I am so weird about money that it takes an act of will for me to buy name-brand pop.

The price difference is trivial. Getting name-brand probably costs me, at most, two to three bucks a week. And the name brand stuff is genuinely better than the store brand stuff. I am legitimately getting a lot more pleasure from my pop drinking than when I only bought the generic stuff. By all logic, it’s a sound investment.

And yet, every time I do it, I have to suppress my deeply ingrained instinct to get the cheapest stuff possible. I have to face it : my economizing is compulsive. It persists even when it makes no sense at all. And this is a problem.

Why? Because it keeps me from being happy and feeling good about my life. I have gone on and on in this space about how important pleasure (especially the kind that activates our reward center) is to mood, and I know that to be true.

And yet, when it comes to investing in my own pleasure, I am a mindless miser.

Where the rubber really hits the road is my weekly budget. I have $100/week to spend. And I don’t have a lot of expensive needs. So more often than not, there’s a little left at the end of the week.

And in a healthier mind, that would be it. Sometimes there is money left, and sometimes there isn’t. Whether or not that happens is not super important. I mean, I budgeted the money that way with plans to spend it that way. Right? If I can’t spend it all, it’s not really in my budget, is it?

And yet, if there is nothing left, I feel intense guilt and a feeling of exposure and danger. I have lost my buffer, and for someone like me, having all the buffers between myself and harsh reality is a necessity.

It’s not easy being this sensitive.

I have been fighting this lately. I have been telling myself that my happiness is more important than my money supply. That I should actually be proud of myself for overcoming my senseless savings craving and using the money to have fun instead. That feeling better is more important than feeling safe. Because I AM SAFE.

But it’s rough going. It’s a real wrestling match. I feel like I am arm wrestling a demon.

And I suppose I am. The demon’s name is Self-Minimization.

That’s one of my theories, anyhow. The same instinct that made me always tell my parents that I was fine, just fine, makes it hard for me to buy anything but the cheapest. Anything more than the absolute minimum makes me feel exposed, like I have revealed a weakness to an enemy who will surely punish me for it.

I guess that enemy would be Life.

And that feeling of exposure is a very top rated member of my Primary Fears squad. I seek safety above all else, like a lot of depressives and victims of anxiety disorders, and the amount I have, in the past, been willing to sacrifice in order to feel safe is truly staggering.

Pretty much my adult life so far, really. When the only way you can feel safe is to hide from the world to the greatest extent possible, it really limits your options. I have spent twenty years of my life retreating as far from life as I can short of total catatonia, and that’s one hell of a disability.

People in wheelchairs get out more than I used to. Depression can turn you into a seemingly voluntary invalid.

The other theory as to why I am so weird about money, and the two are by no means mutually exclusive, is that I just plain have never had much money in the first place.

In fact, I have lived large portions of my life with no cash whatsoever. I lived in a constant state of cash starvation. And when that ended, it was because I got on welfare, and had to figure out how to survive on the pittance they afford you.

So whatever instincts I had towards thrift were very, very much encouraged to flourish.

But it’s more than that. Ask my ex-roommate Dhugal. Every time we went to Costco, it would be the same thing. He would tell me “we can get whatever you want!” and I would be simply incapable of uncramping my mind enough to take advantage of that. I would always be working out how many meals we would get out of something for how many dollars – cost benefit analysis – and he would just shake his head in disbelief.

And that was way before I was on social assistance and had any cash of my own. I was, in fact, many years into my long long cash drought, and I had no personal budget to worry about. I was doing all my worrying on behalf of others.

So I was like this long before I moved to BC and went on assistance.

I honestly don’t know what it would be like for me to have more money. I have had two budget upgrades since I moved here in 99. Both times, I have managed to turn it into a lifestyle upgrade…. eventually.

It’s hard to upgrade your lifestyle when you almost never leave your apartment.

When I was a little kid, I dazzled Mrs. Moase, the lady who ran the local corner store, with my ability to do the math in my head when I wanted 5 of this and 7 of that and 2 of the other.

She said I was going to be a rocket scientist some day. And other kids would be amazed when I left with this huge amount of candy. They thought I must have a huge allowance.

But no. I just had a deep and powerful instinct towards value. Instead of a few expensive items, I got lots and lots of little cheap items, and thus got more candy per penny than them.

Maybe that went to my head.

I will talk to you people again tomorrow.

So, I didn’t make it to the Kwantlen orientation today.

I was planning on it, but then I woke up feeling very ill. I had wicked heartburn, and I felt headachey and feverish, and the room was very gently spinning.

Normally, if I get sick before doing something scary, I immediately think it is psychosomatic. And that could definitely cover the headache, and maybe the feverish feelish.

But heartburn is pretty specific and hard to image yourself into. Dunno if I am coming down with something, or I acid refluxed real hard out of nervousness, but whatever it was, it kept me here instead of my going there.

And I dunno how I feel about that. I have a real clusterfucktacular of a conflict about it. The old me would be exoriating myself on being a wimp and a pussy and giving up on myself and hiding from the world and blah blah etc.

But I am working hard at disabling that system. And I mean, it’s not like I missed anything priceless. I am pretty sure I can find a campus map online and that is all I will need to find my classes. Whatever else, I can probably figure out from the website, onsite literature, and plain old asking around whatever else I need.

But the old monsters are still there. They’re just caged up for the moment. For now, I am listening to The Jagoff when he tells me that it is really no big deal. I don’t like it, but it’s better than ripping myself apart over it.

That never accomplished anything. In fact, it’s utterly counterproductive. You can’t get ahead by destroying your own strength!

Presumably, after a couple of days, I will have put this behind me and will be ready to carry on into the brand new grand new adventure of higher learning at the age of 42.

I know I won’t have trouble with the class work. But I am beginning to worry about actual class.

I haven’t had to sit still while absorbing a lecture in twenty years. That kind of passive absorption was never exactly easy for me. That’s why I would sit in front and ask (or answer) questions. I needed to do it in order to stay awake and engaged.

But I don’t know if that will be an option, and so I may have to cope other ways.

I could record the lecture. I am sure I would not be the only one doing so. Anything I spaced out for, I could catch up on when I watched the recording. That would be a very modern thing to do.

But it feels wrong. It feels like I would be insulting the professor by ignoring him and letting the machine do the work. Like I am saying he or she is not important enough to actually be worth my attention. That doesn’t sit right with me.

Plus, of course, I can’t ask a recording questions.

Another possibility would be to find a more active form of note-taking. I almost never consult the notes I make, but the exact of writing them gives me something to do and keeps me from getting too nervous and restless.

But I have had twenty years of Internet-fed development since I was last in a classroom, and that might not be enough any more. My stimulation needs are much greater than they used to be.

A third option would be to find video games I can play unobtrusively (tricky, when you are sitting up front) and which take up just enough of my mental bandwidth to keep me calm and focused and hopefully looking attentive.

And in a sense, I have been practicing to do that exact thing. I have been listening to podcasts while playing my Picross game on my browser, and that is pretty much exactly the same as listening to a lecture on the basic level.

But I would hate to get caught playing a video game in class. That would be mortifying. If I was worried that recording the lecture would insult the prof, imagine how I feel about being caught playing my game.

I could tell the prof that I can do both, and that I actually find it easier to concentrate if I have something to occupy unimportant parts of my mind while I listen. But I would not expect them to believe me.

And I am not the smug and thoughtless youth that used to love to be caught “daydreaming” and seemingly not paying attention to my teachers only to be able to repeat back to them what they just said, verbatim. That me was a prick. No wonder sometimes not even my teachers liked me.

Ah, the self-centeredness of youth. I thought it was downright hilarious. Like I was demonstrating a superpower, or a magic trick, or something.

So this Tuesday, when I start off my education with a trial by fire via six straight hours of class, I will see just how well I cope with this highly passive form of learning.

Then again, for all I know, education is entirely different now, and not nearly so passive and soporific. Maybe all the professors are hip new professors who are entirely down with the Net and have exciting, dynamic presentations with charts and diagrams and stuff.

I admit, that’s not likely. But it could happen!

Also education related : I will have to get a bank account and my picture ID soon. I am hoping I can charm my way into getting them to re-issue my BCID in picture form. The last time I tried, the bitch blonde at the counter told me that, basically, you can’t get your picture ID back without some picture ID.

So apparently, nobody has ever gotten their driver’s license reissued, ever. Lose it and you are fucked forever.

As for the bank account thing, I should get one of those anyhow so I can stop paying $20/month to Money Mart just to cash my monthly cheque. So getting one for the student loan is no big deal.

Well, that’s the local update. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.