Unusual in that I had therapy today instead of tomorrow, Friday.

It was a decent session. I still feel like we are missing the point somehow. I have a deep feeling that we are not getting at the good stuff, the stuff that really needs to come out, the stuff that is horrible to release but feels godly to have gone.

I still have a heavily laden chest with far too many things to get off of it.

But what I am missing, I do not know. I just know it’s deep and dark and painful and horrifying and I want to evict it. And the only way to get rid of the trash in your emotional closet is to take those accumulated emotions and feel them. Express them. Send them back into the world.

The world gave them to you. It can bloody well have them back.

I got a call from David Granrirer of Stand Up For Mental Health. Looks like I will be joining a new class of potential comedians at Stand Up For Mental Health in May. Comedy and insanity…. two things I’ve had a lot of time to develop.

Ha ha ha.

The basic idea for Stand Up For Mental Health is that you take a bunch of members of the “mental health consumer” community (aka “crazy people”) and teach them to write and perform standup comedy, and in the process help them through some of their issues.

I get the feeling that it will be more group therapy with attendant comedy as opposed to vice versa. And my previous experiences with group therapy have left me with a poor impression of it.

The first group therapy I did was part of a sort of satellite program to the larger Vancouver General Hospital (VGH to friends), and that was around ten people, and that was not too bad. We had plenty of time to get to everyone, and we all got to know each other reasonably well.

That was the one where I discovered the third type of depressive. There’s the anxious, the dysthymic… and the aggressive. There was a guy in there who had gotten really thoroughly shit on by life and had developed an aggressive, abrasive persona in order to deal with it. As such, he got into a lot of fights and confrontations and such.

I really wonder what happened to him. Prospects are not good for people like him.

Anyhow, the VGH one was okay. The lady running it was good at keeping things together and running smoothly. I think she was sort of attracted to me.

Wrong tree, darling. I’m for the boys.

But that group just plain ended one day. Imagine if that was how it worked with regular illness. “We’re sorry, but this dialysis program has come to an end. Don’t let the door hit you on the tailbone on the way out. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here. Where else can you get dialysis? Heck if I know, or care. ”

So that was it for me and therapy for a while. Then I moved in with Angela in Richmond, and after a few false starts with Richmond Mental Health Team (who only deal with serious crazies, not us mere depressives) and a few other agencies, I managed to get into the Core Program at the Richmond Hospital’s Psychiatric Outpatients Department.

My, I am capitalizing a lot tonight. Hope I don’t run out.

That program ran every weekday morning, plus one lunchtime a week. The idea was to give people an intensive program in hopes of getting them over the hurdle and into mental health.

But all it really amounted to was a lot of group therapy, only this time with around twenty people and only forty-five minutes at a go in which to get to everybody.

This, for me, was hell. It was just another group where I am not really listened to and where everyone has worse problems than me (including one woman who had a Fetal Alcohol Syndrome child and Filipino man who had been tortured by the Japanese in World War II) and everyone is more important than I am and where I felt ignored and neglected and abandoned.

Plus, it was run by a Doctor Dahi (or “Prince Dahi”, as the nurses called him behind his back), a man so incredibly incompetent that when he spoke up at all, it was almost always something completely irrelevant to what was being discussed besides containing a few key words from the last sentence or two.

And that’s when he was awake. Can you imagine? The guy fell asleep during group therapy many, many times. I think we went two months without him staying awake through a whole group therapy session.

And let me tell you, it degrades the efficacy of the therapy when you have to talk over the supposed leader’s snoring.

Near the end of that program, they gave us the standard patient feedback sheet, and asked us for our opinions. We were to take the sheets home, fill them out, and hand them in at the next and final session.

I was giddy with pleasure at this opportunity. I was so eager, in fact, that I didn’t even wait to get home to fill it out. I stopped at White Spot (the one on Ackroyd) and borrowed a pen from a waiter so I could fill it out there.

I used up all the space on the main sheet and one side of the supplementary one.

To be honest, describing Dahi’s massive incompetence in great detail was probably the most therapeutic thing I experienced in that program. It made me feel ever so much better.

It wasn’t the first time he learned that depressed and stupid aren’t the same thing, and that some of us craziest are not at all timid when they see something wrong.

I hope I helped get him fired.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The one thing that I hate most about sunshine besides the heat : screen glare. Ow, my retinas!

It’s a gorgeous day 7n Richmond today. Blue skies, yellow sunshine, green grass, and all the rest of the primary color happiness of a beautiful spring day.

It just needs to be a little bit hotter. My ideal weather has the temperature at around 14 degrees, warm enough that you don’t need a jacket but still not actually hot out.

Maybe 16, if there’s a breeze.

Of course, that’s for us polar bears. Presumably, smaller folk need more heat before the jackets come off.

Damn square cube law.

After this, I walk a block to my pharmacy then another block home.

I took the bus to get here, one entire stop, for mostly psychological reasons. Sure, it saves mr a block of walking, but the main advantage is that it starts me at the top of the gravity well of home, instead of having to boost myself into orbit first.

Hmm. That is one of my better metaphors. And no water!

I am, of course, pleased that I got out of the apartment today! And I hope it becomes a regular thing. Hey, once a week getting out om my own for an hour or two beats never at all by…well, infinity.

in strictly mathematical terms.

When I get home, I will finish this bloh entry. Strike while someone hot is ironing and all that. But that will leave me with the open question of what I will do with the rest of my day.

Now would be a good time to develop that second “thimg” to do with my time to replace the baking I no longer do.

I might go back to making videos. Simple “talkers” at first, more elaborate things later on, hopefully.

Well, time for me to get ip and get moving. Got drugs to pick up and the rest of the day to exploit.

When next we meet, I will be home safe and Sound.

(—)

Yup, here I am.

Warmed up a whole lot while I was in the restaurant. Dudes were walking around shirtless. Nobody was wearing a big jacket like mine. I felt kind of dum.

And too hot, obviously.

Financially speaking, currently I am waiting for my GST cheque to arrive. It should arrive on time because this year’s tax return had my current, correct address on it. So there should be no tense waiting period between when Julian gets his and I get mine.

It shouldn’t be too tense either way, though, because luckily, this time I don’t need the money. I didn’t do something stupid like spend the money in anticipation of the check, so it is not like I am screwed without it.

Instead, it is going onto my VISA card along with the $75 from my tax return, and then there shall be a spree of the shopping kind. Amazon might end up getting it all.

It depends. It’s a little more work to shop on eBay and there is always a risk factor, but the prices are usually much better.

On the other hand, Amazon can ship my whole order at once, and that is usually cheaper than having a bunch of things shipped separately from a bunch of different sellers.

So I could go either way.

Dunno if I will get that digital candy thermometer or not. It certainly seems like a bad idea right now, on a hot afternoon. Sook something that has to get to 236 degrees Celsius? Um, I don’t think so.

Maybe I will get really good at making frozen blender drinks instead. Smoothies ahoy!

Right now, the heat is making me feel tiiiiiiiiired. I will definitely need to lay down in front of the fan when I am done here. Heat makes a fat guy’s body work so damned hard.

Curse you, mammalian cellular heat generation!

There’s a bit of dickering with my shrink about when I will see him. He knows I hate uncertainty and it makes me anxious, but for whatever reason, he was incapable of setting a date for this week in advance.

Something to do with his enormous Jewish family and Passover, I suspect.

When I left on Friday, he assured me that the whole thing would be resolved by Sunday, Monday at most.

Ha ha. It took me calling him up today, Wednesday, to get things moving. Of course, he said on the phone that he was planning on calling me some time this afternoon anyway, but I don’t believe it.

Maybe it’s just my lifetime of issues talking, but I think he had completely forgotten about it and if I had not called him today, nothing would have happened.

People never really take my seriously. Curse of being the youngest kid, I guess. You can’t get a lot of responsibility, but you don’t get a lot of respect, either.

Everybody ends up being your parent,because everyone was around when you were young and helpless and clueless. I think a major reason why you are always “their baby” to your parents is that they were there and responsible for keeping you safe when you were old enough to walk, grab, and try to eat things, but nowhere near smart enough to know what things could kill you.

That kind of thing must instill a form of parental paranoia that never entirely goes away. Some part of them will always feel like you have to be protected from yourself and that without them, you would jump down an open manhole just for the fun of it.

At one point, that was true. And all parents hear those “I only looked away for one second!” horror stories. Those scare the crap out of ME, and I stand no chance of ever being a parent to a kid like that.

It just makes me wonder how the hell most of us made it to adulthood.

Well that’s all my ramblings for the day, folks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Like I said on Facebook, Easter has very little to offer a diabetic atheist. ^[1]

Especially one with no family near him. Once you take away God and sugar, Easter is pretty much all about the family, and mine are far, far away.

As in, the closest one lives in Western Quebec.

So Easter is a dull thud of a nonevent to me, just like Xmas. It’s pretty much like every other Sunday. Only with the knowledge that millions of people worldwide are having fun and you’re not.

Not that I’m bitter.

In face, for me, Easter has been a nuisance. Remember how I told you that I was going to go get my non-psychoactive meds today? Well duh, today is “Easter Monday”^[2] so my pharmacy was still not open, and so I will have to go tomorrow.

What kind of a pharmacy has worse hours than a bank? Fuck.

I might wait till Wednesday, so I can do the whole White Spot thing too. I like the idea of making a trip to White Spot a Wednesday tradition with me. It would give me a reason to get out of the apartment on my own at least once a week^[3] and I can bear the expense fairly easily.

After all, I’m no longer shelling out for baking ingredients all the time.

And who knows, maybe the staff will get to know me and I will have an opportunity to not get freaked out by that.

Once, long ago, I talked on this blog about the experience I had in my previous fave White Spot, the one on 3 Road and Ackroyd. I lived in the neighborhood and a meal at that White Spot was a favorite treat of mine, so I was in there fairly often.

All was well until one day, the manager of the joint decided to sit down opposite and say “Hey, I know you! You’re in here all the time! How are you?”

This is a perfect example of how something that is actually quite positive and good (restaurants getting to know their regulars) becomes incredibly traumatic.

Because when he did that, I smiled and was polite, but inside I was freaking the fuck out.

Suddenly, the cozy cloak of impersonality and anonymity that keeps my social anxiety in check when I am in public was yanked away and I was lain bare by this totally well intentioned and in no way culpable man.

It’s not his fault that what works with most people does not work with me. I’m the one with the problem, not him. Were I saner, I would really appreciate that kind of thing. But at the time, I most definitely was NOT.

The whole experience shook me up so badly that I actively avoided that White Spot for months. And the first time I went back, I was bristling with paranoia and anxiety like a frightened cat.

That is what life with mental illness is like, folks. Simple things that would roll off the back of a sane person are enormous, shattering traumas (traumae?) because our brains don’t work right and our mental defenses are crap.

Hopefully, if it happens again this time, I will ready and be able to handle the surge of anxiety better and be able to wrestle it down or even, if I am feeling especially sane that day, I might even be able to roll with it and turn it into a genuinely positive thing, as opposed to a thing I pretend is positive because I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings about something that is not their fault.

It’s funny what we do to keep our social masks intact, isn’t it? Mine’s never been all that good. The real me is easily seen through the eye holes and the real me is impossibly weird to most people.

Like I have said, that is the secret heart of my social anxiety : that moment when I am trying to connect with someone, which is something I desperately want to do, but I can see in their eyes that look of incomprehension and withdrawal, and that just crushes me every time.

I am just too different to relate, I guess. I want to, I really do. But I am just plain not on their frequency.

So anyhow, Easter has been nothing but annoying to me. Last night, I was all ready to do my post Sunday dinner with Le Gang shopping when Felicity and I discovered that the supermarkets had closed early for Easter Sunday.

Instead, we had to go to 7-11, where I get way less for my money, and my carefully thought out plan was put into jeopardy. I thought I had it all worked out. I had $45 left in this week’s budget, and so I thought “$25 for dinner at Denny’s and $20 for my usual supplies from Sav-On. ”

At save on, $20 is plenty, mostly because my pop costs half as much there as it does at 7-11. But no, Easter fucked things up, and I ended up going a whole $1.50 over budget.

And didn’t get as much pop as I usually get. I will run out Wednesday.

So yeah. Fuck Easter. Having been raised atheist before converting to agnosticism, it was never a super huge deal for me anyhow. Might as well be called Spring Candy Day as far as I was concerned.

I know this makes me the Easter equivalent of a Grinch, but I don’t give a shit.

Fuck Easter, man. Fuck it in its fluffy bunny ass.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been napping in the afternoon again.

This would not normally be noteworthy, but I recently had a good streak going of sleepless afternoons, and I was enjoying that. It was nice to be able to be up all day and sleep only at night. It felt right.

But no, I am back to sleeping in the afternoons. Sometimes it feels like I have no choice, like I am just too sleepy to do anything else and so naptime it is.

But other times, I feel like I chose it. I could have roused myself to a higher state of alertness, but I chose to do what was easier and go back to sleep. And I don’t like that.

I want to live, damn it. Not spend my days in suspended animation.

But I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. ^[1] There may be other factors involved. Today, for instance, is the day after I stayed up till 5 am watching videos with Le Gang, and so that might just have had an effect. Plus, it is always possible that there is something circadian going on due to the change of season and the longer days. Maybe I am still adjusting.

But as you wonderful readers know, I find it depressing to sleep so much. It steals my life away. I was doing well for a while with the whole needing to find something to do because I am not going to sleep thing, and it sucks to have backtracked.

It’s hardly fatal, though. I will get back on my feet again. And I will get my life moving.

Actually, I have already done that, in a way. Big announcement : I have applied to Kwantlen for that creative writing thing.

Sadly, there were no slots open until the Fall, so I won’t actually be starting school till September. And I am still not sure how long it will take. From what I can gather from the website, it can’t be more than a two semester program, and yet other places on the website say it’s a two year program.

If it really does take two years, that might be a dealbreaker. I am not getting any younger and I would prefer to be able to apply to VFS, certificate in hand, before 2017. By then, I will be 44, and by the time I was done the VFS program, I would be 45, and that would suck taint.

Most importantly, I would be worried about keeping my motivation to go to VFS for that long. I am the kind of guy who loses focus as easily as people lose umbrellas, and two years is an awfully long time relative to that.

So if it turns out that, somehow, taking one single semester course and two double semester courses takes two years, I will likely back out of the associates program and find something swifter.

I want to go to VFS and learn to write for film and television! Mostly television.

Oh, and I fucked up and won’t have meds for half of tomorrow. I thought I had enough of my non-psychoactive meds (Januvia, Metformin, Glyburide, Lipitor) to last me till Monday, but I was off by half a day.

And I absolutely cannot get these particular meds before Monday because only my local pharmacy, the Medicine Shoppe, has the relevant prescriptions on file.

So in the future, I will know that it is far better to have the prescription in my possession than to leave it on file with a pharmacy, or at least, not the Medicine Shoppe and their not being open on Sundays.

Like the Asian dudes who work there need time off for church on Sunday. ^[2]

What else… oh, I got an email from the Stand Up For Mental Health people saying they would be taking in new students in May and asking if I was still interested.

And at first I didn’t know, because I didn’t know when I would be starting at Kwantlen. But now that I know I won’t be starting til the fall, hell yeah I’m interested!

Something to teach mental health patients to do standup comedy so we can use standup comedy for better mental health? That sounds like it was made for me!

Now, obviously, I already can do comedy. I’m a funny dude. And learning to write material for standup will be only slightly different, in the grand scheme of things, than the skit writing I have done in the past. And I could probably figure out the basics of how to do standup just from all the standup comedy I have seen over the years.

The real benefit will be that it will force me to get out of the apartment, get my ass to a certain place at a certain time, and most importantly, deal with meeting and getting along with a group of strangers with whom I may have nothing in common except for the comedy thing.

That’s the real challenge for me. I may well have to do the sort of free form socializing that I fear the most. There might be group work. There might be pairing off. There might be any number of social pitfalls that I haven’t even thought of. It will not be a safe thing to do.

And that’s just what I need. Risk… but not too much of it. After all, these people all have mental health issues, and I am guessing the slight majority of them will be fellow depressives^[3], so I will have that much in common with them. And it will be all/mostly about comedy, and that’s a subject I am extremely comfortable with.

Perhaps TOO comfortable. (dramatic STING!)

I guess that’s the local update. Hopefully I will come up with something else to write about tomorrow.

After all, even the most self-involved neurotic gets tired of talking about themselves now and then!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am having one of those days when I feel like I am having a millions thoughts as once and I can’t catch any of them.

I feel like father from some old sitcom’s “what happens when the father looks after the house and kids” episode. All these thoughts whizzing about in joyous anarchy, the roast burning and the washing machine belching suds, while I just huddle in a corner with a cup of coffee looking shell-shocked.

Relax, I am not going to start talking about the Turtles again. Although…..

Just kidding. I am done wid dat.

Had therapy today. Plus an adventure. See, when I showed up, the building was locked, because it’s Good Friday. No problem, I knew I would be waiting for my therapist to let me in today. Things are always like that when I have therapy on a stat.

But then this other fella shows up and starts waiting at the door. And I am thinking, “He can’t be waiting for what I am waiting for. ” But what else could it be?

Eventually, I discover from this fellow (who seems awfully nice) that he, too, is waiting to see Doctor Costin at 10:45. We seem to have a scheduling issue. So I am now sitting there thinking, “Well this should be interesting. ”

Doctor Costin shows up, and yup, he scheduled both me and Nice Guy Dan (I have top call him something) for 10:45. He insists that he scheduled me for 11:45, and I say “Well you TOLD me 10:45!”

We get into the office complex, and hash it out. I am clearly pretty pissed off, and at first I say I will wait for Dan, and my therapist says “You will?” and I say “Well I don’t have much of a choice, do I? ”

But then Nice Guy Dan says he will just go off and have a coffee and come back at noon. Problem solved! And I got to be all assertive and stuff. Did not just roll over from the slightest push and self-minimize like I usually do.

Just for fun, the first thing I said to my therapist once we got settled was “So, how did I do with asserting myself?”

He hemmed and hawed and dithered for a bit. Looking back, it was kind of an unfair question, seeing as he had born the brunt of my self-assertion. I sometimes forget that I have strong emotive force and so when I am angry, I send that message out hard. I am so used to thinking that nobody is paying attention to me that I tend to shout.

I must remember to use this power for good!

Anyhow, eventually he told me that my assertion was… good, in that it WAS assertive, and um….

He then, via a highly circuitous route, eventually said that maybe I was a little too over the top. Like one point over the top. Out of 100.

By this point, I felt both guilty and stupid for asking. Guilty because that’s a cruel question to ask a soft sensitive Seventies type therapist and I clearly put him in a bind. Stupid because if I hadn’t asked the question, I would not have had to sit through all the hemming and hawing and equivocating.

I sometimes wonder if I would be better off with a kind but extremely blunt therapist. Sometimes Doctor Costin’s very careful phrasings and fiddling with my word choices really gets on my nerves and slows the therapeutic process down.

And I hate being interrupted, especially when I am spilling my guts.

Anyhow, after that it was therapy as usual. I know why I had such a strong reaction to maybe having to wait : it combined the negative unexpected (never good with me), disruption to my routine (not as bad, but bad), and my feelings of not being taken seriously and being overlooked and unimportant and all that stuff.

Without those stimuli, I am usually a fairly reasonable and flexible guy. But my anxiety started rising when Costin wasn’t there to open the door for us (a nice Chinese man let us in) and rose more as it struck 11:00, fifteen minutes late, so by the time I talked to him, I was already fairly wound up.

I don’t like that I do so poorly at handling the unexpected, but that is just how I am built. Some people are quick responders and some people are deep thinkers, and I am firmly the latter.

Still, I wish I had better shock absorbers. I prefer a smooth ride and there is only so much being careful and cautious can do for you. Sooner or later, you will be on rough roads with sudden bumps, and then what?

Oh well. I’m alive, awake, and learning, and when you got all three of those working for you, anything is possible.

I am going to apply to Kwantlen soon. Probably today, before supper. It won’t get processed until Tuesday, more than likely, but the idea is to get it done ASAP before the motivation to do so melts back into the listless goo I call my will.

Goo is a funny word.

My therapist remarked that it seemed odd for an associate’s degree to be only eight months, as they are usually thought of as half a bachelor’s degree. But I assume that Kwantlen, like most education mills, has everything geared to the four semesters a year schedule, and so my eight months getting an Associate’s is like a year in other places.

And honestly, I don’t care. I am not in this to learn things… I could probably teach these courses. I am in this to get a piece of paper to show to VFS that proves I am capable of this whole education thing after all these years.

As if there is any doubt. I am very good at school. So good that I never took it that seriously.

But this time I will. For the first time in my life, I will be trying hard to get the best marks I can. I want to blast these courses to the back wall with my intelligence and talent and walk away with marks high enough to leave absolutely no room for doubt in the minds of the people at VFS that I am a smoking hot commodity.

Should be interesting.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been watching a movie about a woman with depression and it has me feeling depressed.

No big surprise there. The movie, called Side Effects, who is very depressed, to the point where she drives her car into a wall. She ends up on this new (presumably fictional) drug called Ablixa, and it helps her a lot but it has the odd side effect of making her sleepwalk and do things like set the table or cook.

Sounds like Ambien, doesn’t it?

Everything is going good for her until one night, her husband comes home to find her chopping vegetables. He tries to wake her up, and she stabs him to death, then goes back to bed.

In the morning, she doesn’t remember a thing.

I have half an hour of it left, and I am enjoying the suspense. The psychiatrist who gave her the Ablixa ends up losing everything in the ensuing scandal, and has become obsessed with proving it was actually premeditated murder.

I am betting they will not definitely settle the subject. It’s that kind of movie. But if I had to bet, it would be that she truly is a victim of the drug, because otherwise the movie will have lied to the viewer when it showed her life before the incident, as well as how it depicted the incident itself.

And movies rarely do that, especially movies without an established point of view. There’s no framing device telling us this is her version of the story. So, she’s probably innocent.

But maybe not.

Anyhow, there is a line in the movie about depression, saying that “around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, a thick poisonous fog rolls in, and I am paralyzed. ”

I have described my own depression in nearly identical terms. And I have often spoken about how hard afternoons are on me. They are definitely the time when my fog rolls in too.

Clinically speaking, I know what it is. It’s that numbing agent that the mind secretes in response to trauma. That is what drags you down into the pits of hell, and what keeps you from feeling positive things like love and hope.

It blots all that out.

According to that theory, maybe the best drug for long term therapy would be one that blocks whatever chemical or function it is that causes the fog. That would force the patient to actually deal with their trauma, and while that would have to be done under strict clinical observation to prevent self-harm, it is possible that afterwards, the patient would be cured.

Maybe that’s what ayahuasca works.

But knowledge does not conquer all. Knowing what the problem is does not solve the problem by itself. That takes time, and effort, and the will to struggle against oneself in order to change.

And I am doing fairly well with that lately.

This afternoon I was feeling pretty depressed. But once more. I (eventually) recognized it as a physical thing that would probably go away once I got out of bed and moved around some.

And I was right. I have done that now, plus gotten some food into me at last, and I feel a lot better. I still feel crappy, but it’s a level of crappiness that I can live with.

Plus, there was the movie. That probably didn’t help. Don’t get me wrong, in the long run it does me a lot of good to see things depicting depression and its consequences. It helps me to feel less alone in my struggle against the darkness that kills. And by stimulating my own issues, it helps me to deal with them.

But in the short term, it usually leaves me feeling depressed.

Oh well, life goes on. I am slowly building my plan to get that Associate Degree in Creative Writing from Kwantlen. I have not made a lot of progress on it for the last few days because of my health, but tomorrow is another day.

Yesterday, what kept me from being productive was the bad kind of sleepiness. I slept a lot on Monday, and it was that sweaty, unpleasant, restless kind of sleep that makes it hard to wake up even when I want to, and that always blows my mood. Feeling trapped in sleep.

And it feels a lot like a life and death struggle as well. That’s probably because of my untreated sleep apnea. I am fighting for my life because I am fighting for air.

Oh, I had an interesting dream. I dreamed that I was in a doctor’s office and a young, handsome doctor was telling me that he could fix my knee, despite what I had been told. The procedure sounded long and unpleasant, so I was dithering about it, wondering if my relatively minor knee problem warranted such an extreme intervention.

That’s all I remember of it. Intriguing though. The doctor was a lot like the sexy British doctor from The Mindy Project, which I started watching Season Three of only recently. So clearly my mind used him, even though he’s actually an OB/GYN.

But the idea that my knee could be fixed must stand in for something. Perhaps my mind. I would love to find out that my mind could be fixed (like, say, with a magic pill). I would love to make the fog go away to stay.

I would worry what else it was doing to my brain, but it would still be a risk I was prepared to take.

Hopefully, later on I will feel up to getting that Kwantlen thing going. I can’t wait to have something to focus on that actually gets me ahead in this world. Even if it’s just three courses, it will be good to have some structure back in my life.

I fall apart without it.

Right now, I think I am going to lay down for a bit. I think I need a few more winks of sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.