This is the day, folks. The day the new apartment becomes officially ours. The process of changing residence has begone. A new era has dawned.

Well it’s a big deal to me.

I am quite excited about it. I can’t say I am without reservation on the whole thing. Part of me is still scared that it will be too small and end up all cramped and claustrophobic, even though Joe assures me it’s huge.

And that voice will not be quieted until I actually set foot in the place and take a look around, and will not go completely silent until we have moved in.

I already have my keys. Well, a key and one of those electronic entry fobs. You know, the thing you wave at some sort of sensor so it will unlock a door for you.

Those seem to be all the rage these days. I suppose it is mildly more convenient than actually turning a key in a lock. It would certainly be a boon to people who sometimes come drunk enough that putting a key in a lock suddenly becomes a problem of four dimensional trigonometry.

I think the main function, however, is to make the build seem impressively modern.

Oh no no, we don’t use keys any more, says the building airily. Those are SO last millennium. We just wave bits of plastic in the air.

Still need a key for your apartment door, though. The future only goes so far. I think waving a bit of plastic to get into your apartment would feel very weird. Like your home is suspicious of you and needs proof that you belong in it.

That is pretty much the polar opposite of that warm, homey feeling.

We are going to begin moving in tonight. Nothing major, just a carload or two of boxes, if that. The idea is to go there and meet the place, so to speak. Go there, take a look around, get a feel for the place, maybe get some preliminary ideas as to where various things go.

We will also have to work out whose room belongs to whom. That can be some tricky politics. I have a somewhat high minimum space requirement because I have that big king sized bed.

It is only when moving that said bed goes from merely absurdly large to full blow white elephant. I would gladly ditch it for something smaller. Something that is, basically, half the size, seeing as I only use half of it.

I would even do an even swap with someone with a good sturdy bed of reasonable size. My king for your… what. Prince?

I am worried about the whole issue of moving the furniture. I was naively thinking that the $350 we are getting to move would be enough, but according to my investigations so far, a more reasonable sum for our kind of move would be $1000.

A whole thou. Ouch. That would mean a bill of $650 over the $350 we are getting to move. That breaks down to $217 each, and obviously, I don’t have that kind of dosh. I would have to pay Joe back over time. Preferably a really long time.

What I am hoping is that we can cut that down to something more reasonable by having it be exclusively furniture involved in the move. Everything that can be put in a box, we will move ourselves.

And we can probably haul some of the smaller bits of furniture over ourselves. We just need movers for the big stuff like couches and tables and some of the bigger and heavier bookshelves.

Boy, have we got bookshelves. We’re bookish people. And besides books we have tons and tons of videos, both VHS and DVD. So while that stuff is easily boxable, some of the bookshelves are decidedly… not.

Then again, we got them in here somehow!

Speaking of books, I began sorting mine. The idea to take this opportunity to cull my book collection and get rid of the books I don’t want was a stroke of genius. Not onl;y is that just a sensible idea on the face of it (why move books you don’t even want any more), it turns boxing the books, which is boring, into a sorting exercise, and I love those!

What can I say, I love sorting things. I find it inherently pleasurable. It’s the sort of thing one does not go around bragging about because it makes you sound like the dullest person around.

But I love to sort, and to put the sorted things where they belong. Add that to my lifelong love of books, and it’s a wonder I didn’t end up as a librarian.

Just didn’t occur to me, I guess. Man I wish I could go back in time and give myself some firm but loving career counseling.

I started the sorting this afternoon, but I only managed to get one “keep” box and one “bye bye” box done before I was hit with a fairly severe irritable bowel attack, possibly triggered by the dust.

The idea would be that the dust triggered my allergies, the allergies triggered their signature body wide inflammatory respond, and that made my bowels all irritable and grumpy.

Hence, cramping, headache, and the general feeling that if I moved, I’d explode.

Sp I had to lay down for a while, and when I felt better (these things pass) it was time to get to work on a video and then this blog.

Still, I will get back to it when I am done here. For me, it’s actually fun. Not only to I get to sort things, I get to look at all my books, one by one, and realize just how many of them I haven’t read and barely even recognize.

How the heck does THAT happen?

The new place will be more expensive. Not only is the rent $66 a month per person more, but we will have to pay for our own hydro as it’s not included in the rent in the new place like it is here.

And so this will be a blow to my finances. But luckily, my finances have a built-in crumple zone to soften the blow. Namely, the $100 per month I have been putting on my credit card for online shopping.

Boom goes that, and my painless money available for rent goes up to $500. What I am hoping is that the $34 difference between the new rent and my rent money will be enough to pay my share of the bills.

I doubt it, though. So I am probably going to have to take at least a $20/month hit to my spendable cash.

Somehow, I will survive.

That’s it from me for tonight, folks. Next time I talk to you, I will know more about the new pad.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow!

Yup. I’m going to talk about the death of Robin Williams again tonight.

First, we will get this out of the way :

That song speaks to me. Smokey is not the same sort of clown I am, but the basic feeling is pretty much the same.

I have heard that on the day when Robin killed himself, his wife had no idea anything was wrong. This does not surprise me in the slightest, because he was exactly the sort of person who would find it hard to share his problems with anyone.

Why? Because then he would have to stop being the Robin Williams we all knew and loved. He was addicted to being that person, the funny guy who made everyone laugh and who everyone loved. To admit he had a problem would be to drop that mask, and we clowns wear masks for a reason.

Our masks are the people we want to be. Underneath is the people we are. It is no surprise, then, that we prefer to keep the mask on and just keep being that person all the time. It’s so much easier than being who you really are.

I bet he thought of telling someone many times. He thought of telling him about the endless days when you feel like you are nothing and nobody and nobody needs you or even wants you around. Those are the days without warmth, where the delight you usually feel in entertaining others just doesn’t cut it any more because there is something wrong with the man behind the mask.

Something that is probably related to how much you ignore the man behind the mask because he’s so boring and serious and lame. Part of you knows that you really ought to pay more attention to the man behind the mask, but you just keep putting it off in favour of being the fun, funny, wacky version of your self that spreads joy and happiness wherever he goes.

So you carry on pretending the mask is the real you, while you rot away inside.

And it’s true that the mask is also a form of protection. If people don’t have access to the real you, they can’t hurt it. Anything they might say about you is really just about the mask, so who cares?

And that’s fine… as long as you don’t get confused about which is which. And you will get confused if you don’t have somewhere in your life to just be yourself, and the will to let that happen.

And all the time, the real you is crying out for attention and saying “But what about me? Where’s the love for me, the real person? When do I get to connect with people instead of the mask doing it all? When do I get to be as happy as I make other people? When are my needs met?”

But you just shove that voice to the back of your mind in favour of being this other persona of yours.

I know all this because I wear a mask too. In my case, the mask has a name : Fruvous. That’s the character I roleplay as in various Furry environments.

And he is definitely the person (well, fox) I want to be. He is gregarious, friendly, silly, affectionate, very funny, and almost completely without shame, shyness, or social anxiety.

He is an extrovert. He knows lots of people, but none of them all that deeply. He thrives on attention and withers without it. He is me sans issues.

I spend at least an hour a day as him. I have played him so long that doing so requires very little effort. And for the time I am roleplaying as him, I can pretend to be a far happier and more together version of myself.

And even in my own personal life, I find it hard to admit I am not okay. I was not allowed to not be okay in my childhood. I was just supposed to say I was fine so that people could go back to their lives and resume not thinking about me again.

But I wasn’t fine. I had so many problems as a kid. Looking back, I realize I was a very vulnerable and emotionally unstable kid. I really could have used some kind of psychological intervention when I was in elementary school.

And I had nobody to tell about my problems. I tried to tell teachers about the bullying and they just brushed me off. I couldn’t talk to my parents… they were the ones who wanted me to always be okay.

So to this day, I default to saying everything is fine. And the thing is, when you get into that habit, it seduces you into thinking everything really is okay. You internalize the dismissal of your needs and thus it becomes very difficult to take yourself seriously. And so your problems do not seek treatments.

They get brushed aside.

One of the hardest things for me when I first started going to one-on-one therapy was to shut down the mask. To just abandon my usual self-protection persona and be real and serious and direct with my therapist.

And it’s still a struggle. I know there have been times when I have diverted therapy into an intellectual discussion. Or deflected a genuine insight with a joke. It’s a hard habit to break. Being funny and/or interesting is just so much easier and so much more fun than being the real me.

But I drag myself back to the real pretty quickly.

Part of it is empathy. When you are very empathic, you don’t want to upset people or hurt them because that hurt immediately comes back at you on the empathic channel. You feel their pain, as well as the guilt for having caused it.

That makes it hard to stick up for yourself, and easy to put others’ needs above your own. Their needs seem so much more important to you.

So anyhow, I think I know a little of what Robin went through. I have felt cold and alone and miserable and I too have been the person nobody knows is sad at all, let alone feeling like a massive shadow is consuming them in darkness.

I bet that poor man felt like there was nobody he could talk to, and that there was only one way out of his pain.

I am still mad at him for committing such an act of violence on his loved ones.

But I understand, Robin. I understand.

That’s all from me today, folks. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.