Keep forgetting to post my videos to here. Time to fix that.

When last we did this thing, it was for this vid :

Like all my attempts to provoke, it didn’t. But I don’t mind. I am still not entirely comfortable with that side of my personality, anyway. I want to make people think, which is the basic function of the trickster. I want to wake people up and get them to think about what they believe and why.

On the other hand, I don’t want to upset them or hurt them. Hence the quandary.

My original vision for that video was way, way more obnoxious. No apologia, no backtracking, no switching into polite academic mode. Just declare myself smarter than the viewer and dare them to prove me wrong. Needle people into responding.

So basically, I would have trolled people. What can I say, I am desperate for validation, and negative attention is still attention. I just want to be noticed.

But clearly, I am not actually capable of being that obnoxious. Not against an unknown target, anyhow.

Give me an obnoxious right winger to attack, and watch the fuck out.

Especially if they are a Stephen Harper supporter.

Next, we have this highly appropriate topic :

Now I am not claiming that following the advice in that video will be easy. It won’t, it will be very hard. Part of us will always resist growing up and learning to truly accept our own role in what happens to us. We all spend 12 years of our lives in a world divided into two parts : school, where all you had to do is do what you were told, and all the planning for your future was done for you.

And everything else was play. All you had to do was amuse yourself. Even the school day had lunch and recess set aside specifically so you could go play.

And people keep that exact attitude when they grow into adulthood. But in adulthood, your future depends on you. It’s not all plotted out for you any more. And that means that you will be called upon to do things you don’t want to do and which nobody is forcing you to do.

That’s where people get stuck. A child doesn’t have to think of their future self. Adults do. Either that, or they have to accept that they have chosen the life they are leading.

Next we have the revival of this fine tradition :

The Sarcastic Slideshow! As you can see, I sampled Uptown Funk for the background music. The sampling isn’t quite perfect, which bugs me, but for whatever reason, I could not make that tiny pause disappear. I set my video editor to maximum magnification and shaved tiny tiny bits off the sample, but it was still there.

What I should have done was take the sample into a sound editing program and looped it there. Oh well, I will know that going into the future. It’s all a learning process.

Then I stuck my toe in the warm waters of sample based music once more, and came up with this :

Meh. It’s not awful, but it’s not exactly inspiring. Ends a little too abruptly too.

When it comes to music, I find it hard to find inspiration. Or maybe motivation. I have all kinds of music in my head, but I lack the skills and knowledge to turn that into reality.

So I end up just trawling through my collection of samples for inspiration, and while that can work, the results almost always end up disappointing me.

I wish I could read and write music.

Then there’s this thing :

From what I gather, this fridge food theft is a widespread problem. Not for me, of course, because I’m an unemployable drain on society and we buy groceries communally in this household, but still. There’s a lot of human suffering and confusion being caused by this seemingly baffling case of rampant disregard for people’s property.

I have had a chance to think about the problem a little more since I recorded that video, and I think I have a partial solution for those who, for whatever reason, don’t like the camera idea.

According to recent research, all you have to do is draw two eyes on the fridge door. Just the feeling of being watched tends to make people a lot more honest. It doesn’t matter that it’s just two googly eyes on a fridge door (two more inside would be good, too), it activates that part of our brain that tells us we are being watched and that makes us less likely to try to get away with something that we know will bring consequences.

Makes me wonder if we should paint giant pairs of eyes all over Wall Street.

Finally, there’s last night’s video :

I know that I am treading on dangerous ground by addressing this issue at all, let alone poking at the presumptions around it, but that’s just the kind of person I am. The more taboo something is, the more interesting it becomes because the bigger the taboo, the more likely it is that it is full of unexamined assumptions.

And part of my function in life seems to be to think about the things nobody else wants to think about.

Since recording that, it has occurred to me that there is another biological basis for determining age of consent/majority, but people would not like it very much : brain growth.

See, our brains don’t stop growing until we are around 25 years old. That’s why the 18-25 age bracket does all the crazy shit they do. They are full of hormones and the urge to explore, but their brain isn’t quite there yet. Hence their inability to think out the long term consequences of their actions.

So really, it would totally make sense to make 25 the new, rational age of majority. The age of reason, even.

Have fun convincing people of that, though.

I will talk talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been such a child for so long.

The non-incident at comedy class yesterday illustrated that. I really thought, in the back of my mind , that my joke would go over like gangbusters and everyone would see how funny and talented I am.

Like somehow, the things that limit others don’t apply to me. Sure, other people should not expect everything to go perfectly on their very first day when the whole point of the class is to learn to do it, but surely that doesn’t apply to me.

After all, I’m super talented!

And I can see what is going on there. I am still looking for that situation I had when I was anbsp; kid, where being bright got me a steady flow of opportunities to show off how smart I was and get approval in the form of high marks and being a very lazy sort of teacher’s pet.

And the thing is, all that shit was effortless to me. Math, history, science, English… Total breeze.

But the cracks were already showing even in my elementary years because I reacted very badly to the things that did NOT come naturally to me. Things like arts and crafts, gym, or anything else requiring physical adroitness instead of mental was met with massive resistance. I was a hellaciously stubborn kid who knew seemingly from birth that authority was arbitrary and required a heck of a lot of cooperation from those it is imposed upon. Cooperation I was free to withhold if I didn’t like what was going on.

So nobody could make me do anything. And the worst thing was, emI got away with it. /em

When I look back at those days, it is amazing the crap I got away with. I acted exactly like the rules did not apply to me, and the truth is, they didn’t. My brilliance, stubbornness, and unusual view of authority meant Inbsp; could, metaphorically speaking, get away with murder.

And that’s the situation some part of me is still looking for : praise and approval for doing things that require no effort, and free to refuse to do anything I don’t feel like doing.

Not gonna happen. To put it mildly.

I’m an adult now, and that means that I have to learn to accept that, in the real world, you can’t get by on just your magical specialness. The classroom is never coming back. The same rules that everyone else has to follow apply to me as well, and that means that, just like everybody else, I will have to learn to stick with things that do not come naturally to me and work on them until I am good enough.

It is better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all.

More when I get home.

(—)

Life will always be work.

Nobody is so naturally gifted that they can make all their dreams come true without having to do anything they don’t feel like doing ever. Even the most talented people in any given field have to work at it. They have to do their work whether they feel like it or not. They have to invest effort and endurance into things which may never pay off. They have to settle for net gain via compromise rather than full gain without compromise. They have to accept trade-offs.

In other words, they have to grow the fuck up.

It’s not like all this effort hoarding does anyone any good, anyhow. It’s not like when you need to put an effort in to something, you have so much effort stored up that you could move mountains and barely break a sweat.

Instead, you get weaker and weaker from the total lack of exercise of your will. Your world gets worse and worse because even simple things are hard when you have let your muscles atrophy completely.

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if some forms of depression are simply the result of a tragic lack of growth. Arrested development. Somewhere along the way, the psyche did not get the psychological nutrients it needed to complete a growth spurt, and as a result, stopped development right then and there.

In essence, these forms of depression are rooted in a lack of growing up.

I am not ignorant of the potential for that kind of statement to seriously piss people off. For some people, telling a depressive they need to grow the fuck up sounds an awful lot like blaming the victim.

But it’s not. It’s suggesting that there is something the victim can do to escape their victimhood. Whether or not it’s pleasant to hear, it’s the truth, and if it makes you really fucking angry to hear it, ask yourself why.

The truth hurts like a bitch sometimes, but it’s the only thing that will truly set you free. Face the music, pay the fine, and get the fuck on with your life.

Build strength. Gain vitality. Make a life for yourself. Go find your happiness and be willing to do what it takes to get it. Stop being a filter-feeder (what imagery), stuck in one place and only getting what nutrients happen to float by.

I just figured it out : I keep slipping into the second person because that way, I can lecture myself.

Face the chorus of fear and the clamorous clanging of alarm bells in your head and know that by opposing, you can end them. Stand tall, do not waver, and they will die away when it is clear they will not get their way.

And the more often you do that, the less hold these fears and compulsions will have over you. Overcome yourself. Know that the real you is capable and strong and fierce, and perfectly capable of breaking through all those bonds that have been holding you back and making you think you are weak when you are anything but.

You’re as strong as you want to be.

Or would you rather keep pretending to be weak?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.