Apparently, my streak of having a firm idea what I wanted to talk about via this blog has been broken. Utterly no idea tonight. So as always, I will fall back on personal reportage.

I’ve been doing too little of that lately anyhow. It’s just that other things are so much more interesting to write!

Anyhoo, let’s see. Today was a therapy day, and this session came with a twist.

The twist was named Charlie, and he was a bichon frise owned by my therapist. Turns out, my therapist’s wife is out of town and Charlie is too old and frail to be left alone. When he is alone, he works himself up into quite a state of agitation and at his advanced age, he could do himself harm like that.

So my therapist had no choice but to bring Charlie with him to work today. (Yes, there are such a thing as pet sitters and day kennels, but my therapist is also cheap. )

First he asked me if I was afraid of dogs. I laughed and said oh no, I love animals. So he snuck Charlie in. (The owners of the facility have no problem with dogs, but some of the other office renters do. I suspect some of them might come from a culture where the dog is considered am unclean and disgusting creature. And Charlie had just been groomed the day before!)

And this dog is cute. Bichon frise is an adorable breed. I mean look at this thing.

It’s like it’s made of cuteness and carpeting

“Bichon Frise 600“. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Isn’t that just the cutest? I am not normally all that impressed by small breed dogs, but this one was a charmer.

Of course, as I said before, I had no problem with Charlie being there. The only ill effect his presence had was to make it very hard for me to concentrate on therapy, especially after Charlie insisted on sitting in my therapist’s lap.

Just imagine trying to have a serious therapeutic discussion with a cute fluffy dog like that in your eyeline.

The session went well. I told him about my recent efforts at self-improvement. That I had taken a good long look at what a child I have been and decided it was about time I grew the fuck up. I am done with drifting and defocusing and not thinking about things. I am sick and tired of being a cloud of potential without direction or force.

I want to get things done.

And how I have been thinking hard about the idea of discipline being the ability to do what you want to do regardless of whether or not you feel like doing it. When described that way, it becomes more apparent that this is something you do for yourself, not something that someone else is forcing you to have out of some “character building” dogma.

Like I said before, long and ever ago, our parents are right when they say we need to build character and learn discipline. If you want to make it in the world at all, you need to build up your capacity to do things you do not feel like doing, otherwise your options in life will be limited to what you feel like doing at any moment, and that road leads nowhere good.

The problem, of course, is that even assuming they mean well (and are not just using character building as an excuse for abusing you), the character building exercises always come across as punishment. After all, they are making you do something you don’t want to do. It’s very easy as a spoiled middle class kid to see that as senseless abuse from wicked sadists.

My problem, of course, is that I was never even required to develop any discipline. School was easy for me. Even in college it wasn’t very hard. So I never had to study, let alone study all night until the words blur together.

It was all too easy. And I mean that… I wish there had been something for me to focus on where I had to strive and stretch and learn to overcome my limitations.

My home life didn’t demand much either. I had chores when I was younger but at some point those vanished. I guess my Mom decided it was easier to do it all herself, which is utter nonsense on the face of it.

Just take the time to teach me to do it, and after that, I will do it. It’s not that complicated. But because in the short term it is easier to just do it yourself, you end up doing it for life. Insanity.

So life was quite soft for me at home, too. The only job I kept was taking out the garbage, and that was ten seconds work every Tuesday. (Thus began my dislike of Tuesdays. )

So I just drifted through life. The closest I got to discipline was walking to and from school every day, no matter the weather. I really resented it (still do, really), and it was another symptom of being a self-raised child due to neglect, but I suppose I might have picked up some hardiness then.

They taught me not to complain, then contented themselves with the idea that I must be fine, because they heard no complaints.

After all, no news is good news, right?

You know, not that’s I’m bitter. Why, I am as sweet as chocolate…. before they add the sugar.

Oh, and in a roundabout way, I told him about the Inner Drill Sargent. I didn’t put it that way because I knew he would not “get it”, but I told my therapist about the encouraging and rewarding inner voice I was developing.

Oh, one last thing. I was going to mail my payment to the bus pass people, and I spent a tense half hour addressing the envelope (that’s tense for someone with penmanship like mine) and getting a stamp off Joe and realizing that the “payee” section of the money order was blank so I fretted about what to put there, and etc etc…. and then forgot to actually take it with me when we left for my therapist.

Luckily, The Joe is a benevolent force for all of humanity, and he dropped it in a mailbox for me on his way to work.

I figure my bus pass will be reactivated by the end of the month.

And then I will have one less excuse for staying in all the time.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.