Sorry, no “Silence” today either. I am not quite sure what happens next. Tomorrow, probably.

Plus I have news to relate.

Late last night, the sky over the oil fields of Yemen….

Just kidding. Not that kind of news. Personal stuff. Yesterday, I went to my friend Garth Spencer’s yard sale (which did not occur in a yard, but in his apartment), expecting nothing more than to buy a few books from him as a show of support.

He always has very cool books.

But lo and behold, he had an Android table three times the size of my current one for sale, and I bought it off him for $30, which I can’t really spare (this being a 5 week month… grr) but how could I resist?

Meh. So I will get $40 off my card to compensate. No big whoop.

And wow, do things look nice on it. There is something about making the picture bigger, whether it’s a tablet, a monitor, or a television, that just makes your eyes happy. That’s why the entire history of television has revolved around bigger screens.

And it’s an Android device, so I already know the operating system. It’s not the same “flavour” of Android, so some things have different names or icons or both, and some things are in different places, and a few things look a fair bit different, but all in all, it’s pretty much the same.

The problem is that it seems to be fairly buggy. Sadface. A lot of the games I play on the little one, the Galaxy Tab 2, crash on the big one. And some I can’t even download because it says they are “not compatible with this device”.

I assume that means that they are not designed to handle the device’s aspect ratio, or somesuch. How very irritating.

So it might turn out that I keep playing games on the little one, which would be a terrible bummer. I am hoping that I just need to upgrade the OS or something. If not, well, I will end up only using the big one for watching video or typing.

And that would truly suck.

I can only call it “the device” for now because I have no idea what it is truly called. I know it’s an Android device of Samsung’s Galaxy line, but other than that, I dunno.

One nice thing is that it has more storage. The little one has 4.5 gigs of on board storage, the big one has 13. Still not enough to put my mp3 collection on, but still. Nice!

And my mp3 collection is on an SD card anyhow (as well as my HD), so if I can find an SD port on Big Boy, all I have to do is take the tiny SD card out of one and stick it in the other.

So far, I have not been able to find an SD port on Big Boy, but I am not all that good at finding. It could be right there and I would miss it. My sensory filters are extraordinary that way. Very little gets through!

It’s a wonder I don’t bump into things all the time. I guess just enough gets through.

Oh, and about today’s blog entry title : I have been getting that “life is a long dark never ending silent corridor” feeling again lately. I have a hard time finding value in my life. I feel like all I do is tread water. I survive, but I do not thrive.

Not even a little.

And for me, what is now growth is death. The concept of progress is writ with a heavy hand upon my soul, and so for me, there is no such thing as stasis.

Only health, and decay.

And lately I feel quite rotted. I feel like I am someone who finds their cage increasingly intolerable but does not yet have the ability to escape. This creates the pressure that will eventually lead to progress, but in the meantime, I feel futile.

And yet I know I am not. I know my life has momentum separate from my own will now. Stand Up For Mental Health in mid-May, Associate’s in Creative Writing from Kwantlen starting in the fall.

But still, I feel pointless. Adrift. Meaningless. I suppose the demon Depression and its ability to prevent pleasure will keep me from truly believing either of those things are real before I have done them. They are just mirages on the horizon for me right now, nice to think about, but not truly real.

I was talking with Felicity lately about how depression makes long term planning so hard. The fact is, depression makes it very hard to believe in the future. It saps your self-esteem and mental stability, making it hard to believe in your ability to get your shit together long enough to accomplish anything. It fills you with pain that makes it hard to think about anything besides merely surviving the day.

And it robs you of the pleasure of progress that keeps a healthy person motivated to keep working toward the long term goal. A healthy person gets pleasure from getting a little closer to their goal. But the demon depression’s cruelest servant, a Miss Ann Hedonia, ensures that these small pleasures never reach us.

In fact, a lot of small pleasures don’t reach us.

People talk a lot about “motivation” and “tricks” to motivate yourself to do A or B. But it’s not about motivation, willpower, or whatever else you want to call it.

It’s about pleasure, pure and simple. The person who gets in shape and loses all the weight is someone who gets enough pleasure of progress to keep them going. It is that simple.

I think people would a lot better off forgetting all about willpower and motivation and concentrating instead on finding all the pleasure they can in every little thing that leads towards their goal.

After all, if you are looking for motivation to do something, that means you already want to do it.

So what’s the problem?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.