Another thousand words, I guess.

Definitely on the mend. The Snot Faucet has become the Goo Tube. I am horking up sputum on a regular basis, which is a good thing, although I wish the coughing wasn’t so hard that it makes me think I may puke sometimes.

Either way, SOMETHING is coming out of my face.

But so far, knock on wood, it’s just been sputum. Lovely word, that. Sputum. It is the only proper medical term for a substance that sounds pretty much exactly like what a five year old kid would call it.

So yeah. Progress is being made. My lungs are clearing themselves (albeit painfully) and my salty diet has restored my ability to think clearly and feel human.

I still have a small appetite, but that’s way better than no appetite at all. I have been munching the same bowl of popcorn since midnight last night, having a bit here and a bit there, usually with some fruit and maybe an ice cream treat.

Before I get any further away from it, though, I have to tell you about one thing that happened to me during my illness.

It was when it was at its worst, last Wednesday night (Thursday morning). At around 3:30 am, I got up to drain my bladder for like the fifteenth time that day and I guess I got up too fast, because on the way back to bed, I experienced the worst head rush of my life.

And that’s saying something, because I have gotten them from sinus issues or from low blood pressure before. And hey, if too much sodium gives you high blood pressure, guess what too little sodium does?

No, Timmy, it doesn’t give you mutant powers as Saltless Man. Sit down.

So I get this enormous head rush, with a roaring sound in my ears and an intense feeling of dizziness, disorientation, and faintness. And the worst part of it is, it just won’t stop.

Usually, when this happens, it is over in four or five seconds, leaving me feeling weak and sort of giddy. But this time, it just kept on happening.

Eventually, I managed to get to my bed and sat down on the edge to wait for this thing to play itself out. That took a subjectively long time. And during that time, I thought I was going to die.

I thought that the illness plus my inability to eat much had led to a total blood sugar crash, and any second now, I was going to slip into unconsciousness and just plain never get up again.

After all, it’s not like there is even anyone else awake at the time to help me. Even if there was, how would they know I needed help? Even if by some gigantic fluke, they entered my bedroom to talk to me at just the right moment, they would just assume I had fallen asleep.

And they would be right. I mean, a diabetic coma is a lot like sleep.

So all that was roaring through my head as I sat there awaiting my fate. Luckily, the storm subsided and I was left covered in sweat and shaken to my core, but still alive and ready to go back to sleep.

The reason that I have not written about this incident until now is that until I regained my proper blood saline levels, I could not deal with revisiting it.

And that, in turn, has really got me thinking about just how good I am at just forgetting incidents like that. It’s like I am a little kid who falls out of a tree, is all freaked out and scared and crying for a few minutes, then gets up and goes right back to playing.

I mean, three cheers for resilience, but I can’t help but feel I am completely failing to learn anything from these experiences. Sure, the kid is okay, but did he learn how not to fall out of the tree next time, or maybe even that tree climbing might not be for him?

Still, it does point to a vast reserve of resilience in me, a well of power to just get back up and keep going no matter what, and if I can tap into that for uses other than ignoring and forgetting potentially useful medical information, it could be a powerful source of drive and success.

The picture in my mind is less “unstoppable juggernaut” as “wind up tin toy that rights itself and keeps zipping along no matter how often you push it over”.

But I got issues.

I am not out of the woods yet with this cold thing. Granted, the Snot Faucet is down to a slow seep and my throat feels around ninety percent better, but what I really want back now is my goddamned lung capacity.

It really sucks to run out of breath while taking a dump. I mean W. T. F.

Also, my chest still hurts, and that continues to irritate me.

Still, I am counting my blessings. This is definitely one of those Big Yellow Taxi teachable moments when you learn to value something by losing it. In this case, that something is my health.

In my more normal mode, I might not be the healthiest of people, but it is still a fuckton better than how I have felt this week. And if I want to stay out of the hellhole that is true physical sickness, I have to stop fucking around with my health and start taking it seriously.

I know I say that a lot. And I can’t guarantee that this time will be any different than the others. That’s the thing about being my particular breed of jackass. When the crisis is over, we go right back to how we were before like nothing happened.

That would be highly admirably in some situations, but it’s just plain stupid in others, including mine.

It’s like I never learn!

I’ll talk to you again tomorrow folks.

No, this isn’t a particularly self-destructive Facebook quiz, it is a blog entry about the various very stupid things I have done lately. I am writing this to deal with this issue a la confessionale, and not purely out of self-flagellation.

Though there’s probably some of that in there as well.

But mostly, it’s about getting things off my chest and bringing to anger and self-loathing to some kind of a head so I can lance that boil and move on.

And you all get to watch! Oh, you lucky people you.

I have three main stupids on my mind tonight :

1. The Wellbutrin Caper. Dateline : a week ago today. I was refilling my medicine box when I noticed I could not find the pill bottle containing my Wellbutrin. I looked and looked, but I just couldn’t find it. I was eager to get to blogging, so I told myself I would search more thoroughly later.

A lot of the most tragic tales of my life begin with me assuming I will remember to do something later. I’m not good at that.

So I promptly forgot all about finding the Wellbutrin, and went on with my life without it, because modern psychoactive drugs are exactly the sort of thing you can just drop whenever you feel like it and suffer no ill effects.

Well, except these.

My there’s a lot of them. Makes me feel like I got off rather easy for my five day Wellbutrin fast. Then again, I was sick with this damned chest cold for a lot of that time and that might have masked the Wellbutrin withdrawal symptoms.

So yeah, due to my total inability to remember that I am terrible at remembering things (hmmmm….), I accidentally went off a powerful drug at the same time I would be battling a nasty infection

Because I am just so smart like that.

2. The Amazon Prime Maneuver. A while back, maybe a couple of months ago, I signed up for Amazon Prime because they were offering a free one month trial and I was about to order a bunch of stuff, so why not get it faster?

And as soon as I get my stuff, I will log on to Amazon and cancel Prime. Right? I will totally remember to do that! I am great at that kind of thing!

Needless to say, I did not. Hell, I don’t even remember which Amazon it was, Canadian or American. I have accounts on both!

And this was one of those negative option dealies where if you don’t cancel, they just go ahead and sign you up, charges included.

A perfect trap for absentminded ninnies like myself, non?

So now I got Prime. 88 bucks down the drain. I plan on looking up all the various benefits soon, as I understand a lot of them, but whatever they are, I got’m.

Of course, I didn’t know this had happened. I got to find out when I tried to get $ out of the ATM at Safeway. I told it to give me $60 and it said “insufficient funds”. Well I knew that had to be bullshit, because I knew there was at least $100 on the card. I had put it on there in anticipation of VFS related fees.

Then I go to take some money out to buy sundries at 7-11 after dinner at ABC on Friday night, and it won’t even give me $20. Insufficient funds. Sayswhatnow?

Humiliatingly, I then have to borrow $10 from Joe to buy the stuff I needed.

By now, I am beginning to seriously worry that I have been a victim of cybercrime. I mean, that’s the only possible explanation, right?

So I call the 1-800 number for the card and check my balance. OMG only 5 bucks!

Well, clearly the only way to catch this dastardly criminal was to check my recent transaction history. And that is when I heard it… Amazon Prime, $88.

It was a weirdly stern female voice too, which only added to the humiliation. Like a severe older woman who is only putting up with you at all because you are a friend of her daughter.

Oh well, like dear Felicity said, it’s not like the money just plain disappeared. I have Amazon Prime somewhere for a year. And the dastardly thing is, that makes me want to go order stuff from Amazon in order to justify buying Prime.

It’s downright diabolical. Jeff Bezos… you win.

3. The Saline Solution.This one isn’t quite as stupid as the others, but still. When I was sick last week, I started losing my appetite.

And speaking as someone who has struggled with the issues of how to eat when you really don’t wanna for almost 20 years, I can say for certain that it never gets any easier. The best you can do is treat food like medicine. Completely separate it from your normal conception of food, and just eat it like you;re taking a pill.

So part of my loss of appetite was that I stopped eating my nighty bag of popcorn. No big deal, until you realize that is my main source of salt.

And despite its vilification, salt is a nutrient and something you very much need. Add in that I was eating less of everything else, and you can see that I have been operating on a seriously salt deficient basis all week.

Luckily, my powers of scientific analysis worked this out, and thanks to a bowl of salty popcorn for supper, I feel more human now than I have all week.

I will do the popcorn thing again tonight at the usual time, and do my best to incorporate salt into my diet afterwards till I am back to normal.

So that is my tale of woe for the evening. Life continues to beat me like a rented mule and I have no choice but to endure it.

But I may be bowed, but I will not be broken. I will make it through whatever is thrown at me, and come out the other side stronger.

That said, I will talk to you tomorrow, dear readers!

I swear, I am so goddamned sick and tired of this runny nose that I have half a mind to buy some tampons and shove one up each nostril.

And hey, if I drip a little vodka on them first, I can probably convince the news media that this is the dangerous new way to get high that literally all children between 10 and 18 are doing.

“They call it Smelling the Dragon, and it could be coming to a high school near you. And now, an interview with a teenager willing to say or do whatever it takes to get on television and who will be tweeting about what a lame bunch of morons we are to believe her during the interview. But why should we care if it’s true or not? It fills air time and gets you to click. ”

Hmmm. That ended up being a meatier bit of snark than I had intended. I really should get back into comedy writing. I obviously have a severely impact snark gland that needs to be expressed.

Aaaaanyhow, snot faucet aside, I feel better today than yesterday, and yesterday was better than Wednesday, so the trend is clearly that I am on the mend.

The feeling of being drained of my energy is mostly gone, and boy is that a relief. As I have discovered during my occasional “sleepy periods”, sleeping all the damned time gets pretty depressing pretty quick.

Sure, I can tell myself that my body and mind need the sleep and that the more I sleep, the more I will heal, and all that jazz.

But the fact of the matter is that when it is hard to stay awake, sleep becomes a trap, and you feel like you are locked away in a dark cell while everybody else gets to go on with life.

Sounds ironic coming from someone who has used sleep to fast-forward through time as much as I have, but that just proves that I know whereof I speak from both sides of the cell door.

I still use sleep in order to avoid having to deal with life in too large a chunk. The idea of having to stay awake all day (you know, like a normal person) still freaks me out. I am heavily reliant on the refuge of sleep as a way to zero out my anxiety levels and escape from reality for a time.

It’s the closest thing to not existing for a while outside suicide.

It is hard to describe what I am so afraid of, though. It is tempting to say boredom, but that would be wildly misleading. It’s not being bored that scares me. If it was just that, it would lead directly into the motivation to find other things to do.

What I am really afraid of are the things that come crawling out of my mind when I am bored. With insufficient mental occupation, all kinds of demons and skeletons emerge from my mind and start pushing me towards freaking out.

So I hit the snooze button on that alarm, so to speak, and sleep.

I keep telling myself that I have nothing to truly fear and that I should try staying awake all day just to see what happens.

For all I know, I would go through some sort of eye of the needle crisis point and emerge on the other side a far saner and more emotionally stable person who is more awake than I have been in decades.

That is one possibility, sure. But it’s also possible that I would just lose whatever bare strands of sanity I have left and end up in a rubber room somewhere banging my head against the wall and drooling.

Granted, that is not the most likely option. In fact, that is the exact sort of thing that scares a lot of people but almost never actually happens.

But it is hard to get over the feeling that you are barely keeping your marbles together and that any additional amount of jostling will send said marbles everything like you just scored big time at Ker-Plunk.

It is a matter of faith, in a sense. You have to be willing to just let go and trust that your internal defenses will save you. You have to ignroe everything your emotions tell you about terror stricken emotional conservatism (and the resulting lifetime of eternal inner fleeing from even the slightest fear stimulus) is the only way to stay “safe”, whatever the hell that means.

In many ways, suffering from anxiety-driven depression is like being one of those soldiers from a long resolved war who ends up hiding from “the enemy” for no reason for decades because they become so good at avoiding all human contact that they have no chance to ever learn that the war is over.

Their anxiety about getting caught makes them hyper aware of the slightest out of place stimulus that might indicate that “the enemy” is in the area, and they become expert at moving completely without detection.

That is how I have lived my life as well. When the depression truly ruled me, the simplest and most normal of household sounds (I lived in a bachelor suite in a large house) could make me whimper with fear.

So I just strapped on my blinders and ignored the world outside my computer screen, and only did what was absolutely necessary for survival outside that, and even that not without considerable difficulty.

I look back at that time now and I am amazed that I survived it. I guess I was too scared to do anything rash. It’s absolutely true that we depressives are at the highest risk of suicide when we are on an upward mood swing.

Because we really, really, really don’t want to go back there,

Anyhow, I must be getting better, because I am back to being wrist deep in my own navel and talking about my depression again.

I will talk to you again tomorrow, folks.

Love you all!

Today was better than yesterday, but still not that great.

I am definitely on the mend. My chest is mostly cleared, and coughing doesn’t hurt any more. That is a huge improvement right there. Yesterday, I was ferociously suppressing the urge to cough because coughing was intensely painful.But now, if I get the urge, I cough freely.

Don’t get me wrong, coughing is still not exactly fun. But compared to yesterday, it is a goddamned breeze.

My throat is not as sore either. There’s still some swelling in there and swallowing is a little bit of a challenge, but at least fluids go down easy.

What else. Oh yeah…. not constipated any more. Funny how I usually only notice how long it has been since I pooped when the dry spell finally ends. If I was more cognizant of such things, I could solve the problem with a slow but aggressive course of fluid intake on my own.

Overall, I am getting better, and it’s only now that I can look at what has been happening to me this week and think about what exactly was going on.

I think the problem is that being sick with an infection and being depressed are a lot like one another. Having to stay in bed, being all tired because my body was fighting the infection, being all mentally incoherent…. that’s an awful lot like being depressed, and as a result, I think being sick made me depressed.

And vice versa.

I guess that should come as no surprise. My depression is always there like a gravity well, and recovery is largely a matter of developing the thrust to stay out of there despite the pull.

Anything that drains your engines is bound to cause a bit of a regression.

I also think hay fever has been adding itself to the mix as well. It’s hard to tell, of course. The cold could very well be nasal as well. All I know is that my nose has been running constantly and that always gums up the works.

So I have been rather very a lot unwell, actually. Nothing to take to the doctor or anything, but still, life is still ganging up on me.

That’s okay. I can take it. I will survive. I am through letting life squash me flat. I will bounce back sooner or later and then the battle will continue.

Not much else to report. That’s the thing about spending most of your time asleep in bed. It does not exactly generate a lot of topics for conversation.

As always when I am ill, I make a specific effort to remember what it is like so that I can be properly grateful when it is over. My life might not be a bowl of cherries when I am well, but at least it’s a hell of a lot better than this.

Well, as well as I ever get, anyhow.

I did manage to get myself together enough to go over to Safeway to buy a few things,which is good. I didn’t super need what I bought, but I thought I needed a reason to move around a little and get things circulating.

Plus I felt I needed some happiness food. So I got myself some of those sugar free iced novelties I like so much. They are expensive but worth it.

And Safeway’s selection for sugar free cookies is crap.

In terms of how I felt, the trip was a mixed back. On the way to the store, I felt fine, and was glad I had decided to do it.

But by the time I was on my way back, well.. let’s say the trip back from Safeway seemed very long indeed, especially the stairs to the apartment.

For me, the worst part of being sick, other than it triggering my goddamned depression, is the icky feeling you get from sick sweat cooling on your body. It leaves me feeling all gunky and gross, and yet it’s hard to shower when you can barely stay awake for more than half an hour, and that is sitting down time.

So first thing I am gonna do when I feel better is take the mother of all long hot showers and try to degunk myself but good.

I would say I was going to take a long hot bath, but despite meaning to take one, I never seem to get around to it, so fuck that.

Showers are just way more convenient and way less of a commitment. Taking a bath is this entire process. Showering is just a matter of an aggressive form of rinsing.

Like I have said before, I wish there was a human washing machine… that is, like a washing machine for clothes, but for people. You would just sit down in it and it would give you a very thorough cleaning.

Without the tumbling around, though. That would hurt.

In fact, I guess it would be less a washing machine for people as a highly specialized form of hot tub. One with like, wash and rinse modes, and presumably a very good filter considering the whole idea is to wash all the gunk off you.

But just think of how awesome it would be to get super clean every morning, and all without lifting a finger. I bet people would be a lot happier if they had very healthy clean skin all the time.

Or maybe that’s just my own weird little obsession. I don’t know.

Now I have to decide if I am awake enough to catch up on the week’s Daily Shows with Joe or whether I need more downtime. I think I will at least try to stay up. I have some diet cola in the fridge if I need awakeness assistance.

Or maybe I will just go back to sleep and trying to sleep this sickness away.

Man, being sick is depressing.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow! 🙂

Yup. I called it. Things have gotten worse before they get better. This summer cold of mine really ground me in its teeth today, and man does that suck.

I feel somewhat better now, probably because the worst of the day’s heat is over and things are starting to cool off. Plus, I finally manages to haul myself out of bed and get some supper into me.

There is no illness that low blood sugar and heat sickness can’t make worse.

And the thing is, I knew that I should be getting out of bed to go refill my water glass with ice water and maybe have the occasional light snack. I can’t claim I was just lying there wondering what to do.

I was just too incoherent to put together a plan of action and execute it. There is a point of no return for things like this, a point where I am no longer capable of fixing the problem, and the idea is to stay out of that zone no matter what.

Today, I lost that little game, so the afternoon sucked. I managed to sleep through about two thirds of it, which is always a good thing when you are ill, but the rest of the time I was awake and feeling miserable and grumpy.

Oh well, I am alive and kicking now, and I have a nice big glass of water to nurse, and freezies in the freezer (sugar free, all juice, pure heaven) for when I feel I need a more radical form of cooling.

Hopefully, I am past the worst of it and will be on the road to recovery soon. I have therapy tomorrow and I would hate to have to reschedule because I am too ill to navigate the public transit system.

Or rather, to walk to the damned bus stop after therapy. If I had rides both ways, I would go without a though. The therapy itself doesn’t require a hale and hearty me. But as is right now, my appointment is at 9 : 30 am so Joe can drop me off on the way to work. But after that, I am on my own for getting home.

That’s not normally a problem, especially now that I understand what Skytrain to get on from Bridgeport. (Hint : Not ones with ‘airport’ or ‘waterfront’ on them).

But this illness is really draining my already less than robust energy supplies, and so hauling myself down to the bus stop near Costco, then up to the platform, then down from Richmond-Brighouse to the 401, then from 1 and Francis to home… that is a lot of schlepping for a sick Fru.

Meh. Either way, I will make it. I value therapy very highly (apparently, some don’t. which strikes me as terribly immature) and I will get there by hook or crook or even the bus.

What else. Oh, something awesome : Patrick Quigley, the awesome guy who handled my (unsuccessful but not his fault) application, emailed me to say he is going to try to get VFS to refund my $50 application fee.

If he can do that, I would really appreciate it. I am somewhat low on cash right now, and I could really use the do’h. Obviously, there are some people at VFS who are still unhappy with how I was treated, and I find that highly gratifying.

Usually, when I am a victim of injustice, nobody knows and nobody cares.

Speaking of injustice, I got Simon’s email address from Patrick, and sent an email to him today. I chose what those familiar with Anne Of Green Gables will recognize as the “Mrs. Lynde” approach, in that I apologized deeply for being rude, told him I understood how hard his job must be, and humbly asked him to help with my search for an appropriate writing course or two.

I am having trouble with that. So far, all I have found are fly-by-night courses of the “$15 gets you a two hours seminar at a Radission Inn” type, and at the opposite end, full degree programs that take two years to finish.

Um, no. What I need is some single-semester courses of the continuing education sort than I can blow out of the water and then hand the wrecking over to Simon before Xmas, and maybe get into VFS in the new year.

There is no point in taking a stupid $15 course on How To Write And Publish Your eBook In 21 Days (listen buddy, I know how to write them) because if I was Simon, all that would prove is that I had $15 to spare.

and obviously, there is no point in taking a two year associate’s degree (lame) just to qualify for a one year Writing for Film and Television course.

So I will have to keep digging. Surely somewhere out there are single-semester courses for bored housewives who want to finally get down to writing that novel they have been meaning to write since they were in college.

What else… I was also planning on calling and asking about that house we have our eye on today, but I don’t think I am up to it. Sigh. Perhaps tomorrow I shall muster up the wherewithal to do it.

We are running out of time and I am terrified someone will snap it up before we even make the call, but there is only so much I can do.

Ah well, this too shall pass. One way or another, it will all work out, and by this time next year this stressful period of my life will be nothing but an amusing anecdote of the time when everything in my life was suddenly happening all at once.

An anecdote I will recount with breezy yet self-deprecating wit as I hobnob with the creative hoi polloi of Hollywood North and meet everybody who is anybody in the world of actually writing the damned thing.

Those scripts aren’t delivered by angels, people!

I will talk to you again tomorrow, folks, hopefully with full lung capacity back.

I feel better today. And, worse.

Getting some of my negative thoughts out of my system last night definitely helped my mood. It always does. Sometimes you just have to vent the negative stuff.

That’s why some people end up having to fight for their right to be sad, or rather, to express it. The Happiness Patrol, being basically stupid, tries to keep people happy by telling them not to be sad, or at least, to keep it to themselves so they don’t make others sad.

But emotions are information and that information needs to be shared, so that only makes the person worse as the sadness and anger build up inside.

Anyhow. Back to feeling better. I do get really frustrated with my life fairly often. And it’s hard to get out of the habit of taking that frustration out on myself. Even the most negative and self-destructive of habits can become the path of least resistance and hence the easiest thing to do.

So instead of trying to completely suppress this anger and frustration with my life, and hence creating more emotional tension in my soul, I am instead working on developing my belief that I can do something about it.

After all, I have a bus pass. I (usually) have money. There is a great big world out there beyond this apartment and there is no reason I couldn’t just walk out that door and go find meaningful (or at least enjoyable) things to do.

For example, I could just go to Stanley Park. I saw a little of it when I was looking for the Aquarium, and it seems like a very lovely place. Peaceful, green, full of little nooks and crannies and surprises. And it’s all free. Free to get in, free to get there via my bus pass… totally free.

And there is lots of summer left over, so I could go there any time I like. It’s not like my days are filled with better things to do. I could even bring the tablet and do my blogging there, amid all that inspiration.

I definitely feel like I need to open myself up to the world more, and give myself some real input instead of all this virtuality. If I want to learn to feel more real, I need to interact with more real things, and thus have rich real world experiences within me, not just this thin and tenuous online life.

Besides, I need to go out there and find some writing courses that I can afford and will not totally hate. I will tamp down my irritation at having to take some lousy little writing class when I can probably write better than the instructor and have certainly written a lot more than the other students, and honestly could probably teach the damned class…

Ahem. I will forget all that, be a good sport, totally crush the courses academically speaking, and get into the VFS Writing for Film and Television for the January 5 start date, or die trying.

Once I get all that in place, I will lose the feeling of disconnection that has made me sad lately, and resume feeling like I have a direction and a purpose, and that will help me simply scads.

Sure, it sucks to have my dreams deferred, but what the hell. Better late than never. Starting in 2015 is better than never starting at all.

So I am feeling better about that, and about my life in general. I have done my flailing and wailing and gnashing of teeth and I am ready to face facts and get on with my life.

Still gonna email Simon, but I am not pinning my hopes to that longshot.

The way I am feeling worse is physically. I have caught the chest cold that has been plaguing Joe since last Sunday, and so my chest feels all scratchy and my throat is all raspy (giving me a slightly deeper voice, which is cool) and I am going to probably get worse before I get better.

So bleh on that. I will up my lemon juice and chicken soup intake, and do whatever else I can to make sure I have plenty of fluids and vitamin C in me for my immune system to use, but I am pretty sure I am in for a bumpy ride.

Oh well, such things are best endured with a positive attitude, knowing that this too shall pass so there is no point in getting all sad about something that will be over before you know it.

I will just take care of myself and try not to lick any doorknobs while I’m contagious. It won’t be easy.

What else… Spuug was nice enough to stop over today to look at my computer. Thank you so very much, dear William! He is going to go to the Vancouver Hack Space and try to get me a new power supply for my computer there. They often have spare computer parts just floating around for anyone to take, and hopefully, they will have a power supply that suits my computer.

Money is a bit of a rough issue for me right now, and I would really rather not have to figure out how to pay for a new power supply. As is, it will take all the money left on my card to make it through the next week.

But then again, a week from tomorrow is check day, and I could just get it then.

So all in all, viral infections aside, I am doing alright. The road of life is neither straight nor smooth, so I suppose it is wisest to not get too attached to any one game plan and focus on the goal instead.

I will get to the Vancouver Film School Writing for Film and Television program by whatever means necessary!

But for now, I am gonna relax, recuperate, and maybe make some phone calls concerning places we might rent.

I will keep you posted.

I’ll talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

Today has not been great. I made a mistake and I have been paying for it all day.

Today was the day I was supposed to go to get my knee looked at. But when I woke up today, I felt really horrible. So I decided to call and reschedule.

That was the mistake. The moment I put the phone down, I felt awful about what I had just done. What a stupid and immature, self-destructive thing to do! It would not have been that big a deal to just go to the damned appointment. But no, I had to wimp out and lie that I was sick just so I could go back to my stupid fucking life a little bit earlier.

And that’s the real crux of the problem : I hate my life. That’s why thinking I was going to VFS was such a boon for me. Finally, I had some sort of purpose and direction to my life.

And as much as I bitched about all the complications in my life recently, the truth was that said complications gave me purpose and direction and something to strive towards, and the moment I put down the phone, I was back in the dead blank void of my stupid fucking pointless life again.

And it sucks to be back. It really does.

That’s not to say I don’t love my friends and spending time with them. Hating my life doesn’t mean hating everything in my life.

It just means that a person needs a lot more than that to be happy, and I am severely lacking in the “everything else” department, and I am seriously fucking sick of it.

I desperately need to learn to seek, find, and use my own internally derived sources of direction and inspiration. I need to make my own structure and not rely on some outside force to do it for me.

School is still a good idea and I am still going to try talking with Simon again. If there is any chance of me getting into VFS soon, I have to go for it. I have to work hard at not getting discouraged, though. My natural, learned reaction when presented with something like this is to just give up on myself, and it is up to me to teach myself new patterns and break new ground.

If you reinforce the positive patterns enough, and let the bad patterns deteriorate from lack of use, then eventually, the positive patterns become the path of least resistance and your whole world becomes easy and fun.

So yeah… today was not good. I have felt stupid and wrong all day, and have been beating myself up over the rheumotologist thing for most of the day.

And yeah, I know that beating myself up over a bad decision is counterproductive, to put it mildly. But it’s not something I can just wish away. I am seriously angry with myself for being such a child about things and I am going to have to work through that emotion before I can go back to being calm about things.

I mean, admittedly, I had more exercise yesterday than I probably had in the previous six months, and I felt sort of sore this morning, but it wasn’t nearly enough to justify skipping a very important appointment.

That brings me to the highs. I had a great time hanging out with my sister Catherine and her husband Joe this weekend.

Dunno what I was so anxious about. It’s not like a lot was being asked of me. I just had to show up and hang out, more or less. All that was required was me.

Saturday, we just went to White Spot in the Winnebago (which rocks) and chatted, eventually moving to Blenz. That was very nice, because as you know, we hadn’t seen each other in like 20 years, and so we had a lot of catching up to do.

Truth be told, I didn’t talk about myself much. There’s not a lot to talk about. I am happy to learn about other people’s lives, and related my own anecdotes from my life back when I had one.

On Sunday we went to the Vancouver Aquarium, which I adore. I saw so many awesome things. In the rain forest area, they not only have all kinds of amazing fish and butterflies and birds, they have a three toed sloth (awesome, always wanted to see one live) and a whole squad of marmosets, which are, of course, adorable.

Talk about two ends of the mammalian activity scale!

They also had all kinds of truly freaky and wondrous jellyfish. Jellies are such a trip because they are clearly alive and yet they have almost none of the things we normally associate with life like eyes, legs, and so on.

So they are a very abstract kind of life, so simple and so elegant and delicate.

They also had scads of fish, natch, including a few different kinds of sharks and some truly amazing rays that looked like alien spaceships hovering along the bottom of the ocean.

They also have penguins now. African penguins to be precise, so named because they are the only species that lives in the south of South Africa. When we were there, the poor things were just hiding from the heat in the shade of their enclosure, so they were not exactly putting on a show. But I was glad to see them as these are the only penguins I have ever seen live.

But my favorites are always the belugas. They look so beautiful as they glide through the water seemingly without effort. Like ghosts, as I always say, or some kind of spirit of the water.

My sister even got me a little fridge magnet with a beluga on it as a memento. Squee! My sister is awesome.

So it’s been an up and down time for me lately. I think that once I am fully rested and cooled down and have more time to process everything, I will be over the whole messing up the appointment thing, and I will be able to move on.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks.

Looking forward to going to the aquarium today. The Vancouver Aquarium is a wonderful place, and according to their website, they have recently had their “biggest expansion ever”, and it was already plenty big.

So I can’t wait to see what they have added since the last time I was there. I can’t imagine. What don’t they already have? An entire zoo? A dolphin burlesque? Surfing?

Another thing that has expanded is the price. It is now $34 to get in. Yowza. That’s like, what it costs to get into Disneyland. I suppose the Aquarium is a theme park of sorts, but still. Yikes.

And tomorrow, I have the appointment with the rheumotologist. I have to admit, I am sort of nervous. I have no idea what they will have to do to my knee in order to diagnose it, but I am better it will be uncomfortable and possibly even painful and scary. Not looking forward.

But there is definitely something wrong in there, and it would be wildly irresponsible of me to try to ignore it. I am still getting those sickening clicks deep in the knee, like something bending then popping into place, and lately every time I sit for more than a few minutes, the knee and surrounding area stiffens up and I have to work it to make it bendable again.

That is a worrying thing. And annoying, of course. Makes me feel like I am rusting shut like the Tin Man did in the Wizard of Oz. Oilcan! Oilcan!

So yeah. Still kind of wishing it was Tuesday already. It has been one weird week and I would love to get back to feeling like I have some sort of control over my life once again.

I am still planning my counterattack on Simon. I should have launched it immediately, but damn it, I still can’t handle a lot of things at the same time and so I can only really concentrate on whatever the next big thing is.

By the time my mental docket is clear enough for me to address him, it will likely be Wednesday, which is in some ways perfect because it will be one week exactly since our last conversation.

I’m going to apologize for the tone of our last conversation, thank him for taking the time to talk to me, and then ask what I can do to prove myself to him.

Simple, humble, and hopefully, appealing. Honestly, with how crazy my life feels right now, taking a few writing courses somewhere sounds lovely.

Or at least, it sounds marvelously uncomplicated compared to getting into VFS. The courses themselves, I don’t think I will enjoy. I imagine they will seem slow-paced and unchallenging to me. I am not some middle aged woman looking for pointers on how to finish her chamomile tea fiction book about a bored housewife.

I am someone who knows how to write and what works for him and whatnot, and I don’t really want a lot of input from others. I have learned the hard way (the way that involves spending a lot of money on books about writing that turned out to be useless to me) that I can’t learn about writing from others.

I can only learn about writing by writing, and by exploring my own inner space. My writing skills are my own very particular custom machine, and other people’s parts just don’t fit in it.

I have to go it alone.

Now, if I had been accepted at VFS, that would have been different because I would be learning about kinds of writing that I have never done, as well as learning about the industry and what it takes to succeed there.

But some rinky-dink little writing course at Douglas College? Feh.

It reminds me of when I had to take the Writing 101 course in college. See, colleges don’t trust that people who graduated from high school are actually literate, so they make every single student take this “how to write an essay” course in order to create jobs for lots of English majors teach us to communicate at a college level.

I very much resented having to take it. Here I was, brain the size of a planet, someone who had taken advanced English in high school and passed it with flying colors two years in a row, and I was being forced to take a course about how to write at like, a grade 10 level.

It was like putting me in Remedial Reading. I hated it there, and I am afraid I let it show, which seems quite rude now. It was not the fault of the professor teaching the course that I had to take it. There was no need for me to be all impatient and even contemptuous of the thing.

I wasn’t like, openly hostile or mean, but my feelings about the whole thing were pretty clear from my demeanor. If I had to do it all over again, I would definitely tried to be far more gracious and less truculent about the whole thing.

Oh well, I was not even out of my teens at the time.

And I will try not to repeat that mistake with whatever writing courses I end up taking. Sure, the odds are they will not be particularly hard for me, and yes I am not happy at having to jump through such a ridiculous hoop in order to follow my dream, but that would be no excuse to take it out on anyone there.

They had nothing to do with why I ended up there. If I want to vent my frustration, I can do it here, or I can take that energy and use it to just totally blow away the course and not just pass it, but impress the hell out of everyone there so when it comes time for me to reapply for VFS, they have nothing but good things to say to Simon when the time comes.

Sounds like a plan.

I will talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

Sorry if today’s entry comes across as a tad rushed, but I woke up later than I had planned and so a bunch of stuff had to be crammed together, including blogging.

See, today’s the day I am going to get to see my big sister Catherine for the first time in ages, and I told her I would call her at 1, so I am in a bit of a rush to get some stuff done before then.

Some days, this little blogging habit of mine is a lot less convenient than others. But I would never skip a day unless I was physically incapable of blogging.

I feel like I am a little behind in sleep. That’s probably due to the amount of diet cola I have had in the last 36 hours. I should really moderate my caffeine intake. Most of the time, it’s not this bad, but sometimes circumstances collide and I end up rocking a pretty high caff level.

Oh well, today should be a busy, active day, and that should at least help with the caffeine jitters. I am really looking forward to going to the Vancouver Aquarium for the third time in my life. It is a truly magical place. There’s so much to do there, and there are so many things to do and see.

And I get to do it all with my big sister Catherine, whom I have not seen in ages.

I may squee.

Had a great night watching videos with Joe, Julian, and Felicity last night. I always enjoy their company enormously. We are a funny bunch of people and Felicity has a real knack for finding hilariously weird little videos of old commercials or weird PSAs or whatnot.

I still feel like I have some sleep debt, though. Yawn. Would you believe that there are some people who think sleep debt is a myth?

It’s simple : sleep is a biological need. We’re not totally sure exactly why we need sleep, but the evidence is overwhelming that we do.

And when a biological need is unmet, it doesn’t just go away. It remains until it is met. If you need 2000 calories to get through your day and you only eat 1500, that missing 500 calories does not go away. And if you continue to under-eat like that, that food debt is going to rack up pretty damned fast.

Perhaps the simplest example would be the automobile. If your commute takes a half a tank of gas (you poor thing), and you keep only putting in a quarter tank, you are going to run out of gas, and it’s not a question of where such a gas debt is “stored” or where it “exists”.

I am thinking that the backlash against the idea of sleep debt is fueled by people who never get enough sleep and are in denial about the effects of sleep dep.

Me, I have no such delusions. I know that not getting enough sleep can scramble this egghead. Sleep has always been a challenging thing for me, and it’s been a rare time in my life when I am fully rested and alert.

And I know that’s a problem. I am never operating at full capacity. I am always fighting some form of sleepiness.

Wow, imagine how smart I would be if I was well-rested. It’s almost frightening.

Honestly, right now, what I want to do the most is go back to sleep. I have already slept around eight hours, and that is clearly not enough. I feel like I could sleep for a hundred years.

Perhaps I will suggest to my dear sister that we get together in the late afternoon. I would feel kind of guilty for doing it, but I am truly sleepy right now and I would rather be more rested and alert when we have our little reunion.

So we will see if I can be assertive enough to be mildly inconvenient to others.

I am getting better at the assertiveness thing. I am way better at getting server’s attention in restaurants and asking for stuff, which was a big stumbling block for me for many years. Self-minimizing can be a terrible thing and, coupled with timidity, can lead to a very thirsty person being too shy to get their waitress’ attention and ask for more water.

The urge to never ever draw attention to yourself, because that means danger, can become deeply ingrained. You can be a person who is desperately lonely and yet working very hard at being socially invisible. It is a sad state to be in.

I should know, because I lived in that tiny castle for a long long time. And when I look back on that now (and I am by no means out of the woods yet), I wonder what I thought was so wrong with me.

Truth is, some wounds run so deep that they are beyond what I think. Sometimes, the tail wags the dog.

Woops, time to go meet my sister. Slightly short entry this time. I will make it up to you all by adding 150 words to tomorrow’s entry.

Wish me luck! Talk to you again tomorrow!

So today was therapy day, and as befits the trend of my current life, it was complicated and odd.

See, Joe, the wonderful fantastic awesome roomie who drives me thither and back, is working a 10 am to 6:30 pm shift for the summer, which kind of makes driving me to my usual 11 am therapy appointment a no-go.

Luckily, today I was able to arrange for all my future appointments to be at 9:30 am, so Joe can at least drop me off and I can then bus home.

But before that, I had to deal with today, so my plan was to get Joe to drop me off at the Denny’s we love and I would wait for my 11 am appointment there.

See, the wonderful thing about that Denny’s is that it’s only about a ten minute walk from my therapist’s office. Sa-weet!

And that went fine, although my appetite did one of its vanishing acts and I just could not bring myself to order anything besides the Diet Coke I was sipping.

That’s probably for the best, though. I am feeling rather financially bruised this month, and I couldn’t really afford it.

So I sat there and played solitaire games on my tablet and sipped Diet Coke and was occasionally amused by the sudden English words in the conversation of the Chinese family eating near me, the best of which was “sau-sage slam”.

Honestly, I was feeling pretty crappy. Nobody’s fault, least of all Denny’s, just one of those days where you wake up with a headache and low blood sugar and a general feeling of crappiness, and it takes a while for all that to burn off and let you feel like a human being again.

Luckily, by the time I left Denny’s I had woken up enough to feel human, or at least like a member of the primate family.

After I got the time change sorted with my therapist, I told him about not getting in to VFS. He was gratifyingly shocked. (See, Simon? Everyone thought I was a shoo-in for the program!)

I told him about my big plan to send an email out to all kinds of people in positions of power explaining my case to them in hoping of bringing pressure down on my nemesis Simon.

He talked me down a little and suggested that a more effective strategy might be to email Simon alone and plead my case to him, and ask him what I can possibly do to prove to him that I can do the work.

Besides taking a few lame rinky-dink writing courses and waiting till next session, which I think is in December or January. That would suck, but I have decided that I will do it if I have no other choice.

I am going to give him the list of everything. I calculate that in the last five years, I have written nearly 2.5 million words, not to mention the novels and all the videos I made.

And I am ready, willing, and unstable enough to do any crazy writing task he hands me. Want me to write a whole novel over a weekend? I will do it or die trying. Write a full screenplay while he watches? No problem. Wax and shine his car?

Maybe. Depends on how much I trust him.

The advantage of this initial approach is that it is non-confrontational, and is actually me submitting to him… in order to get what I want. That is classic Dale Carnegie psychology and will probably work a lot better than my flaming phoenix of self-righteousness approach, which would probably just put him on the defensive.

If this approach does not work, I will then contemplate upping the aggression level and taking my case to a higher court, as it were.

Nothing like talking to an older man (in the form of my therapist) in order to cool the jets of even a 41 years young fellow like me.

So after therapy, it was time to take the bus home. No problem, there is a bus stop about a ten minute walk from the therapist’s office, over near Costco. The stop is minimalist, to put it kindly. No bench, no shelter, not even a list of bus arrival times. Just the sign that says BUS STOP on a pole.

So I had to stand while I waited, and that wasn’t fun. Plus a LOT of trucks were going by, which made the whole “listen for the bus” thing more complicated.

Trucks can sound like buses.

But things didn’t get really complicated until I decided, on a whim, to get out and take the Skytrain when my bus pulled into a Skytrain station.

I mistakenly got on the one marked YVR, because if you are starting from downtown Vancouver, you take the Skytrain marked “YVR-Richmond” to get home.

But this was not that Skytrain. What I didn’t know was that I was on the little leg of the Skytrain that goes to the airport. So I had mistakenly got on the airport-ward Skytrain, and that was definitely not where I wanted to go.

I had thought it would be just a few hops from Bridgeport to Richmond-Brighouse and it had already turned into this whole thing.

So I changed trains and got back to Bridgeport station, and got on a train heading for Waterfront, figuring I would just get off at the next stop, switch trains again, and be headed home.

But it was not that simple, of course, and I ended up lost again until I figured out how to find a Richmond bound train.

Phew! I had wanted a little bit of adventure and I got a double handful instead.

No real harm done, though. I made it through it all and only ended up getting home later than I thought I would, and got a little more exercise than I had planned.

Tomorrow, I go hang out with my big sister and her beau. Tonight, I hang out with La Gang and watch videos.

But for now… I am going to take a nap.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!