I’m under mild time pressure tonight, so this entry might be a tad more stream of consciousness than usual.

So I made the call to this Daniel guy at VFS at around 3 pm. Got his voice mail, left a message.

Tried again at 3:30 pm. Got his voice mail, left another message.

One more try at 4:15. Got his voice mail, left a third message, and that was it. Don’t want to seem desperate.

Even though I am. I totally am. I want into the VFS Writing for TV and Movies course so bad, I feel like a dog in heat at the end of its leash. It can smell the thing it wants, but it can’t GET THERE.

I will try again Monday. On the one hand, I don’t want to seem desperate, on the other hand, I don’t want to give him the impression that I am the sort of problem that will go away if he ignores it for long enough.

You always have to make it so that the path of least resistance is to do what you want.

In retrospect, I am not surprised that he was not answering his phone between 3 and 5 on a Friday. Patrick, who’s thinking about life insurance and is also my “guy who helps people through the applying process”, told me to call this Daniel guy today, mid-afternoonish, but I don’t think he took the Friday Effect into account.

I assume this guy is not answering his phone because he’s kind of already checked out and answering the phone is work, as is dealing with whatever the person on the other end wants.

Monday it is, then.

Therapy today. Told my shrink about all the stuff that came up regarding that Internet addiction documentary that I wrote about last Wednesday. He didn’t have a whole lot useful to say about it, but therapy is a nonlinear process and sometimes it’s enough just to have someone listen to you for an hour.

I am still pondering the lack of controlling influences in my life. I remember that there was one time, one time only, that I tested my parents. I was hanging out with Jason Heisler and some other of the heavy metal/bad seed crowd, and I decided I would just stay out till 2 am and see what happened.

They did eventually notice I was missing and get worried I was dead in a ditch somewhere. They called the cops, asked around, and generally fretted until I showed up.

And while I got quite the “Thank God you’re alive NEVER DO THIS TO ME AGAIN lecture when I got home, I found the whole experience really gratifying because it proved that they actually did care whether I lived or died.

So that was my big experiment with “acting out”. I never did it again. I worried my parents a few times after that, but it was not on purpose. I just lost track of time, or ended up someplace where I could not get home on my own, or the like.

Still, how many teenage boys have a curfew of midnight?

Answer : All of them who were raised to be the least amount of work for their parents to parent. They told me that they trusted that I was sensible enough to stay out of trouble and take care of myself, and the thing is, they were right. I never did anything particularly crazy in my teen years because people do that shit to rebel.

And what did I have to rebel against?

Oh, I have to write down this weird dream I had this morning.

I remember I was in a restaurant, talking to a midget who was carried around by a huge man, Quatto style. He was complaining and snarling at people and being aggressively misanthropic.

So I had to ask him, “Why did you open a restaurant?” meaning “If you hate everybody, why the hell did you get into a very service heavy business?”

But he took it as an invitation to tell me the origin story for this business, which I do not remember.

I decided to get some food, seeing as I was in a restaurant, and I decided to get one of my favorite diner dishes, the hot turkey sandwich. Turns out, they didn’t have that, so I said “Well have you got a cheeseburger?”, and they did.

Can’t go wrong asking for a cheeseburger in this culture.

Then the total came to $17.90 (I can definitely read numbers in my sleep) and I was all, “For a cheeseburger and fries? I could get that at McD’s for ten bucks and it would include a drink!”

Then things get weird, because after that, I was in a sort of basement in the large building which housed the restaurant, and there was a bunch of groovy people there smoking pot and dropping acid.

Someone offered me some acid, and I said to myself “I should stop being so timid” and so I took it and got quite high.

You read that right. I got high in a dream. The metaphysical implications are staggering.

Except in the world of my dream, acid didn’t make you see colors or totally trip out. Instead, I experience a highly unstable euphoria and staggered around. I was having motor issues, but I was too high to care.

People in the dream said “Dude, are you okay?” and I cheerily reassured them I was fine, I just had not done acid in a really long time. Like 20 years.

That is more or less where the dream ended.

As always with the dreams I bother to write down here, it’s not just the bizarre nature of the dream that compels me to record it in my blog, it’s how vivid the whole thing was. I can remember the taste of the fries, the smell of the restaurant, the face of the midget (looked like a Chuckie doll sneering in disgust), the sound of plates clattering and people talking, the feel of the plastic tray in my hands.

And while I joked about it earlier, I am pretty interested in knowing what it means when you do drugs in a dream. Was my mind trying to access certain emotions and used the acid as a shortcut?

Well, whatever. Right now, I need to rest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Being right is not that important.

Or at least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

In order to discuss this subject, we’re going to have to make a distinction between two different sense of being right. In one sense, the term merely means that one has the right answer. That is to say, you are right about a subject if your ideas and knowledge about it accurately reflect reality.

It’s the other sense of the word, the one that means, in essence, “winning the argument” that gets us into trouble.

The problem stems from the fact that we human beings have a very strong instinct to merge our sense of reality with the commonly held one in our community. This way, what is know by one becomes known by all, and the tribe grows stronger.

That’s great when everyone is talking about their own separate experiences, but what happens when two people have mutually exclusive ideas about something?

Imagine our cavemen ancestors. Around the fire one night, Ock confidently states that the wildebeest will be returning to the upland meadows any day now and tomorrow, we should go there and set up our jumps.

But Teg says that the wildebeest will not be there for another moon, and it would be a waste of time and their precious stores of preserved meat to go there this early. They should stay here, and fish.

Clearly, an answer is needed. The tribe cannot do both. And a mistake in either direction could cost them dearly. Either Ock or Tek is right, and a mechanism is needed to resolve this dissonance.

Luckily, we have an instinct for that too, and that instinct is called argument.

Ock and Tek must argue and this argument must reach some sort of settled conclusion so the tribe knows what to do when the sun rises in the morning. They will argue with each other, but really, they will arguing their points for the benefit of the tribe. The tribe will ultimately decide who they believe.

Note that coming to the literally correct answer is not the highest priority. The highest priority is to resolve the conflict. The second highest is maintaining social order. Accuracy is, at best, a third.

And because we are human beings and thus very complicated creatures, lots of other instincts interfere with the process of getting the “right” answer. Social status is on the line when Ock and Teg argue. The winner will rise in status and the loser will fall. Thus, their verbal fight will be fought with great passion and ferocity. They are fighting for their social lives.

But both disputants enter the arena with social status as well. It might be that Ock is a respected leader and widely recognized as an excellent hunter and strong warrior, while Teg is thought of as weak and slow. The tribe will not only be more fearful of the wrath of Ock (who could cost THEM social status), but our instincts tell us to obey the socially dominant and to believe what they say, as it is more likely to be important to us within the human society.

In the case of Ock and Teg, something of vital importance is, indeed, on the line. But fast forward to modern life, and those same instincts get us into trouble, because the truth is that, in most cases, winning arguments does not matter.

Our instincts, both social and teleological, make it feel like winning arguments (being RIGHT) is terrible important, but for the most part, none of us are deciding the fate of our tribes, and winning an argument does not prove anything except that one person is better at arguing.

It might as well be trial by combat.

Now I will not say that nothing is on the line when we argue. There is that urge to merge pictures of reality to deal with. When someone says something with which we disagree, we become torn between the urge to merge and the urge to maintain our beliefs, and this causes a conflict within us. When we argue, it truly feels just as important as Ock and Teg, even when it isn’t, because our world view is clashing with another’s and one of them, so our instincts tell us, has to win.

So we square off against one another, in person or on the Internet or wherever, and fight battles over the most trivial of things, and act like our very lives are on the line.

But in truth, not even social status is truly on the line. If you have an audience, then the audience members who agree with each position will be rooting for their side, and there is virtually no chance that anyone’s mind will be changed in the slightest and social status will rise amongst the people who already agree with the winner, and fall with those who don’t.

Neither opponent will change the mind of the other either. That’s just not how it works. And there will be no clear victor either. Our instincts tell us that if we verbally dominate the other person, they will have to say uncle and admit we are right and they are wrong, and we will emerge the clear victor.

But that almost never happens. Nobody ever “has” to admit they lose, and why would they? To our instincts, you are never defeated unless you submit?

So that kind of arguing is more or less a sport, a game, and people would be better off simply saying “Why do I care if some random person is wrong about something?” and letting it slide.

Argument is still important in a broader social sense. Bad opinions are overcome by strong arguments from the people on the right side of history, and progress may well come from the millions of skirmishes of daily life.

But in your own life, you have to ask yourself : is it worth it to win an argument and lose a friend? Or someone else you love?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh mister sandman
Leave me alone!
I had big plans today
To get some things done

Instead I spent all day
Asleep in the clover
I hope these sleepy times
Will soon be over!

To the tune of this, of course.

So yeah, having one of those darned sleepy days today.

The first day of a sleepy period is usually okay. I sleep a lot, but it’s pleasant enough sleep. The dream density is high, but I am well enough inside that things dont’e get too dark or too surreal. The sleep is fairly relaxed and comes easily. It’s annoying to sleep all day when you had things you wanted to get done, but otherwise, it’s fine.

It’s when these periods linger on that it gets unpleasant. Sleep feels less like a Little Nemo picture and more like something by Hieronymous Bosch with the flu. I end up feeling sick through and through, and falling asleep seems like succumbing to a disease than wholesome rest.

So tomorrow, I am going to fight this thing. I will let it have today, but tomorrow I am going to make a point of getting up and moving around and getting fresh air and in general try to stimulate myself out of this state.

And it has to be physical stimulation, the kind you can get by moving. Mental stimulation won’t cut it, I stimulate my mind all day. I have developed a thick layer of resistance. I have to move. Get my circulation going. Get some cardio going.

Which means I really should go down to the second floor to check out the recreation area. We’ve lived here since last September and I still haven’t been down there. It’s not like it would take a huge effort to do it, either. It’s just an elevator trip away.

Plus they remodeled it recently, so there is a chance there is an actual gym there now instead of three consumer level exercise bikes and a lot of empty space.

I could even use my tablet like a Walkman (I am so old) and further socially insulate myself.

There is a wardrobe issue. I don’t have any gym clothes that fit. Well, pants, specifically. I have plenty of T-shirts, and my shoes would be adequate to the task.

But I have no gym pants that actually fit me. The two pairs I have won’t stay up without suspenders, and even if I was prepared to face the social embarrassment of being since in gym shorts and suspenders in public, it would make working out REALLY hard.

I mean, my suspenders spontaneously release just from brushing up against the back of a chair. They would not last a minute on an exercise bike or lifting weights with a Universal gym.

Plus I am out of excuses not to at least go a little ways from home. My bus pass has surely been activated by now and so I could go anywhere in the GVRD for free. There must be some free (or very cheap) stuff out there which I would enjoy. I could make a fun little trip of it.

My model for that sort of thing is my friend and roomie Julian. He is far more timid and shy than I am. And yet he regularly goes all over the place doing things which interest him. If he can do it, why can’t I?

No pressure, though. Pressure destroys. Desire inspires. The secret, for me, is to think about what I will enjoy about the thing I want to do, and let the desire for that enjoyment inspire me.

Thus, I concentrate on rewards, not obligations or the “smart” thing to do.

Motivation is a tricky thing, and it rarely acts in the simplistic way that an overdeveloped superego thinks it does. Motivation comes from the id, and a stifled and suppressed id doesn’t motivate anybody. You cannot punish yourself into action.

This is nto easy to learn. At least, not for me. I find myself envious of people who had to learn everything the hard way. Normally I pity those people, but in their own blind way, they know some things I don’t because they refused to accept any limitation excepts the ones that actually exist in the world, and even then, they keep looking for a shortcut.

That kind of unrelenting force of self seems quite foreign, even alien to me. My lifelong insistence on caution, sensibility, and thinking things through precludes that kind of exuberance of spirit. And while I might watch these people crashing into the same walls over and over again and shake my head in wonder at how anyone can be that stupid, well, stupid is as stupid does and I am the one who has spent the last twenty years housebound and they have gone on to have lives and jobs and spouses and such.

I’m working on it.

Of course, they have the advantage of being able to draw on the strength of the herd. They don’t have to invent an entire self for themselves before they can even function. They didn’t climb to the peak of Philosopher’s Mountain to enjoy the view then look down and realize they had no idea how they were going to get back down. By being ignorant of them, they let society mold them into something like a functional citizen whereas I, by being extremely aware of them, end up a very old tadpole.

At least I am not calling myself a hothouse flower any more. I have made peace with that. So what if I am a not exactly a rugged all-terrain drought proof specimen? I’m a little bit magic, and that’s all that counts.

It’s growing the fuck up that is the hard part. Maybe that is all that us depressives have to do, when it comes right down to it. Figure out that, despite out biological age and our flashy intellects, we are but children inside, and our salvation comes from growing up to be bigger and stronger than our sad little issues.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Obligatory Joe Cocker link :

Probably not the first time I have linked the late great Mister Cocker on this blog, and it surely will not be the last.

That song came up on my random shuffle MP3ing, and it got me thinking about the Seventies and how much psychological language ended up in the mainstream consciousness from all that group therapy.

Ever since Freud, there have been waves of pop psychology and self-help books and therapy trends that have not only advanced the science of psychology and its efficacy, but also advanced the public understanding of the everyday inner lives of their neighbours and themselves.

Part of me hates to admit it, but we really can’t think about something before we have the words for it. Without words, especially words for describing one’s mental world, the underlying realities remain nebulous, undifferentiated, and impossible to communicate to others. You can’t even discuss them with yourself.

And what you cannot communicate does not get treated.

So while pop psychology trends can be very irritating to those of us who have some sort of clue what we are talking about, and occasionally can even do some harm by giving people false hopes for a simple solution, or confuse them with false information, it is also the vessels by which people learn more about themselves and others.

The Fifties was a decade of optimism. Things are great, the future is bright, we have a heck of a good thing going here so don’t you dare rock the boat by being weird. Optimism and conformity were socially enforced, and the psychology of the time, on the surface, seemed to reflect this increasingly rigid optimism and the expectation that everyone would be happy to conform.

But under the surface, things were changing. The idea that anyone might become mentally ill through no fault of their own began to seep in. It was a feeble little thing at first, but it was there.

It was even possible, within very tight limitations, to blame society, or at least the local version thereof. Why, of course this man became neurotic. His bosses are working him too hard!

Then the Sixties came, and that enforced optimism started to crash and burn. Instead came the hard-drinking cynicism of the Mad Men era. The new consumerism turned sour in people’s mouths, housewives began really hitting the booze, and dreams died lonely and cold in the street. Psychology turned from being a matter of fixing the occasional broken unit to a secret world of therapy done on the down low for people who feel, deep down, that if having it all doesn’t make them happy, that means there is something wrong with them.

Then the hippies came along, and brought the sunshine back. And while they were somewhat successful in shedding conformity and expanding their minds (and hence the public mind as well), they had their own version of enforced happiness. Everyone was supposed to be groovy, and if you weren’t, you got left behind or even blamed for harshing the mellow.

That had to lead to the Seventies, when the fact that everyone was neurotic and messed up finally breached the surface of the public consciousness, and people developed and deployed this whole new language to describe all the ways in which their parents had messed them up.

Suddenly it was okay (in fact, practically mandatory) to have a therapist, to go to group therapy, to have strange aversions (or even stranger perversions) and people were more open about the fact that modern life does not make people happy than ever before.

It was, in many ways, a dark and cynical time. The sunshine high of the late Sixties turned into a decade-long hangover, and people turned to the cheap, the dirty, the easy to escape the pain. The world had come close to annihilation during the Cuban Missle Crises, MLK and two Kennedys were dead, Vietnam lingered on and on like a case of the flu. Crime rose as the hippies of the Sixties became the addicts of the Seventies, and everyone pretty much agreed that everything was going down the crapper.

Pessimism, like optimism, can’t last forever, and eventually people shook off the malaise and decided it was was time to pray to a new god : money.

I can only imagine how refreshing it must have been to stop pretending that you loved granola and brown rice and that you were actually much happier living in some shitty commune full of lazy self-indulgent hippies who, being middle class, had always assumed someone else someone else would be doing the actual work. To go back to that clean, exciting, unnatural world that the Sixties and Seventies had rejected, and really enjoy everything civilization has to offer.

The Eighties optimism was cynical and tough. It was not idealistic at all. The Seventies had seen a lot of dreams die and a lot of other dreams simply fail, and so the new optimism had to be based on the baser emotions of greed, envy, and pride.

It was, in some ways, a time of willful and dedicated spiritual bankruptcy, a rejection of everything you didn’t like in the world by slapping the cheapest possible veneer over it and a big sign that said “Don’t have to be sad about the world any more! We’ve made all the sad things go away by giving you the minimal excuses and obfuscations you need to justify your total selfishness and self-absorption! All people who try to make you think about sad things are just loser liberals who want to keep you from succeeding! Go ahead, be assholes!”

It’s a pretty big sign.

Hmmm. I started off planning to talk about psychological language and how profoundly it changes everyday life, and instead I ended up writing about decades and the zeitgeist.

Again I ask : why is it I never end up writing what I meant to write?

Maybe the universe is trying to tell me…. something.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The subject of “toxins”, those mysterious poisons that people feel the need to get rid of by any means necessary, has been bobbing to the surface on Facebook lately. Lots of angry atheist types are enjoying themselves far too much as they crow about how there is “no such thing as a toxin” and “no scientific proof that toxins exist or that the products sold to cure them do anything” (well duh, you can’t cure someone of something that doesn’t exist) and as usual with these assholes, they have things entirely wrong and are too stupid and hateful to know it.

It’s been said that those who love something the most are often those who understand it the least, and so it is apparently up to me to school these schoolboys in some basic science.

Let’s start from the root idea of toxins. It’s a simple idea : we modern human beings live our lives surrounded by unique manmade materials and environmental pollutants that our bodies do not know how to handle. As we live amongst all these substances, even ingesting some of them in our artificial foods, our body takes care of most of them, but small amounts accumulate in our bloodstreams and tissues and impinge upon our health.

An anti-toxin purge, therefore, is simply a procedure of whatever sort that flushes these unnatural substance from out bodies.

None of that is controversial science. Science knows that these substances exist and accumulate within us. Whether in our bloodstreams, bones, or bowels, we accumulate toxic junk.

Not in large quantities, of course. If a substance makes people markedly ill in a short period of time, we tend to find out and get rid of it, sooner or later. Those substances are known toxins in the full scientific sense of the word.

But what about something that just makes you feel vaguely tired and depressed, something that suppresses your immune system a little, or that only leads to a very mild sense of being ill? And what if the cause is something so common that there is no way to distinguish it from the chemical background noise? What if it’s the plastic they use in the lids of disposable coffee cups? Or the residue left behind by organic farming methods? How would we know?

Now multiply that by all the new substances invented in the last century, and it is no big leap to think that there must be some of them our body does not know how to handle quite right. Every moment of our lives, we breathe in trace amounts of everything that is in the room with us (and a lot that isn’t), not to mention the things we eat and drink that eventually become a part of us, and so a “flush” or a “purge” might well make people feel better.

And that’s the idea. To make people feel better.

And no, it’s not just the placebo effect. It’s the purgative effect. These herbal concoctions that are sold as anti-toxin have many impressively natural sounding ingredients, but they all boil down to the same things :

Diuretics, to flush out the kidneys and bladder. Laxatives, to do the same for the bowels. And a mild muscle stimulant to help everything along. Maybe some known herbal painkillers or mood elevators to heighten the effect.

And the thing is, when people have purged like this, they will feel better. Partly because the very nature of the event makes a strong impression on people. Going through a week’s worth of trips to the bathroom in one evening is a very intense experience.

And because it is so intense, it will also get your endorphins pumping, and that means that once the seas inside have calmed, you will experience a sense of euphoria that leaves a profound, almost religious, impression on your mind.

Then there’s the effect of being empty. Most of us will never be as empty as someone who has just been through a purge. It’s a very unusual sensation (been there once) and something that maps extremely well to our sense of innocence and purity (just look at all the bad stuff that is no longer in me) and this further cements the feeling that something profound has occurred.

And who knows, it’s entirely possible that these purges actually do clear unnatural substances from our bodies. Maybe the tsunami of purging is just what the body needs to wash loose the stubborn substances that it otherwise cannot handle. Things that are not severe enough to cause a full body reaction, but that taken as a whole, you’re better off without.

Again, none of this is controversial science. It is all rooted in scientific fact. The fact that many of the people buying and using these purgative products do not understand (or improperly understand) the science does not mean that the science does not exist. Neither does the fact that these products are often marketed in such a way as to rouse people’s superstitious fear of the modern world rather than sound rational reasoning.

A flashlight works just as well for the person who thinks it runs on fairy dust as the one who knows it runs on a battery.

Can I say for sure that these purgative products do what they say? No, I can’t, But I can say that, for most people, they do no harm and probably even do them so good.

We could all use a hard reboot of our systems once in a while, ya know what I mean? Both mental and physical.

So to all you people shouting “ha ha, stupid hippie, toxins aren’t real!”, I trust that I have sufficiently established that science far from precludes their claims from being true.

Of course, there is nothing stopping you from going right along believing the comforting lie that preserves your hate-fun.

But know that to do so makes you just as superstitious and irrational as those over whom you claim superiority.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Last night, I suffered a terrible emotion blow, and while I talked it out with my therapist (if you are going to get a terrible shock, might as well be ten hours before therapy), I want to record it here too because it hurt like hell and sent me reeling for a time and that is the sort of thing that one should record in one’s diary.

Which is what this is… more or less.

Now, don’t worry, nobody died or got cancer or said something really hurtful and mean to me. It’s more personal than that.

See, at something like 2:30 last night, I was on my way to bed, chatting with Joe and Julian as I went, and just by sheer coincidence, my declamatory wanderings led me to our bulletin board.

What a great time to check on what is next on my calendar, that very important appointment with the gastroenterologist to see about the largish holes in my abdominal wall that seem like they are kind of a big deal.

This is an appointment that was made last October for an appointment in March. I have been waiting a long time for someone to take this whole “holes in your gut” thing seriously. It seemed sort of urgent to me when my GP told me about it, but apparently the medical establishment doesn’t think so.

And the thing is, I was sure that appointment was for the 22nd of this month. That’s even the date I entered into the “reminder” program on my tablet that I downloaded specifically to make sure I did not flake out on the appointment.

But it wasn’t the 22nd. It was the 12th. As in yesterday. As in I FUCKING MISSED IT.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook already know the story. This was such an enormous smackdown from the post-VancouFur high that I had been enjoying all week, and so unexpected and at a time when I am at my most psychologically vulnerable (when I am sleepy), that it struck me like a sledgehammer and left me feeling… well, I’l let myself explain it.

This is what I posted to Facebook last night, shortly after the revelation :

Well, FUCK. I just realized that the super important gastroenterologist appointment that I made IN OCTOBER (there’s a bit of a waiting list) was yesterday the 12th, NOT the 22nd like I thought.

So now I get to walk around with two holes in my abdominal walls for God knows how long because I fucked up.

And so now I feel stupid and scared and hopeless and depressed. The news hit me like a highly appropriate punch in the gut. I feel anxious and fragile and a little dizzy and disoriented.

What can you do if you are not fit to take care of yourself?

So yeah. I was a tad upset.

And as you can see, some old tapes started playing in this big old brain of mine. The ones that say I am incompetent, that I am not fit to take care of myself, that if I was my own parent I would lost custody of myself, that I am alone and helpless before a cold and uncaring world that would shatter me into a million pieces and leave me to die in the cold as soon as look at me.

Sorry if that sentence leaves you tired.

Having gotten to sleep on it, then talk to my therapist about it, the wound is not as painful as it was before, but I still feel very hurt and busted up and fragile and vulnerable inside. This thing activated all my deepest issues, like my profound feeling of abandonment and neglect, and the feeling that I am an abandoned baby bird, or maybe a very old tadpole, and entirely incompetent and incapable of doing the right things by myself.

And when you are nearly 42, there’s just plain nobody else. So if you can’t take care of yourself, you’re fucked.

And yeah, I know all that is quite irrational. Realistically, I have a problem keeping appointments when they are more than a month or two away.

And that’s it. It’s a problem, granted, but it’s hardly a ringing condemnation of my life competence. Everything else I more or less manage to get done. I feed, clothe, and shelter myself. I make it to GP and therapy appointments. I do things like reapply to VFS and get my taxes done. I take my pills and my insulin.

But that’s not how it feels. Damn depression sucks.

People have no idea what kind of a world we absentminded people live in. I am constantly paranoid that something I have forgotten will turn out to be super important and bad things will happen and it will be all my fault.

So I try to double check everything all the time, but it’s never good enough.

But I will get over it. The healing has already begun. I have faith that I will recover from this and maybe even grow stronger because of it. Sometimes one needs a short sharp shock to the shell in order to remind you that the shell is even there.

And that maybe you would be better off without it, in the long run.

But this deep down terror and insecurity will still be a problem even when this wound is nothing but a thin white scar. I feel like I got a glimpse of both the angels and the demons of my nature in the past week, and while I don’t feel the best right now, I think it has been a very spiritually productive week in more ways than one.

In two. Two ways. That’s the number of ways. 2 is more than 1.

So while I will be processing this blow to my psyche for a while, I will also be trying to hold on to the lessons I learned about myself at VancouFur about being a very funny dude and having no reason to hide from the world because I am awesome.

I just have certain issues with remembering certain hard to remember things.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling kinda meh right now.

It’s no mystery why. I have been diet cola, and hence caffeine, free for two days. When I did my shopping at 7-11 on Sunday night, I only got two bottles of Diet Coke, figuring that I already had a lot to carry and by the time I ran out, which was Wednesday, that week’s budget would “officially” be available and I would not have gone over it.

Going over budget fills me with guilt and fear.

And so I knew I would run out, and figured that when Wednesday rolled around, I would just “have to” go get more.

Edna Crabappel : “Ha!”

So I have been sans artificial stimulation for two days. Normally, when I am writing to all you wonderful people, I am experiencing a (usually quite pleasant) caffeine buzz from the diet cola I had with supper, and that, shall we say, helps get the words out of my brain and onto your monitors.

But alas, no such boost is aiding me tonight. Last night I had the second half of my con report to do, and that more or less writes itself in the sense that it has a natural, easy “timeline” format and all I have to do is write down my memories and impressions of various panels and events.

I didn’t even have to remember which events I attended. It was all there in my pocket guide, in which I had circled the events which I planned to attend. Easy.

But tonight, I am back to the “free range” writing I usually do, and without caffeine, I am feeling sluggish, lazy, and self-indulgent, like a spoiled cat.

Oh well, I have blogged under worse conditions. I have blogged when I was sick, when I was in a lot of pain, when I was so sleepy I could barely focus my eyes, and even if I somehow become totally paralyzed, I swear I will learn to blog by blinking.

I write, therefore I am.

I have said the before, but it recurs. I look back at my life before I had the tentpole of daily blogging to hold everything up, and I wonder how the hell I endured it. Spending the whole day just on video games and fucking around on the Internet seems like an intolerable nightmare to me now. It would be a form of torture if I had to do that now.

Heck, even now, I find myself getting very bored with the usual crap I do when I am not writing. I find myself growing impatient, restless, and ready to gnaw my arm off to get out of my cage and find something to DO.

And I am loving it.

Well, okay, maybe not exactly loving it. But I am happy it is there and eager to foster that feeling. It’s exactly the kind of energy I need right now. The kind of deep down drive that demands action or else.

If I can keep this growing pressure contained, channeled, and focused, it will force me out of my dry, limp complacency and push me out into the world, or at least outside of my all too cozy little cage.

The convention filled me will the energy of positive human interaction. At the convention, I could be more open, more broad, more lively person than the fading phantom behind this here keyboard, and I desperately need that kind of heat in my life to melt the ice around my heart and let me be free.

Heck, it was that wave of energy that pushed me to both get my taxes done AND reapply to VFS.

I have also created a fresh student loan application online. Everything is there except for the Appendix Three stuff, which is the part that VFS fills out IF they accept me.

They would be fools not to, but they have been fools once before.

Reapplying was…. bizarrely simple. I just logged into my account on their website and bing, there I was on the “thank you for submitting an application” page. With the correct dates on it and everything.

That seems a tad presumptuous to me, but what the heck, it saved me a lot of work. My previous application almost got me in (thanks a lot, Ian) so it must be pretty good.

So all lies in readiness. I am hoping VFS will call soon. I hope I am not too late for the May session, as waiting till September would kinda suck.

But better September than never, right?

So I have done what it takes to get my life moving again. And that kept me going through Monday and Tuesday. But now I am out of important and purposeful actions to take and I am back to that growing boredom.

Oh… and I haven’t been baking lately either. I ran out of flour and Splenda a while ago, and I lack the financial security to buy more after paying for the convention, so it’s been a no baking zone around here for a couple of weeks now.

If I get “ahead” financially, I will buy more before my next check. If not, it will have to wait.

Possibly for a long long time. I have noticed that I have a lot more energy since giving up the baking. Presumably, not stuffing myself with baked goods after every meal has made my carb count go way down.

So I miss the taste but…. if I resume baking, I will have to show more restraint with consuming the results.

Maybe I will just make Saturday night my Baking Night. Bake a couple of things and stop. Then be forced to make that amount of dessert last the week.

Baking a thing a day was definitely too much. I had to stuff my face just to keep up!

Or maybe I will start doing some entirely new thing. Ya never know with a crazy artist type like myself.

But no matter what I do, I know one thing will remain constant :

I am fabulous.

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

Saturday, March 7, 2015

11 am : Turkey Readings. Yes, you read that right, VancouFur now has its own version of the Turkey Readings. I was beside myself when I read that. The Turkey Readings at Vcon are the most fun thing I do all year and to have them happen at VancouFur is like having two Xmases for me.

Turnout was… not great. There was like six of us and that included the host. Compared to the 100 plus attendees at the Vcon version, that’s not much, but this was the debut of the event at VancouFur and I am sure it will grow with time.

And those there were very generous! Our little 45 minutes of fun raised almost $200 for the Vancouver Orphaned Kitten Rescue Association, or VOKRA. VOKRA was this year’s (and last year’s) chosen charity for VancouFur and really, how can you argue with a charity like that?

ORPHANED KITTENS, people. Sad little kittens with no homes. It doesn’t get more sympathetic than that!

Artist’s rendering shown here.

2:30 pm : Everyone’s A Critic. Another writing type panel that I went to without looking up the particulars. Turned out to be about what you’d expect. Discussion of the art of the critique and how to supply someone with that most vital of artistic nutrients, constructive feedback.

It was hosted by the same pair as Friday’s Writing In 3D, and had the same problems from my point of view. Slow, unfocused, and I didn’t feel that the hosts really brought anything to the panel. They were both nice guys (one of them with a sexy British accent, rawr) but I would have appreciated a little more drive and a little less audience chatter.

One thing that struck me was that the idea of constructive criticism is that it should leave the person feeling encouraged to keep writing (or whatever). I had never thought of it quite that way. When I critique, I do try to phrase it in the form of “this could be better” rather than “this stinks and so do you”, but I tend to be very thorough and incisive, and I suppose that might well come across as discouraging.

There goes that machine of mine again.

And to be honest, a very bitchy part of me was thinking “Oh, but some people SHOULD be discouraged from writing. Very, very strongly. ” But that is an unworthy thought. It’s neither my job nor my responsibility to choose who writes and who doesn’t.

And who knows, someone who seems absolutely without talent today might bloom into a great writer with a little sunshine.

4 pm : Furries in the Media. Always a great panel. Pleased to see that, in response to last year’s incident with a very tightly packed panel in far too small a meeting space, this year’s panel was held in the entire ballroom area. Plenty of space there!

Sadly, the demon of modern AV equipment sank its teeth into this event with a vengeance. It took one and a quarter hours for two extremely competent nerds in full techie communication mode (I understood about one word in three) to get the host’s laptop connected to the big projection screen.

All the while, the host, poor Carthage, had to basically improvise in lieu of the presentation he had so carefully prepared.

Luckily, we got things going eventually and got to discuss the topic. We furries are real, real sensitive about how we are seen by the world, and so this is always a hot topic for us.

This year, we of course talked about that chlorine gas attack at last year’s Midwest Fur Fest. Briefly, someone or other threw a can of pure chlorine into a stairwell, and everyone in the hotel had to go outside in the December 2014 cold at 3 am and four people got quite sick.

Carthage made an excellent point that, as awful as that incident was, it also functioned as a turning point for the Internet’s view of furries. We of the fuzzy community have gotten used to being open to abuse by the whole Internet (everybody loves having a group they can shit freely upon) but the gas attack made us sympathetic, and a lot of people suddenly said “Hey, why are we making fun of these people?”

Sometimes tragedy forces people to grow.

5:30 pm : Youtubealoo! Took a while to get started, but once it did, it was a very interesting collection of YouTube videos of various sorts. I think the organizer/curator must have decided that there was no point in including any videos that had gone viral, because by definition, odds are we have all seen them.

An intriguing find : There are two gentlemen on Fiverr.com who will perform absolutely any script for $5. A fellow with a Jamaican accent, and one with an Australian accent.

I assume there is a time limit, but still. Any script. Five bucks.

You can bet that got the little wheels turning in my head.

10 pm : Eye of Argon. Where to start. Well, the Eye of Argon is widely considered to be one of the worst pieces of fantasy fiction ever published. Its use of language is heavy-handed and repetitive. Its story is extremely hackneyed and predictable, the prose goes beyond being purple and becomes ultraviolet, and as the story goes on, the author starts to just plain make up words.

And that only scratches the surface of its literary crimes. Read it at your own peril.

Eye of Argon as an event takes this rare gem of suckitude (as one panel said, it’s a story famous for its quality) and turns it into a game. The idea is that everyone sits in a circle, and when it is their turn, they read the literary magnum opus aloud for as long as they can without laughing (or until they reach the end of the page).

If (when) you laugh, you pass it on to the next person in the circle, and so on and so forth till the whole thing has been read.

This usually takes two hours (for a 17 page work) and makes everyone involved laugh themselves silly from lack of oxygen.

I was no exception.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

4 pm : Closing Ceremonies. Not really keen on ceremonies myself, but there are so many people I know involved with the convention now that I kind of felt obligated. And it was okay. Nice to see people get recognized for the awesomeness they do, and happy to learn that there were 720 (!) attendants this year, and that we raised, in total, over $1700 for all those poor little orphaned kittens.

And that’s a lot of kitten chow!

That’s all I did on Sunday, panel-wise.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. ]