No idea what I want to talk about today, so let’s just check out where I am in life right now.

Let’s see. I am doing fairly well with the CPAP machine. Been through several waves of resistance to using it lately. These will get smaller over time if I just maintain firm pressure towards greater discipline.

Right now, I would say I am something like 70 percent compliant. In other words, I use my CPAP machine for around 70 percent of the time I am asleep.

One odd phenomenon has cropped up. I will sleep with the CPAP machine on, and wake up feeling rested, but only from the neck down, so to speak. My eyes are still tired and I feel a little lightheaded and dizzy.

My current working theory (of course I have a theory) is that while my lungs are happy with being CPAP’d, my face muscles are still adjusting to my sleeping with this thing (the CPAP mask) on my face.

Plus, there is no guarantee that the machine is curing my sleep apnea one hundred percent. According to the data I got from my last trip to the sleep store, I am still having four sleep apnea “events” per hour. That’s a whole lot better than the seventeen per hour I was having before the CPAP, but it’s still not a one hundred percent cure.

Then again, that was before the pressure increase. Maybe I’m down to three per hour now.

Anyhow, part of me is still resisting putting on the mask “just to sleep”. It seems absurd, at least to the more primitive parts of me, to strap on a plastic mask just to sleep, and that part of me resents it and tries to convince me to skip it “just this once”. And about thirty percent of the time, it does.

But my will is iron, and I will overcome this incarnation of The Jagoff. God, I hate that asshole.

What else…. well, I am still on track for Kwantlen, of course. I have made some progress towards finding funding. At the very least, there seems to be some federal money I can access. There’s $250 per month of study for disabled people, and there’s money for students from low income families, and well, I am my own family, more or less, and very low income.

$11K a year, folks. It’s not a lot.

Unfortunately, for the disability money, I am going to have to jump through hoops to prove I am disabled. Apparently, the fact that the BC government thinks I am disabled is not good enough for the Feds. And that will be a pain because it’s not something I can just fill out online. I will have to get a hard copy and get my therapist to fill it out. Which is a drag.

The real problem is that I can only tackle this stuff in occasional bursts of activity. Otherwise, I get too stressed. This, despite the fact that I know I can handle it, at least the parts that just involve filling out forms online.

I still have trouble dealing with reality.

Plus, all the Google fu required just to find this damned information really stresses me out. I am just not cut out for research. I get too frustrated when I can’t find what I want.

I have had this issue with frustration for my entire life. Like I have mentioned before, I got away with a lot of not doing what the other students had to do because I was so damned stubborn. I would get frustrated when trying to do anything like arts or crafts, and then I would refuse to keep trying, and I don’t need to tell you (but I will), that’s not a great approach to life.

Come to think of it, it was frustration, but it was also anxiety. I suppose they can be the same thing sometimes. I would be trying to do what everyone else was doing, but because of my motor-sensory issues, I would not be able to do the simplest part of it, and I would feel like a loser and an idiot and that everyone was staring at me and judging me.

That anxiety – the feeling that I just can’t work reality right – is with me to this day. I get very anxious when anything involving competently handling the physical comes up.

This is an enormous issue. I have done myself no favours by avoiding anything that involves using your hands for anything but typing and using the mouse. It’s one thing to be too clumsy for sports, but being too clumsy for life? Not good.

But that might just be my depression talking. That, and some very old tapes from my childhood. Realistically speaking, I am physically competent enough for a lot of stuff. I would do fine with office work of any sort. I am fully capable of manning a cash register or a copier. I am sure I could flip burgers and work french fry machine.

So the bizarre disconnect between my eyes and my hands is not nearly as debilitating as I sometimes feel like it is. It’s not like the ability to glue glitter to construction paper is in high demand. There are a lot of jobs I could do perfectly well, if I could actually get the job.

But that’s another issue.

So maybe I need to ease back on my feelings of incompetence. I am competent enough for modern life. Maybe I couldn’t do some manual labour jobs and I will never be a master of the visual arts, but I am already a master of words, so if I was good at drawing too, that just wouldn’t be fair, would it?

Not that I would turn it down if offered. If I could take a pill and become very good at drawing, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Because then I could write and draw comics!

And some of them wouldn’t even be porn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, we’ll get this out of the way.

Cool video. Weird to see Stipes act all anchormanly.

Anyhow, yeah, it’s been a bad day, and yes, this blog entry will be dedicated to me bitching about it.

It started when I was looking for flog fuel^[1] this morning when suddenly I get this screen popping up telling me that I have been caught viewing, storing, or distributing pornography that features stuff that is illegal in Canada (which could be anything from hardcore BDSM to bestiality to pedophilia or really, anything that’s too ‘weird’ for Canada) and that my device would be blocked because of that, and that CSIS was coming for me, and etc whatever.

I imagine that someone less savvy would be flat out terrified by that, and I feel bad for those people, because they would fall victim to this obvious scam, and maybe even live the rest of their lives in fear of every knock at their door.

Luckily, I’m so sharp I can split infinitives with my mind, so to me it was obviously a scam. All the “information” they had on me, like my IP address and what kind of tablet I was using, is information you can get easily on anybody just from their IP.

That’s how ads these days know how to target your country, or freak you out a little by saying “we have hot girls looking to have sex with you in (name of your town)”.

Sorry dear…. wrong merchandise.

Oh, and it even had a randomly generated “CSIS Case Number” to make it seem all official like.

But it was clearly a scam not just because of the bullshit listed above but because they asked for money. And they had the gall to say that you would be paying a fine you’d incurred for being so pervy (honey, you have NO idea) and by paying that fine, they would, in essence, let you off with a warning.

AWOOOGAH. Bullshit detected! That is not how either law or government works. If anyone ever suggests you pay them in order to get off with a warning, they are not legitimate law enforcement and you don’t have to give them a goddamned thing. If a cop writes you a ticket, that’s it, you get the ticket, it goes on your record, you lose points on your driver’s license, and you have to pay the fine… at the courthouse.

Otherwise, that’s someone shaking you down for a bribe.

Presumably, the scammers hope that you will be so full of guilt and fear that you will pay them and consider yourself lucky. But I am too skilled a smartass to fear them and as for guilt, I was not raised in any kind of religion and seeing as all I was doing was reading text files, I feel absolutely no guilt about the content of any of them.

It’s just text, people.

Oh, and the final tipoff that it’s a total scam : they wanted payment not via VISA or Mastercard or even PayPal (all of which have a paper trail) but by one of these traceless transactions that only require a 19 digit PIN.

Sadly, their ability to turn my beloved tablet into a useless brick is no fantasy. Right now, it’s just a device for showing their message and that is it. Can’t load anything and rebooting does nothing to stop that.

So I will have to research how to un-brick it. I’m sure there’s a way.

After that, I went to my pharmacy to pick up some meds and some alcohol swabs for my insulin injections, only to discover it was closed. And at first I was all “Whuuuuuuut?” but then I remember it was a stat holiday today, one I call “So We’ll Have A Long Weekend In August Day”.

Well fuck. Luckily, slightly more than a block away from that pharmacy is a Shopper’s, and they are a major corporation and therefore not inclined to do bullshit things like close on stat holidays like people just don’t get sick then.

So I walked there, handed in my Rx, and sat down to wait for them to fill it. No problem, I thought, I brought my tablet along so I could entertain myself…..

Yup. It was THAT tablet.

Do’h. So all I could do was sit there and wait. And while waiting, I was briefly targeted by one of my social anxiety’s archnemeses : the friendly retarded guy.

That’s a double whammy for me, because I generally don’t want my bubble of anonymity shattered when out in public anyhow, no matter who it is, but especially not by… well…

Retarded people freak me out. I am not proud of this, nor do I think it is in any way morally justified. They didn’t ask to be how they are any more than I did. They have as much right to be treated with respect as anyone else.

It’s me, not them.

But look at it this way : I have issues relating to people of normal intelligence, and get freaked out taking to them.

Luckily, he only said a few words to me. I was terrified he’d latch onto me. Again, not proud.

And then the lineup at Shopper’s was HUGE, and who was right ahead of me in line? The friendly retarded guy. Luckily, he was too busy with what was, for him, the clearly tricky business of paying for his things to notice me.

Then I went to White Spot, ordered a BC Chicken Burger, and it was way too juicy. I had to wring it out onto my plate before each bite or it would have soaked me in its drippings.

As it was, it still got me a few times, so I got to walk home with stains on my T-shirt anyhow.

So yeah. Not a great day. Tablet bricked, pharmacy closed, wrong tablet, stains on shirt.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.