Lying in bed, typing this into my tablet, I think about sleeping.

Slept pretty darn deeply last night. Which is a good thing, though somewhat draining. As I type this, I am pretty close to sleep, and when I am done, I will probably go right back to sleep.

But I felt the need to put in at least a token effort at blogging before nodding off again.

So it is Halloween. On a Saturday, which wad great when I was a kid. Because it mean extra trick-or-treating time.

At the risk of sounding like a broken…mp3, Halloween does not have a lot to offer an adult diabetic unemployed person with social anxiety who lives in an apartment building and therefore receives no trick-or-treaters.

Then again, with today’s paranoid overprotective parents, there’s not much trick-or-treating going on anyhow. Gone is the era of my childhood, where our parents just dressed us up and turned us loose, trusting that it was perfectly safe for us to knock on the door of dozens of strangers and ask for candy.

And the thing is, it was.

I worry about what sort of message is being sent to kids when their parents act like the world is bristling with child molesters, serial killers, and kidnappers. I can’t help but assume that these are going to be some very fearful children when it comes time for them to deal with the outside world on their own. It’s like we’re raising a generation of agoraphobics.

And trust me, agoraphobia sucks.

But maybe I am wrong. Generations have a way of resisting the more negative aspects of the parenting of the previous generation. Maybe when it comes time for these kids, the ones who will be trick-or-treating in a mall tonight, to become rebellious teenagers, they will rebel with acts of radical trust and courage, and collectively confront the demons of unreasoning terror their parents, with the best of intentions, have installed in them.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that trust in the world is a precious, precious thing, and the idea of all those kids never even getting a chance at it because of their overcompensating latchkey parents gives me a cold shudder inside.

I mean, I get it, Gen X parents. I would probably be an overprotective parent myself. And it would be very hard for me to keep my own terrible mistrust of the world from infecting my kids. I would do my damnedest to prevent it, but I might not succeed.

After all, I inherited mine. Well, some of it. My mom is shy and somewhat fearful and so am I. What Mom fears, you fear. It’s a basic survival instinct shared by all mammals. Little animals who don’t learn what to fear from their mommies don’t live long enough to contribute to the gene pool.

But sometimes, that information is false, and we end up fearing that which is harmless and living the life of the stressed, scared, and unhealthy.

People like me never entirely leave the adrenalized state. Actually, that’s pretty much everybody in modern times. That’s basically what stress is. Stress chemicals like cortisol build up in the bloodstream and keep us from being able to totally relax, and that prevents us from getting the kind of deep rest and relaxation needed for renewal.

I sometimes wonder if all the antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills we are taking these days could be replaced by something that simply eliminated stress chemicals while we slept. Then we could get really good sleep and wake up feeling wonderful, without any stress left over from the previous day.

I suppose that could lead to reckless action. I know that when I had a brief window of stressless existence thanks to being on liquid Valium during a laproscopic examination, I felt so good I felt like I was invincible. It took a pretty significant effort of will and restraint to keep myself grounded in reality long enough to get home and go to sleep.

And that was some mighty fine sleep. I can see why Valium became so popular. Talk about stress relief!

I still have those lorazepam tablets my therapist prescribed for me before the convention. I should put them in my bag. There have been a few times in the last week when I could have used some emergency stress relief.

Then again, maybe I am better off dealing with the stress without being able to escape from it even via chemicals. Yesterday’s events made it crystal clear just how much work I have ahead of me in order to learn to not be so panicky and view the novel and the unexpected as a challenge, not a tragedy.

I have been panicky my whole life, although a lousy childhood no doubt made that worse. But that panic-escape response has been with me as long as I can remember.

Maybe some people are just built that way, and the only choice we have is to give in to it, or learn to resist it. But I hope not. I hope I can, through therapy and spiritual growth, become someone who can face the world with greater calmness and dignity and well informed reason.

While still having fun and being funny, of course. I would never want to stop doing that. I love to make people laugh. I just want to go from zero dignity to “theoretically capable of being respected”.

Being around people without dignity, who just plain don’t look after themselves or make any effort to make a good impression on people, can be painful. I have been socially ignorant of how I come off for way, way too long.

I would like to be able to be around people without sending out those weird, creepy, sorta gross signals that a certain kind of low self esteem sends out. And I am not just talking about hygiene and clothing.

It’s about not sending out the message that you don’t care enough about others to do even the minimum to keep from offending them, I guess.

Social obliviousness only excuses so much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Man, do I need a pair of gloves.

Waiting for the bus. It’s spitting rain, so I should not have the tablet out. But I’m tense.

You see, I woke up around noon, and the bus to school arrives at 12:24,  so I didn’ have much time to get ready. And now here it is, 12:35, and still no bus. Meaning I rushed around and got my ass out here at 12:15 for nothing.

And that makes me tense and angry.

If I had known I had this much time, I could have had a relaxed lunch instead of just tossing some food in my bag and assuming I would get a chance to eat it eventually. I could have enjoyed an episode of Scrubs (just started in on it) while enjoying said lunch. I could have gathered my stuff in a relaxed and thoughtful manner, instead  of  throwing it in there like the law is on my tail.

Maybe I should look up the bus schedule for today again. Maybe I got the time wrong.

Bus has arrived. More on this later.

(—)

.

After class, waiting for bus.

Class wad… Intense. For the first half, we had to partner up and do a bunch of simple sensory and perception experiments. Before we even started, my social anxiety had me in a cold sweat. I have to find a partner? Visions of being ignored and rejected and having to go to the prof and say (wormy voice) “Um, teacher, I don’t have a PARTNER” in front of everybody swam before my eyes. Luckily, I had already shared a few words with a nice East Indian girl, so it was easy to turn to her and ask, and she said yes.

So that was on terrifying hurdle overcome.

And doing the experiments turned out to be rather fun, once enough social anxiety had drained from my brain to relax a little. The most fun one was the one where we had to throw ten styrofoam balls into a basket, first normally then with these goggles on that distorted our eyesight as if we are REALLY drunk.

That was, of course, hilarious. Those goggles were quite the trip.

More when I get home.

(—)

And now I am home.

So yeah, the goggles were fun. They really did make me feel like I was drunk, although I have never been THAT drunk (well, once, but I don’t remember it). The visual distortions threw off my sense of balance as well by setting off a struggle between my inner ear and my eyes. And when I took them off, I felt dizzy and slightly spaced out.

I did surprisingly well, tho, given what a doofus I am. Got four baskets out of ten sans goggles. 1 with the goggles on. I am comfortable saying that 1 out of ten in those circumstances can be legitimately chalked up to chance.

We also did a very scaled down version of the Ames Room test. Our “room” was actually a little wooden box about the size of a birdhouse, but the effect is the same. One ruler looked WAY bigger than the other, even though they were identical twelve inch rulers. It was trippy. Then you open the door, and of course, now you can see how the thing is shaped like a trapezoid to fool you.

I have always wanting to mess around with an Ames Room, especially after seeing one in this music video :

Oh, warning : this song is VERY catchy, especially the chorus.

I apologize for whatever inconvenience having that stuck in your head might cause. Wow, that hijacked my brain!

Anyhow, the lab stuff ended, and then came the thing I have been dreading from the moment I read about it in the syllabus on the first day of class… the Annotated Bibliography! (SFX : Woman screaming, monster roar, dramatic chord)

I didn’t know exactly what it was, but it sounded so very, very Not Me.

Turns out, we have to take the subject of one of the experiments we did and find three references for it. The first one is supposed to be the “seminal” research, in other words the oldest source for whatever effect it measures. Like, if it was the Ames Room effect, you would look for the original paper, presumably by some dude named Ames.

The second one has to be something recent which cites the original study. The third one has to be a study that cites the second one. Thus we learn how to do basic psychological research and establish a chain of study leading to whatever.

I hate basic research.

And I was really not getting the whole scholarly search thing. Mostly this was due to my own tendency towards panic. I was getting freaked out and I needed several infusions of professorial advice before I could calm down enough to see that what I was trying to do was not that hard and I just had to get a grip on myself.

I really am prone to panic. I am really high strung in some (usually novel) situations, and for a lot of my life, I have let that panic rule me. I was even considering trying to beg off doing the lab stuff today by saying my social anxiety made it impossible. That’s how deep the urge to give in and escape can be.

But if you don’t endure, you can’t adapt. You have to hang around long enough to get the fuck over yourself and see that the problem is not nearly as bad as you thought it was. You can’t build memories of problems overcome without enduring the panic reaction and not giving in to it.

So I stayed, and the lab stuff was actually fun, and while I was freaking out for a lot of the time we spent in the computer lab researching our annotated bibliographies, I am now fairly certain I can do the research and find what I need, and after that it’s merely a matter of writing and following the fussy details of the AP style manual.

So I’m hanging in there, and maybe, just maybe, I will manage to grow out of my problems.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It is a few minutes before my Creative Writing class. This seems like an approprite time to start blogging.

Got all my stuff done. Did the Post-It note thing. Forgot that the Post-it notes were supposed to be in, get this, in Haiku form.

Well fuck THAT noise.

Still, I am icreasingly aware of what a sloppy, slacker job I am doing on my work.nbsp; I did not invest a lot of effort in my assignment due today. Maybe I will get away with it, maybe I won’t. Either way, I am not proud of it.

Time to up my game and show the world what I can REALLY do.

(—)

On break now. In this class, we will be creating a concrete poem. Then animating it. Lovely.

Luckily, I have an idea that I think will work. Dunno how to make it in Photoshop, and it might be a lot of work to animate, but at least I have something to work with. And I am intrigued to learn Photoshop animation. Though I imagine it will be simple frame sequencing, with maybe a little tweening.

I am doing my best to work through my childish reactions to having to go outside my comfort zone and do something visual. I want to be more open to new things, as well as open to new experiences that will rewrite my opinion on what I can and cannot do.

I know I have a lot of artistic talent. I want to be more open to different ways to express it.

And I have so much to express. So many words left just hanging around in my brain, waiting in vain to get out, causing trouble.

(—)

After class now, waiting for the shitty bus that will only take me partway home.

(—)

And now I a home. You know, a two block walk is no big deal.

Although I am a little worried about my knee. You know, the injured one that I never got around to getting treated. It has been complaining when I am out walking lately. Maybe the cold is a factor, I don’t know. So I am keeping an eye on it. Last thing I need is to have to blow out on me and end up having to get to and from school on the HandyDart or something.

I suppose I could manage to get on and off the bus with a crutch, but I really don’t want to be waving a piece of light but solid metal backed by my weight around an enclosed space packed with people. Not with my clumsiness. That could go very very wrong very very fast. It doesn’t bear thinking upon.

They can do miracles with tensor bandages these days.

And I am needing that eye appointment more and more these days. I am getting more squinty by the minute, or so it seems. I need a strong prescription. At least, I hope that’s all I need.

Diabetes attacks the eyes, after all. Musn’t forget that.

My feet are doing okay. I haven’t had any mysterious stabbing pains lately, and that crazy hot itching sensation I have gotten in the past has only made a very brief and minor appearance.

Still, I check them three or four times a week. Don’t want to miss a dead patch or a sore spot. Diabetes is very hard on the feet, and I already know from their tendency to catch and keep a chill that the circulation to my feet is not great.

Oh. And I still have two large holes in my abdominal wall.

Honestly, it’s a wonder that I am alive at all, let alone mobile.

Had therapy today. Started off trying to talk about my mother, but ended up doing more of a survey of my childhood issues. I am not saying it was unproductive, it just wasn’t what I set out to do. But then, I rarely end up doing what I set out to do.

I am just too nonlinear. Or, like I said once before, I am very linear and my lines are just different from everyone else’s. Often on an entirely different plane. That’s why it’s so hard for people to get me.

I am too unique and original for my own good.

One thing we talked about today was my difficulty in trusting people and really opening up to them. Even with my wonderful friends, part of me is always tense and paranoid. I can’t see me ever being able to completely trust anyone. It feels like I will always be guarded and nervous and relying on my analysis of the person rather than any sense of trust.

There’s just too much ice in the way. Ice, death traps, demons, monsters…. it’s pretty much a dungeon from an RPG. And if some brave hero actually made it to the center of my maze, he may well find that there’s nothing there. And there never was.

Right now, I can be fairly sane and reasonable, but I fear what would happen if someone tried to get closer. I still have a lot of bad stuff inside me, and I might not be able to keep people from being hurt by it if they got closer than friendship with me.

And I can’t stand the thought of taking my issues out on some poor person whose only crime was trying to get to know me better. To me, that would be empathic oblivion. No matter how it happened or whether or not I was in the right or in the wrong, I would have to live with the memory of that person’s pain and the knowledge that I caused it.

And I refuse to become callous, even though it might be good for me to dial down the sensitivity a little. Stop taking on other people’s emotions as entirely my responsibility. Shut off that echo chamber in my head that makes things seem far worse than they are by amplifying the signal way, way, way too much.

But the idea of sacrificing some of my sensitivity appalls me. Even knowing it’s a medically sound operation and that I might be better off without that thin sliver of capacity.

I just can’t do it.

There has to be another way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Waiting for the bus.

Got my Ideology and Politics exam back today. 67 percent. Ouch.

That is well below my usual personal minimum of 75 percent, and WAY below my usual average of 83 percent. So I am not a happy camper.

I have a very strong feeling that we are being held to standards that were never made clear to us. A lot of what she said about the weaknesses in our exam answers are things she never taught us. She seems to expect us to be able to write like scholars without her teachung us how, and this is a first semester intro level course. We have to learn to crawl before we learn to walk.

But seeing as I am still smarting from a low grade, all such thoughts must be viewed as suspect. It could very well be that I am simply lashing out against something which upsets me and wrecks the warm glow of ego I have been enjoying lately.

And to be honest, I knew I had not done well. So this should not have come as a big shock.

Clearly, I have some work to do in order to get my grades back up to where I feel they belong in this course. That means I am going to have to become a better scholar, as well as pay very, very close attention to anything instruction-like the prof says, and really try to get into her head and figure out what it is she wants from us.

Luckily, I am pretty good at that kind of thing.

(—)

Fuck! My bus finally showed up… and it was full! Son of a bitch. Right now, I am back in Kwantlen, where it is warm. The next bus is not till 6:10, so I have fifteen minutes to warm up and wallow in seething resentment of full buses and low marks.

Oh well. At least I still have you nice people.

I have two of the three pictures I need for that stupid “overheard conversation” assignment for my Creative Writing class. The third I will do at home.

I got my snippets of overheard conversation from the BCSFA meeting last Sunday. I figured that this way, I would be overhearing quality stuff. But I am still not happy about the assignment. I hate having to do this kind of thing.

I just want to write. Ask me to write a play, a poem, an editorial, an obituary, a business letter, a memo, or a shopping list and I will do it, happily and well.But forcing me to eavesdrop and take pictures? So very not on.

Oh well, I suppose taking people outside of their comfort zones is part of the mandate of education. But I am still going to resent it. I am a writer, writing is what I do, and I can write anything.

I’m just not great with the photography.

(—)

Home now. The next bus was almost full but I got on anyhow. I was too impatient to get home to wait for yet another bus. So I ended up standing around three quarters of the way home. Fat guys hate standing.

But it’s not that long a trip, and I did get to sit down after the bus stopped at the Skytrain and that sucked out like three quarters of the people on the bus.

And only replaced like, half of them.

It’s definitely getting to be chilly. I was cold enough after waiting at the bus stop for the bus (the one that turned out to be full) that I was thinking about getting a pair of long johns.

Do people around here even know what long johns are? Long underwear, people. Kind of a necessity if you live somewhere that has real winter. When going outside means facing temperatures of -18 C, it’s all about the layers.

And these dress pants of mine don’t exactly provide much protection.

It’s going to be worse tomorrow night. IT’ll be 9 PM when I get out of Creative Writing class. My jacket protects me just fine from shoulders to mid-thigh, but the rest of me needs more.

Who knows, maybe I will find a nice little restaurant to eat at partway home. Like say, the White Spot on Ackroyd. That way, I have an incentive to walk home like I did last week.

Otherwise, things are funky winkerbean. My metafictional website is due tomorrow as well, plus some little “read theses things then write 150 words about which one you like and why” thing. Whatever. That’s barely an effort for someone like me.

Still working on developing a big ego. Nothing assholish, just a cocky attitude towards the world and a firm (ish) belief that I am an amazing human being with lots to offer the world if the world would only wise up and take it.

How’s that? Eh, it’s still a WIP.

Right now, the Melt is kicking in and I feel really sleepy. I wish I could just give in and go to sleep. But I haven’t eaten supper yet, and I got a bunch of work to do for that Creative Writing class tomorrow night. And while you would think not having to go to class till six PM would leave me plenty of time to do my work tomorrow, experience has taught me that those extra hours have a tendency to evaporate real fast once you factor in a trip to the therapist.

Oh, and I have to make another doctor’s appointment, because the medicine he prescribed me for a certain rather person problem last Friday night was apparently a) super expensive, like $360 for the full course of treatment b) super obscure, so obscure that the elderly pharmacist at Shopper’s had never heard of it, and c) super rare, seeing as the full pharmacy at the local Shopper’s did not carry it.

So I have to go back to the doc to get something less esoteric for my condition. I realize now that I could have let the pharmacist take care of that, but whatever.

Being a grownup is so much work!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

TMI and/or TRIGGER WARNING : Indirect reference to poop.

Waiting for the bus home. Not exactly well.

Not as bad as earlier, though. Earlier today, shortly after lunch, I felt this sudden wave of anxiety wash over me. It felt like I had built a wall around a lake of anxiety and that wall had suddenly collapsed. Along with that came some fairly bad bowel disturbance…. not painful but vety uncomfortable. And loud.

And…   something else.

Soon I realized I needed to use the toilet. As I got up, the need became more acute. At the same time, I felt this twisting sensation in my lower abdomen, like someone was wringing out my intestines with both hands.

Fearing the worst, I frantically looked all over the bed for signs of an accident. Nothing. Phew.

But after I was done in the bathroom, I discovered that the worst had, indeed, happened. It had just missed the bed and hit the floor.

Not an auspicious start to the day.

I thought about skipping class. But I was feeling somewhat better. So I went. Missed my bus by mere seconds, so
I was 20 mins late. Also not great.

But whatever. Class is over for the day. I will treat myself tenderly tonight and hope to get my system calmed down.

(—)

Back home now, and feeling a lot better since I got some solid zero-out time and a nice hearty meal into me. I still feel a little too squirmy inside, but it’s down to a nuisance level.

So, still on alert, but it’s a minimum alert.

Let’s tackle intellectualization again, shall we?

I understand what happens, and why. By reacting to things with analysis instead of emotion, I can get positive cold emotion (fascination, revelation, ego confirmation) instead of negative hot emotion (fear, helplessness, emotional damage) from any given situation. It’s a terribly clever way to hide from the world and not deal with my emotions at all because it does a very convincing job of convincing me I am dealing with things.

After all, I understand what has happened, I have examined it, filtered out the bullshit and gone straight for the truth at the heart of it, and fitted it into my highly detailed and insightful model of the world and how it works and such.

So much activity! But it’s like those Victorian gentlemen scientists who thought they really understood butterflies when all they had done is study dead ones preserved under glass. I understand so much, and I can congratulate myself on how perceptive and insightful I am, and how I see so much more of the big picture in both scope and detail than other people.

But my butterfly collection is still dead. Nothing in that process is warm or alive or life-affirming. None of it nurtures the soul. In fact, it doesn’t nurture anything at all except for a deep sense of being unreal, the world being unreal, and the nature of my existence being as fragile and temporary as a daydream.

Because the truth of it is, no matter how far my mind might roam, I am still living a very isolated and intellectual existence. School, for obvious reasons, has strict limits to how much it can change that. Especially given that I don’t do anything extracurricular at all. No clubs, no study groups, just class and home.

College is a very intellectual experience, at least for me. Still spending all day feeding my mind and very little else.

So I suppose it makes sense for it to be my first baby step out into the world. But at some point I am going to have to come in from the cold. I need to learn to live. Not how to exist…. how to truly be alive, in the world and in my heart.

Still waiting on Spring. But it’s coming.

So I know what I do and why. Intellectualism is a brilliant dodge for me. But it leaves me with a huge vault of frozen emotions from things I convinced myself I was dealing with, or convinced myself that I would deal with…. later.

You know…. in the Spring. That will be coming any day now. Or maybe it’s already here and I just haven’t felt it yet. I am deeply aware of my need for a stable and reliable source of renewal, but I haven’t found it yet.

But the fundamental cognitive question remains : how do I stop? Or rather, dial it back to a healthy level? It is such a deep and fundamental coping mechanism that I can’t even remember who I was before it was there.

Even before school trauma, I was a brilliant and curious child. Maybe a certain degree of intellectualization is natural for anyone of high IQ, I don’t know. For all I know, the opposite is also true.

But due to my total inability to socially integrate, I was left with no other path. No balancing influence. No foot in the world of healthy interaction. And by the time I could make friends (around grade 6), it was really evident that all the school damage, plus the intellectual gulf between me and my peers, had created a thick barrier between me and others. When I retreated into myself, I left a lot of people behind. My social antenna is broken. In a sea of signal, I receive nothing.

And I am still getting over that. I am all too aware of the barrier that still exists between me and others. I know that, despite how much I love my friends and my family, there are still miles of lunar surface (dark side, no less) that exist between me and them. And even though I know that this gulf is of my own designing, I feel helpless to cross it.

All I can do is continue this slow thaw of mine, and hope that maybe, someday, I won’t need to be numb any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But not a bad day. Maybe. I dunno.

Been kind of depressed today. Feel sad and dragged down. My bed is very appealing to me. I have a strong urge to not bother with things. My a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anhedonia”anhedonia /ais medium strong. I feel like there’s no point to anything and it’s hard to remember why I do anything right now.

All of that is classic depression. Bed-seeking, apathy, anhedonia, nihilism. It’s all in the textbook and it’s all true of me right now. Clinically speaking, I’m depressed.

But maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. There’s no point in getting depressed about being depressed. Maybe this is just plain something I need to go through right now and at the end of the long dark tunnel lies the golden light of renewal.

Maybe I am bed-seeking because I am truly behind on sleep. I know from experience that getting eight hours of sleep a night is no guarantee that you are getting enough sleep. Maybe I am not getting enough REM sleep.

iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/uUcKeKt8C1k” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen/iframe

Or maybe I need one depressed day a week to keep me going. Maybe the best plan for me is to assume my Saturdays will be Sadder Days and so there’s no point in making big grand plans, like I did today, that I know I will not be able to execute.

I emhad/em planned to really get to work on that Creative Writing project today. Plus the readings for next week, and my 150 word reply to them.

Damn. Potty break.

(—)

Oh, and my creative writing prof also wants us to write down snippets of overheard conversation on Post-It notes, put said notes in public places which are somewhat ironic given what is written on them, and take a picture.

I really don’t want to.

Once more, I find myself wishing I had tsken the more traditional Creative Writing class. They wouldn’t be making me do twee crap like this. All I would have to do is write. That is what I am good at, and it is what I want to do.

If I could write the Post-it Notes myself, it would not be so bad. It is the jotting down bits of overheard conversation and then trying to find where it fits that I resent. I can think of lots of things that would make for cool art when affixed somewhere. But the odds of anyone actually saying them are low.

I don’t like having to find the locks that fit random keys. I don’t like finding things in general. For me, it is far easier to simply make key and lock together. Then you know it will fit.

So I dunno. I guess I could just go to White Spot for lunch, set my tablet to record audio, and see what it can pick up. Then I can listen to it later and pick the best bits.

Assuming my tablet will pick up anything. Just because I can hear it doesn’t mean the tablet’s microphone can hear it. If only we had equipment as good as our senses!

Either way, I am sure I can do the assignment. I just don’t want to. Wah, says my inner child. Wah!

Back to the original subject. I have been pondering the question of whether depression is a bad thing or is it thinking that makes it so for a long time now.

In the short term, there is nothing wrong with just surrendering to it now and then. Let it have its way, and take a rest from fighting it all the time. Save your energy for the more important battles later. Lay your burden down.

The trouble is, will you be able to get out of that comfy cozy hole when the time comes to be active again? The temptation to stay will never be stronger than when you are trying to get yourself out of the hole just when you have gotten all comfy. It would be so easy to stay down and let your life fall apart so there’s no pressure on you any more.

I don’t know why I have such a big issue around pressure. I guess part of me wants to be free to melt into a puddle at any point, and pressure prevents that. Pressure, and obligation. Best not to get entangled with others in the first place, says the Devil of Depression, and let everything go so you can be a limpid liquid again, relaxed and tranquil.

Yeah… and deeply dissatisfied with life. I guess all our demons tempt us to choose the short term immediate thing (going back to bed, eating that bag of cookies, yelling at your kids) and not the long term difficult but superior thing (getting things done and making yourself feel better about your life, suffering through sadness but losing the weight that makes you feel so bad, restraining yourself and getting to have a closer relationship with your kids).

One thing that might be contributing to my sleepiness is that today was the first day I felt the need to turn the heat on in my room since last Spring. I guess that means summer is truly over. Hello, autumn!

But all that lovely cozy heat might well be contributing to my overall sleepiness. I have mentioned the phenomenon I call “the melt” in this space before. It can be defined as “the tendency of an increase in warmth in a certain range to make me sleepy”.

It happened a lot when I was a kid coming home on a cold winter day. The difference in temperature between the below-freezing outdoors and the toasty warm temperature of home would quite often make me very, very sleepy in a way that was actually quite delightful when it didn’t interfere with my plans.

And as a kid, I didn’t have a lot of plans.

Oh well. The blogging is done. My words have been expressed. Think I will curl up in my nice warm bed and snooze.

It’s not depression. It’s sedation!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thought I would mix things up and start blogging before class! While still at class!

I’m telling you, I’m a wild man.

Finally made a doctor’s appointment. Kept forgetting. I’ve had no diabetes meds except for my insulin for a week. And I am almost out of insulin. Luckily, I am pretty sure I can get more.

This is not good. I have once more lagged in my duty of self-care. There is nobody else to take care of it, so it’s up to me to keep myself healthy, and yet, I keep doing dumb shit like ending up super diabetic because of absent-mindedness and procrastination. I have to admit, I am a little disappointed in myself.

The worst part is, I won’t be able to see the doc till next Friday, a week from now. So by the time I get more meds, it will be two weeks without. I am kind of scared as to what happens then.

I am already feeling the effects. That’s why I am so thirsty lately, and why I am peeing so much. I have little appetite except for occasional periods where I suddenly get SUPER FREAKING OMG hungry. I am hypoglycemic a lot because I don’t have meds to help smooth me out.

It’s feast or famine in my bodily stores. Very not good.

I am pondering calling my doctor’s office and seeing if I could get an emergency prescription for a week’s supply. Going any longer without my meds might be dangerous. I think I could make a case that this is an emergency.

If only it wasn’t so tricky to fit an appointment into my schedule. My one open day, Thursday, is the day my doctor is only in the office until 1 PM.

A ha! I called again, and I can get the emergency ‘script as long as I am there before 6:30. Not a problem, class ends at 4.

Yay for me for being proactive and going out of my comfort zone. It was much harder to make that second call, for complicated social anxiety reasons, but I did it and I am proud.

Heck, I just made a third call, for clarification. Sadly, the news is not good. Turns out I have to be there AT 6:30, which is not nearly as convenient for me. And it’s an appointment, not a “come by before”, and so God knows when I actually get to see him. Hopefully before 8.

It really has been that bad in the past.

But I dunno. Maybe he’s not overbooking any more. Or maybe by the end of the day, the congestion has cleared.

You know, because so many people have given up and gone home for supper.

But I got no choice. This is the price I pay for putting things off for so long. And at least if it’s an actual appointment, I will get the full prescriptions and all.

I will have to go to Shoppers’ to get them filled, tho. Ye Olde Neighborhood Pharmacy will be closed by then. Oh well, it’s just an extra block. Hopefully Joe will be able to drive me to the appointment and to Shopper’s. I could use the psychological support. Oh right…. speaking of Joe…

Joe has one of those professional development dealies today. So instead of working his usual 3:30 to midnight, he is working 9 to 3:15. Poor guy. He got home at midnight last night and had to go straight to bed. He’s now at work. He must be terribly tired.

At least that means he will be available for going out to dinner tonight. Normally, we would only get his company after midnight. It will be nice going out to eat on a Friday, like we used to do way back when.

Of course, having a doctor’s appointment at 6:15 will complicate matters. Oh well, if it gets late enough, all you can eat sushi at our favorite sushi place will become an option.

All you can eat places bring a strange economics to the table. People won’t go if they don’t think they are hungry enough to eat way more than usual, because that’s the only way they feel like they will get their money’s worth.

And that would make sense if you are going to a really expensive place. But people feel the same even when it costs exactly the same as a totally finite meal from their family restaurant of choice. A meal that they would walk away from feeling fully satisfied that they had gotten their money’s worth, and also feeling quite full.

So the exact same quantity of food that is sufficient for the money at a regular restaurant suddenly becomes not worth the money when you go to an all you can eat place. It makes no sense.

But I am sure there is some fascinating psychological principle at work here. I can’t wait till we cover it in one of my Psych classes. I love that actual psychology is being applied to economics now, with marvelous experiments like this one :

iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/meiU6TxysCg” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen/iframe

For one thing, it means that economics is being forced to admit that A) they have been applied psychology all this time and B) people do not always act in their narrow and reductivist definition of “rational self-interest”.

Because people are people, not fucking robots. They don’t always know what their rational self-interest even is, let alone always acting in it.

All economics is voodoo economics. It’s never been a science at all. It’s all guesswork and drawing the target after you shoot.

(—)

Weird place for a (—), right? I was almost done blogging when I had to leave for class.

So I am blogging from class. We have a five minute break, so I will not get far. But what the heck. I write. It’s what I do.

(—)

That was brief. As i suspected.

Waiting for the bus. Damn it is cold. My jacket protects my torso from Jack Frost, but this is getting into glove weather, and I only have one glove.

Just like Michael Jackson.

(—)

Home now. Time to go to the doc. Wish me well.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.