Don’t worry, it’s not emthat/em kind of giving up. I still want to live.

But it has occurred to me that I would be far better off if I just gave up trying to control things, trying to predict things, trying to plan things, and all of that.

I would be, in short, better off if I didn’t think much past tomorrow and lived my life entirely for pleasure and fun. A kind of enlightened yet shallow hedonism.

It sounds a tad extreme, I know, but I am the sort of person for whom the occasional drastic measure works a lot better than a lot of fiddly little halfassed incremental measures.

And I am just so tired of trying to fight the tide. I want to learn to surf it. (Remember, if it swells, ride it. ) Or at least learn to float.

We are not, after all, in control of our lives. Not fully. Our individualist culture teaches us that we are captains of our own fate, that we can do anything if we just try hard enough, and that therefore everything that happens in our life is our fault. As if we are all the authors of the book of our lives.

But it is just not that simple. Life is a lot more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. You make your own choices, sure, but you don’t get to write the book. You just get opportunities to choose from a limited list of options.

So for the most part, we need to ease up on ourselves. I know I do. I think an application of a very precisely defined apathy might just be the only way out of this forest of aversion and self-loathing (intimately connected) that I find myself in.

No negotiation, no puzzling, no intense self-analysis and judgment. Just a great big FUCK IT to the world. There is nothing I am supposed to be doing. There is nothing I should be doing. There is nothing that I owe the world or other people besides a modicum of good behaviour.

I am free to just do whatever makes me happy, and let the chips fall where they may.

That is a pretty radical statement coming from me, but I like it. It gives me something to use against all the worries and doubts and aversions and perversions of my storm toss’d soul. No argument, just : FUCK IT.

Like dealing with a difficult child. No argument, no negotiation, this is HOW IT SHALL BE. There is really something to said for picking the right moment to stop being reasonable.

Historically, I have been the opposite of that. I had such a weak and evanescent sense of self that anything could overwhelm it and leave me hating myself for any number of reasons, mostly specious.

And the thing is, that is easier. Sure, being constantly torn apart by the dogs of self-loathing is horrible, but it’s familiar, and it requires absolutely no potentially risky investment of effort.

So much energy inside me, and yet so little determination. Because determination requires faith in oneself. and I have no faith in myself because I know I always cave under the slightest resistance.

Heck of a catch, that Catch-22.

Well it is time I hit ctrl-C on this damned loop, or at least ctrl-break. I deserve better than this. I need to say that as often and as firmly as I can.

I deserve a real life, with relationships, a vocation, paid work (not necessarily the same thing), recognition of my peers, status in the community of my choice, and basic human dignity.

I have nothing to be ashamed of. I have been very ill, and I am not out of the woods yet. I am an intelligent, sensitive, creative, talented dude and if the world was fair I would be a success by now.

But the world is not fair, and I got stuck with a serious disease for twenty fucking years of my life. A disease that actively prevents its own treatment. A disease that I did not even know I had for at least half of that time. (I had heard of depression, but associated it with people who slit their wrists or jump off bridges. I did not know that most depressives do not do that, and there was such a thing as quiet depression. )

I really want to pick myself up, brush myself off, and start all over again. And that is good. What I need to avoid is letting that desire rage out of control and force me into a position where I hate myself for not getting there fast enough.

That is just pure insanity. The process will unfold all the faster if I can just keep from trying to interfere with it. I will gain more vitality and life energy from a life of casual relaxed hedonism than one of pressure, judgment, and self-loathing.

It’s not like I am doing super well under the previous regime. At some point, you have to stop banging your had against the wall and start looking for a fucking door.

Now whether I can pull this transformation off is uncertain, but hey…. that’s okay too. The drive for sure things and the connected radical aversion to risk is an affliction, and worse than anything that could happen if you just loosen up and gamble from time to time.

You can’t always know where the road will lead before you set foot on it… but you will never know if you don’t explore.

I bet I was one of those babies that didn’t explore his environment unless he was unhappy. That is my basic temperament. If I am happy where I am, I stay there. I have no inherent urge to explore, not in the physical sense anyhow.

In the mental sense, I am a restless adventurer constantly exploring and testing new paths. That’s kind of what we brainy introverts do when we are in our inner world.

We explore it.

It has occurred to me that I care about a lot of stupid shit that is not even within my control.

Now I am not talking about philosophical or political caring. I am now and will always be implacably dedicated to the pursuit of the higher compassion. Nothing can change that.

No, I am talking about stupid petty personal things which I not only care about, I blame myself for.

For example, if I am talking to someone and the conversation dies, it’s my fault. I’m dull, I’m boring, it’s my job to keep the conversation going with questions and insights, and so any awkwardness coming from a conversational pause is my fault and I suck.

One can easily see how that sort of thinking leads to very low self-esteem. There is no equality to the system, no sense that it is just as much the other person’s job to keep the conversation going as it is mine. Nope, if there is a pause, it’s my fault for not being interesting and/or clever enough.

This is of particular concern to me lately, as the trend towards internality has continues and I find it increasingly difficult to remain totally focused while talking to people. The parts of my mind that were once readily available to focus on conversation , think of things to say, make predictions as to where the conversation is going, feel for the right moment to speak, and so on are all clogged up with internal processing, and it feels like my mind is filled with a thick heavy fog.

The most alarming part of this is I sometimes find myself fading out when I am the one talking. It’s very dissociative amd disturbing, and I feel like I am losing my grip.

What’s worse is that I don’t think there is anything I can do about it. The fog is just there. I can’t make it go away.

What really bothers me is the idea that my friends think I am ignoring them because they are boring or unimportant to me. Nothing could be further from the truth. I enjoy and value them greatly. I just don’t have it in me to be the twittering little songbird that keeps the conversation going any more.

I try and I try, but it’s like trying to fight the tide.

Why is this happening? Could be a number of things. Could be simply that my physical health is deteriorating and it is taking my intellectual health with it. When I was out and about yesterday, I felt terribly terribly weak. Every step felt like I was wearing a cement suit and my body ached and I felt out of breath.

This has me worried. Also irritated that this symptom presented itself right after I talked to my GP.

There were no chest pains, thank goodness, and at first I assumed it had something to do with my lungs. But I seem to be breathing okay, and that leaves the heart.

It could be that my heart is giving out slowly.

Less dramatically, it could have simply been fucked up blood sugar. I was out of diabetes meds for way too long. It might have simply been that my body did not have enough insulin response to respond to what, for it, was a major uptick in activity.

I was also carrying a somewhat heavy bag. Possibly not a good idea.

It was very frustrating, because usually when I am out and about like that, my body resists at first but then finally accepts that I am going to be moving for a while, and my weak little engine coughs into first gear, and I feel a lot better.

But not yesterday. That second wind never came. Hell, the first wind is still on back-order.

Back to my increasing internality. The positive view is that this is a temporary state as my mind processes a lot of uncorked emotions and therefore needs more and more of my mental CPU cycles to work on it.

The negative view would be that I am simply losing my mind, and it is only a matter of time before my ultimate nightmare occurs and I fall into my own mind completely and totally lose touch with reality, and end up a drooling catatonic in a back ward somewhere, helpless against my nightmares.

Either way, the furniture is definitely in motion in my mind. The process of recovery is moving into a higher gear and I no longer have any control of the process. What has begun must be done. It is as inevitable as a viral infection that has to run its course before the patient is well again.

So it might get worse before it gets better. I might have to spend a lot of time sleeping and a lot of time awake but haunted and eclipsed by the deep mystical truths I must now confront.

Honestly, I would rather do it in my sleep, but some things only happen in the light of day.

It is good, though, that this train does not stop. If it was optional, I might chicken out and get off.

That would only lead to stagnation, though, and I have had quite enough of that, thank you. I burn for freedom from my self imposed cage. My skin craves sunlight and fresh air. There has to be a way that I can feel clean.

So the recovery process will continue. I might be able to slow it, but I could never stop it. And deep down, I ache for transcendence and transformation.

I have been this version of me for far too long. I am so tired of being the world’s oldest caterpillar.

So if I have to walk through the valley of madness, if I have to tread the tightrope over the pit of insanity in order to find my promised land, so be it.

If all else fails, I can just go crazy.

I find that oddly comforting.

Another day of feeling pretty blah.

I can’t wait to get my full set of meds tomorrow. Once I have them, I am going to try to go on a bit of a health kick. Plenty of fluids, cut back on the carbs, look around for more actual decent content for my diet instead of all the crap I eat.

I am just sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. I want to face the day with some intestinal fortitude, not to mention a little more wiggle in my step and maybe, even, a cheerful and open attitude to the world.

It could happen.

It is beginning to really bother me that I have only used my bus pass one time since I got it. That one time did me a world of good in terms of how I feel both physically and mentally, so I should really plan another day out.

Just me, my bus pass, and the GVRD. Maybe I should finally take a trip on the Richmond arm of the Skytrain. After allm, it’s called the Millennium Line, and it’s 2014. I am kind of overdue.

Dunno where I will go. Someplace pleasant. Maybe find a park somewhere and a nice comfortable park bench and do a little writing out in the world.

I certainly could use the fresh air. There is something that happens when I spend enough time away from this cramped and dusty little room of mine. The air in my lungs turns over and I start feeling way better because I am finally getting enough oxygen for all my little cells.

I am thinking of asking Joe if it would be possible to set up someplace I can sit out on our balcony. Traditionally, we have mostly used our little balcony as storage space, pack-rats that we are.

But it should be possible to set up some sort of nook where I can take in sunshine and fresh air with minimal social exposure. Enough days of that, and who knows? Maybe I will have the energy to be happy.

Because happiness takes batteries. Happy people have enough energy to go do the things that keep them happy, and can thus remain motivated and energetic. They have excellent spark plugs, a dynamic dynamo, and a good strong battery.

But us unhappy people just don’t have the energy to go get energy, more or less. Even if we know damned well that doing X will make us feel better, we still lack the energy/motivation/whatever to actually go do it. We are starting cold every single time, and our engines are pulling a far heavier load.

Depression is one of the most invisible illnesses there is. Even other mental health disorders draw attention to themselves by making the patient do crazy stuff.

But I don’t do anything crazy. I don’t do much of all, to be honest. And in most circumstances, nobody notices the person who is not doing anything. We just fade into the wallpaper and lead lives of quiet desperation.

We generally can’t even articulate what it wrong with us. I mean, I am a very articulate person, but I still find it very hard to explain to others (or myself) why I can’t do certain things that seem perfectly logical, sensible, and achievable.

I just…. can’t. There is something very wrong with my inner machinery and as a result, the normal rules do not work for me. All I can do with my day is survive it, it seems.

I really do not want to believe that, though. Dreams are precious, and mine include being a far more active and engaged person. In the service of that dream, I have to believe that I could be doing more with my life.

And if that opens the door to self-loathing, I will just have to deal with that.

Learned a freaky cool thing today. What would you expect to find inside if you sliced open a chrysalis one day after it had been formed around the caterpillar?

You’d expect to find the caterpillar, right? Maybe slightly transformed? A little bit different at most?

That’s certainly what I thought, and I am pretty sure that is what I was taught in junior high science. But it turns out that is totally wrong.

You know what you find inside that chrysalis? Goo. Nothing but goo. The caterpillar is completely gone and there is nothing but goo left in its place. It is that goo that will somehow become the butterfly.

Some scientists noticed this, and decided to find out whether or not anything of the caterpillar remained in the butterfly. So they trained some caterpillars to associate a certain odor with a painful electric shock. Soon, the caterpillar just hated that smell and reacted strongly to it.

Those caterpillars then pupated and five weeks later, butterflies emerged. And sure enough, the butterflies reacted to the odor just the way the caterpillars did.

So something of the caterpillar survived their radical transformation into goo. That is an amazing thought. From the point of view of an observer, it would seem that the caterpillar, in effect, completely dies. There is nothing left of it. It is as gone as if it had fallen into a vat of acid.

Yet something remains.

It’s no wonder that observers of this transformation have likened it to a resurrection, not to mention THE Resurrection. IT is such a perfect, living metaphor for spiritual transformation and transcendence.

What I still don’t understand is… why does the butterfly need the larval stage at all? Why can’t eggs hatch into butterflies? What vital ingredient requires an intermediary stage?

Is it just a matter of adding mass? Certainly a butterfly is bigger than its egg. But lots of other species, including others with no parental care, do not use this middle step.

I have no idea what the middle stage is for, but I really want to know. I have a strong intuition that the answer could have great metaphorical value for me.

Maybe I have simply been in my middle stage all these years.

If so, I am going to make one HECK of a butterfly!

Today has been, in a word, painful.

Not solid agony or chronic physical discomfort. More like a deep down ache that settles in and stays.

Partly it is the weather, which is grey and cold and rainy. That kind of weather is always pretty harsh on my mood. I like to think I do not have any kind of seasonal affective disorder, but I can’t deny that winter does wear me down and it has a lot to do with the amount of light.

I remember living through El Nino when I was living in the Los Gatos hills in Silicon Valley. Months and months of heavy, unrelenting rain and skies dark enough to confuse day and night for the poor little birds and flowers.

I become intensely depressed. Not in the self-loathing way, thank goodness, or I would have killed myself. It was more like the blues, where I just felt down and sad and brooding all the time.

Not even cuddling with Zane the White German Shepherd made me feel any better, and at that point in my life, cuddling with that big sweet snowbank of a dog was just about my favorite thing in the world.

Still, I am older and wiser now, and I am slowly learning that being down and being out are two different things. Sometimes you feel up and energetic and other times quiet and contemplative, but it is only in the valuation that either of those states becomes sadness or gladness.

And valuations can change.

You can choose to view the down times not as a slide into the pit of despair but simply as times to relaxed and think about things, knowing that the big mood wheel will bring you back to perky and active soon enough.

Feeling bad about not feeling like doing certain things gets you nowhere.

The missing ingredient, sadly, is faith. Faith that whatever you are feeling at the moment will pass and the sky will light up with sunshine once again.

This is obviously true from a logical point of view. A glance at anyone’s life will show parts that are better and parts that are worse, and therefore no one state is permanent.

But in the battle between reason and emotion, emotion always wins in the end. If you feel something strongly enough, you have no choice but to believe it regardless of all evidence and logic.

Those belong to the sane realm, and you don’t live there any more.

Where was I? Oh right. So, it could be the rain that is bringing me down.

But I am also a sick person. I need to remind myself of that as often as possible. I have a serious illness called depression, and so every day is a special kind of struggle for me.

I am disabled. Everyday (see, that’s how you use the world correctly, Internet!) tasks are very difficult for me because my disease saps my will and drains my energy and makes me think I am incompetent at everything, so why even try?

I know I keep repeating that in this blog, but it is a lesson I am still trying to learn. It is important in my fight against that massive mountain of misery inside me, which cannot be shifted, only…. melted.

Viewed from this perspective, that of a person struggling with a crippling illness, I am doing OK. I have written three novels and a bunch of other stuff. I go out now and then, hoping to do that more in the future. I write a thousand words a day on this silly ol blog no matter what. I ain’t dead yet.

Any yet, the self-loathing always comes back around again, and I think I know why.

Deep down, I crave pain.

Not, I think, as the expiation of some deep down guilt, though I could be wrong on that. No, this craving for pain has a lot more to do with catharsis in a primal form, using one form of pain to drive out another.

A lot of people have used physical pain to release emotional pain. Cutters, for instance, or religious flagellants. But this bizarre transaction can take place entirely internally. You become both the abuser and the abused, and thus you create a very dark and tortured world whose only saving grace is that it blocks out the real world entirely.

And some of us will do damned near anything to keep from having to deal with the real world which frightens us so with its risks and dangerous and noxious intensity.

But it can’t be a delusion. It’s unpleasant. Delusions are all about happy rainbow land for Pollyannas, right? Therefore you can always trust that anything dark, painful, or horrible is honest to goodness real, and the worse, the realer.

But darkness is no less delusional than light, and at least the Pollyanna types are happy in their delusions, for a while.

So today was not a pleasant day. So what? There will be sunshine again. I have been out of my diabetes meds (besides insulin) for around a week now, so I am not exactly at my healthiest. I have been very thirsty lately, and peeing a lot, which is a good indication that my blood sugar is too high and my body is working overtime producing lots of urine to try to take the excess blood sugar away.

I will be getting my meds refilled on Friday, after therapy, so there’s that.

Until then and for the near future, though, I would be best off making peace with the fact that I am very ill, and my main job is to try and get better.

It is a boring job, and one that looks a lot like doing nothing at all to any outside observer. It is a very hard job nonetheless, made all the harder by the disease’s knack for isolating you emotionally.

So no matter how many people you have around you, you are alone, just like a deep sea diver who never gets wet.

I think it is time I went back to bed to further convalesce.

Good-bye, my friends.

Unsurprisingly, yesterday was kind of a loss.

I barely remember it, to be honest. I spent most of it asleep. But that’s not unusual for the day after a convention. They have a way of wearing you out even if you are getting plenty of sleep.

And I got lots of sleep after I got my sleeping pills. More proof that I would sleep a lot better if I was just more active.

And soem time soon, I am sure I will be. Aaaaaany day now.

Oh well. Getting upset over lost days and implacable immobility doesn’t make things any better, so I might as well say “these things happen” and try to get on with my life.

Speaking of things which upset me, I guess I am ready to talk about Putin and the Ukraine now.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I am amazingly and profoundly angry at Putin and Russia right now. Even when I heard about the “military exercises” near the Ukraine border, I never really thought Russia would go ahead and invade. But invade they did, and now the whole world has to deal with this mess they made.

And I just cannot figure out what their end game is here. Putin is not a stupid man. He cannot possibly have thought this whole “unmarked vehicles” gambit would keep people from knowing who was behind it all and throwing a completely righteous shit fit over this blatant act of imperialism.

So what the hell is he up to? Sure, he has gained territory (sorta) but Russia is already pretty big. He can’t need new land that bad. Whatever they have in Crimea cannot be worth the precarious position he’s put us all in. This can’t possibly be what is best for Russia right now.

It just adds to my suspicions that Putin is only a figurehead now, and it’s his cronies that are now really running Russia. And when the cronies take over, madness and chaos always ensues because they are all quite accustomed to being controlled by the formerly iron will of Putin and when that control slackens, they just go hog wild doing whatever they want to do.

So you get anti-gay laws(Russian Orthodox cronies), enormously shameful Olympic facilities (fat government contact cronies), and now a genuine motherfucking invasion, presumably backed by his military cronies.

I am forced, in fact, to wonder if this is just the execution of a long term plan by Russia to regain the part of the Ukraine they lost way back in the 50’s. A plan that was put on ice for a long time under Gorbachew and Yeltsin, who were more interested in the actual welfare of Russia over settling old scores, and which were still on ice with Putin until his leadership weakened and he had to start actually giving his cronies the things he had promise them in return for their support.

Russia is, in effect, without a leader. Putin is just a plaster puppet of himself that his cronies can hide under while they loot, plunder, and despoil mother Russia. Nobody is in charge, so nobody feels any responsibility for the consequences of their actions. It’s not like his cronies are in any danger, if they go down, so does he. So they can do all the things they have always wanted to do and he can’t do a thing to stop them.

So his socially conservative cronies get the hateful anti-gay laws they have always wanted (plus laws against ‘disrespecting’ religion), the borscht barrel robber barons get their billions in Russian contact money (with a highly convenient lack of having to actually do anything with the money but to line their nests with it), and now apparently the old KGB cronies and military cronies get the war they have asked for every Xmas since 1951.

I have no idea what the international community can really do now that Putin’s hands have slipped off the wheel and the loony bus is driving itself to crazy town. Any kind of threat or punishment contains with it the assumption that there is someone in charge and that this someone cares what happens to Russia.

But there’s nobody in charge now. None of these asshole cronies of his will suffer at all if Russia gets into hot water. In fact, odds are their own little empires of influence and control (and corruption) will do just fine no matter what, or even prosper under the current system of unchecked chaos.

We need to stop acting like Putin is some towering monolithic menace determined to drag the world back to pre-WWII days and start calling it like it really is : he is a weak leader who cannot control his own people.

As long as we treat him like a master villain, his ego is intact. If we start treating him like the weak willed joke of a shadow puppet that he is, maybe he will get upset enough to grow a pair and rope things the fuck in.

Otherwise, things will only get worse from here. The incontinent monkeys currently running Russia have only begone to settle old scores. Remember, they are all very old now, and hence, there is a great chance that like their contemporaries worldwide, they are just a bunch of petty, cranky, spoiled old man-babys who have absolutely no sense of pragmatism and restraint, only pathetic scraps of ideology crudely pasted together with old grudges and sheer spiteful meanness.

Basically, imagine if the government of Arizona was running the USA. That’s the kind of madness we are talking about here. Whatever mental faculty that normally keeps cranky blinkered ideologues from actually enacting their insane plans is gone, gone, gone, and what is left is just about the worst possible form of unrestrained darkness.

You can’t even rely on their sense of self-preservation to rein them in. They are too old to care and too privileged to believe anything bad can actually happen to them.

And so far… they have been right about that, more or less.

Let’s hope someone can grab the wheel before it’s too late.

I have a bit less than half an hour before my next event, so I thought I would spend some time chatting with y’all.

Yes, I said y’all. No, I’m not from the American South. I just like the word.

Been pondering my own facet of the “nice guy” paradox. Specifically, the part about what it means to be easygoing.

The thing about being easygoing is that it is defined by an abscence : an abscence of worry, an abscence of stress, and above all, an abscence of demanding, fussy behaviour.

“I’ll have the raspberry. ”
“I’m sorry, we are out of the raspberry. ”
“Really? That’s too bad. Do you have the chocolate?”
“Yes we do. ”
“I’ll have that, then. ”

Stuff like that. I feel genuinely sorry for people whon lack that flexibility. People for whom the lack of raspberry would be extremely upsetting and they would either get mad or get sad.

How can these people live like that? To be clear, I am not implying that they have a choice. We are not all wired the same way and our basic emotional responses are often beyond our control,

But as seen from Mellow Island, it seems quite awful. Such a lack of adaptability seems to me like it makes the person so much poorly adapted to life.

Then again, those people tend to be a lot more ambitious and driven (out of necessity, one would think), so perhaps it is all worth it if it leads to success.

I could never live like that, though. To me, it is sheer madness.

Another thing about being easygoing is that it is largely an invisible virtue, People tend to notice the good things you do, not the bad things you don’t. The only time people notice how easy to get along with I am is when they have been dealing with really difficult people.

Hence my power to attract people who are in unhappy relationships. When you are not getting along with your mate, generally things have become very difficult and stressful and hostile, so an easygoing laid back affectionate person like myself seems like water in the desert.

But no matter how much they appreciate this oasis, they don’t stay there. They go back to their troubled relationship, renewed, or they find someone else with the strength you have lent them.

Because the painful trutg is that being sweet and nice makes people like you, but it does not make them respect you. And without respect, there can be no real love.

So it has been a while since I fell in to that trap. I have grown very good at keeping people at arm’s length online while still being my perky and affectionate fursona. It is sort of sad, but us sensitive types have to guard our hearts.

Unrelatedly, a strange fuzzy logic problem occurred to me recently,

Suppose you have a dog, and one can of dog food. You feed the dog food to the dog.

At what point do you no longer have a can of dog food? The moment the food passes through the dog’s lips? (Dogs have lips, right?) The moment it starts to digest? The moment it finishes digestion? The moment the waste portion is eliminated, thus signaling that the whole thing is now either waste or dog?

Or is that dog food, in a sense, ever gone? That does not seem to make sense either. We defininitely think all the food WE eat as being gone!

It is a classic fuzzy logic problem that illustrates the difference between quantitative and qualitative measures, even in things which seem perfectly quantifiable.

Logic is always weirder than you think.

Grabbing fifteen minutes between panels to blog for you nice people.

Just overheard : “you know, just chill out in the hot tub and have some sambuka.”

Accidental clash of imagery aside, sounds delish. Though if we are doing liquers, I would prefer Peppermint Schnapps, maybe with some Creme de Cacao, maybe not.

It’s a mood thing.

Having a good convention so far. Waking up was not easy, but it never is when I get some decent sleep. I must have slept ten hours at least. Finally getting my sleeping pills, plus my pants, plus having what for me was a very active day (sad) must have helped.

But a shower, some fresh cold air, and most importantly 591 ml of Diet Pepsi seem to have charged me up sufficiently for the day’s events. I know when and where my next panel is, but I have already forgotten what it is.

Oh right, Carthy’s Furries in the Media panel. Should be fun.

To be continued!

(One hour  later)

Back in the lobby again to catch my breath and talk to you lovely people.

The Furries in the Media panel was quite awesome, as usual. We were still going strong when our time ran out, which is always a good sign. Carthy says he may ask for more time next year, as people obviously have a lot to say about the subject and discussion is healthy for any community.

Forgot my jacket in the lobby before the panel. Also lost my watch. Recovered both, though the watch is broken, which is how it escaped in the first place.

Damn am I getting tired of being so disorganized. I try so hard but I still do such stupid shit. I seriously want to know how absentminded you have to be before you qualify for a minder.

And the harder I try to keep it together, the harder it flies apart. I think if I am to protect my fragile nascent dignity from further such humiliations, it will take an entirely different approach.

Pressure on the existing system clearly does not work.

Maybe I need to start making lists.

1. Start making lists
2.

See you again tomorrow folks!