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.