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!