Daily Archives: April 3, 2015

Skimming the overflow

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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.

Turtles and me

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Just finished watching Turtle Power : The Definitive History Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a documentary about the whole Turtles thing, from how Eastman and Laird met to the day they signed the rights away twenty years after the first issue.

They met because Eastman found a copy of a fan comic Laird had been doing called Scat (interesting title) and decided he wanted to meet the guy behind it. They hit it off instantly and, after a lot of time spent drawing and watching TV together, they came up with the Turtles, made the first comic, and borrowed money from relatives to get 3000 copies printed.

And it took off like a rocket from there. The 3000 copies sold out in a few week. By issue 8 they were selling 150 thousand copies per ish, six ishes a year.

Then came the toys, the cartoon, the three movies, and the live tour. (Yes, a live tour. In which they were rock stars and sang pro-social rock and roll. That still amazes me. )

The movies were, sadly, of descending quality according to fans and the box office. The phenomenon peaked with the first movie. Sadly, nothing aimed at kids can have a long life, as the N’syncs and Justin Biebers of the world know. The second movie was so ill-received that the third had no chance to make it. After that, things dropped off pretty fast.

But of course, nothing that was that big dies out completely. Now fathers are introducing their kids to TMNT, and they attempt to reboot the franchise now and then.

The less said about the Michael Bay movies, the better.

I really enjoyed the documentary. I love finding out all the details about something I like. Anything about how the sausage is made in the media is fascinating to me. And I was a Turtles fan at the time… sort of.

I was too old for the cartoon when it was on. Plus, I had the disadvantage of having been a fan of the comics. To me, at the time, with the snottiness of youth, I thought the cartoon was a farcical demoting of dark, complex, interesting characters into pathetically tamed down goofy kid’s stuff.

People forget that the original comic was not for kids.

So while I was somewhat aware of the massive phenomenon that was TNMT in the 90’s, I was not a part of it. So I had no idea, before I saw this documentary, just how massive it was.

I mean there’s big, and then there’s BIG.

What really got to me was the testimonials from people who were kids at the time. They talked about how, all at once, every kid was into TNMT. It hit that fast. There was something about the Turtles that instantly appealed to kids and the fact that the people involved did an extremely good job of marketing them didn’t hurt either.

As someone who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, I can’t say I have ever seen someone catch on that big. Sure, there were big hits like He-Man, but never to the point where entire classrooms were filled with wall-to-wall He-Man fans.

Some people would be into He-Man, some into G. I. Joe, some into Thundercats… it was a diverse social environment.

So I find it hard to relate to this massive cultural phenom. It really feels like the Turtles were the exact right thing at the exact right time. The days of He-Man were just ending, and the kids were ready for something completely different. Something a little more mature, a little more cool, a little more edgy. Something a little less obvious, that talked down to them a little less, and that had that magic “boy band” formula of “four people with different but relatable personalities”.

For historical context, think of the Beatles.

You have The Nerd (Donatello), the Bad Boy (Raphael), the Good Boy (Leonardo), and the Party Animal (Michelangelo). Between those four, you pretty much have most kids covered.

Luckily for me, because I was not a kid during the TNMT explosion, I was never asked to pick a favorite Turtle. I honestly don’t know. Parts of me resonate with each of them.

In the comics, I liked Raphael because he was the dark moody one and I was still in my Wolverine phase where I was attracted to that kind of character. Seeing as I was a teenage boy when I read the comics, I too was moody and dark and would have been the one to rebel against authority if anyone had been trying to assert it over me, and so I loved characters that reflected that.

I mean, my other big hero (and always my A #1 dude till the end of time) was Spider-Man, and he’s not exactly a “joiner” either.

The difference, of course, is that I grew out of it. Now I can’t stand prima donna assholes like that who act like their emotions mean they don’t have to control themselves like everybody else does. Just having these people around makes everything more difficult and time-consuming and just way more of a hassle than it needs to be, and one begins to wonder whether it is worth having them around at all.

Luckily, cartoon Raphael is a lot more like me. Basically, I see myself as being part Raph and part Donatello… a sarcastic nerd. I admire Leo for being a leader and keeping things together but I don’t really identify with me.

And Mike is an idiot and annoying and I often want to smack him. Seriously, Michelangelo… STFU. You’re a dumbass!

I get the concept that his function is to keep things from getting too dark and being sort of the jester of the group, but I am not feeling it. Raph is funny. He’s my kind of court jester.

Then against, I have never liked clowns.

Anyhoo, I really enjoyed the documentary and highly recommend it to everyone who was even slightly a fan of any of the versions of the Turtles. Even the Michael Bay ones.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.