No, I haven’t become a vampire (dammit). But I am hungry all the frigging time lately and it is getting on my nerves.

It started after Xmas dinner at Joe’s parents’ place Thursday. I ate only slightly more than usual there, but I knew something was up when I was hungry as hell when we headed home around midnight.

Since then, my usual meals just don’t cut it. It’s like I somehow opened a new chamber in my stomach. Oh look, there’s all this room to fill now. MUST EAT.

So I am plotting some kind of strategically large meal. I am hoping that I can catch up.

As to why this is happening, I, of course, have some theories. Perhaps the two glasses of wine I had that night have me enough of a muscle relaxant effect that it calmed my system down long enough to clean a bunch of the gunk out. Or maybe having a good, balance, tasty, home cooked meal was just what my often undernourished body needed to bounce into greater health and hence appetite. Or perhaps some of both of those options.

Either way, I am irritatingly hungry lately. It has been a long time since I last found myself counting the minutes between meals. It’s an unsettling thing to have return from my past.

On the other hand, it’s a very healthy feeling hunger. A life-affirming hunger. A real hunger, instead of a craving or an artificial hunger induced by boredom or other emotional need.

Luckily, I have never been the type to “eat my emotions”. I have never found that eating to solve an emotional state works for me. Probably because I have a nervous stomach, and so eating when I am upset or angry or depressed would be rather unwise.

I’d just end up making myself sick, and that never helps anything.

Still, I have nutrition on my mind lately. My diet sucks. I don’t get nearly enough of the food stuff, and way too much of the bad stuff. I need fewer carbs and more dairy, protein, and veggies.

And more fresh air, of course. More time outside the apartment, by myself, being autonomous and not feeling like I am a hothouse flower who can’t survive in the outside world and so I an trapped in the little box that is my bedroom.

I sort of had plans to do that today. I need more of my non-psych meds, plus I need to go in for labwork. Both are available literally one block away from me. And I was prepared to make the journey.

But then a little voice in my head said “But wait, you’re almost out of psych meds too, and that means you will be going to the pharmacy after therapy on Wednesday anyhow, so why not wait till then and get them all at once?”

I hate that little voice. It’s never been on my side, not really. It’s the cleverness I use to defeat myself, and I am tired of losing to it,

Nevertheless, the little voice’s point was enough to destroy my motivation. So I guess it wins again this time. I will go another tow days says diabetes meds because of it.

My life is so pathetic sometimes.

I feel kinda sleepy today. I was up late-ish last night but I do that a lot, so that’s probably not it. It’s probably a combination of it being a little stuffy in here (must air out again) and just the usual random bullshit about sleep debt and the need to dream and blah blah blah.

Right now, sleepy as I am, it’s hard to keep the depression away. Hard to stay focused when what I crave is to defocus, fall apart, and go to sleep in a bucket like Odo.

I will likely end up going back to sleep when I am done blogging. Not sure why I decided to blog now instead of after supper. I guess I just needed something to do so I could feel productive now that my primary motivation has vanished.

So after this, there will just be my daily baking to do. Not sure what I will make. I am not in the mood to do a cake. I’m sort of off cake right now. Whatever happened with that too-sweet and/or too-rich icing I made before Xmas has made me a little averse to cake in general. An overreaction, for sure, but my tummy is fussy like that.

It has a very long memory and it can really hold a grudge.

So I don’t know, maybe I will make cookies of some sort. Something light. Like basic sugar cookies, or peanut butter cookies.

Eventually, this aversion to rich desserts will fade and I will power through what is left of it by forcing myself to eat, say, choco-mint cake or the like.

I feel frustrated and restless lately. Some of that is a little bit of post-holiday blues. Sure, there’s New Year’s Even next Wednesday, but meh. The corrosive ennui of depression took the excitement out of the new year for me a long time ago.

Not much happened in the last 24 hours. Went out to eat with my friends last night, as is our Sunday custom. Then afterward, back to the apartment to watch vids.

Joe, sadly, had to work an early shift the next day (as in 7:30 am early) and so he had to go to bed at 11. Ouch. So it was just me and Felicity from then on.

Watched an episode of the 1980’s version of Mission Impossible, and I have to day, I really enjoyed it. It’s just so very satisfying to me to see how they well and truly fuck with people.

Evil people who deserve it, of course. But still, there’s a side of me that loves that kind of thing in a way that scares me a bit. Good thing I don’t have a crack team of highly skilled operatives at my disposal.

My immoral soul would be in peril.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what I feel inside me at this moment. It’s like a dead zone in my soul, and yet, not quite. It should feel eerie and possibly even unpleasant, but instead I find it… interesting. I feel like I am slowly exploring a dark, ancient mansion, suspended between fascination and fear.

I’m sure this is a transition phase of some sort. A momentary stillness between emotional states, like that moment of weightlessness at the apogee of your swing when swinging on a swing (swing) on a playground.

I was entranced by that moment as a kid. I felt like if I could part company with the swing at that exact moment, I would stay weightless and gravity would no longer apply to me.

Clearly, that’s not possible, nor does it make any sense. But kids get odd ideas in their heads.

I aired out my bedroom yesterday. Opened both the bedroom and bathroom windows as wide as they can go and left them that way most of the afternoon and into the evening, until it got too damned cold.

Really freshened up the place. Must remember to do that more often. Things can get rather stale in here.

I also attempted gingersnaps yesterday. I say “attempted” because what resulted was not gingersnaps at all. They taste like ginger and they are a decent sort of cookie overall, but they ain’t gingersnaps.

The first sign of trouble was, when I had just finished fluffing together the dry ingredients (it’s like sifting them together, but with a spoon), I suddenly realized that the recipe I was using called for Splenda Sugar Blend, the stuff that’s half sugar, instead of Splenda Granulated, which is the stuff that’s one hundred percent Splenda.

Well fuck. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I had just used up the last of my flour in assembling the dry ingredients, I would have just dumped everything and started over with a proper recipe this time. But as it was, I had to just keep going and use one hundred percent Splenda anyhow.

Then I found that I had less molasses than the recipe called for. I was sure I had the quarter cup the recipe asked for, but,not quite. I had more like… 3/8ths of a cup. So, that was a problem.

That become especially evident when I tried to pull the dough together. It was way too dry. It was so dry that I couldn’t even get all of the dry ingredients to mix into the main ball of dough. That was clearly not going to work.

And that’s when I made my third mistake. I decided that in order to moisten things up, I would add more applesauce. (My first time baking with unsweetened applesauce, by the way. )

The problem with that brainwave is that it was extremely difficult to get the applesauce to mix in with the existing (and surprisingly stiff) dough. So I ended up having to work the dough A LOT and that only made it even stiffer.

Finally, it was time to turn the dough into cookies to bake. The recipe said the cookies should start as rounded tablespoons of dough. And if my dough had not been incredibly stiff, that might have worked. But as it was, I ended up with 20 very large Godzilla cookies instead of the 50 or so dainty, crispy gingersnaps I was looking for.

Plus, the dough was better with the extra applesauce, but it still wasn’t that great, and so the dough did not come together quite right and I ended up with folds and cracks in it. So the texture of the… whatevers I ended up with is a tad uneven.

But what the heck. They’re food. They taste good, even with uneven texture, and I look forward to having them over the next few days. I won’t be baking today, as it is Sunday, but Monday is another baking day with its own challenges and rewards.

That means, though, that tonight I need to buy flour and molasses. I’m always running out of something!

And this month is going to be brutal. It’s a five week month, and of course, I only realized that after I was a week and a half in and had already spent more than I ought to have done. Add to that the fact that I have to go add more dough to my card because I forgot I had a domain name to pay to renew, and that’s not even counting the $45 it will take to renew my bus pass, and you start to see why I am feeling financially smooshed this month.

God, I wish I had a way to earn money. I would feel a heck of a lot better about myself if I could earn bucks, instead of relying entirely on the Province for everything. I have never supported myself, and so to me, the mere act of being able to pay the bills with the fruits of my own labour seems like an impossible dream lying beyond the eternal horizon.

I still feel incompetent. I know I am not, but it’s a hard mental pattern to break. I know damned well that I have strong organizational skills and a sharp intellect, and those combined can make for an effective way to deal with the world in a way closely mirroring actually being good at stuff.

The dream, of course, is still the artists’ dream of being able to do nothing but create art and have everything else taken care of by others. It would be so awesome to not have to worry about the petty details of life.

Then again, it’s not like I have a lot of them to worry about now. In theory, I already have a lot of things taken care of for me due to Joe’s awesomeness.

But I am not in control of that. It makes me feel guilty and burdensome, not empowered and free.

Some day, I swear, I will pay my own way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Happy Boxing Day, everyone!

Had a lovely time with Joe’s parents last night. Ended up eating some dark chocolate covered macadamia nuts, which didn’t sound very tasty, but surprise! They were.

Dinner was divine. Turkey, mashed potatoes, and truly excellent roasted veggies. I had a full plate, and then, showing restraint that surprised even me, had a second plate that was just meat and veggies.

Take that, carbs!

Speaking of which, Joe’s mother Pauline told us some pretty amazing stuff about the Atkins diet and how Doc Atkins (may he rest in peace) was a pretty smart dude. There’s a fellow who sort of took up the cause after Atkins, and his name escapes me, but according to this dude, vegetable oil is the devil.

Remember how we were told to avoid saturated fats and only eat the unsaturated ones? Turns out that was exactly wrong. They thought that, because they found lots of saturated fats in the bloodstream of people with heart disease, it must be the saturated fats that were the problem.

But apparently, a fat being saturated means that all its electrons are in use and there’s none left over for it to combine with anything. So it stays fluid in your bloodstream, and can’t react with anything to create problems.

Unsaturated fats, on the other hand, have electrons left over for reactions, and therefore can react with things. And one of its favorite things to react with is gluten, and together they form this glutinous substance that your body finds rather had to keep moving, to put it mildly.

So that’s what clogs your arteries. That’s what turns into arterial plaque. That’s what kills people.

This blows my mind because, like most of us, I believed the whole “saturated fats are bad” thing. It made sense at the time, although I am started to wonder if that was just because “saturated fats” is a phrase that sounds obese. Margarine for me, please… I don’t want to end up saturated by fatness! Look at all those fat people. They sure look saturated to me!

Now Joe and I are considering switched from Becel margarine to good old butter. Not entirely, because Julian is a vegan with a milk allergy and so he will still need margarine.

But for Joe and me, maybe it really is better with butter. It will take some getting used to, because I have been eating margarine for like decades and real butter tastes insanely rich to me now.

But my baking would taste better with butter. So there’s that. It’s what most recipes call for.

Carbs, however, are still evil. Pauline told us about this study they did with obese children with Type II diabetes where they put the kids on a strict zero carb diet for two weeks. This was to get the kids’ metabolism out of this mode where your insulin turns carbs into fat incredibly fast, meaning that your body doesn’t even get to use all of them.

I think of this as your body being in “feast mode”. it assumes that because you are eating a lot, this must be a feast time where you are storing fat for the winter and ergo the smart thing is to not just store as much fat as possible, but to stay hungry so as not to interfere with the process.

And as long as you keep eating lots of carbs, the mode stays in this mode, building up an enormous fat reserve that it will never use. After all, it’s saving it for a winter that never comes.

And how does your body know winter comes? When you stop eating all those carbs!

But the study did not end there. After that, they introduced carbs back into the kids’ diets, all the while closely monitoring how their blood reacted.

Monitoring what is actually happening to people… amazing. That’s practically science!

And they found that everyone had a different setting when it came to how many carbs it took to trigger feast mode. So not only did the kids lose both their fat and their diabetes over the year-long study, they came away from it all with a carb count they can use to stay that way.

I would love to go through this process myself. Lose my obesity and my diabetes? I’m SO there. And doing it via science that actually makes sense and monitors things closely using real, actual science, and not just some untested jagoff theory based on some doctor’s guess or other forms of nutritional folklore.

I imagine it’s very expensive, though, so I doubt the province would pony up for that any time soon. Not unless they develop the forethought required to see that if someone can cure my obesity, it will save them beaucoup de bux further down the line.

And I doubt that Christie Clark has the forethought to order pizza.

You would think that the fact that they keep electing people who turn out to be really, really stupid would give conservatives pause for thought, at least out of embarrassment. It can’t be fun to keep getting razzed by us liberals about the clearly literally stupid people they elect.

But they have been victims of stupidism for at least twenty years now. Once you stop believing a leader has to be smart and start voting for idiots no smarter than yourselves, you are down the booby hatch and there’s no going back.

Once the lemming horde is big enough, it just goes faster and faster towards the cliff and the lemmings no longer have any choice in the matter. If they slow down, they will get trampled without mercy. The only way to stay alive is to keep up with the herd, even if you are sure the herd is heading for disaster.

And yes, I know lemmings are not actually suicidal. Neither are conservatives. They are victims of a group dynamic, not a group urge for self-annihilation.

All we can do is try to rescue the ones near the outside edges, and hope they don’t take us with them.

On that happy note, have a great Boxing Day folks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

This Xmas afternoon, I feel a little depressed.

That has nothing to do with Xmas though… I am always depressed in the afternoon. Afternoons are the worst time of the day for me. Don’t know why that is, but it is so.

So I am not sitting here depressed because it’s Xmas Day and I am all alone and blah blah etcetera. I am depressed because I feel like yesterday’s day-old crap, and that puts me in a foul mood.

Made home fries last night for the first time in aaages. I had to bend my pride a little and look up a recipe, because while chopping up a potato and coating the pieces in vegetable oil is not something one forgets, the time and temperature is.

The recipe called for 40 minutes at 450 degrees. That seemed long to me, but my usual policy is to trust the recipe the first time then adjust or discard it based on results.

Turns out my instincts were right. After 40 minutes, my little potato wedges were about half burned, and the bits of onion I had included were blackened cinders.

So yes, I had to endure the smoke alarm screeching in my ear from the smoke. Argh. And the potatoes were edible, but next time I think I am going to try 30 minutes, and see how that works out.

I didn’t feel depressed last night either, which is good. I think I was able to sort of hold myself in a pattern of eighty percent not thinking about it and twenty percent enjoying it.

So there might be a delayed reaction coming my way some time soon. Fine. This two shall pass.

Looking forward to dinner with Joe’s family tonight, although, if you know me, you know that means that I also dreading and freaking out over it and there’s a voice in me that says “Don’t go! Stay home where it’s safe!”

That is approximately what it is like to be me. The social anxiety is always there, waiting to rise up and stage a coup. Even though I know I enjoy it every year and that these are very nice people who mean me no harm, there is still a loud voice, perhaps that of my inner child, saying “No no no, I don’t want to go… don’t make me!”

But I have been concentrating on seeing the truth beneath the fear lately. I have realized that a lot of things I thought I could not do, I actually probably can do if I wasn’t freaking out over it inside due to the feeling that I can’t.

This means that I am actually a lot more competent than I think I am. The fear is the problem, but fear can be overcome. Fear can be smashed with a brick of grim determination. You can say to fear, “We’re doing it no matter what, so you might as well get used to the idea. ”

Sometimes, your inner child needs discipline, not love. Structure and limits, not hugs and kisses.

That’s something I never got as a kid. Nobody ever paid enough attention to me to discipline me or make me do things I did not want to do.

That, admittedly, would have been difficult, given how willful and stubborn I was. It would have taken someone with a lot of willpower and tenacity.

Not a lot of those around in my life. I was… not easy to deal with. Even back then, I was a very sensitive kid, which meant that tidal mood shifts were always a possibility. They didn’t happen a lot, but still.

And there was the constant issue of my brightness. To this day, I don’t think I truly understood what effect it has on others… what it is like to be around me. I do my best to be funny and nice and so on, but I am pretty sure there have been many times in my life where I have been too blunt because I have insufficient theory of mind to imagine that other people really do not think like me, with all the possible cards on the table and a philosopher’s determination to follow the truth no matter what.

Unlike mine, their world has walls. And they live within those walls. To them, those walls are their world. And those walls are mostly made of rules about what to think and talk about and what you should never, ever door because it spoils the illusion of walls and limits and so forth.

It’s like we are all standing in the same wide open field, naked, but some people have all decided to believe that they are in various structures and fully clothed. They do such a good job of this that, for the most part, they don’t get cold, and can live their whole lives in that field without ever knowing it except for a few bad moments when the illusion drops.

That’s why conservatives always think liberals are trying to destroy society. We’re not, obviously, but we do tend to destroy people’s illusions, and for a lot of people that is the exact same thing. Everyone agreed to the common illusion, or so they think, and then liberals come along and attack those social illusions, and the very foundation of conservative life starts to shake and crumble.

It would behoove us on the side of the people who are actually factually right about the world and what makes things better to remember this when we argue with these people. Remember that they are fighting for their world, a version of the world that makes sense to them, and to them, we are attacking everything they stand for and all their illusions.

We need to be able to supplant those illusions with better ones. Ones still comfortingly simple and comprehensible, but which also reaffirm positive liberal values like mutual support, planning for the future, and mercy.

I am positive there are many within conservatism who have grave doubts about how callous and downright evil it’s become. They are waiting for some way out, but it can’t be defecting to the other side… that’s unthinkable.

They need a third option.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I come to you from my GP’s waiting room. This is both a way to pass the time while I wait, and a fun little experiment re : his constantly late ass. The more I manage to write, the later he is.

And the place is packed, so who knows, I might finish the day’s words and a novel besides.

Not likely though. I am already getting annoyed with using the virtual keyboard. Wish I had my little Bluetooth keyboard.

I mean, this is barely 100 words, and it feels like a thousand.

As usual, I have two choices : type in landscape mode on the tablet, and have nice big buttons and only two lines of room to display what I am typing, or the other mode, where I have lots of display room and an itty bitty keyboard.

This is giving me a headache. More later.

(÷÷÷)

Went to the bathroom. I was beginning to feel a little claustrophobic with all the people around, so a little alone time was just what my current lack of doctor ordered.

Plus, you know, I had to go.

As I type this, Doc Chao is half an hour late. Sounds like a lot, but for him, that’s amateur hour.

Oops, I may have been a little bit hasty. I just got upgraded to Waiting Part 2 : The Waitening. I am in the exam room now, so… halfway there, or so.

Still pondering getting some Xmas cheer (booze), but leaning against. Alcohol and depression aren’t a great mix, not to mention alcohol and my meds, or alcohol and diabetes.

I resent that. It’s unfair that most if the world can takena little comfort from liquor, but not me. I know that a chemical form of escape is probably the opposite of what I need right now, but still. It would be nice to have a way to smooth out life’s rough edges now and then.

They’re so pointy.

The hand dryer in the bathroom is CRAZY…..

(÷÷÷)

Home now. Sorry for the interruption. The hand dryer in the doctor’s bathroom is CRAZY strong. As in, watching your flesh ripple and deform like you’re in a wind tunnel strong. The brand name was BLAST and boy did it live up to its name. I would have taken video of it if there had been a place in the bathroom where I could line up the shot… it’s insane.

And of course, being crazy strong, it’s also HELLA loud. Like a jet engine warming up crossed with the Jolly Green Giant’s cocktail blender. It is truly in the realm of trying too hard.

I can’t imagine what the sweet little old Indian lady who preceded me in the bathroom (it’s single occupant) must have thought of it. I mean, I’m a big bearish dude (with, admittedly, a lifelong sensitivity to loud noise) and it scared me. I can only imagine what it seemed like to her.

Oh, and it’s sensor-activated too, like they all are now, and so there’s that whole weird thing where you have to find the sweet spot where it goes on and stays on long enough to dry you. That’s just plain a wrong interface, if you ask me. Everybody instantly knew how to turn the thing on back when you had to press a button. There was no need for a vaguely embarrassing pantomime ritual to please the Dryer Gods.

But people are obsessed with the idea of being able to wash and dry their hands without touching anything. All the germphobes and clean freaks have driven innovation in public bathroom fixtures to the point where you will have to do that little dance twice, once for the tap then AGAIN for the dryer.

Me, I do my best to have faith in my immune system. I have been down the germ-phobic route before back in my early 20s when I had my health breakdown and became a raving hypochondriac. I was washing my hands 10 to 12 times a day, and anything that people touched a lot, like remote controls and door handles, started to feel like they were all covered in a thick greasy layer of human sweat and grime.

But I pulled myself out of that particular nosedive. I decided that if the doctor said I was healthy, I would believe him, and that if I had made it this far without catching the Black Death (and so had billions of others), my immune system was doing a fine job and I shouldn’t bother second guessing it.

Basically, I saved myself, not for the first time, via rationality. It’s a powerful tool for overcoming oneself when used properly, but you have to have faith (ha) in your own ability to arrive at the truth, and then believe it.

It’s the believing that is the hard part. I realize now that the majority of people do not have faith in their ability to derive a correct view of the world via their own faculties of reason. For the majority, their worldview is something they simply absorb and/or deduce from their own experiences.

I’m not saying there is no reason involved. But they couldn’t really tell you what they believe and why. They don’t really know. Their world-view is usually more functional than comprehensive. Big questions are useless to the running of one’s every day life, and can even be socially disadvantageous as well as leading to confusion and a sense of being lost.

So why should they go there? For them, the risks vastly outweigh the rewards. That is why, to us smarty types, they seem like they don’t think at all. They do think, but not like us, and they don’t need think like us to most of the time.

Sadly, this does make them vulnerable to those who will prey on their small picture, day to day minds by appealing to their worst natures and binding them up with fear and hate.

That’s why, for the intellectuals, while the challenge of communicating with and helping guide the average folk can be frustrating and discouraging, if the white hat intellectuals won’t do it, the black hats surely will.

Someone is going to manipulate them. We do them no favours by keeping our hands clean. They need people to shepherd them, not as overlords, but just as people who can see more of the picture and further down the road than them.

So would you rather they follow a shepherd…. or a wolf?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what life feels like to me lately, more often than not. Just a slow trip down a long, dark, silent corridor. No sign of a beginning or an end. Just silence, and darkness, and the sensation of unwilled movement. And a feeling of eeriness and dread.

I don’t know where this feeling comes from. But I have learned that asking such questions of depression can be depressingly futile, because sometimes, there is no reason apart from one’s on messed up brain chemistry. Guess what, your chemicals have decided that right now, you will be depressed.

And you are free to make up any reason for it you like. Some of them might even be vaguely accurate. But underneath it all are those messed up brain chemicals.

On a deep level, I feel like there is a key to escaping that long dark corridor. Like I could just turn my head and, like in a dream, I would be someplace warm and happy and alive.

Real bucolic Disney meadow stuff. And yet, somehow, also the 1970’s, because that’s where all my happy childhood memories lie. Times with the family all around, when I got plenty of attention (sometimes a little too much) and adults were charmed if a little nonplussed by this adorable precocious kid with the red hair and freckles. Times where it’s always summer, because that’s when my mother would be home (she was a teacher) as well as my siblings, and we would sometimes go places as a family, and everything was pretty peachy keen, honestly.

Times before I ever went to school.

It’s good for me to remember those times because it’s good for me to remember that my life was not always hell. There were some golden years. And it’s those good memories that I want to draw upon when trying to purify myself.

One can return to innocence, but you have to let go of so much of what seems important (but isn’t) first.

We all have a deep identity. The person we would be if we didn’t know who we were. Mine is friendly, enthusiastic, very expressive, caring, sensitive, and extremely charismatic.

At least, that’s what I have figured out so far. When I imagine the purified version of myself, free of my burdens and my scars, I picture a vibrant happy person filled with optimism and enthusiasm and charm.

Intelligence works in there some way too, I would imagine. But it wouldn’t be the central point of my being, like it is now. It would be integrated into all the rest, supporting and informing it, but not being this giant overgrown unbalanced thing like it is right now.

Integration. I talk about that a lot. It’s a tricky thing to explain to those of you who live outside my head (you know who you are). The word compartmentalization might work. My mind is highly compartmentalized, with different parts of it spread far and wide with only that icy cold void of the intellect connecting them. These parts are supposed to be working closely together but instead they barely know each other exist.

Integration, then, is the process of bring them back together. But it is a long and tricky n-dimensional jigsaw puzzle to put oneself together again. You can’t just click yourself together like a Kinder Egg toy. The parts have to be delicately maneuvered around and into each other, like you are assembling a space station in zero gravity, and that takes time.

Still, I have faith that progress is possible, and indeed, is happening. I am a vastly different person than I was even a year ago, and I expect that I will be even more different (differenter?) this time next year.

This would all be easier if I could just surrender myself to God. I totally understand why that works. By doing so, you return to innocence because you basically return to childhood. It’s not just you against the cold and cruel adult world any more. You can be a child in God’s house, and that is powerful because it fulfills our deep and largely unrecognized need to feel like a powerful Alpha is in charge, and they have the big picture covered, so you can relax and just live your life.

People without that kind of leadership tend to become nervous, fearful, and even violent. That’s the sort of thing where mob violence is a possibility. When people feel like their leadership is incompetent or corrupt or both, our status instincts tell us to agitate and create chaos until new leadership is in place.

The human animal is only truly content when ensconced in a solid, stable, predictable hierarchy in which it has a clearly defined role and total faith in the people above it. Hence the appeal of fascism and other totalitarian forms of government. They would seem to provide that sort of thing, and if they could actually deliver it, they might have some merit.

But they can’t, so they don’t. No system can survive unless its citizens feel safe, and those kinds of government, being paranoid and sadistic, vehemently oppose the idea that any citizen should feel safe from their governments.

So these governments always end up with the secret police and the political officers and all kinds of other ways to make sure no citizen can ever just relax and enjoy life, but instead has to always be on guard against the forces just waiting for them to screw up so they can pounce.

Amazing how I can start from my own problems and end up in political analysis, isn’t it?

Tonight is our little Xmas at the apartment. We’ll go out to dinner, then come back and exchange presents. And, of course, watch lots of video together.

It’s our thing.

Still considering the Xmas cheer option. I know, roughly, where the closest liquor store is. Get myself a little bottle of spcied rum, or maybe just by some tasty looking bottled beverages.

Either way, I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.
\

This blog entry will come to you a little later in the day than usual because I got sucked into a little video game called 100 Doors 2 on my tablet.

I got it thinking it would be a game where you had to choose one of two doors, which would lead to another two doors, and so on, and the idea is to find the one path that leads all the way to Door 100. I played a game like that once, about a decade ago, and while it did violate my “there has to be a way to get the answer right the first time” rule, I found the game surprisingly fun despite primitive graphics and no sound at all.

But no, it’s a puzzle game in the purest sense of the word. The idea is that you face 100 elevator doors, each of which is opened via a different and unique puzzle. In one, to open the door might take solving a sliding block puzzle, or using objects like the old graphical adventures, or cracking some mathematical code via visual clues and deduction.

It’s a lot like room escape games, but simplified.

Historically, I have not liked this sort of game because when you get stuck, you’re fucked. The puzzles are in sequence and if you can’t figure out Door 30, you will never see 31 or beyond.

In fact, I had almost given up on the game and was about to delete it when I saw there was a “skip door” option. Oh ho! So I was NOY fucked when I was stuck. I could go on to the other doors in the set of 20 and come back to the sticky one later.

That made all the difference. Like a clever test taker, I could do all the easy ones, then come back and focus my mental energies and creativity on the ones I didn’t get the first time around.

So now I am hooked on the game. When I finally crack a tricky one, I get a real surge or victory, like “Yeah motherfucker, you thought you were tough, but I SOLVED YOU. ”

And I know the game truly has me in its claws but good, because I started playing at a quarter after seven and when I looked at the clock again, it was a quarter to nine and it felt like no time had passed.

That would make a good bit of ad copy for the game : So good, you will become unstuck in time.

Otherwise, today’s been quiet. Joe is home for Xmas holidays, and so it’s nice having him around. Some part of my mind still feels like the normal number of people to have around is six, like the family I grew up in. So having more people around, especially at this time of year, makes me happy, even in this rather petite apartment.

Made a white cake with caramel flavouring today. I made one a few days ago as well, but this time I wanted to try out this vanilla icing recipe I had found.

I already having a pretty good chocolate icing recipe, plus a lemon glaze. Adding a vanilla frosting recipe to my cake decorating powers would make me very happy.

Unfortunately, the recipe did not work. Totally inedible. Right consistency but… bleh.

I am not too surprised. The recipe called for powdered sugar made with powdered milk, along with the usual Splenda and cornstarch, and I don’t happen to have any of that around.

So next time I am shopping, I will buy a small bag. I’m not giving up on this recipe yet! If I am willing to keep half-and-half in the fridge for my chocolate icing recipe, I am surely willing to keep powdered milk around for vanilla.

Right now my caramel flavoured white cake (vanilla replaced with artificial caramel flavour) is sitting on the counter, waiting for me to come along and make that excellent chocolate icing for it. I would have done it earlier, but after the failed vanilla icing experiment, I needed some time before I bounced back.

Besides, I really needed to eat. I have fallen back into a very bad habit lately, namely skipping meals. That is never ever a good idea, but old habits die hard (with a vengeance). It;s just so easy to say “Oh well, I know I should eat right now, but it’s only a few hours till suppertime… I will just wait. ”

Right, because it is way better to have my blood sugar crash and get super crazy hungry than to eat at a weird time.

See, it always starts when I wake up hungry and it’s like 9 in the morning. I eat… but then technically the next meal should be at three, then nine again, then three again, and so on ad infinitum.

And that is clearly madness.

So instead of eating at three, I wait till six. And for a normal, non-diabetic person, that’s not too crazy. But for me, that is a terrible idea. And yet, I do it over and over.

Last night was especially egregious, because I did the exact things I know lead to an IBS attack. It’s a simple formula : don’t eat enough during the day, then eat way too much, way too fast.

And that’s what I did. I ate a meal at eight in the morning and a snack at three (so I was trying, dammit), then I went to Denny’s with my friends and stuffed myself with chili and turkey and all the trimmings.

The minute we stood up to leave, I knew I was in trouble. Luckily, I managed to keep everything together long enough to get my shopping done. But when we got home, it was straight to the loo, do not pass go on the way, or anything else for that matter.

It’s a special kind of humiliation to know you have just made a mistake you have made dozens of times before.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Obligatory SNL link :

YouTube doesn’t have the full video, so audio will have to do.

Having a pleasantly lazy Sunday. Well, pleasant until it’s blog time and I find my marbles stubbornly resisting coming together. Apparently my brain is trying to take the day off too.

Well tough titties, brain (don’t make me hurt you, pinky), we got one thing to do today and that’s come up with the usual 1000 words. It may seem like a lot today, but if we just keep at it and try not to get distracted by shiny objects, we’ll make it.

I really feel like a child right now (but where would I get one on a Sunday?). A child on holiday, seeking only fun, mind loose and open but also impatient and prone to petulance. So maybe a wee bit spoiled.

It must be the proximity to Xmas that is doing it. My mind wants to retreat back to a time when Xmas was a wonderful time when the family was all around me and happy festive things were happening (getting the tree, trimming the tree, helping Mom make the rapure by cutting up the meat) all leading to Xmas morning, where we would all sit around the living room, doing one gift at a time, everyone watching and sharing in the joy of the person unwrapping.

Even my father was nice around Xmas time. He really did his best to keep his temper under control. Sometimes he slipped, but for the most part, he was good.

So despite a largely lonely childhood, Xmas was a really good time for me, and I have many treasured childhood memories of the Yuletide season. When you are a kid, Xmas is nothing but magic.

So different when you are an adult. There’s nobody there to make the magic for you. You have to do it yourself, and when you are all alone, it’s just not the same.

So while I keep Xmas in my heart, I don’t really do anything to celebrate it by myself. Not so far, anyhow. I am too scared that if I go there, the sentimentality will also bring sadness and loneliness with it, and I need to avoid that to stay safe.

Like I say ever year, Xmas is the most dangerous time of the year for me, mental health wise. The emotions it brings up can be very dangerous for a depressive like me. I might harm myself. So I have taken to enjoying the holiday season, but when Xmas Eve and Xmas morning come along, I more or less hibernate through it.

Otherwise, the sadness and loneliness will put me in the kind of danger that only people who have been suicidal know.

Of course, there are placed I could go. Places where they open their doors to all who are lonely and alone, places that would welcome me in, and I wouldn’t be so alone, and I would be around others, which is… safer.

The problem with that notion is the usual one : social anxiety. The very thought of going to some place I’ve never been that will be full of strangers who might have unrealistic social expectations of him and who will definitely find him to be cold fish, and a strange one at that… that might actually be worse than being alone.

I’d probably need to have a few stiff drinks in me just to walk through the door.

Maybe some day, when I am a little healthier, that would be an option. Find some open doors Xmas Eve event, bend the rule a little and have some Xmas cheer, and maybe even learn to relax about people and let them in.

It’s a good dream, one I can imagine happening. Using liquor as a social anesthetic is not strictly kosher by the rules of both my diabetes and my medications, but I can’t think of anything else that would work.

I have tried taking an extra dose of my Paxil. My therapist says that is totally legit and something I should always count as part of my coping resources.

But I find the emotional chill that produces to be very unpleasant. I would never rule it out completely, because there are undoubtedly situations where it would be worth it, but there is a reason lowering my Paxil dose has made me a happier person and that’s because I want to feel things.

I might be numb, but I know it and I am actively trying to escape it and let my emotions flow.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all glacier metaphor on you this time.

So no, I don’t think I will be seeking an open door this Xmas eve. And I doubt I will do anything special all by myself except open some presents Xmas morning.

Luckily, this year, instead of a virtual gift certificate, my sister Catherine sent me a whole whack of wrapped gifts, and so I will have a bunch of things to open that special morning.

I suppose I could get some Xmas cheer of my own. Might make the evening go a little more smoothly. I don’t know where the liquor store is around here, but it would not be hard to look up. Might be nice to have some mulled apple juice mixed with spiced rum.

But knowing me, I will likely never get around to actually going out there to buy the ingredients. So I will not invest a lot of hope in that outcome. It’s a possibility, but not a necessity.

I guess today’s blog entry turned into my annual Fru’s Sad Xmas blog entry. I feel a little better for having gotten some of my thoughts and worries out. Whatever happens, I will muddle through somehow.

And of course, I have Xmas dinner with Joe’s family to look forward to as well. That really does me a lot of good, knowing that the whole thing won’t pass me by entirely.

Don’t worry too much, folks. I’ll make it through.

And I will talk to all of you nice people again tomorrow.