Back at my normal level of finances, that is.

I had to go through three weeks in the wilderness after the convention, living on $60/week. That broughtback unpleasant memories of what life was like before I got onto full disability, and while I got through it, I had to worry about money again and hence it was a drag on my mood, specifically my feeling of security.

But now I am back on $100/week, and boy what a difference that $40 makes.

My sense of security is key to my personality. I can’t stop worrying about something until I know it’s taken care of, or otherwise will be okay. Till then, I fret.

So yeah. Mood equals money. Money equals mood. More money means better mood, and vice versa sorta.

It sounds crass. Part of me doesn’t like admitting that. It makes me sound shallow and materialistic to myself. But poverty is its own beast. Being poor forces you to concentrate on things like money, just like a starving man can’t stop thinking about food. When you lack something, you tend to think about it a lot.

To me, the definition of poverty is having to think about every single purchase, no matter how small. Every single time you open your starving wallet, you have to make absolutely sure that you can afford that pack of gum and there isn’t something a lot more important you could be spending that dollar and a half on.

The less you have to worry about money, the further out of poverty you become. This maxes out at around a middle class income level. If you are making $40K to $50K a year, you do not have to think before making everyday purchases at all. Going out to dinner, going shopping, going to a movie, even charging that big screen TV to your credit card… the world is open to you in a way a poor person can barely comprehend.

Obviously, you are not financially omnipotent. You can’t buy a yacht or a sports team. But all the little pleasures of modern life are open to you.

Poverty is especially draining and discouraging for those of us who grew up middle class. No matter how we scoff at middle class pretensions or throw around words like “bourgeois”, when you are raised middle class, that is your “normal” and anything below that feels very wrong to you. Part of you will always feel like a failure because you do not live like you did as a kid and all of society radiates the message that loss of status and privilege means you are now a lesser person.

Even if you have never had a mean thought about the poor in your whole life, you never lose the status judgments you were raised with. Sure, it’s okay for THEM to be poor…. they’re poor people! But for YOU…. it means something has gone terribly wrong and it is all your fault.

It’s not something you think about every day, but it’s always there, like it’s in the air you breathe. That pressure to return to your previous level of status as a middle class kid never goes away, and if for whatever reason you feel like you are unable to get to that status (which your social programming insists is the bare minimum), feelings of despair set in and make your life even worse.

I am fairly sure that a majority of my depression would go away if I simply had a higher income. Not all of it, but relieving that pressure would do me a lot of good.

I live on around $11.4K a year. And that, to me, is the good life, after living on a hell of a lot less.

Plus I would feel more secure. Like I may have said before, it is no mystery to me how someone like Scrooge ended up a miser. He was insecure and felt the bite of poverty, and gaining money made him feel better. It’s like he was building a wall against the world with that money in a desperate attempt to feel safe.

Of course, in his case, the real problem was inside his soul, and no amount of money can fix that.

But it is so easy to think that it will. For a while, every gain in wealth really does improve your life. Worry disappears, a sense of security sets in,. and the world seems like a much nicer place.

But as with all decadent addictions, you end up requiring a bigger dose to get the same effect, and even then, the effect diminishes over time. You desperately seek higher and higher doses of cash to get that feeling of security back, and as with all addicts, the addiction hollows you out and replaces any emotion that gets in its way.

Love, compassion, restraint, moral duty, even ties to family can and will be ruthlessly excised if they dare to even seem like they might get in the way of you getting more and more and more, and to hell with how.

There was a time when I thought I would be a business student and become an accountant. That might well have put me on the path to that kind of life. I know that, deep down, I have a terrible greed fueled be a terrible need, an all-devouring never-satiated monster that would eat the world if it meant I could feel safe and whole just for a few seconds.

As with all addictions, it promises to be a cure, but it is only a treatment, or at least a distraction. The problem remains, you have just masked the symptoms for a little while.

And yes, I am as guilty of that as anyone else. It’s just that for me, it’s carbs.

And as a fat person, I am a member of the least sympathetic group of addicts there is, accord to society.

With that happy thought, I bid you adieu.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been watching Rio 2 tonight.

The original movie was about a blue something-or-other toucan, thought to be the last in the world, who lives a comfortable life with some enthusiastic yet dorky ornithologists who ends up in Rio because they found another of his species… and it’s female!

You can imagine the awkwardness that ensues. Talk about pressure!

But of course, Jewel (the female) eventually falls in love with him when she sees how brave he is in some contrived danger or other, they make friends with wacky characters along the way, and it all ends happily.

In the sequel, Blu and Jewel have three kids, consisting of the crazy adventurous “that was awesome!” one, the nerdy “by my calculations” one, and the apparently teenaged “What-EVER” one. I say “apparently” because according to a throwaway line, she is only 3.5 minutes older than the younger of the other too.

Why do movies do things like that to innocent people like me? These kinds of continuity paradoxes hurt people of the “always thinks things through” variety like me.

Anyhoo, this time their adventure starts when a flock of wild blue whatever toucans is discovered in the depths of the Amazon rainforest, and they go on a trip to find them.

Blue is a likable character because he starts out as a pampered, spoiled city bird with no idea how to survive in the wild, and has what to me are entirely sensible reactions to situations of danger, discomfort, and distress. Almost all of his reactions are the same I would have, and he says what I would say, more or less.

Still, I am enjoying the sequel more than I did the original. The first one felt formulaic and forced. This one is far more original and has a lot more personality, especially in the character animations.

Plus, it isn’t CGI, so it looks all warm and pretty.

Other than my adventures with a certain hapless but lovable toucan, today has been quite quiet. The wrestling match with my life as I know it and my life as I want it to be continues. It takes a lot of rounds to win a fall against the habits and securities and especially the false beliefs that are deeply ingrained in my mind, but the fight never ends, so victory is inevitable.

Every day, I ask myself why I am still spending most of my days playing video games or sleeping, like I am always semi-hibernating. What is wrong with seeking out more active things to do? It sure beats letting the days go by.

Yesterday did me a lot of good, despite the fact that my body did not stop hurting for the whole time I was walking. I guess it has been so long since I have done the out and about thing that my body got rather rusty. What usually happens is that my body complains at first, but at some point, it grudgingly admits that we are doing this and kicks into a healthier gear.

But not yesterday. I get the feeling it was the lack of sunshine that did it. Being out in the dark and the rain is always a little depressing, and there was insufficient positive stimuli from my environment to arouse me fully from my torpor.

That’s the only way to describe my standard lifestyle : torpor. I don’t do much, I don’t say much, I keep things ridiculously low stimulus, and I can sleepwalk through my days, weeks, months, and years.

My advice to all young people : get your shit together now and DO THINGS. Don’t let yourself become a basement troll who plays WoW all day. Or if you do, be the one who organizes the raids, or the reliable DPS guy, or whatever.

You are young, resilient, and energetic. It will never be easier for you to take risks and try things. Go find the world you belong in, then hang onto it.

As for me, I am 41, soon to be 42, and I am just now finally going through a weak form of emotional teen-hood. It is entirely possible to have a severe form of arrested development and not realize it for years… decades, even.

And it is a tough pill to swallow when you are my age. Your pride resists the realization that you have a whole lot of growing up to do. Nobody wants to admit, even to themselves, that they are still a child inside and have never matured past, at best, the junior high level.

But to be honest, it’s more like elementary school, at least for me.

I try not to blame myself. That’s a wrestling match too. Depression makes it so the most negative and damning thoughts are the easiest to think. You even take a terrible sort of comfort from being the worst.

After all, nobody expects anything of you then.

But a lot of shit happened to me through no fault of my own. Nobody was looking out for me or trying to teach me how to live. I was left entirely to my own devices. I grew up wild. I grew up free. I grew up with all the doors flung open.

I grew up scared. And meek. Too meek to stick up for myself and demand my needs be met.

I would love to be able to go back in time and ask my parents why I was treated differently than the other 3. I would love to see if I could get them to admit it was because I was an accident and they just plain did not want to deal with an extra kid and so they arranged it so I would take care of myself as much as humanly possible and make it as much like they had never had me as I possibly could. No wonder I grew up feeling abandoned, despite what on the surface appeared to be a cozy middle class life.

No amount of money can save you from bad parenting.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.