Daily Archives: September 1, 2015

K minus 7

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The K is for Kwantlen, of course. I start classes one week from today.

I must admit, I am nervous. Not about the classes, of course. Those aren’t going to be a problem. It’s more like I am nervous about the newness of it all and worried that all that stimulation will give me a panic attack.

So in a sense, I am nervous about being nervous and anxious about being anxious. Neuroses are so meta.

That’s why I am glad (and nervous) about orientation tomorrow. Granted, it will be more socially stimulating than just showing up for classes next Tuesday, but I think not knowing my way around will be easier around a bunch of others in a similar state.

Besides, part of my plan for going back to school was to give myself more social exposure so I can further my recovery from depression, social anxiety, and whatnot.

So despite a potential social anxiety meltdown, I am going to go to the damned thing. I think I will take an extra Paxil that day, however. My therapist says that is totally fine by him. Nothing wrong with a little extra chemical sangfroid when I am entering a potentially triggering situation.

What I can’t figure out is whether it is truly an all day event, from 9 am to 3:30 pm, or whether those are just the hours it will be going and I am free to drop in and do whatever I need to do while I am there.

Obviously, I would prefer the latter. I wouldn’t have to be there at 9 am and I would have the comfort of autonomy and crowds instead of feeling like an animal being herded.

And it seems unlikely that they want me there all day. Surely a campus orientation can’t last all THAT long. Those hours seem a lot more like an elementary school day than a college event.

And I am fairly sure the entire thing is option, so there’s that.

But part of me is very nervous and hence wants to do everything “right”. I am trying to calm that part of me the fuck down, but it would be a lot easier if I had some solid info to go on. And yet, there is no contact info on the thing I got in the mail, so I don’t know who I can ask about it.

I may have to just call the university and wing it, and that would be very difficult for me.

God, mental illness sucks.

But whatever. It says on the webpage for orientation that my attendance is “expected”, which is less than “mandatory” but more than “optional”. So I will be there.

I just don’t want to be there all day. That sounds tiring and dull.

Overall, of course, I am looking forward to being back in school. I have total confidence in my abilities to do well in the classes I am taking. It’s just this little orientation speedbump that I have to get over first.

Part of me really wishes I could just show up for classes a week for today without any other bullshit.

I need solid intel, dammit.

Oh, one small bit of bad news : I do not have Mondays off, like I thought before. I have next Monday off, but that’s it. After that, I have one-half of my Ideology and Politics class on Mondays and the other half on Wednesdays.

Dang it. Oh well, welcome to the five days a week world, I guess.

Still, that’s a course I am looking forward to. Seems right up my alley. Like I said before, those are two of my favorite things. In fact, I think my love of politics is driven by my love of ideology, because politics is ideology writ large. It’s the arena in which a nation figures out what it really believes. How can I not love that?

So that’s Mondays (and Wednesdays). Tuesdays will be the big day because I will have six straight hours of education. From 1 to 2:50 pm, I will be in Intro to Journalism. Then I have ten minutes to get to Intro to Psychology : Areas and Applications. That’s it, ten minutes between three hour courses.

Should be fun! Crazy fun, the kind of fun that really requires you to stretch yourself, but still. Fun!

I am curious about what they teach in Intro to Journalism. I find it hard to imagine. I hope it’s essentially a boot camp for learning how to write like a journalist. That would suit me just fine. I would love to learn enough to try to make a go at a soft journalism job like columnist or reviewer. Or at least be able to freelance that kind of thing.

Wednesdays, I just have that other half of the Ideology and Politics class between 2:30 and 4.

Thursdays, I have Intro to Creative Writing at (bizarrely) 6pm. Not sure what goes on there, either, but at least it’s directly on target for my degree. My instinct is to be all cocky and say “What do they have to teach me? I’ve written four books and a metric whack of short stories!”

But that only shows that I have done it, not that I know what I am doing. And I haven’t submitted anything for publication, so as far as I know, I might be doing it all wrong.

Then on Fridays, at 1 pm, I have Intro to Psychology : Basic Processes. I am glad that I can take both Intro to Psych classes in the same semester. It means I get double the dose of one of my favorite subjects in the whole world. And it also means that I can sign up for more interesting stuff in the second semester.

That should take the sting out of the fact that I am going to be taking my one mandatory brutal math course. I don’t know what to think about that. I am quite good with numbers at a sub-calculus level.

So hopefully, I can learn calculus now.

I know at least one reader of this blog who could tutor me. You know who you are.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, and give you all the gory details.

August Video Roundup

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Dunno if I will have time to make videos when I am in school, so… this might be the last one for a while.

Here’s yet another piece of my goddamned music.

Hmmm. Not sure about that Phrase B on the main instrument. It’s not nearly as pretty and harmonious as the two repeats of Phrase A and the one instance of Phrase C. Otherwise, though, it’s a pleasant mixture of the funky and the ethereal.

Maybe stopping making videos for a while will be good for my music. Give me more time to just fiddle around with things until it’s all as groovy and together as I want it to be.

Next up, an experiment : music, a slideshow, AND captions!

Guess I was just filled with inspiration that night.

Looking at it now, it was as I feared. It’s too much to take in all at once. That’s why I gave up on text captions for funny pictures. Whether you do them before or after the picture or even during, it ruins any sense of comedic timing to try to read the caption and take it what it is referred to.

And I am all about the timing, baby.

And now, a crappy talk :

I swear, I had a whole lot more material of higher quality about the subject before I started talking about it. I got my main points across, but I feel like I missed a bunch of stuff.

I know, I know, I am too damned hard on myself. I figure, in the beginning at least, every artist has to find out how hard they can be on themselves and still produce/learn, then dial it back one notch. The conflict between our high standards and our growing skills is what fuel the next project, then the next, and so on.

The secret is to keep producing.

Up, some funky stuff :

Dedicated to the big pickle hater in my life.

I do wonder about those people. The ones for whom the smell of vinegar is wired directly into their disgust center, and provokes a reaction similar (but not identical) to how humans react to urine or feces.

Surprisingly, I really have no theory for that. Some slight but vital mutation in the ammonia receptors in their noses? I dunno. It just strikes as both strange and sad that we have people who react so violently to something so common.

The whole world eats vinegar!

And now, the sad truth about traffic :

Car are about flow. The pleasure of driving is in continuous flow. Traffic ruins flow.

I have had most of those thoughts in my mind for a long time, but it was the realization that human population patterns are essentially random that pulled them all together into a theory of traffic. Nobody is going to start telling people they can’t move someplace because it has reached its peak traffic capacity.

The people already living there might want that, but freedom of residence is too deeply ingrained to budge an inch.

And now, the best piece of music I have done lately, IMHO :

I mean, that sounds like it could totally be the theme to a TV show.

Getting the images was trickier than usual. I wanted the sort of freaky, alienating imagery you’d see in the opening of an X-files type show, but that’s a bit more than a simple Google Image Search can provide.

So I had to just try various adjectives and see what came up. It was a lot of work but I like the results.

I love that super pissed off looking alien in the suit. Holy shit, Zagzorp, who bent your wookie?

More music, this time with a heavier sound :

What can I say. I really like the flute. And I have a ton of really good flute sample.

As was recently pointed out to me, it’s that third sample where I tend to mess up. I am very good at matching basslines to beats, but beyond that, my judgment is apparently impaired.

Oh well, I am learning by doing. If I keep at this, I am bound to get better at it. And if not, whatever.

It’s not like I am expecting to have a career in music. I just do it for fun!

Next up : guess what? More music!

This time, I set out to experiment with chords. Ones I make myself, not samples of chords. I wanted to see if I could create some of those extraordinary effects you get when you start with a simple chord in full sustain then shift one note to change the chord in ways that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

I didn’t quite get there with this piece, but I am definitely going to try again.

Next, I talk about major issues of great national importance.

Wacky Lay’s flavours! I love these flavour competitions. The flavours are always impressively complex and realistic. And I love trying new stuff, which would surprise the hell out of my siblings.

Amongst my group of friends, I’m the adventurous eater. Magine.

The other two are the Montreal Smoked Meat and Butter Chicken. Not too keen on either of those, but compulsive thoroughness knows no mercy, so I will get around to trying them both eventually.

I have nothing against smoked meat. I just don’t trust meat based chip flavours after my run in with the cheeseburger flavoured Doritos man years back. Those things really messed me up.

And I have never liked butter chicken. WAY too rich.

And finally, music.

Somewhat successful. Don’t you love that bassline that it starts on. The volume balance is off though, so the climax is a lot louder than I intended. (That’s what SHE said!)

Plus that electric piano riff is just gorgeous. I should try my old method of song generation again, which was to get together all the samples I love and try to make them work together.

Or use them as movements in a symphony. I dunno.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.