirelessly power a device via USB. Yet.

So my mouse was dead, which means I can’t actually use my desktop computer at all because I can’t click on my username on the Windows bootup screen.

Okay, I will just do tonight’s entry on the tablet. Um, nope. Finagle’s Law played a little joke on me. Turned out the wireless keyboard for my tablet is out of juice as well!

Oh, my sides.

So the little keyboard is currently plugged into a USB port on the shared living room computer, and I had to knock on Joe’s door to get a couple AAA batteries for my wireless mouse.

The wireless era is very keen, but it is not without cost.

So anyhow, Netflix. I finished watching Life of Pi. Overall, it feels sort of empty and manipulative. The sort of film that seems pretty decent when you are watching it, but afterward you feel sort of empty and disappointed. I can’t help but feel that the movie, and presumably the novel upon which it is based, is trying too hard to appeal to bookish types like myself. It is clearly trying very hard to impress you with how uplifting and literary it is.

Go sell that shit someone else, Ang Lee.

Then again, that might just be my paranoia talking. Certain directors (I’m looking at you, Guillermo Del Toro) have made me instantly suspicious of movies that seem to be putting a lot of effort into dazzling visuals. I have come to associate that with a lack of narrative substance. Highly visual people are often not narratively driven people, and so they just want to go from one beautiful scene to another, and to heck with the plot.

For reference, see What Dreams May Come.

I will say this, though : The young man (Suraj Sharma)who played the protagonist, Pi Patel, must have gone through ten different kinds of hell filming it. The experience must have been grueling both physically and emotionally, spending all those days on a little lifeboat, clambering around and acting his heart out at the same time.

And the movie has some of the best special effects I have ever seen in a non-genre film. The tiger (and the other animals) really look like they are right there on the boat with poor Pi, and I know darn well they weren’t. It is all green screen and CGI. But it looks extremely real.

As for the film’s big conclusion (spoiler!) about “which story do you prefer? So it is with God.”, I say bleah. Those of us in the reality based community want to know the truth of things. The version we would prefer is irrelevant. I

Maybe that seems cold to some people, but it’s just the way I am built. I have a burning desire for the truth. Nothing can be allowed to get in the way of that. I have been trying to temper that with some human feeling lately, with some success, but deep down I will always have the soul of a philosopher.

And sometimes, that means going for the jugular.

The last thing I watched on good old Netflix is the pilot episode of the series Once Upon A Time. The premise is that all the characters from all our fairy tales have been magically transported to a little town in Maine called Storybrooke. (Oh, I see what you did there. )

They all have amnesia, and have forgotten who they “really” are. I know that sounds like a fairly terrible premise, and to be honest, I only gave it a shot out of sheer caprice.

But I actually quite enjoyed the pilot episode. The story is not nearly as cheesy and obvious as you might think. The fairy tale and real world elements are woven together well enough to not be clunkily cliched.

Of course, that’s the pilot, and pilots are often very well honed products created carefully and lovingly over a nice long period of time so they can get everything “right”. That is why a lot of series with very promising pilots end up not being so great when they get into full production and all the pressure and time constraints that entails.

So the show has earned me watching one more episode of it. We shall see how it pans out.

On a personal note, I am beginning to worry about my health. I feel like I have been out of breath a lot lately, and feeling kind of weak, and those are bad signs when you are a forty year old fat guy.

So I am going to go to my GP again soon, possibly this Friday. It might be nothing more than the stuffy air in my bedroom, but better safe than dead.

I have to handle this very carefully, though, because as a recovering hypochondriac, I know I have a tendency to fly into a panic about my health and become quite hysterical, magnifying every little ache and pain into sure signs that I am seconds away from dying from super cancer AIDS.

So I will have to keep my pragmatic common sense hat clamped down firmly on my head for this. No speculation, no self-diagnosis, just a careful gathering of objectively verifiable observations to present to the doctor, and the patience to draw no conclusions until I have seen him.

Who knows, maybe it IS just the stuffy air in my bedroom and that if I got out of the apartment more often, it will all sort itself out once my lungs were clear.

But on the other hand… well, let’s just say I figure it’s prudent to get checked out.

See you tomorrow, folks!

So far, Operation Have A Big Ego is working out okay.

Of course, deciding to do it and doing it are two different things. Like everything else, this will be a process. I have a hell of a lot of unlearning to do, and a hell of a lot of new trail to break in this mind of mine.

But the decision to go this route really crystallized when I was explaining it to my therapist yesterday. (Funny how I often figure things out while talking about them. I guess that is what therapy is for, really.)

I told him that I can’t go the sane, logical, restrained middle route. The one where you have a reasonable ego and believe in yourself in the proper, quiet, make sure you’re not a burden on others with your negative crap way. I am increasingly cognizant of the fact that I am a passionate, emotional person, and far from being a weakness, that is the source of my greatest strength and my greatest power.

My enormous crystalline intellect has strength, but no power. It’s fine tools with no hands to use them, it’s a fine automobile with no fuel to fuel it.

The power for my Great Machine can only come from passion unleashed and feelings deeply felt. I want to feel more, do more, care more, and be more.

Abd so I can’t stay in a tidy little ego box any more. I realized that I have been harshly restraining my belief in myself for most of my life out of fear of the manic madness of egomania, and fear of taking responsibility for my inherent power.

I have long wondered why it was so hard for me to truly integrate my observable good qualities into my self-image… why the fact that I have some extraordinary good qualities never seemed to help with my self-esteem.

I see now that I was afraid to face the truth of it. My power scared me and made me feel like I was losing my grip on reality because, despite my intellect, I am a product of middle class society and as such I have no framework, no model for how to deal with the fact that you are extraordinary.

And my mind kept up the illusion by producing an impressive feeling of manic madness whenever I contemplated my strong points. Thought like “I am a god amongst men!” were produced in convincing qualities in order to scare me off of thinking about my strengths. As bad as it is to be depressed, that kind of insanity is utterly terrifying to me.

That is the sort of thing that could cause me to finally lose grip on my connection to reality. Or so I thought.

But now I realize that those thoughts come from the vast temperature difference in my mind, the big insulated wall between my dominant cold intellect and gigajules of latent emotional energy. Of course when you stop holding the ego down, it will immediately leap to the opposite end of the scale… the equal and opposite madness.

But that doesn’t mean it will stay there. In fact, as long as the two sides continue to intermingle freely, the two sides will eventually reach a happy, sane medium once the oscillations die down.

I am beginning to realize that fear of going crazy has been keeping me crazy. A lot of the things that I feared would “finally put me over the edge” are actually things that would be quite good for me in the long run, and the fear of losing my grip has actually been keeping the healing powers of emotional integration do their job.

My emotions can’t destroy me. My emotions are me. The springtime flood from winter’s thaw can’t destroy me, because I am the water as much as I am the banks of the river.

Gee I’m deep.

And as I was explaining to my therapist, I think the only way to thaw myself out inside is with the opposite of depression, elation. Pleasure. Happiness. And I have a great source for strength and belief in myself : I am one amazing dude.

A lot of people would hand me their left eye just to have my wit, or my intellect, or my warmth, or my depth of thought. When you really think about it, it is pretty amazing that anyone can have all of those at the same time.

So what if I am not good at physical, practical things? Compared to my strengths, that is half a pittance and a handful of small change. Lots of famous, important people were clueless klutzes.

And it is by embracing these truths about myself and allowing my ego to rise that I will find the strength and power to not only push back at my depression, but push it over.

And I realize that it is far from politically correct to believe in yourself. We are all supposed to keep our heads down and never ever truly believe in ourselves, and if we do, we are never ever to admit it, for fear of making someone feel bad.

But I think people should feel free to have all the ego they think they can get away with, as long as they are not using that ego to put others down. Belief in yourself can make you a powerfully positive person with abundant energy to share with the world and make others feel better, not worse.

And sure, there is always envy and jealousy and spite. There will be people who will hate you simply because you are obviously quite happy with yourself and are fully aware of your good points, even if you are as good as gold or better and never ever deny anyone else their greatness.

Well to hell with such petty, small, cold little creatures. They are Nietzsche’s fleas of the market, and fear of fleas never keeps the lions of the world from doing as they please.

I am going to follow this ego thing wherever it goes. That does not mean I am going to totally take the brakes off and give myself unlimited license to be an arrogant and dismissive prick. The sweet, kind Fruvous you have known will remain. I am paying very close attention to this process in order to make sure that is true.

But the process will continue, no matter what.

FINALLY got to see Scott Pilgrim Versus The World today. And I loved it.

I had wanted to see it for ages, but you know how it is. At the time it came out, I could not afford to go to the theater at all, and then it came out on DVD and I couldn’t really afford that, and then, four years later, it pops up on Netflix and I am all YES. I will watch this thing now.

And it’s a blast. The hyper-intense visuals got a little annoying in parts, but that is probably just because I am old and feeble. The whole setup, the idea of having to fight the seven evil exes in video game style fights, appeals to me as if it was a projection of my own mind.

About those visuals : I am pretty sure some of them worked a hell of a lot better in the graphic novel upon which the movie was based. Mixing the cartoonish with live action is always a big gamble because that route passes right through the Uncanny Valley. Asking an audience raised with cartoon and live action being two separate dialects of the same visual language to process having them both on the screen at the same time causes a kind of cognitive dissonance that can be unsettling.

I mean, I think there are parts of Who Framed Roger Rabbit that have that effect, and I adore that movie.

Your mind wants to tune in to one level of abstraction or the other. This also happens in animation when the animators introduce toonish elements into what is otherwise a fairly realistic animation.

But anyhoo, loved the flick. Obviously, the whole inclusion of video game imagery is custom made to appeal to me because I have played video games almost literally my entire life.

Seriously. I played Space Invaders when I was so small I could only see the top half of the screen. I am not exactly sure what I was getting out of the experience, but I have since seen other wee ones do the same thing, so I am willing to just consign it to the vast and mysterious land that is the mind of a toddler.

I mean, who knows what goes on in those little heads? They are halfway between human and animal, with the cleverness and tool manipulation skills of a human but with an animal’s lack of anything between instinct and action.

So video games are pretty much written into my base DNA. But more than the use of video game imagery is using video game elements as metaphors for other things.

Never saw that done so well. And it turns out that it pops big in this noggin of mine. I felt like it shone right into my heart. Amazing when someone skillfully appeals to emotional furniture you did not even know you have.

Means you get a cool movie and learn a little about yourself as well. That’s a great bonus.

Michael Cera is always a pleasure, although I am not sure he was the ideal choice for this particular role. I get the feeling that the original character in the graphic novel was not quite a Michael Cera soft-voiced timid type but more like a totally average normal kind of guy, almost generic. The sort of guy who blends in wherever he goes because nothing about him really sticks out. You meet him and you feel like you have met him before because you have met so many others of his type.

That is obviously rampant speculation though. For all I know, the graphic novel version of Scott is exactly like the movie Scott and I am just blowing smoke out my ass.

Besides Cera, the other breakout performance is Jason Schwartzman as Gideon, the final boss and mastermind behind the League of Evil Exes. His role is not a big one, in fact he barely shows up for most of the movie, but he does such an amazing job at completely embodying the Asshole Ex Boyfriend that I had to mention it.

He makes Gideon such a perfect asshole that you are truly joyous when he gets his comeuppance. That is, of course, the job of the villain, to be so utterly despicable that beating him or her feels like a victory not just over a person but over evil itself. Schwartzman pulls this off perfectly.

The movie never explains how Scott, supposedly normal guy, suddenly gets awesome kung fu powers when the whole fighting the evil exes thing starts. I realize that asking that question in something so stylized is a little absurd, but I still want to know. It probably also worked better in the graphic novel.

The fights are quite awesome, by the way. Basically video games meet The Matrix. Lots of fancy moves and wire fu and people being kicked through walls and stuff. But unlike a lot of movies these days, SPVTW does it all in a way that makes sense and is not too hard to follow.

It takes skill and finesse to turn up the speed on the action without it turning into just a jumble of noise and pictures. You have to have a deep command of visual language and know exactly how human vision works and what it can do.

My own dabbling in the world of video editing has show me that the editor of a movie is a very powerful person. They are the ones who take all the bits and pieces and synthesize them into a cohesive, understandable, effective narrative. There is no other medium like it. As a writer, I have to create whole worlds, but I have the advantage of starting from scratch.

Movie editors, on the other hand, have to take whatever principal photography and the rest of post-production churns out and make it into a movie.

It’s like a form of collage.

Anyhoo, final summary : SPVTW is very fun and even somewhat moving. I recommend it for anyone under thirty or anyone else (like me) who grew up on comic books and video games.

I am feeling just a little incoherent right now.

Partly that is just my usual brain fog. It’s remarkable how well I think given the kind of shit that goes down in my head all the time. It’s like, I have no life and yet I am remarkably unstable.

These things are probably related. If I had more of a life, I would no doubt use up the excess of energy that leads to me being so damned incoherent and unstable. The storm inside would be robbed of its energy.

The problem is, I have learned to cope with this inner storm not by going out into the world and expressing my energies in a healthy way, but by hunkering down in my tiny little world and waiting for the storm to pass.

But it is never going to pass. Not till I find more ways to let all that energy out. I feel like I want to press myself against the glass that separates me from the world so hard that it squeezes all that energy out of me like juice from an orange, and I can finally find true peace.

My life might seem stress free and peaceful, but that’s only on the outside. Inside it is a nightmare of blood and ice.

But at least I am learning. I am opening up inside. I am activating. Eventually, I will step out into the big bright world in a big way.

But there’s no hurry. My life is decent right now. I have friends, I have toys, I have a very active and intelligent mind, I have loads of talent and potential.

However that all works out for me will be fine. I am through with pressuring myself. That’s my new motto : “no pressure”. None. I am through with all that crazy-making nonsense. Clearly I do not do well under that regime. I just end up building up guilt and self-loathing about all the things I could be doing and/or should be doing, and where does that get me?

Nope, it doesn’t make me a hyper-motivated overachiever like my sister Catherine. I only wish.

Instead, it just makes me avoid the things that activate that guilt and self-loathing…. which just happen to be the very things that would lead to the kind of achievement that would get my out of this damned situation.

So that’s it. The pressure system has been tested and found to be entirely wrong for the job. On a scale of one to ten, it scores a negative eight. Time to switch.

Instead, I will pursue my own happiness and pleasure however they might show up. I keep saying that it is far, far better to do things out of desire than compulsion, which is what pressure tries to be. Pressure, fear, and whatnot are cold, and motivation is hot, so the pressure ends up killing your motivation while pretending to provide it.

So no pressure. Everything’s fine. My life is pretty good. The most important thing in my life right now is to gather as much of the warm and happy side of things into my soul as possible, and that looks a lot like just having fun and seeking pleasure.

But what I am doing is actively seeking the things that will bring me pleasure, happiness, and joy, not only because those things are awesome on their own, but they are the antidote to that big lump of frozen ancient pain deep inside my soul.

If I am to walk through life as a free man, I am going to have to melt that lump and let my waters flow free.

Another reason I might be a little incoherent is that I just watched the first half hour or so of Scott Pilgrim Versus The World and it is quite the trip. I have gotten as far as the fight with the first evil ex boyfriend, who looks a lot like an Indian version of Balki from Perfect Strangers and whom they kept saying was dressed like a pirate, but wasn’t.

Methinks there was a lack of communication with costuming at some point.

I am quite enjoying the movie so far. The attempt to make it like the graphic novel it’s based on are a bit much sometimes. But overall, I am loving it’s extravagant excess of style. It is a live action cartoon, and that is a lot of fun.

And I can’t help but love Michael Cera. I mean, that’s George Michael Bluth! He is just so cute and so funny, how could I possibly resist? I know a lot of people are tired of him and his persona now, but I am not. I always want to give him a hug and tell him everything will be okay.

And I am not alone in this.

Earlier, I watched this profoundly disappointing piece of crap called Dinotasia.

The description on Netflix made it sound like this was going to be a documentary about dinosaurs that used the latest in computer animation to take you to prehistoric times, etc.

And it was narrated by Werner Herzog! I am SO THERE.

But it turns out that it is not a documentary at all, it is a series of vignettes starring relatively realistic dinosaurs (no talking or anything, although one might argue their emotional responses are more mammalian), and let me tell you, the vignettes are uniformly stupid.

There’s two kinds : incredibly sappy and corny, and pathetically infantile attempts at comedy. Neither are informative. Herzog “narrates” only in the sense that every vignette starts with one of his classic impressive sounding yet sort of confusing bits of trademark verbiage.

“Here ve see dat the laws of nature, while never kind, can be zed to be deeply ironic, ant furthermore, undermining de vast sweep uf history iss a deep ant primal need to urinate. ”

I can’t entirely condemn the film because I am clearly not its target audience. It is meant for kids, and I am quite positive that children watching it would be absolutely delighted with it. They would laugh at the humour and be moved by the schmaltz and just love the dickens out of the flick.

It is not the movie’s fault that I was expecting a Walking With Dinosaurs type documentary.

But I need to satisfy my info craving somehow.

Time for some podcasts!

Great. I felt fine all day, then right when it is time for me to sit down and blog, I get all tired and sleepy.

Maybe it’s the meal I just had, making me tired as my blood sugar comes back to something normal. I was surprised to find myself feeling quite woozy and wobbly when I got up from bed for supper at around 7 PM. I had a perfectly solid and complex lunch today. One would think that would do me for the nonce. But no, I was experiencing mild but distinctive low blood sugar symptoms.

Usually when that happens, after I finally eat, I get a slight euphoric feeling that leads to tiredness as, I am guessing, the body says “Ahhhh, that’s so much better, let’s make him lay down and sleep so he doesn’t waste all this blood sugar again.”

It is sobering to think that the symptoms of low blood sugar are the result of every cell in your body crying out for food.

It can’t be a natural sort of tiredness, because I took a nap in the afternoon. Then again, it was one of those dream soaked naps that leave me all wrung out and spacey, so that might be a contributing factor as well.

Geez, I almost dozed off there when I paused for thought. This is more serious than I had thought.

Still working on my new “no pressure” mindset. Putting pressure in myself to do things does not work. It strangles that which it hopes to inspire and only serves to jam the system.

So I am working hard to stay in a zone of comfort and relaxation and acceptance. Whatever happens is fine by my. I am just a happy hedonist looking for a good time. Plans, ambitions, dreams, and so on can all take a break and cool their jets, because I am resetting the clock and dropping all power levels down to zero.

I will either learn to grow myself in a healthy, sane, stable, viable way, or I will stay as I am for the rest of my life. Either is fine. Putting insane amounts of pressure on myself to Do Something accomplishes nothing but making me miserable and jamming the system.

Fix the blockages first. Then I will turn the power back on.

As always, my goal is to learn to act from desire instead of compulsion. I want to rebuild how I see the world and how I act within it is based on desire and happiness, not guilt and misery.

W00ps. Zoned out again. Damn, you would think I had been slipped the Mickey. Never accept free drinks, people, unless you saw the bartender make it.

Getting very tired of the spotty WiFi reception in my room. I could order a new WiFi router, I guess.

Or I could just rearrange my room a little. See, the thing is, the reception is only really bad at the exact spot where I want to use it, namely the head of the bed, which is where I lay my bed.

So if I was to shift things around so that I laid the other way around, I might be ablke to fix the problem. Seems odd to consider moving furniture to be less of a hassle than ordering something online, but honestly I could really use the change anyhow. I have been sleep on and sweating into the same section of my giant king sized bed for years. If I could just start sleeping and lounging on a different part of the bed, I bet I would sleep much better.

My therapist says I need a new mattress, and that would definitely be nice. Mine is pretty old now and has been through a heck of a lot, including the many times I had to fold it in half to fit in some vehicle when I had to move.

And mattresses really don’t like that.

So it is not, objectively speaking, a very good mattress. It’s all bowed and sprung and infirm. Any sleep specialist, or chiropractor for that matter, would probably look at my bed and throw their hands up in despair.

Ergo, I cannot deny the need. I would likely sleep a million times better if I had a fresh, firm, new mattress.

Getting one is no easy task, tho, because even if I had someone who wanted to give me a totally new mattress right this very second, I would still have to find a means to transport it.

Still, it is an idea well worth considering. I would sleep a lot better, and who knows what that would do to my mood. I cannot discount the role of sleep apnea in my low mood.

Maybe if I got some decent rest, I would get some pep in my step and be all eager to go out and conquer the world.

Or at least get to a furmeet or too.

Still fading in and out. When I am done here, I am going to hit the hay SO DAMNED HARD.

Watched the final episodes of Mad About You today. So I am a little teh sad. Final episodes of sitcoms always make me very emotional, as they tend to be quite sentimental and I am just a big fat gooey sponge when it comes to that kind of thing.

I am both highly logical and analytical, and very sensitive and sappy. I really need to get these two sides of me working together somehow. It could be quite the combination.

I have a lot of powerful personal assets in my personality. Sometimes that frightens me, because of course, with great power comes great responsibility, and I have felt like a giant amongst paper pygmies for a long long time.

But they are probably a lot stronger than I give them credit for. I have already been opening up my personality some and the results have been pretty good.

Wait till they see the real, full me!