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.