Still pissed off about not getting into VFS, and currently plotting how I am going to make Simon’s life difficult.

It’s going to be tricky. I don’t want to end up alienating a lot of people and making a bad name for myself in the industry which I wish to join. But I also want to make the case for my rejection’s injustice and get some sympathy going for my cause. So I am going to need to tread carefully.

I am probably going to craft an email to send to various higher-ups at VFS. There doesn’t seem to be a single overall leader, but there’s some pretty high-status people acting as senior advisors and I imagine they have considerable pull at the VF of S.

I might even include a few people at CBC in the list of recipients of this email. You never know, they might like the “essentially rejecting me because of my disability” angle. That’s the sort of thing they can get behind.

And seeing them on the recipient list (no Bcc for me!) will send the message that I am willing to go to the media with my case and possibly bring down a whole heaping helping of bad PR down on the VFS brand.

I mean, what have I got to lose?

And I think I have a pretty good case. Simon’s sole reason for rejecting me was my lack of documented work or academic experience. That’s a direct result of my disability. It’s like rejecting a person in a wheelchair because you have never seen them jogging.

I have ample proof that I can write a hell of a lot. How many people who get accepted into the program write 7000 words a week just for fun? And have written novels, skits, short stories, and a play?

Simon tried to tell me he also though I had no viable financial plan, which was total bullshit. It said right on my application that my plan was to get a student loan and cover the rest with bursaries related to my disability. So when he said I didn’t have a clear financial plan, I said “Student loan and bursaries. That’s my plan. ”

That shut him the fuck down.

I kept him on the phone, arguing with him, for like 45 minutes, and I wish it had been longer. So I have the satisfaction of knowing that he didn’t get the neat little painless “bearer of bad news” interaction he no doubt expected. I bet he thought he would tell me I didn’t get in and I would just say “That’s too bad” and he’d express his no doubt very deep and sincere regrets, and that would be it.

But that is not my style. The only reason I was not as sharp an arguer as I might have been was that I was in a state of shock and surprise. If I hadn’t been, I would have hammered that twit but good.

If there is one thing I am a deadly ninja master with, it’s words.

He kept droning on about how “he has a responsibility to make sure that the school… ” blah blah bullshit about making sure the school runs smoothly.

If I had been on my game, I would have countered with “And just exactly do you think I would do to the school? You’ve admitted that my writing is not the issue. I am not arguing with your authority to do this. I am questioning your rationale. ” Or something like that.

But hey, who is on the top of their game when they just got a huge shock?

I will be going out with the guys tonight. Normally, we would do this on Friday night, but we moved it to Thursday night in case my dear sister Catherine was arriving on Friday.

Turns out, she’d not getting here till Saturday. But I still want to go out tonight. Honestly, I need it. I need to do something fun to counteract all the negativity I have been balancing.

I might even indulge in an alcoholic beverage, if they are available. I am not sure whether our usual Denny’s is licensed or not. That’s something I usually ignore, being practically a teetotaler. Never been a regular drinker, and the diabetes just gives me extra reason to not bother.

But what the heck. One pear cider or the like won’t kill me. It’s that OR dessert though, not both.

I swear I will crack this Simon thing. I am not sure I will actually get in, but I will at least make him rue the day he ever decided that I was someone he could shit on with impunity.

If I do somehow get in, and he or his friends are still there in admin, I will have to be extra careful, because I can see them wanting very much for me to screw up somehow so they can swoop in for the kill.

Not exactly the most relaxing educational environment, but fuck’em. By the time they get their traps set for me, I will (God willin’) have already gained plenty of allies by being talented and capable and a genuinely nice fellow.

I am a likable guy. It’s one of my best assets. And it’s no act. I am just being me. I like being nice to people, I love to make people laugh, it makes me feel good when others feel good.

Man, I really am Pinkie Pie. Also Fluttershy, though I am getting over the shy part. I have no reason to be so shy. I am a great guy. I should be proud to just put myself out there and deal with the consequences.

It won’t be ab easy path, this Coming Out (of my shell), but I will get there. I am stretching my comfort zone a little more every day. Sooner or later, it will become a tunnel out of this stillborn life of mine.

And when it does, watch the fuck out, world!

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

I was not accepted into the VFS Writing for Film and Television program.

They rejected me.

All my plans just crumbled into dust and I feel like three and a half kinds of crap in a crap shaped box.

Mostly, I am filled with rage. I was positive that I would get in because I knew my writing is very strong, I am talented as hell, and my application kicked ass. I am super fucking talented and I would have been a major asset to their program, and the people I talked to seemed to agree.

But no, this Simon twit who is in charge of admissions and his two cohorts decided that my lack of recent job or academic experience meant they were not “comfortable” with my ability to do the course, and so they rejected me.

Well fuck THEM. They made a huge mistake in not accepting me. That Simon twit told me that if I took some writing courses and did well in them, maybe they would reconsider later on.

And I might do that. I don’t know. I am too fucking angry about the whole thing to even think about it right now. Honestly, right now I feel a lot more like storming the VFS campus and demanding they let me into the course than anything else now.

I mean, what a stupid reason to reject me. They knew I am psychologically disabled. They know I have been sick for a while. So obviously I would have a big gap in my work and academic history.

In a way, then, they rejected me because of the direct results of my disability. I might just have a case against them on that basis. When I am more calm, I may look into that. Motherfuckers may not have heard the last of me.

Thje other half of the trauma besides anger is, of course, disappointment, which has never been an emotion I handle well. Since I was a little kid, the news that I am not going to get something good that I was totally sure I would get has completely devastated me.

No wonder this whole depression thing started when I was taken out of school by my parents. That was one whopper of a disappointment. Arguably, I still haven’t gotten over that one and it was over twenty years ago.

Turns out, if you interrupt the development of a fragile organism at a crucial state, it will never ever recover.

I had everything going my way for once. I was going to take a course that was perfect for me, have a chance to really show off how outrageously talented I am, meet all the right sorts of people, and take the television industry by storm. My life was finally going to go somewhere and I was finally going to escape the doldrums of my depression and sail to the sunny shores of success.

I might even have met Mister Right there, who knows. Lots of fags in the art world.

But no, now that all lies in ruins and I am back to being the same pathetic schmuck with no direction in his life that I was before I dared to get my hopes up.

The one thing I am not feeling, though, is down on myself. I don’t take this rejection as meaning I am not as talented or brilliant as I thought I was. Far from it. This twit Simon made it really clear that this was not about my talent at all, it was just some petty requirement that they have some piece of paper that proves that I can handle taking writing.

You know, other than the fact that I wrote a million words in 11 months, I have been writing 1000 words a day for five years, I wrote three novels, I have produced dozens of little videos, did a webcomic for around a year, and oh, I produced directed starred in and WROTE a play in college that everybody loved.

Oh, and I wrote a couple dozen skits for SMD, one of which is a twenty minute long short movie script.

I have probably done a hell of a lot more writing than most of the people who apply for the course, but because there is no diploma attached, it doesn’t count.

So I have no doubts about how much I deserve to be in that program. This is entirely that twit Simon’s mistake.

I wonder what the real reason he is rejecting me is. Maybe he is not getting along with Patrick Quigley, the guy handling my enrollment process and the person who has actually met me. He really went to bat for me promoting my being admitted, and that is something I will be grateful for till my dying day.

Because really, there must be something else going on. Most of their students would be coming right from high school or college, and would not necessarily have any more of a job history than I do.

So there must be some reason I was singled out. My age? My size? My disability? I could sue their asses for all three of those.

Did Simon just get his back up because everyone who met me or read my application wanted me in the program and he had to prove HE was the boss by rejecting me?

I am not done fighting yet. There are ways and there are ways of attacking this problem. I can make this twit Simon’s life a living hell.

And oh look, the twit has a name, Simon Custodinho. And that name has a Facebook profile and a LinkedIn profile and phone number (604-507-4395) and everything.

He’s remarkably accessible for someone who makes such important decisions that have a huge impact on people’s lives.

Now I am definitely not telling you to flood the guy with messages from you and all your friends on every possible platform.

Yes, if there is one thing I am definitely not telling you to do, it’s flood the guy with messages from you and all your friends about what a massive mistake he has made in not admitting me.

But I am not telling you not to do it either.

I will talk to you again tomorrow, folks.

No, it’s not a creamy good chip dip with mood stabilizers in it. I have just been feeling a little down today.

Don’t know why, although I could, of course, theorize. I am growing frustrated with the petty details of getting my freaking BCID.

The website for my home province of Prince Edward Island has a handy dandy form you can fill out and submit online in order to order a copy of your birth certificate.

Which would be faboo, but it just plain will not recognize me as the person who has the right to said document. I filled out the form flawlessly, and it still says no. I must have tried ten different variations of my name and my parents’ names last night and it just won’t recognize me.

That is both frustrating to my goals and upsetting in general. This whole ID business is really messing with my admittedly somewhat fragile sense of self. Not being recognized or validated for who I am is kind of a thing with me, and having the website from my home province refuse to recognize me as the Island boy that I am just ups the number of provinces that don’t recognize me to two.

I can’t imagine what I was doing wrong. And to compound the frustration, the lady in charge (or at least the one that answers phones and replies to emails) Cindy was no fucking help at all. I poured my soul out to her in an email, and her reply was “Gee, that’s weird. ” Same thing on the phone. I will be forced to email the PDF of the requisite form to Felicity so she can print it out, then fill it out, then get it scanned so I can email it back to her.

Or fax it back. Did you know there’s still fax machines? True story.

Admittedly, dealing with Cindy also brought back painful memories of just how fucking useless people back home can be. That quaint informality and friendliness that people from Away love so much comes at a price, and a big part of that price is people just not really caring about their jobs.

At least, not enough to focus and be alert and ready to spring into action. The whole Island is draped with a very soft, very thick blanket of sleepiness, and if something requires a greater state of awakeness than that, it just does not happen. Nothing will get an Islander to wake up more than they usually have to. It has been a frustration for me all my life and now it is really coming to a head with this thing with Cindy.

And I know it would be no use to get mad at her. It wouldn’t make her any more likely to be of help to me. It just reminds me, forcibly, of why I am so glad I got the hell off the Island and escaped to places where at least some people are fully awake on occasion.

The other annoyance dragging me down is the CareCard thing.

The good news is that I was successfully able to order a new CareCard over the phone today, so yay that.

The bad news is it won’t arrive for 3 to 4 weeks.

I mean, what the fuck? Why the hell does it take that long? The nice fellow on the phone said that it used to be faster, but now it goes through ICBC and their card printing factor, so tough freaking luck.

I never dreamed that it would be this complicated just to get identified. It’s always the step you think will be the easiest that blossoms into a million complications, isn’t it? Typical.

Admittedly, this is partly that particularly male frustration pattern where it’s not just about solving the problem, it’s about make the thing do what it is supposed to do, otherwise the thing wins.

Don’t laugh, ladies. This is the sort of thing that drives the male mind. We get in dominance battles with inanimate objects, and feel a thrill of victory and glory when we make the damned thing do what we wanted it to do and what it is supposed to do. Our minds really work that way.

So in my case, I want the fucking online form to WORK. I want it to accept me as who I am. Printing out the boring old paper version feels like defeat. I would be much happier if I just found a way to make the online version accept me.

Because I exist, god dammit. I did a risky thing today and decided to Google myself and try to find traces of my existence. For example, I tried to see if there was any record of my work with the UPEI Theater Society. I figured if I got a mention somewhere, I could send the link to VFS as further proof of my creative powers.

But alas, no. They have record of my production of The Real Inspector Hound…. but without my name attached. The records only state what plays the theater society produced. It doesn’t list a single freaking name attached to the productions.

And the play I actually wrote, directed, produced, and starred in, What’s On, is not even mentioned at all.

So in that case, I gambled and lost.

Holy SHIT, life just keeps getting more complicated. I just got a phone call from my doctor’s office. The good news is that I finally have a appointment with a rheumatologist to see what is up with my knee.

The bad news is that I have to both call tomorrow morning to confirm the appointment AND go all the way to my GP’S office to pick up some form to fill out AND go all the way into Vancouver for the freaking appointment AND bring all my medications with me.

Fucking specialists! So next Monday, I got this whole adventure to go on.

It’s like I opened a Pandora’s Box full of complications.

Life is just too damned hard sometimes.

Oh well, talk to you again tomorrow folks!

I got an email this morning saying that the student loan people could not process my request for VFS to fill out the Appendix Three part of my student loan application.

Being a calm, rational, centred person, I immediately panicked. But after I got ahold of myself, I realized that the most probable reason is that I have not technically been accepted into VFS yet.

In retrospect, I guess I probably should have waited. But I am way too eager. I am sure the whole thing will work itself out once I am accepted.

Could be any day now. (Hurry up dammit, I need the worry space for other things!)

I left a voicemail for Patrick, the dude handling my application, asking about the Appendix Three business, plus whether it is cool to pay the deposit with a check from Joe made out to me but endorsed over to them.

As far as I know, Patrick has yet to get back to me. I was assured by Sheena (I think it was Sheena) that Patrick would get back to me “like, within the hour”, but I called at 1 pm and waited until 4 pm, and no call.

Whatever, I am sure it is no big deal.

On the identity front (great name for an industrial group), Joe was wonderful enough to drive me to Money Mart today so I could put $100 on the ol’ credit card. That money will go to getting my fershlugginer birth certificate from back home.

I am not sure how much of that I would spend. For like 77 bucks, I could (I think) have the thing in my hands as early as this Friday.

But I have no idea whether it is really that urgent, and I may well need yet more cashola when it comes time to actually getting the thrice damn’d BCID, or as I might as well do, the BC Services Card, which is the former BCID merged with the CareCard system so there is a single, unified government services card for you to lose and have to replace.

Reminds me of that bit in one of the Hitchhiker’s books where the Galactibanks had installed all kinds of high tech security measures like retina scans, DNA testing, and so on to make their accounts absolutely immune to pilfering, then issued their rich customers a single card that replaced it all because it turns out that rich people don’t like having to submit to hours of painful and annoying tests just to get at their money.

Ford Prefect found the card of one of the executives of the new, corporate, soulless Hitchiker’s Guide, and promptly stole it, and used it to do things like buy the London Zoo and tell them to let all the animals go.

Dragging myself by the scruff of the neck back to the point, I am going to attempt to order the copy of my birth certificate from back home online tonight. I am not entirely sure that it can be done entirely online, but I will try, and if not, I will order it over the phone tomorrow.

I will have to do the same for the CareCard. I swear you used to be able to order a new one online, but I can’t find it on the website any more. Joe thought it might be related to this whole “merging it with the BCID” business, and that seems plausible. I suppose the stakes for identity theft get higher every day.

I have decided that I simply will not let myself doubt that I will be accepted to VFS. This is partly based on the fact that I know the samples of my work that I sent in are good, and the people I have met seem quite pleased with my application, so the signs are good.

But mostly, it is a conscious decision to believe in myself. I am super talented, dammit, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. I would be perfect for the school and it would be perfect for me. I will go there, I will be righteous awesome, I will kick ass and take minds, and I will impress all the right people (and a few of the wrong ones, just to keep in practice) and when I graduate, it will be the beginning of a totally awesome career in television.

I will either get work in the industry, or I will gather about me a coterie of lunatics ready to take on the world and make kickass comedy with no limits. Anything is possible and everything is permitted as long as it’s funny.

And there will definitely be no limit to our artistic ambition. We are looking to do no less than make skits so fucking funny that they rock the world and set the bar higher for every other skitcom group out there.

Forget humility. I have tried it and found it wanting. From now on, my plan is to keep on thinking I am totally awesome unless the universe definitively proves me wrong, and even then I will probably just learn from my mistakes and go on to be even more awesome in the future.

There is a lot of power in this madhouse of a mind of mine, and I am determined to use it to make a place for myself in the world.

Forget the superstitious belief that you have to always doubt yourself, otherwise the universe will notice you and take you down a notch.

There is no Nemesis waiting to slay your hubris. Go ahead and believe in yourself. What’s the worst that can happen? It’s not like my current life fills me with joy and fulfillment. I am more than willing to bet it against a future where I am no longer trapped by my fears, but liberated by my abilities.

Sounds like a dream worth risking everything for to me.

I will talk to you again sometime tomorrow, folks. I love all of you!

This is a subject I have been thinking about for a while, and today is as good a day as any to try to bring my thoughts about it into focus.

From the time we first enter the school system, we are unintentionally taught a particular point of view : school is bad, play is good.

This has a lot to do with the limits of how our education works. Children are born curious and wanting to learn. It’s a miracle diablu how efficiently we kill that in our kids.

And this is how we teach them to hate work as well. At a too-early age, we force them to sit down and shut up while a teacher talks to them. They come to associate school with being boring and stifling, and this teaches them to resent having to do it and to treasure every moment away from it.

Thus a sharp and unnecessary wall is erected separating the two worlds of work and play. You endure work because you have to, and then the moment you are allowed to go, you revert to being just a kid and try to get out of having to do anything else that you don’t want to do.

That’s why kids resist their chores so much. It’s not the task itself, it’s that it takes them away from our rich tapestry of entertainment options and languid self-indulgence, and they have absorbed the idea that they need all of that undemanding leisure time they can get just to cope with the other part of life where their personhood and will are suppressed in the name of education.

This was an inevitable result of the rise of individualism. The more we strengthen the individual, the more outrageous it seems to be forced to do things against out will. It goes against the grain of a highly individualist society which reinforces individuality, will, and autonomy at every corner for any individual’s personal freedom to do as they please at any time.

Eventually, you leave school and join the work force. But the exact same attitude prevails there, too. There is the massive unspoken assumption that work is bad and everyone hates it and everyone would rather be doing something else.

It is school all over again. Nothing has changed. You do the work that your job requires and take what little pleasures you can while doing so, and every waking moment when you are free from your responsibilities is spent indulging in all the manifold avenues of entertainment and leisure activities you can.

And the one thing we do not do, under any circumstances, is anything that seems like work. We treat work as a necessary evil at best and a crime against our personhood at worst, and the idea of working when you don’t have to is absurd.

And woe betide anyone who confesses to liking their job, because unless you have the sort of job others wish they could have, saying that you enjoy your work will be interpreted as meaning that you are either a brown-nosing apple polisher looking for a pat on the head for having an extra correct attitude, or a person so appallingly boring that for them, boring things are the only things boring enough for said boring person to enjoy.

So unless you are a race car driver or a rock star, you cannot claim to enjoy the thing you are paid to do for a living without social penalty. (And if you DO have that kind of job, you will also be socially penalized via jealously. Oh, you love your job, must be NICE.)

This creates the rather perverse situation in which essentially nobody is allowed to admit they like their work. To do so is a subversive act because it contradicts the dominant narrative that work is bad and not-work is good.

But what is the real difference? It’s certainly not effort. People expend enormous effort on things nobody is forcing them to do all the time. Hiking, writing articles for Wikipedia, devoting hours of sweat and toil to a video game… practically everything we do for fun and enjoy requires an investment of effort. We are clearly not merely lazy creatures who prefer to do as little as possible.

We want to expend effort. So the difference between work and play cannot be merely a matter of energy expended. Nor can it be the nature of the work, because one person’s mind numbing tedium is another person’s bread and butter.

It has to be a matter of choice. What we choose to do is fun and play, and what we do without wanting to do it is work.

Then what is wrong with choosing to work? And enjoy it? Are we not better off learning to enjoy the thing we have already chosen to do (our jobs) instead of wasting time and energy resenting our chosen jobs?

Sure, most of us are not doing our dream jobs, that is to say, we are not doing that magical job that so suits our talents that it defeats the entire concept of work by being exactly the sort of thing that we would choose to do and hence is like being paid to play all day.

But those jobs, by and large, do not exist. All jobs inevitably demand that we do something we do not feel like doing at the time and would not choose to do, and hence all jobs are work.

All life is work. No one leads an effortless life, except perhaps for the people who have learned not to resist their own choices and adapt to their circumstances.

The ultimate example of this schoolyard mentality is the concept of retirement. We absorb this “work bad leisure good” mentality so deeply that we imagine that the best thing in the world must be unlimited leisure time.

But people are not built to do nothing. Sooner or later, you will want to fulfill your human need for meaningful effort. A mountain of candy might seem like the ultimate goodness to a child, but sooner or later they are going to eat themselves sick and want some real food.

Would it really be so bad if we learned to love our work? If we made a space for people to admit that sometimes their jobs are not entirely awful? Would it really be such a threat to our sense of autonomy and individuality to just give in, adapt to our circumstances, and be a happier and healthier organism?

I think that if we just admitted that work is something we all need in order to lend purpose to our lives and satisfy our feeling of having contributed to the collective, then we would all be a lot better off, and we could go forward into our lives rid of a corrosive delusion that only interferes with true happiness.

That’s all from me for today folks! Talk to you again tomorrow.

The nice lady with the Chinese accent at Wing Kee said it will be about an hour before I get my food, so I figured I would use that time to blopg, and that way when the food arrives I can just settle down with my Chinese food and My Little Ponies and chill for the evening.

Before I ordered from Wing Kee, I decided to do a little research. See, their flyer says they offer free delivery within 5 km, and I have been getting dinged $5 for delivery whenever I order, so I decided to boot up Google Maps and find out just how far away Wing Kee is.

Turns out that, as the car drives, they are 5.4 km away. So they got me there. I am 400 meters away from free delivery, damn it! I tried to research another Chinese place closer to me, because frankly five bucks for delivery is outrageous, but hunger was making me impatient so I decided to just go with good ol Wing Kee.

However, when I am less hungry (and not on my tablet… slow freaking thing), I will look for a more reasonably priced alternative.

I decided I would treat myself tonight because I have been feeling somewhat depressed lately. Having my main PC die on me really threw me for a loop, and what with the ID business looming over my head, I have been feeling a little down.

It’s not helped by the fact that I have been undereating again. I have been skipping meals because I wasn’t hungry at the time and so I am rocking a near constant hypoglycemic state. Not smart!

It got so bad that this morning at around 6 am, I woke up with a full bladder, and while emptying it into the appropriate receptacle, got this intense head rush… that didn’t stop.

That is a very bad sensation. I was also trembling and my legs were wobbly and I felt cold in a very scary way.

So I marched my buttocks out to the kitchen and forced myself to eat. I probably should have eaten more, but the minute my blood sugar started climbing, the effects of my sleeping pills kicked back in with a vengeance, and so I pretty much had to go back to bed.

I really have to stop doing this to myself. I have let my eating discipline go slack and I can’t afford to do that. For me, it is potentially lethal for me to skip a meal. For a long time, I had a very good record when it came to eating when I am supposed to eat regardless of whether or not I felt hungry.

And I need to get back to that. When it is meal time, I will eat. I might only eat a piece of fruit and a PB&J, but I will eat.

I swear sometimes that self-discipline is (or tries to be, in a slacker like me) a zero sum game where if you become more disciplined in one area, you slack off in another area. That, plus the tendency to slack off in the summer anyhow, plus the new stressors in my life equals a higher potential for doing stupid things like skipping meals. So I had best be on my guard.

I am trying very hard to be the caring, engaged, lovingly disciplining parent that I never had to myself. It’s not easy to undo a lifetime of self-neglect and stop doing to myself what my parents did to me (namely ignore me) and so it will be no easy task to get myself ship-shape again.

But I feel that I am on the right path. Certainly, the fact that I will be going to school soon (fingers crossed) will do me a great deal of good by providing lots of structure and an environment in which my considerable creative assets can be both recognized and honed.

I think I will really bloom and shine at VFS. It is the perfect place for me to be, and I am proud of myself that I am finally reaching out to get what I want out of life instead of being trapped on the sidelines be my fears.

I wonder how old people will think I am at VFS. People are always surprised when they learn my true age online because I have a very youthful attitude and you don’t see a lot of people in their forties who are all perky and cuddly and whatnot.

Then again, I have a fursona online. That kind of makes a difference. Still, I bet the people at VFS who have NOT read my application will be surprised to find out that I am old enough to have seen Star Wars in the theater the first time around.

Turns out that living the cloistered life I have led has kept me well-preserved on a strictly psychological level, and I plan on using that to my advantage

(two hours later)

Chinese food arrived and was eaten. Ponies were watched. I am at the end of Season Two, and they are using the “suspicious of the loved one’s new mate” standard plotline. You know, where the main character meets the new mate and doesn’t like them, and accuses them of being awful, and everyone thinks they are just being jealous and possessive and paranoid, but it turns out they were right all along.

I’ve seen it a million times. But loving the Ponies is not about originality of plot. Plot originality is overrated.

Like a good sitcom, it’s all about the characters, the dialogue, and the laughs. The best shows are always the ones with the characters you love and want to spend time with. If you don’t have that, you have nothing.

Well that’s all from me tonight in this unusual blog entry. I don’t usually let anything interrupt me when I am blogging, but this time it was FOOD.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Plus other stuff, I am sure.

Went to get my ID today, but it turns out you need ID to get your ID these days.

The problem is that, in addition to losing my last photo ID card, and apparently having lost yet another CareCard (???). I also lost the pocket birth certificate that I have carried around forever for just this sort of identification.

So I had no way of proving I was the guy who deserved to get a BCID with my name on it. For all they knew, I was a criminal intent on identity theft.

That’s totally a thing these days.

So I am going to have to get another copy of my PEI birth certificate, and who knows how big a hassle that will be. I haven’t given up on my original yet… I have a bad feeling that I put it “somewhere safe” at some point and then promptly forgot about the entire thing, and I have a few places to search.

But I might well have to go to all the trouble of phoning home to Prince Edward Island and convincing them to send me a copy of the proof that I was born.

Funny how the province of British Columbia believes in my identity enough to send me $950 a month plus spend further thousands on my medical expenses, but that’s not enough to convince ICBC to give my a piece of paper with my picture on it.

Oh well. At least today I am not blogging via my tablet. My clue finally showed up and I figured out that I could just use the shared computer in the living room, with its nice comfy full sized keyboard. to blog. Duh!

So no foreshortened entry today. We are back to the full thousand.

No progress on the computer front, natch. It will take me asking one of my more technical acquaintances to come over and play computer doctor before my beloved PC is up and running again.

I really miss playing Hearthstone. Everything else, I can handle via other means, but you can’t play Hearthstone on an Android device (yet!) and I don’t think this shared computer has the hard drive space or the CPU muscle for it.

Oh well, there are worse tragedies. I am hoping that replacing my computer’s power supply will do the trick. The worst case scenario would be that when the power supply blew, it took a bunch of other stuff out with it, and that I basically have not so much a computer as a brick now.

That would suck. I would have to just plain reclaim this shared computer as my own personal computer and leave my friends to fend for themselves. Both computers are mine, so I am well within my rights to do so.

But I would really, really prefer it didn’t come to that. I would feel guilty about it, and would rather just have my current main PC go back to normal instead.

Did the therapist thing today. My therapist was a tad nonplussed to have been called as a character reference yesterday.

Actually, there is a story about that.

See, yesterday, I had a phone appointment with Daniel from VFS, who is some sort of head of education something or other there. He just wanted to talk to me about what special needs I might have as a person with depression, and I honestly couldn’t think of anything at the time. I don’t need a handler or assistant or anything like that, as far as I know.

And we have yet to figure out how to build emotional prosthetics (seriously, Windows dictionary? You have prosthetic but not prosthetics?) unless you count drugs, so it’s not like I need the place to be depression-accessible somehow.

I don’t even know what that would mean, anyhow. Subdued lighting?

So my conversation with Daniel was brief. But during it, he mentioned that usually, they want people’s two references to contain only one friend, and I had put two.

At first I thought “But I don’t know anyone else!”, but then, after I got off the phone with Daniel, it occurred to me that there was one person who knew me besides my three friends, and that was my therapist.

But it was too late, right? My application had already been submitted, references included, so what could I do?

Fast forward to around 4 o’clock, and I get another phone call from VFS. It’s Sheena and she is calling my references. She dialed our number by mistake, having copied the wrong number down, and had meant to get Felicity.

There was my opportunity! I told her to call my therapist instead, and gave her his name (which she got wrong) and number.

To be honest, I didn’t really think about his end of things. But it turns out he had never been used as a reference before and had no idea what to say, given patient confidentiality and all.

So during therapy today, we filled out a page of questions she had faxed him, and faxed it back to her. Usual job interview type stuff, like how well I work with others (depends on if they are idiots or not) and what my work ethic is like (I work like hell until it’s done).

Weird questions for one’s therapist, but I have been outside the world of employment for like 20 years, so it’s not like I have former employers or co-workers they could consult.

Anyhow, so all my preparations for VFS are complete except for the freaking ID thing. Maybe I should go back to the ICBC place and throw myself on the mercy of the court. Tell them I can’t get into school without it. Beg them to make an exception for me. Look really sad and pathetic.

Nah. At least, not until all other avenues have been exhausted.

After all, I have my pride.

Talk to you again tomorrow, all you wonderful beautiful fabulous kind people!

But the gain remains neutral.

Which do you want first, the bad news or the good?

I will do the bad news first. I always like it better when things get better asthey go. I’m vrty sensitive to trends.

The bad news id that right now, my computer is dead. Just will not turn on. No beeps, no flicker, nothing. Zero response to the power button. Might as well not be plugged in.

And it is plugged in. Even a technical ignoramus like myself knows to check that. Both end of the power cable are firmly plugged into their respective sockets, and I know the power bar is getting juice because the red light is on.

So I am guessing it’s the power supply. That is the big black box in the back of the computer that you plug the power cable into, for those eho dunno. They usually come with the computer case, so most people don’t realize thry are a component. But I had one fail before, so I know.

If I am right, a new power supply usually is like 40 bux, so not an expensive repair, assuming I can get someone to perform the surgery for me.

I faint at the sight of motherboards. It’s a genetic weakness.

Thank goodness for this tablet!

The good news is that Joe has agreed to lend me the thousand dollars for the VFS deposit. Phew! That is such a load off my mind. Joe is such an awesome dude. I am so incredibly lucky to have such a brick of a dude as a friend. When they accept me into VFS, I will be able to give them the deposit right away, which should look good.

Speaking of this tablet, I am currently typing this blog entry via its virtual keyboard, and thst is rough going. As a result, tonight’s blog entry will be WAY shorter than usual. Neither my thumbs nor my nerves would be able to take doing the full thousand like this.

I was going to use my little bluetooth keyboard to type thid, but it has lost its charge since I used it months ago, and I didn’t feel like waiting for it yo charge before getting my blog on.

Oh further on the VFS front, I completed my student loan application online last night. It hasn’t been submitted yet because they need the bit the school fills out first, but my bit is done.

So VFS is processing my application, my student loan application will enter the system soon, thanks to Joe I will have the deposit ready, and tomorrow I will sort out this BCID business.

It is looking like smooth sailing from here on in.

Except that my computer is broken.

Damn you, Zero Sum!

I will talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

Turned out to be no big deal.

That is my seven word summary of today. I went to VFS, chatted with Patrick Quigley who is handling my application about hither and thither, and took the tour of the writing floor, got an info packet, and came home.

I think the main reason they get people to come in for the tour et al is to do the basic impression test to make sure you’re not an axe murderer, a creeper, or a mutant from space. You learn a lot about a person just by meeting and conversing with them for five minutes. That’s the whole idea behind speed dating. So while a little part of me was thinking “I traveled an hour and a half for this?”, I can see why they do it.

It lets them weed out the really bad candidates who nevertheless look good on paper.

And I am confident that I made a good impression. They seem to be happy with my application (I made sure to infuse it with my signature charm) and my writing samples will be adjudicated soonishly. I am quite certain they will approve.

I sent them a political essay (You Will Burn In Hell, about how nobody can possibly follow every part of the Bible, despite what mindless literalists try to claim), a short story (Rust In The Sunset), a skit (Evening Pamphlet), and Maple Leaf Menace, which is a script for a short film.

Hey, they said I could send up to 4. So I sent 4. Wanted to show my range.

Basically, I figure that those samples will, at the very least, show that I have loads of raw talent that could really benefit from the education at VFS. That is more or less how I see it myself. I have been exercising my writing muscles on my own for nearly five years now, but there is only so far I can get by myself.

What I need is outside input from those in the know, and structured challenges for me to fulfill. The VFS program offers both of those in spades, and I am confident that they will see that I could be a star student if given the chance.

The trip to and fro was uneventful. My first time on the Millennial Line, despite having live in Richmond continuously since it was built in 2010, four years ago. The stations are very nice. They have a kind of elegant simplicity belying a true depth of design sense that I admire. They seem elegant and minimalist without seeming bare or spartan. They make great use of glass and wood without seeming cheesy or cheap.

I like them, is what I am saying.

And I love that the downtown stations are built right into the street, just like the subway stations I have seen in TV and movies. The one bad thing about going over people’s heads instead of under their feet is that you don’t get that awesome feeling when you emerge from the subway directly onto the street and it is like you just emerged from a hidden world.

Getting from Waterfront Station to VFS is super easy. The station is about ten steps from being on West Hastings (it’s on Granville), so it was easy to just walk the four or five blocks downhill to 198 West Hastings.

Technically, I could have taken a bus, but it was such a nice day and my leg was doing very well, so I figured “Why increase my tension by waiting for a bus when it’s not that far away?”.

So I had a pleasant walk through Gastown, gaining amusement from how hard everything seems to be trying to be hip and cool without looking like it is trying to be hip and cool.

As for The Tour, there was not a heck of a lot to see. The writing floor of 198 West Hastings is just a bunch of conference rooms and a pocket sized writer’s lounge. After all, what more do writers need? Writing for film and television is mostly about meetings, cold reads, story conferences, and that sort of thing. Sure, we writers need time alone to do our thing, but if you are working in media, a lot of it is going to be collaborative.

Which means I am going to have to get used to group work after all. Dammit. Oh well, at least the people I work with will actually be interested in the work and trying as hard as they can to make it succeed, and not just a bunch of assholes trying to get out of doing any work while being as obstructive and obnoxious as possible.

Yeah, I got issues.

One neat thing about the writing floor is that it has its own little kitchen, so I could bring food from home and cook it there. That’s better than my other option, brown-bagging it entirely. I can’t afford to eat out for lunch every school day… that would be 20 schooldays a month at a minimum $10/day, so… yikes… so I would have to bring food from home at least some of the time.

I will take care of getting my ID on Friday, and I have been assured that it’s no big deal if I get it in late. They are not going to hold the whole thing up just on the ID. So, phew.

But now I have a bigger challenge : coming up with the $1000 deposit. I read about that on the website, but I didn’t realize until Patrick told me that they will expect that deposit like, the minute they approve my application, and that could be as soon as next Monday.

Patrick said that they would probably take $500 and then work out a plan for me to pay the rest. I could afford to pay them $100/month easy, or $200/month with somewhat of a pinch.

But right now, on my own, I could only come up with $200 tops, and so I am going to have to find some kind individual to lend me the other $300 or I might be up shit creek again.

Oh well, I am sure someone can pony up the cash. It will truly be a loan, as I will just pay it back from the student loan money when I get the chance.

Tomorrow (or possibly later tonight, if I am feeling ambitious), I am going to tackle the student loan application, and try to bag myself as much funding as I possibly can.

Turns out, being an emotional cripple is good for something after all : government money! w00t!

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

Today is July 1, Canada Day. the one day of the year that we normally reserved and modest Canadians can muster up the courage to quietly sing our own praises and gently toot our modest little horns.

We celebrate ourselves today, even though it doesn’t come naturally to us. It’s not that Canadians are not proud of their country or that Canadians lack communal spirit.

We’re just not a super demonstrative people. Singing our own praises seems far too American to us, and if there is one thing about the Canadian identity upon which all Canadians agree, it is that we are NOT American.

I can only imagine that every time we insist upon that on the world stage, it seems like one twin insisting on how different it is from the other. We are New Zealand to the USA’s Australia, Austria to their Germany, Portugal to their Spain. No matter how strongly any of us insist on how unique we are compared to our bigger, louder counterparts, and no matter how many absolutely true and valid points of difference we can point to, from the outside, we will still look more or less the same.

And unless you are absolutely sure you could tell an Austrian from a German, you can’t blame those outside North America from looking at us that way.

The differences, therefore, are for us to understand, and nobody else. We live and grow in the shadow of American cultural dominance, and while we don’t like to think about it, we have to admit that if the USA were to disappear tomorrow, we would be ill prepared to go on without them.

I mean, we would have to watch Canadian TV! The horror.

In some ways, then, it is amazing that we retain any unique identity at all. But no matter how strong an influence another culture has on our own, national character remains the same, and ours is strikingly different from that of our cousins to the South. We are a quiet, unassuming, public-minded, reserved people, and while we have very little influence on what goes on down South in the United States, we do have the world’s best view for the show.

As for the world stage, we are distinctly part of the crew, not the on-stage talent. We show up when we are needed and do what is needed to be done and we neither seek nor receive praise for it, because Canadians have, in their quiet way, an extremely strong sense of duty, and we are perfectly content to just do our part without requiring individual recognition.

Time and again, Canada has shown its willingness to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do. We were fighting Hitler for years before the USA decided to show up, and we didn’t need a personal motivation either. Hitler was no immediate threat to us. Tojo hadn’t bombed Vancouver Island.

We saw the threat, saw that our friends and allies in Europe needed us, and showed up ready to fight.

And that has been our pattern ever since, sometimes to our detriment. We show up where we are needed, whether it’s Cyprus, Sarajevo, or Afghanistan, and we do the jobs that are not sexy or glamorous enough for others, and when the job is done, we just go home and resume our lives.

We do our part. That’s what Canadians do.

This extends to the domestic realm as well. Unlike certain nations we border, Canadians have a much better grasp on the idea that society requires a sacrifice from each and every one of us, and that when something benefits us all, it is more than just a noble ideal to support it, it’s a sound investment.

We are the “peace, order, and good government” nation. Note the lack of soaring, inspirational ideals there. We are not looking to become shining examples of awesomeness even in our (unofficial) national motto. We just want things to be peaceful, orderly, and sound.

Note especially that last phrase : good government. Can you imagine an American even saying those two words together? Implicit in the phrase is the idea not just that government can be good (surprise, Fox News!), but that it is something that can be made good. It is an inherently communalist phrase, at least compared to the radical individualists down south, and I think it says a lot about who we are as a people.

It also says a lot about who we are as a people that we are constantly trying to figure out who we are as a people. When you live in the apartment above what it arguably the loudest nation on Earth, it is no wonder that you end up having trouble hearing your own voice.

And it is so much easier to just listen to whatever songs they are playing downstairs.

But I don’t think we Canadians need to worry so much about who we are. Clearly, whoever we are, we are despite all the noise from down south, and we will continue to be that nation no matter how loud and self-aggrandizing they get.

We might not always be able to hear our own voice, or understand who we truly are apart from simply not being American, and that is understandable given our unique situation.

But we always have been, always are, and always will be our own people, and we do not have to understand what that means in order for it to be true.

Call us the Invisible Nation. There is nowhere in the world where our cultural identity makes a big impact… not even Canada. We are a nation who stays out of the limelight and just gets on with the job. We will never be someone’s shining city on the hill where the streets are paved with gold.

And that’s fine. Someone has to still be there after the heroes have all gone home and there is plain, unglamorous, unsexy work to be done in order to make the world a better place.

And that is what Canada does best.

Make the world a better place.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!