Here I am, starting a blog entry with “here I am” again. This time, your intrepid reporter is waiting in line at the ICBC licensing office, waiting to grt my precious photo ID reissued.

I got my birth certificate yesterday, and today, I will finally legally exist again. I will be too busy tomorrow to get anything done, so it will be Wednesday or Thursday before I can get to VanCityto open my account there and get a void cheque.

Then it is over to (weirdly enough) the local postal outlet to get my student loan. Then I will be able to pay Kwantlen what I owe, buy book, and hopefully have enough left over to get a new tablet and a decent pair of shoes.

Oh, and to pay back Joe for the loan I needed so I could get this damned ID before Xmas, Or more importantly, Vcon.

As usual, it feels like the convention snuck up on me. I think the fact that it starts on the second day of October contributes to that. We tend to naturally think in exusting units of time, and so there is a natural mental barrier keeping people from thinking about what is in the next unit.

(—)

Well, the good news is that my number came up, I went through the process successfully, and I am now done.

The bad news is, I ain’t got no ID card.

Not yet, anyhow. It will be three to four fucking weeks and arrive by mail. And I cannot wait that long. The university needs their money ASAP and I don’t know how much longer these shoes will last. So I am stuck trying to get a bank account without ID, then get the student loan deposited into that account withput any photo ID.

It is that second one that worries. Banks I can count on to be greedy for new customers.
  j
I think I will go check out the food court here, or maybe walk to White Spot.

I can’t really afford it, but I really need to activate the reward center of my brain.

(—)

I am in the food court now, eating my veggie laden six inch Cold Cut Combo. It probably won’t fill me up, but it will get me home.

See, I didn’t know it would take so long to get the ID because the last time, it didn’t. They printed it out right there. It was still warm from the printer when I put it in my wallet. But apparently, that was too fucking convenient.

I mean, I guess I am happy to have gotten the process started. But for my immediate needs, it is woefully inadequate. I asked the very nice Japanese lady who served me if there was any way to speed it up – because at this point, I would be more than willing to pay for faster service – but no.

Well, I am done eating. Time to go home.  Hope I make it there before I go crazy.

Against bureaucracy, the gods themselves struggle in vain.

(—)

Now, I am waiting for the 405 on Three Road. This is my most geographically diverse blog entry ever!

I am near Three Road and Lansdowne. A lot of people waiting! It IS the tail end of the 9 to 5 rush, after all. And that rush is a lot bigger than I would have thought, because it turn out everything in Lansdowne Mall closes at six.

That’s right, SIX. PM! That is batshit fucking insane. Why close when people are just getting off work? For that matter, why only be open during business hours? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Are these people afraid of money?

Damn it is cold in the shade today. Stupid me for not wearing my jacket. But it looked so nice and sunny! These are the deceptive days of fall, where if ypu took a picture, it would look like a picture of a perfect summer day.

But it is actually way colder than that. Hence my summer clothing leaving me cold. I wish the bus would show up already. I have seen two 403’s and FOUR 410’s, but no 405. So here I shiver.

Never thought I would ever have this much resentment for shade.

Honextly, I could have walked home twice by now. But now, if I leave, the bus wins.

It’s not easy being male.

(—)

And now I am home. Phew.

Not bad, I did 730 of my words on the road. This using writing as a way to relax myself in times of stress has a lot of promise to it. It helps me sleep, helps me deal with depressing life events, and even helps me sort out all the tangled wiring in my head and replace it with nice clean simple circuitry.

It’s like I’m going from transistors to microchip all up in la cabesa del frufru

I am going to try to find a way to receive my student loan sans bank account. If I could have it just show up on my prepaid visa, that would be mega awesome.

Heck, I could probably settle my debt with Kwantlen online that way. Fine by me. But I don’t know if you can get transit numbers for a credit card. And that’s what the void check is for.

So I may end up having to turn on my “lovably helpless” charm at Van City and try to get a bank account without primary ID. And then turn it up to 11 when I have to convince some hapless postal outlet worker to let my loan through without primary ID.

This quest for identity is proving to me quite the existential quandary.

I exist enough for the government of BC to give me $947 a month. I exist enough for Money Mart to cash those checks. I even exist enough to pay sales tax and to enlist in the military.

But until that fucking thing arrives in the mail, I don’t exist enough for a student loan.

Or rather, to collect the damned thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am beginning to have some doubts about my Friday Psych 1100 class.

We are going through so much material so fast that I can’t possibly keep up, and I am super good at that. It seems the breakneck pace of last week’s case is the norm. And if I am have trouble keeping up… what about the kids?

Now, admittedly, the reason I can’t keep up is that I am taking notes. I am taking notes because she has told us again and again. that not everything we’ll be tested on will be on the slides or in the text. And she’s made good on that. Most of what she tells us is not on the slides.

It might be in the text, I don’t know yet, I don’t have the text yet. I sure hope so.

The other reason I am madly taking notes is that I usually make notes of things which I find interesting and this is psych, so it is all interesting to me. I doubled my knowledge of the brain today. But the information came at a blistering speed.

She told us that if we thought she was going too fast, we should tell her. At the time I scoffed internally. Master Student Moi, thinking someone was going too fast? Usually the problem is the exact opposite, and teachers that others think are going too fast are barely interesting to me.

Bt Holy Hannah she goes fast. And this is meant to be an introductory course. There is no lower level Psych course at Kwantlen than Psych 1100. We are supposed to be learning about basic psychological processes.

Instead, we seem to be getting a hyper-accelerated course in how to do research psychology. I have no desire to ever do research psychology. If I pursue psychology as a career, it will be as a counsellor. I want to help people directly. I want to be the light in the darkness for people who desperately need it.

I am not looking to ever work in a lab. When it comes to science, I am a theorist only.

And I can’t help thinking that, as utterly adorkable and loveable as she is, she might not be the person to be handling 19 year olds. She is going at her speed, not ours, and I am worried that the other students are getting freaked out like I am about the sheer amount of info she flings at us at top speed.

I bet that, like me, a lot of my fellow students are wondering how much of this stuff is going to be on the test. Actually, I am wondering how much of this stuff can possibly be on the test without the test being twenty pages long. The prof has assured us that the test will be multiple choice, but multiple choice can be brutal if designed that way, and she seems like the sort of person who, in all innocence and completely without malice, would want to give us “interesting” problems that tested us on as much of the material as possible.

And then there was today’s mock peer review exercise. That was a nightmare.

The idea was that we were given a short bit of psychology type writing and use her “rubric” (a word she has never explained but uses all the time, along with “heuristic”) to rate the writing.

But here’s the thing. I am not good at turning my impressions of something into quantifiable terms. If the task was simply “read this and write an analysis of it”, I would do that happily, and the analysis would be deep, thorough, thoughtful, insightful, and unique in perspective.

But ask me to rate the piece of writing on a scale of 1 to 5 on vague criterion as “accuracy” and “cohesion”, and I am totally lost at sea. Especially when I have only three minutes to do it, and the countdown timer is right there on the screen.

I do not do well with short visible time limits. Like I have said a million times before, I don’t do sudden well. I think fast in many ways but not in the sense of being able to make complex decisions in the heat of the moment. I need time to sift through the facts and put them into some kind of functional structure before I can make any sort of rational decision about it.

And I only do rational decisions. That is both my gift and my handicap.

Perhaps I just think about these things too hard. I don’t know. Maybe the rest of the class is doing fine and I am the old fat slow dude now who needs everything slowed down for him.

But I don’t think so. I think she is going way too fast. And that can only mean one thing : it will be up to me to tell her. I am certain none of these “excellent sheep” kids are going to do it. Who wants to volunteer to be the person who risks looking like a moron to the prof by saying the class is going too fast for them?

From what I have read, the kids these days don’t have that kind of backbone. Seeing as, so far, I tend to be the only person in my classes who asks questions and one of the few that answers them, I am inclined to believe this is true.

Then again, it was the same back in UPEI. Maybe I am just bolder than the average student and, and this is the important part, I have way less fear of being singled out and separated from the comfort of the herd.

Plus, of course, I am a total ham and I love attention. That has to figure in somewhere as well.

Anyhow, I am going to give myself some time to think about it, and decide whether I should email her about the speed issue. She is going crazy fast for a low level course.

I mean, I know she’s very enthusiastic about her favorite subjects, and I love that about her, but that doesn’t mean she can do what I would be tempted do in her place, which is run through the subjects at the speed of my love of the subject matter.

I would be tempted, but I wouldn’t do it, because I have sufficient theory of mind to know that people learning something need a radically slower speed than those who already know it.

Seems my psych prof does not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sounds pretty butch, no? But alas, that’s not the sense in which I mean those words.

What I am going to talk about today is along the lines of the thoughts on superstition I have had before, but expanding on that delicate barrier between what we think might happen and what we “know” WILL happen.

I have touched on this subject before when I talked about why we lock our doors. Briefly, we do that because we feel like if we don’t lock our doors when we leave, a burglar will come and steal all of our valuable stuff.

You could say “If you don’t lock your door, a burglar will get in” to any audience at all and everyone will nod affirmatively. Same goes for locking your car. The relationship is clear : action A will result in consequence B.

But it is by no means that certain. Sure, if you leave your house or car unlocked, someone might break in and steal your stuff (or the whole damned car), but the actual odds of it are pretty low.

And if you point this out to people, they will grudgingly admit that yes, it’s a risk, not a certainty. But it will make them uncomfortable and they won’t want to dwell on the subject. And odds are, they will go right on thinking of it as a certainty.

Why? What leads to this fundamental malfunction in reasoning?

That’s our starting point, but what I really want to talk about today is how this odd malfunction maps to differences in personality. Specifically, the “carefree/careless” versus “worried/careful” axis.

This could also be seen as the old optimism versus pessimism axis, but that doesn’t really do it justice. However, it provides a useful pair of words, so I will use that axis when I talk about this subject below.

Perhaps the real definition of a pessimist is “someone who sees negative possibilities as certainties”, and their level of pessimism corresponds exactly with both the number of those things they see as virtual certainties and the distance between possibility and certainty in their minds.

This would suggest that some people would be far more prone to things like phobias, anxiety, and ultimately depression. The tendency to see negatives as certainties (and positives as untrustworthy) creates a worldview in which the world is full of horrifying certainties and the best you can hope for is to manage to avoid the myriad disasters that surround them at all times, waiting for us to drop our guard so they can strike.

This is clearly an unwarranted and damaging distortion of reality and one that requires a belief that the world is basically malign and “out to get you”.

But it can’t be out to get you, because it isn’t a person. In order to have ill intent, the universe would need a mind, a personality, and emotions. That requires it to have some level of sentience. And it just plain doesn’t.

At least, for us nontheists. The religious are free to think God (by whatever name) has it out for them. One of the main functions of theistic religion is to provide someone to get mad at when things go wrong.

But if you do not believe in some version of God, that you can’t think the world is out to get you. Or that it loves you, either.

And yet many people who do not consider themselves religious nevertheless go around with these negative delusions without giving them a second thought. Superstition, it seems, is inevitable and therefore unavoidable.

Personally, I would rather have positive delusions that my current negative ones. At least then I would happy. And my error rate would remain around the same.

On the brain level, one could say that negative/depressed people make negative neuronal patterns more readily than positive. Some part of their mind makes this determination, and it is that part which is fundamentally broken in pessimists and their outliers, the depressed and the down.

In realtime, the subjective experience of this malfunction is in interpretation, as demonstrated by the whole “glass half empty/ half full” metaphor. Two individuals react differently to the exact same stimulus, and the key is in how they interpret it.

This difference might seem trivial when looking at a glass of water, but they become extremely significant when looking at relationships, interactions, and life in general. Indeed, if two people can come away from the exact same experience with radically different interpretations, one of which leads to misery, then the difference is extremely significant.

So if you know you have negative bias to your perceptions, how do you change that?

The first step is, I think, to learn to withhold judgment. When you feel yourself going down the negative spiral, stop yourself and simply withhold judgment for a moment. Try to work your way back to what is triggering the negative spiral (the one that starts at “I just spilled the milk” and ends with “I am a horrible, horrible person and I don’t deserve to live”) and try to put it in perspective. Is it really that bad? Can you say for sure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to “normal” people? Are you judging yourself the way you would judge someone else who did that?

By withholding judgment instead of trying to insert the opposite judgment, you avoid having to fight the basic grain of a negative personality. Maybe you will reach the exact same conclusion as you were about to make before you took a time out. Maybe you won’t. You aren’t trying to convince yourself that a bad thing is good.

You’re just saying that might not be quite as bad as you thought it was.

This is a cognitive solution, and cognitive solutions aren’t easy. They take a lot of effort in monitoring your own thought processes so you can stop the negative ones and insert better ones in their place.

But over time, you can rewrite old patterns with new, and before you know it, you will at least be at neutral.

And for those of us who have been lost in our own shadows for a long long time, neutral would be a victory.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well that was seriously fucking depressing. I don’t know what to do with all the anger and humiliation and self-loathing I am feeling right now. I hope I can calm myself down.

Well, when it doubt, blog it out.

I just came back from what turned out to be a very brief Ideology and Politics class. Brief, because it was only when I got there that I realized that I had completely forgotten to do the assignment due today.

I told the prof, and she said that well, that was all we were working on today so I might as well go home. I even offered to help the “odd man out” by peer reviewing HIS assignment, but the prof seemed to think that poor dude was better off hoping someone else would show up late than getting help from me.

I’m telling you, I am liking her less and less. She was totally unsympathetic to me. That’s fair enough but the way she talks, it makes her sound sweet and kind and apparently, no, not really.

And while it is mostly my fault for spacing out on an important assignment, I do think she takes around eight percent of the blame for not putting assignments up on the Moodle site for the class. All my other courses post assignments to their course sites, and that means that the first thing I see when I log onto the system are links to the courses that have assignments due.

My fatal mistake was assuming that list was complete. In a sense, I was betrayed by technology. I looked at the site, saw I had nothing due today, and went on my merry way, completely forgetting that there was something that doesn’t show up there.

Well, it won’t happen again. I have added a “Homework” list to the notes I keep via Google Keep, and the moment I am assigned something, I will put it THERE, and THAT will be my Bible for what I have due and when.

All because one prof doesn’t like using Moodle. Fuck.

The worst part of this, the absolutely worst part of it, is that I spent time last night working on an assignment for Creative Writing that isn’t due till tomorrow night.

I could totally have done this What Democracy Means To Me bullshit instead. But I forgot all about it. I remembered it as recently as Monday afternoon, but between then, I slipped into thinking I could trust Moodle and that, in a sense, erased my memory of the damned thing.

Part of me really wants to just drop the class. That would not be the sensible adult thing to do, but I could do it. I am taking a full courseload, I could afford to cut one loose. And then I wouldn’t have to go to school on Mondays and Wednesdays at all. I could just stay home and….. do what, exactly?

That’s the catch. I really don’t want to add two more purpose free days to my week. Imagine how depressed I got Monday when that class was canceled due to the prof being sick (a class where I no doubt would have been reminded about the assignment) and then multiply that by two times the number of weeks left in the semester.

So no, that’s not really an option. I will show up Monday and resume learning. I have no other choice.

I am not at risk of self-harm now, but I was on the way home from my humiliation. The idea of throwing myself down the stone steps in front of Kwantlen flashed through my mind a couple times as I left. Not because I wanted to die or even that I was looking for pain or punishment.

Just for something that would cut through the pain I felt inside and maybe give me a kind of time-out where I was temporarily free of expectation to do stuff or cope with anything but getting well.

I mean, nobody expects a guy who “tripped” down the stairs to worry about missed assignments, right?

It’s sick that a part of my mind is always thinking like that. Not the self-harm part, the schemey part. But not just manipulative and calculating, but warped, self-destructive, and utterly without honor or shame.

I can’t help it. Cowardice plus intelligence equals deviousness. The evil thought are always there.

But I don’t act on them. I, obviously, did not throw myself down the stairs of Kwantlen Richmond. That would have been an entirely different kind of blog entry. But the fact that the thought and the urge flashed through my mind says a lot about why I never feel entirely safe from myself.

Maybe it’s an illusion my depression creates to protect itself, this suicidal/self-harm ideation. Maybe I could let go of my iron self control and ruthless self-suppression and nothing bad would happen except I would feel a million times better and look back at how I was before and wonder what all the fuss was about.

But that’s not a risk I can afford to take. And it knows that.

Luckily, I think this assignment was only worth 3 percent of my final grade. So not that big a deal in the overall picture. I will do the assignment and hand it in, partly because getting some marks for it is preferable to getting none, but mostly as a good faith effort to show the professor that I am taking it seriously and care about getting my work done.

And that I am not completely mentally incompetent, I suppose.

Absentmindedness is such a debilitating flaw. I am learning to work around it with notes and reminders and alarms and such, but I have been this way for my whole life and having it trip me up over and over again, no matter how hard I try to keep it together, really wears a fella down over time.

Oh well. Today’s tragedy is tomorrow’s memory and the future’s anecdote.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I have 40 minutes to spare, I am bored of video games, and I don’t feel like masturbating. So I guess I’ll blog.

Another class got canceled. That flu is really making the rounds. My Intro to Journalism prof has it, and so there goes another unit of my education.

You know you are a grownup when having a class get canceled makes you say “Boo!” instead of “Yay!”. I imagine a lot of my classmates are happy to have the extra free time. But not me.

To me, as we learned yesterday, a canceled class leads to depression. And yes, this cancellation depresses me. Not as bad as yesterday, because I had some warning beforehand (the prof warned us via email yesterday that this might happen) but still pretty bad.

And I am helpless against it. This is another one of those moments where I have to look my insanity in the face. Despite having been forewarned, despite my experiences yesterday, and despite knowing that I still have a class today (at 4), I still feel like there is this huge heavy weight bearing down on me, like gravity and air pressure has increased around me, and all I want to do is lay down, close my eyes, and wait for it to be over.

And that’s what I really want to talk about today, because I do that a lot.

I call it zeroing out, or bed diving. It’s what I do when my background stress level has risen to the point where I can’t handle it and I have to reduce stimulus levels to near zero in order to calm myself down.

Mostly, this manifests itself as tiredness. I start feeling sort of sleepy, and what do do when you are sleepy? You lay down and go to sleep.

But often I don’t sleep. Not really. Or if it is sleep, it is a form of sleep that is radically different from the usual kind. It is almost like self-hypnosis, or some kind of intense meditation. I relax and defocus my mind, and slowly turn down the volume on my cacophonous thoughts, and the next thing I know, it’s later.

In a way, it’s almost impressive. There are people who spend their entire lives trying to achieve something sort of like that, but way way better. If I could learn that trick, I would be a much healthier dude.

As is, I feel like all my zeroing out does for me is allow me to break even. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that I use this practice as a crutch, and it makes me reluctant to go anywhere or do anything where this release will not be within easy reach. And that’s a real problem.

Plus I am not sure it is a healthy practice in the long run. Responding to stress by shutting down, like a turtle withdrawing into his shell, is not exactly a winning strategy. Coming out of your shell and actually dealing with your problems is vastly preferable. Some problems just plain don’t go away when ignored.

And I am so sick and tired of hiding.

What got me onto this subject was that last Sunday, I actually caught myself in the act of craving a bed dive. As cognitive psychologists will tell you, catching yourself thinking the wrong thoughts (the ones you want to get rid of) is the first and most vital step in overcoming them. Once you have done it, you have a kind of snapshot of what the wrong thought looks like and feels like, and your superconscious mind can add it to its filters.

It’s kind of like a firewall, in reverse.

Some people don’t believe that cognitive psychology has anything to offer.This includes one of my psych profs. That sounds insane to me. Sure, it doesn’t work for everyone, but for us hyper cerebral types, it might well be the only thing that does work.

We do everything cognitively. We’re very good at that. Why not use that to deprogram yourself from the inside?

I think people get the wrong idea and think that you can’t deal with emotional issues by cognitive means. And they are right to the extent that the cognitive approach might not be the most efficient tool for some issues. But for me at least, thoughts and emotions are intimately and inextricably linked. I am simply not capable of deal with cognitive-free emotions.

I don’t know what to do with them.

Time for me to go to class. I will finish this when I am done.

(—)

And now I am back. Funny story. Sorry if you already read the short version on Facebook.

Either Daylight Savings Time happened and nobody told me, or I somehow managed to think I had class at 3, not 4, and so I went to school way early and sat down in class, wondering how I could possibly be late.

And there was only one seat left, which took me a while to find. And that was strange. I mean, it was logically impossible for a class I had attended twice to not have room for me, right?

But it was the right people and the right material, so…. right class. Right?

Wrong. As it turns out, because I was an hour early, I had come in on the last hour of the previous class, which just happened to be a different section of the exact same course.

I swear, life conspires to fuck with my head sometimes.

It took me a while to figure this out. I got my first hint of the solution when the professor started talking about running out of time. I looked at the clock. 3:30 pm. But doesn’t this course run from 4 to 7?

Eventually, it clicked. D’oh! So I ended up getting the last third of today’s class twice. The prof said I could leave once I came to the place where I had come in before, but I figured, what the heck.

I’ll just learn that section REALLY well!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.