I’ve decided that I am going to go through all the videos I have uploaded to YouTube both to remind myself that I am awesome (no really, I am!) and to find the ones I want to repost to Facebook and hence share with new people, like my sisters.

It is somewhat slow going, as my videos are not exactly short (problem) and even when it is me talking, I still can’t sit still and watch them quietly. Turns out I can’t even binge-watch myself.

Speaking of binge-watching, I’m up to the 12th episode of the first season of My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic. I am watching two episodes per meal, which is as close to binge-watching as I get. It would go a lot faster if I was the kind of person that can just watch a ton of episodes of something in a row, but I know damned well that I can’t.

If I tried, I would just get sick of whatever it was I was watching. Little errors and similarities would build up in my mind and, worst case scenario, I would end up permanently “off” something I once enjoyed.

So no, no rapid brony-izing for me. At this rate, it will take me around a month to complete my journey. Fair enough.

The show is awesome, of course. To me, its beauty is that it does exactly what dozens of other shows like it have done, but it does it so much better.

The characters are genuinely lovable, and have consistent, believable personalities. The animation is colorful, expressive, and smooth. The humour is genuinely funny, with perfectly timed comedy beats that express the comedy (and charm) with grace and density. The editorial voice is light but firm, just the sort of thing to keep a show on an even keel and have all the plot points come off so smoothly that it makes it all seem effortless.

I don’t even mind that the show makes the moral of each episode really clear with the whole “Twilight Sparkle writes a letter to Princess Celestia telling her what she has learned about friendship at the end of each episode” thing. The show is, after all, intended for kids, and kids need that kind of guidance. There is nothing wrong with fables.

And I love how the show strikes just the right balance between realism and fantasy. The world of Equestria is a wonderful, magical place that any kid would want to live in, and definitely a nicer place to be than our own mundane, complicated world. Mission accomplished there. And yet, it’s not a sunwashed saccharine plastic paradise either. It’s not unrealistically perfect. Friends fight, things don’t work out right, the days are not filled with nothing but peace love and harmony.

Because honestly, a too=perfect fantasy world would completely fail to teach kids anything. What kids (and adults) need to learn is how to cope with difficult, stressful situations, and therefore your world has to leave room for difficult, stressful situations. The idea is to take the audience through them in a safe way, and thus give them the kind of ersatz life experience that is the goal of all great art.

But enough pony talk. (Don’t get me started… oh right, you didn’t. )

When I go over my videos, it’s nearly always a very positive experience for me, because guess what? I find them fascinating. Turns out, everything I talk about in them is exactly the sort of thing I find really interesting.

I mean, what are the odds?

Seriously though, other than occasionally wishing I was wearing a shirt in some of them, I enjoy them, and they are good for the ego. And my ego needs all the shoring up it can get given its rapid decay rare due to depression. The talky ones are very interesting, and the funny ones are funny, and it really reminds me that I am a talented dude and that I should not feel bad about my abilities just because depression gets in the way of their use sometimes.

Things will happen when they happen, and beating myself up over everything I am not doing and all the tools I have around me that I never use only further guarantees that I won’t use them because the guilt makes me avoid them.

It’s amazing how nimbly depression can find ways of fueling itself. Well, the thing about being psychologically unstable is that it’s remarkably stable.

You can defeat yourself every single time.

In a couple of hours, I will be leaving to go to Ray’s birthday party, and to be quite honest, I really don’t feel like it, I am having a sleepy day, and all I want to do is go back to sleep and catch up on my Z’s.

The problem is that the part is at 6 pm, which is way earlier than we usually get going around here. Usually we are not even at the restaurant until 8. On a normal Sunday, I would have four hours or more in which to take a nap and then take a shower and get ready to go out.

But no, I will have, at best, an hour and a half for naptime and then half an hour for a shower and such. My naps are usually longer than an hour and a half, so I would have to set an alarm if I wanted to be awake on time.

And that sucks. I have spent so much time with a loose, lazy schedule that any little change seems like a massive imposition. All I really wanna do is go to sleep for three hours and then wake up and do my thang.

But that is just plain not in the cards today, so when I am done here, I will attempt one of my power naps where I don’t exactly sleep like normal but it performs the important, immediate functions of sleep.

Wish me luck on that, it’s just as likely to fail as to succeed.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

Time to kiss another demon goodbye.

I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid. And I was a kid in the Eighties (mostly), and so nearly every one of them was a product of the pro-social movement that was the Eighties response to the criticisms of the Seventies. Social conservatives on both the left and the right attacked cartoons for promoting what seemed to be anti-social, even anarchic attitudes, and that was an easy sell to the harried parents of the Seventies dealing with their young rambunctious kids.

Remember, just like effortless weight loss and less taxes, more services, you can always sell people on the idea that their kids’ rotten behaviour is NOT THEIR FAULT.

So all the Eighties cartoons I watched went out of their way to promote pro-social values. Primary among these values (as they were mostly defined by liberals) were cooperation, tolerance… and friendship.

Ah, friendship. You can’t go wrong talking about how awesome it is to have friends. Friendship isn’t even a virtue, exactly. It’s something that just happens naturally to most people. You can teach people to be better friends by being more considerate and less selfish, but for the most part, friendship just happens.

Except, of course, if you’re a very lonely little boy like I was. Then all this talk about how awesome friendship is just makes you feel worse about being alone. For all of my childhood, I got the message beaten into me via repetition that friendship was this wonderful, magical thing that made everything better. Friends helped each other out. Friends cared about each other. Friends protected each other.

Friends were everything I didn’t have in my life and didn’t think I would ever get. So what was life-affirming and pro-social for other kids was very depressing for sad little me, and I was too young to be able to articulate it but I am pretty sure it made me a sadder little boy.

When I look back at my childhood, the oddest thing to me is how I just absorbed whatever happened to me. I didn’t really react to it, or form an opinion on it. I didn’t even get mad at most of them. When you are a kid, you don’t really have a sense of what is normal and acceptable, and what is not. That is especially true if you are am isolated and therefore under-socialized kid like I was. I didn’t have my friends’ households to compare mine to. I just had my own sad little world of books and television and video games, and it never occurred to me that there was something wrong with that.

We are born adaptable and are able to become whatever sort of person our society and our circumstances dictate. Therefore, no matter what kind of household you grow up in, it’s normal, at least until you enter the wider world of school.

And by then, most of the really important variables have become constants in your mind.

And things grow strange in the dark. Starting with having a family that never really had time for me with siblings who were too much older than me for me to relate to them or feel like part of their group, then adding the tragedy of my missing out on kindergarten because I was too bright for it (first time my intelligence fucked me over, yay), then falling to the the bottom of the pecking order in elementary school, there is only one word to describe what I became : socially retarded.

And there were all those cartoons pushing friendship. As if kids wouldn’t make friends unless you told them to do it. Praising friendship is like praising family. It’s (almost) always an easy sell because you are just telling people how awesome it is to do what their instincts tell them to do anyhow.

And yeah, I’m bitter. It’s hard not to be. I really got screwed in life in so many ways. I was just an innocent kid and did not deserve all the crap life put me through. And I was too passive and timid to fight it.

I was a delicate little flower, and I was treated like crabgrass.

All my guardian angels were asleep on the watch. All the adults who were supposed to look out for me failed to do so. I know I was not the easiest kid to handle, but there should have been someone in my life who could do it. Someone who stood up to the plate and took on the job, instead of just relying on how easy it was to ignore me to help pretend I wasn’t around.

I wasn’t the easiest kid to handle. But I was still a kid. Someone should have been there for me.

Obviously, it is watching My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic that has brought all this stuff up for me. Part of me wishes I could go to the happy accepted innocent fun world where all this stuff makes sense. Even when I was little, I would look into the windows of seemingly happy homes and wish they would let me into their warm and accepting world. But I never truly believed it could happen because I knew, deep down, that I didn’t belong in that world, and that I would spoil it far before it could ever fix me.

I guess that is what happens when you are sexually abused as a child. Your innocence is forever lost, and you feel broken and dirty and poisonous for the rest of your life. And the feeling is not entirely unjustified, at least if you are as sensitive a soul as I am. I can feel when my strangeness is hurting people. I can tell when contact with the negatives of my nature is draining the happiness and life force out of others.

And I am too kind a soul not to care about it.

Where is the love for the gentle men of the world?

Talk to you tomorrow, folks.