I’ve been dreading this election.

I have been dreading it ever since I learned in Journalism class that 80 percent of Canadians agree with Harper on the niqab thing. Could my beloved Canada truly have fallen for this blatantly racist smokescreen issue? Could my nation be falling to the forces of crazy evil stupid? Could we truly have fallen so far from our own ideals that we would let the demon Harper continue to contemptuously soil every single good thing about us like an incontinent harpy?

Could we really be ready for five more years of this catastrophic nightmare?

Now that the election results are coming in, I can see that this is not going to happen, and my earlier dread seems foolhardy. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have 163 seats, and the minimum for a majority government is 170, so it looks like JT will be our new prime minister despite seeming, to an old phart like me, like he’s too young to shave.

I don’t like him. He seems very fake to me. Fake like Hillary Clinton, but admittedly, far better at it than she did. I don’t like the idea of the leadership of Canada seeming hereditary, like we voted for Justin simply out of nostalgia for his last name. I don’t like that Canadians apparently lack the vision to see that the Liberals are never going to bring about any kind of real change and that Canada needs a lot more than a kinder, gentler plutocrat.

More importantly, I don’t trust him. I don’t trust him to have the interests of the everyday Canadian at heart. I don’t trust him to stick to important Canadian principles rather than compromising with the forces of intransigent evil at every turn and then expecting us to pat him on the back when he sells the farm for a song, because after all, we still have the little red schoolhouse! For now!

Basically, I do not trust him to know when to be unreasonable. To put your foot down, stick to your guns, ignore your advisors, and do what you know in your heart is the right thing to do regardless of what the media and the opposition are going to do or say about it. Some things are simply not negotiable, and I don’t trust J.Tru to have the confidence, maturity, and integrity to be able to do this when it is called for.

And it will be called for.

Still, the traitor Stephen Harper has set the bar so low that it would take a doctorate in geology from a very good school to find it, so that all Justin Bieber Trudeau has to do is refrain from gleefully rolling in his own shit to seem like a superstar.

The important thing is that the Anybody But Harper Party seems poised for the win. It bothers me that Harper will lead the official opposition, with probably something like 100 seats, when what the big-L Liberals need most is an NDP opposition nipping at their heels and their conscience.

But at least Historical Villain and International Man of Misery Stephen Harper will no longer be in power.

I really don’t like him.

This prayer goes out to all of Canada, from Gander, Newfoundland to Vancouver Island,

I pray that we are kind.

I pray that we understand that the foundation of all morality is not authority but compassion, and that it is through kindness that we make this nation stronger. A tribe that lets its weakest die is a tribe that soon has no members. The tribe that cares for those most vulnerable and thus turns tax burdens back into tax payers is the tribe that thrives.

I pray that we are courageous.

I pray that we can find it within ourselves to fight for the weakest among us. That we have the courage to call those who would feed on the week to make themselves strong what they truly are : cowards. And bullies. And the opposite of civilization. I pray that we have the strength and courage to put ourselves at risk by daring to come between the wolf and the flock. I pray that we can continue to be the true north strong and free.

I pray that we are wise.

I pray that we can see that it is by division that the corrupt conquer the just, and that only by seeing through the illusions of difference to see the true Canadian spirit within every one of us that we can resist the tyranny of the powerful over the masses. I pray that we can see that, despite their supposed power, the tyrants of today are not more powerful than we the people, and the only thing we have to do to unstead these petty children is refuse to let them get away with murder any more.

I pray that we are just.

I pray that the Canadian public continues to believe in the core Canadian principle of fairness. That we understand that what can be done to one of us can be done to any of us, and thus remain willing to treat all Canadians, regardless of religion, community, or ethnic origin with the same just and merciful regard we would wish for ourselves.

I pray that we are intelligent.

I pray that we are intelligent enough to see through the smokescreen of meaningless side issues concocted by some team of bloodless, heartless consultants somewhere whose only purpose is to pray on our fears and drive us further apart so we are easier to conquer. I pray that we are intelligent enough to keep our minds focused on the common, everyday issues that affect our common, everyday lives instead of being distracted by the callous manipulations of those who have nothing but contempt for the everyday Canadian taxpayer.

I pray that we are mature.

Mature enough to see past out own immediate short-sighted interests to the future of the nation and the world we are leaving our grandchildren. Mature enough to understand that some things are worth what we pay for them via taxes, and that sometimes we are the ones who must restrain our inner children and accept that there are rules, limitations, and obligations that we must accept not as burdens imposed from above by some sadistic authority figure, but because they are the price of living in this great nation of ours and only thieves and slackers try to get everything while paying nothing.

I pray that we are sincere.

I pray that we mean it when we declare ourselves to be on the side of the angels. I pray that we mean it when we take pride in Canada’s history as the people who do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, the ones who show up when peace needs a keeper and when freedom needs someone to fight for it. I pray that the good graces of our neighbors and friends continue to be of value to us and that we remain able to see ourselves as part of the world and not an island unto ourselves.

I pray that we are kind, courageous, wise, just, intelligent, mature, and sincere.

In other words, I pray that we are Canada.

And that’s all I have ever wanted us to be.

The visual kind, anyhow.

This fractured fiction project I am working on for my Creative Writing class is proving to be a nightmare, as I suspected it would. I went through a lot, emotionally and artistically, last night, and all that resulted from it was a very small improvement on my first design. I have gone from “does not work” to “barely works and looks like a shitty website for the 90’s. ”

The problem is that my visual skills don’t come close to matching my visual standards. I know what I want to see but I haven’t the foggiest idea how to make it happen. I want to make something that conforms to my standards at least as much as my writing does, and of course, I am way better at writing than I am at designing web pages.

I want my project to look plausible, as there is definitely a strong “blurring the lines between reality and fiction” aspect to what I want to achieve. I want it to look like a real website, essentially, so that it can be immersive for the reader. And that would be tricky enough for someone without my particular set of abilities.

But my standards for realism are quite high. I have the sort of analytic mind that notices things that are anomalous and therefore don’t make sense. So I will notice little things that most people would not.

And the thing is, I don’t even know what I mean when I say “a real website”. I’ll know it when I see it, I guess. Hardly a good way to start an ambitious project.

Honestly, I kinda wish I was taking a more traditional creative writing course. It shames my ambition and my pride to say so, but life would be so much easier if I could just stay in the world of text and not have to mess around with anything more ambitious than a one act play.

But I will succeed at this. It will involve a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but I will keep pushing myself to innovate and learned no matter how unpleasant it is for me. Doing the easier thing accomplishes nothing. I want to grow in strength, power, and ability, and that means leaving the comfort zone and breaking new pathways in my mind.

And honestly, if I can pull this off, the reward is not only the skills I will force myself to learn along the way, but the art itself. If I can pull this off, it will be a pretty funky cool piece of art in and of itself. Something I can be proud of.

And that’s what will be pulling me forward on this misbegotten project. The desire to make a really cool piece of art. And, hopefully, to impress my professor. Doctor Nicola Harwood.

What can I say, I still seek validation from teachers. I want them to think I am smart and special. The fact that my mother was a teacher for most of my life is probably somehow related.

But mostly, it’s about the fact that when I was a bullied kid, the teachers were the people I could impress, and I was a lot safer with them than I was with my peers.

Like I have said before, the fact that I did not value my high marks and the ease with which I did my work at the time did not mean that I didn’t crave those high marks and the validation they brang. Having an abundance of something does not erase the fact that you need it.

It just obscures it.

Similarly, the fact that I think this prof is already pretty impressed with my skills as a writer does not change the fact that I want to keep on impressing her.

I mean, I am pretty sure she has been deliberately picking me last when we read our stuff aloud because she knows my stuff will be excellent and she doesn’t want the others to be intimidated by it, and/or she wants to finish on a high note.

At least, that’s the best interpretation I can put on the phenomenon. It’s possible that she is doing it because she hates me, though I don’t get that vibe from her at all, and I have fairly good antennae. Or she is somehow trying to put me in my place.

If so, it’s not working, because the students seem pretty impressed with my work too. I guess all this bloggening has had its intended effect and made me a pretty good writer.

This, naturally, greatly pleases me. I have been working more or less in the dark for a long time. No offense to you, my dear readers, but you are all, as far as I know, people who know me personally. And even then, you rarely offer any opinions as to my work. I understand this, and I would do the same in your shoes.

But from the writer’s standpoint, nothing beats positive feedback from people who don’t know you personally. I know that sounds perverse, to value the opinion of strangers more than the people close to you, but that’s just how the ball bounces when it comes to being an artist of any sort.

And writing is such a solitary pursuit that we writers naturally develop an insatiable need for feedback. Even those of us who are otherwise extremely antisocial (not me, of course… I love you all) crave someone else’s perspective in order to answer the eternal question in every solitary artist’s mind : Is what I am making any good at, or am I fooling myself?

Even if we vehemently disagree with the feedback (good or bad), it gives us some sort of anchoring point, a sense of where we stand relative to… well, reality.

That’s why I was so happy when people laughed at the jokes in the play I wrote for college. Sure, the head of the theater society told me it was really funny, and my actors laughed a lot at the table read, but… it was the audience who would be the fuinal arbiter of my skills, and they laughed like hell.

So I guess I have some idea what I am doing after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Waiting for the bus, ergo blogging.

I set out on the day’s journey, eager to finally put this whole student loan thing behind me.

So of course, there’s another delay.

I was so happy when I went to the Vancity website and fpund out they were open on Saturdays. Turns out I would NOT have tonbsp; wait till Monday! But fate laughs at such hope and takes joy in quashing it.

Turns out, you need an appointment to open an account, and Vancity was “booked solid” (read : none of the people who do that come in on Saturdays), so I had to make an appointment for 1 pm on Monday.

I could tell the “all booked

It’s lucky for Vancity that I forgot there was a Coast Capital right next to Shopper’s Drug Mart only a block away. Otherwise, I would have just walked over there, seen if they were open, and if they were, I would have asked them if THEY could give me a checking account today.

I still might, honestly.

More when I am home.

(—)

Pondering going back out there and trying again. It’s 2 pm and they are only open till 3… so I better make up my mind quick.

I know, I will just phone them and see if I can set up an account today with them.

Nope, no such luck. It’s 2, and they close at three, so their last appointment has already started. Bugger. Guess I will be waiting till 1 pm on Monday after all.

It’s going to be a little tricky. I can do 1 pm because I don’t have class till 2:30, but that means that at 2 pm, I have to be out that door and waiting for my bus. Or at least, walking to Kwantlen. The guy who booked my appointment said that the appointments take an hour max. I sure hope he’s right.

This never happened any other time I signed up for a bank account. But I never signed up with one on Saturday before.

Well, I suppose I should go get some food. I was too nervous to eat before I left, and now that I know there will be no more excitement for today, it should be safe for me to eat.

Eating when my stomach is all nervous is…. bad.

(—)

Decided to eat at the computer. I don’t normally do that, but then again, sometimes I do. Just goes to show that I am so weird, I am weird even by my own standards.

Right now, I have a lot of emotions sorting themselves out in my mind/bloodstream. I am, of course, very annoyed at this delay in the resolution of my long ordeal. It gives me a very irritating feeling of being thwarted.

There’s also pure frustration. Just like when I am about to go to class and find out it is canceled, I had summoned up my energies and then found out that they had no outlet. That always frustrates and depresses me.

Ah yes… depression. Does not mix well with low blood sugar. I am fighting it off but I can feel its weight pressing down on me. It’s making me want to lie down in bed and hide from the world for a while by taking a nap.

But I am not going to do that. Not yet, anyhow. I am at least going to finish this blog entry before I succumb to the gravity of depression by reverting to my lowest energy state.

I will probably stop being sleepy once I lay down, anyhow. For some weird reason, being at the computer makes me sleepy in a way that vanishes like snow in fire when I lie down. Which is, of course, extremely frustrating.

I don’t know what important variable is in a different state when I am sitting at the computer versus laying in bed. Is it a temperature thing? Because my computer’s proximity to the window does mean I am cooler here than anywhere else in the apartment. (In more ways than one.)

That could definitely be a factor. Another factor could be, well, air quality. My mattress has soaked up a heck of a lot of my flop sweat over the years, and while I can wash the sheets and the pillowcases, I don’t know how to clean a mattress. So it pretty much stays gross.

I try not to think about it. What you cannot change, and all that.

It’s possible that it’s just the difference between sitting up and laying down as well. The whole sleep apnea thing, at least the “obstructive” kind I have, is that when someone like me lays down, a part of my throat or nose flops into a position where it gets in the way of my breathing. Sleeping makes it even worse when said thing relaxes.

So maybe I get sleepy sitting at the computer because I am finally breathing properly. My body is like “Oh yay, the oxygen level is finally right… time to sleep before it goes bad again!”.

I never claimed my body was smart.

It’s probably all three of those combined plus a bunch of other shit I don’t even know about. Sleep is a complex phenomenon and my wiring on that issue has been messed up for as long as I can remember. I overstimulate my mind so much that there is no telling what is going to happen.

It’s not the mental exercise that is the problem. It’s the high stimulation level I achieve. One of the basic rules of mammalian subjective experience is that higher stimulation levels take more out of you than lower ones. And that any sudden change in stimulation level can be perceived as painful and causes the organism to seek to correct it.

Like, say, being unable to take the dropoff in stimulation between playing video games on your tablet so you just keep going until your mind is crying out for sleep, but you keep denying it.

I wouldn’t know anything about that myself, of course.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t be offended, but I’m bored. So I’m going to blog.

Had therapy today. I can’t say that much was accomplished. I talked about how depressed I was last weekend. I realized that it wasn’t just the lack of purposeful endeavour, it was the sudden dropoff from a very full week. Then on top of that, I knew there was an extra day of weekend to suffer through. No wonder I got depressed.

I feel like last weekend was one of those times when you meet a former self at a crossroads, and barely recognize them, and what you do recognize makes you very sad because you remember what it was like to be that person and it wasn’t pretty.

Last weekend, I got a taste of what my life was like before I went back to school, a scant six weeks ago, and it made me depressed to think of all the years I had been that other person, and horrified to find myself back in that position even for a long weekend. I have not been out of the hole long enough to lose my fear of being sucked back into it.

In fact, the mere thought terrifies me.

Perhaps next time I meet my former self at the crossroads, all I will feel is compassion and pity for that benighted, withered soul trapped in a tiny box of his own devising. He deserves my pity. He was not a happy man.

It reminds me of that time when I went to a movie with the local furry community (which I had founded). I’ve mentioned the incident before. It was the night that, through the camaraderie I had found, I realized how brutally lonely I had been for years.

When something is constant, you stop noticing it. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t suffering from it.

This time, it’s my boring and unsatisfying, purposeless life that I have escaped. And from this new vantage point, I can finally truly understand what was wrong with my life before returning to academia.

People need purpose. Goals. Focus. But it’s so easy to get distracted. Just like I just did. Totally forgot I was blogging. New thought push out old thoughts. Dammit.

Before I went back to school, every day was a silent crushing void to cross while I waited for the next good thing to happen. I was extremely dissatisfied with my life and as a result, pretty unhappy. Sure, I had wonderful friends. But friends alone are not enough. We have so many other needs.

So now, at least, I have some purpose in my life. Some forward momentum. And best of all, something to look forward to. I am really enjoying my classes, and that means that I have something to look forward to five days a week.

Add in going to dinner with my friends Sunday night, and I have six days of the week covered. Saturdays are still kinda lame, but I probably need the rest.

One good thing to come out of today’s therapy session was the impetus to maybe join a club at Kwantlen. I have found one that suits : the Creative Writing Guild (Guild?how adorably pretentious.) It meets directly after my Wednesday Ideology and Politics class, so it would be super easy to attend.

And from what little I know about the subject, writers have a lot in common. When I have been part of writing groups in the past, I definitely felt like we had a mutual vibe, like despite how shy and antisocial a lot we can be, we recognized a similarity between us that was hard to describe.

Plus, you never know who will be in a position to do you some good some day. So, you know…. networking.

I am also interested in the Kwantlen Psychological Society (I love how old-school respectable that sounds). But apparently, the only way to learn about when they meet is to email the KUSA (Kwantlen University Student Association) club coordinator and ask.

That strikes me as bizarrely backward. But whatever. I sent the email.

And there’s always my idea of starting a GLBT society for Kwantlen. I am kind of curious to find out whether anyone will have a problem with that. Knowing how my life goes, the answer is no. When I do anything I think might provoke a reaction, it always disappears without a ripple, like an alligator slipping into the water.

But you never know. I get a very distinct “place upper middle class kids are sent when they don’t have the marks to get into someplace more prestigious” vibe from Kwantlen, and around here, that means a lot of Chinese kids whose parents might not be fully adapted to Canada’s relaxed and tolerant ways, and those people tend to be super uptight about respectability and propriety and hyper vigilant for anything that might not look good on a resume.

Some maybe I could succeed in ticking them off. It would not go well for them, obviously. It could even become one of those “daily shame” stories with a headline like “Canadian college student founds GLBT club. What happens next may surprise you. ” or even “Homophobic University Slams Student For Starting LGBT Club”.

I have to admit, and I am not at all proud of this, but I would enjoy that immensely. Those people would be on the wrong side of history regardless of my particulars, but I can state my case very forcefully and eloquently, and that would make it even worse for those people.

I am, admittedly, not terribly telegenic. But as long as I give the media a good sound bite, that won’t matter. And if I have time to think about it, I could come up with one killer sound bite.

Massive verbal skills give you great power when applied correctly.

I really should have become a lawyer. Stupid younger me worried that he’d lose his soul to the job.

Current me is all like…. so?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So today was the day I was to hand in that assignment I was freaking out over last week.

To recap : last Tuesday night, I worked myself up into quite the tizzy because I thought I had a major paper for my Ideology and Politics class due the next day, and so I slapped one together based almost entirely on my own thoughts, cause that’s just now us boldly original thinkers/lazy researchers roll, dug up a few afterthought citations, and prayed I could get a printer to work.

Um, no. The one I recently acquired uses the old fashioned LPT1 printer cable, and miracle diablu, despite us have boxes full of assorted cables, none of them were the right one. And my old printer turned out to not be as broken as I thought it was, but it was totally out of ink.

So I freaked out big time. I knew the thing was supposed to be handed in via hardcopy, and I couldn’t do that, and I was having a serious freaking anxiety attack. Tearfully, I emailed a PDF version of the assignment to the prof as proof that I had, indeed, done the work, and begged her to give me an extension.

Then, the next day, I found out the assignment wasn’t due to the next Wednesday class, which I totally would have known if I had just read a certain email more carefully.

I am really starting to worry about this habit of mine of leaping to conclusions. I am starting to suspect that it is an emotional rather than cognitive issue. Pent up emotion just arcs through my brain like static electricity being discharged, and bypasses all the common sense checks, and I end up at an actionable conclusion that is just plain stupid.

Anyhow, after that bit of embarrassing relief, Joe was able to find a color cartridge for the printer, so I am now able to print black text on white paper by putting the printer into “color only” mode.

That brings us to today. This morning, I printed out the assignment and took it to class. There, I was reminded that this journey was not yet at an end : I had to peer review a classmate’s work.

Now, this is something I really don’t want to do. I don’t like being put in the position of judging another student’s work, even if they are the only ones who will ever see it. I don’t want to hurt anyone, in general, and on a purely selfish level, I honestly don’t want to read someone’s poorly written, poorly thought out, just plain awful paper.

If that happens, I will be torn between my desire not to hurt people and my heavily analytic mind which is perfectly capable of performing a detailed and brutally honest and precise takedown of a subpar paper.

That’s the worst case scenario, of course. And so, of course, that’s what happened. The student I swapped with ended up being someone with extremely poor English skills, and reading the paper was therefore quite tricky.

Basically, it was written in Engrish. Not as bad as the Engrish stuff that can only be interpreted as some kind of mystical free verse, but close.

So now I have to fill out this peer review form about the paper. That means that, in order to placate my highly demanding conscience, I have to somehow evaluate this thing without judging the very poro English in it.

I gave it my best shot. But some of the questions were specifically about use of language in the paper, and I had no choice but to be pretty brutal there. I wish I had a copy so I could show you nice people what I am talking about. But imagine talking to someone who only barely gets across in English. It was like reading that.

This approximates what I had to deal with.

And just to put a cherry on this turdblossom, I realized halfway through that this poor fellow was stuck trying to evaluate my paper, and well, I don’t exactly write for the beginning reader.

Couple that with the fact that the thesis of my paper on the question of group versus individual rights was that it was a false dichotomy and group rights are only collective expressions of individual rights, and that is not the sort of concept that goes down easy even for very confident English speakers.

There are downsides to being such an original thinker. I only hope that the prof gets it, and gives me a good mark despite the fact that my thesis could be construed as an attack on the question itself.

Not my intention, but… it’s in there.

Needless to say, but said anyway, this experience did not improve my opinion of having to do peer review. Having to evaluate my peers is bad enough, but I never dreamed of this sort of problem landing in my lap. I can’t imagine that this fellow is going to get a passing mark from the prof. Honestly, I wonder if he is qualified to take the course at all. Perhaps he understands English better than he speaks/writes it. I hope so, because otherwise, his experience of the class must be terrifying and incomprehensible. I have no idea how he bypassed the English requirement for entry into Kwantlen. Perhaps the test was multiple-choice. Or perhaps I misunderstood the rules and that test is somehow optional.

Regardless, it’s clear to me that the guy will not be able to do the actual work of the class. Not until he seriously upgrades his English skills. I don’t know how he got into the position he’s in now – perhaps he told people what he thought they wanted to hear (that his English was perfectly good and they didn’t have to pay for more courses) when he should have told the truth.

But he can’t possibly pass the course. He should drop it and come back when he speaks the language.

I hope he gets the help he needs.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Two blog entries in one day! You lucky people.

The topic of intellectualization came up in Psych 1200 today, and it is a topic which has vexed and perplexed me for a long time, so I thought I would take another stab at it tonight.

Because I am too impatient to wait till tomorrow.

From my very first therapist, I have been told that one of my problems is that I intelldctualize everything. And the problem is not that I disagree. Far from it. Hits the nail on the head, as far as I can tell.

The problem is that intellectualization is something I learned to do at such an early age that I can’t see it. I can’t (thus far) tell when I am doing it. And I have a hard time even imagining any other way to be.

And yet, at the same time, I can sense… I can FEEL… that there is something deeply wrong with it. Intellectual pleasures, even intense ones, are a cold and lifeless thing. They can entertain, they can explain, they can even legerdemain, but they cannot sustain. Real, physical pleasures, as well as vitally important social pleasures, are needed to make life worth living.

Otherwise, yours is a kingdom of ice, snow, and death, surrounded by hundreds of miles of lifeless tundra.

(Hey look, water imagery. Are we still doing that? )

Back to the subject at hand. I know there is this great and mighty wrongness in me. I can sense the parts of me that are missing (for now) like you can feel the gap where a tooth should be. Part of me yearns to reach out and connect with people, but there is a tired old wall of ice between me and them.

So, I intellectualize. I analyze. I synthesize. I test. I explore (intellectually). I ponder. I think. I write.

These are the things I feel confident and comfortable doing. When it comes to matters purely intellectual, I am confident to the point of arrogance. Going back to school has really thrown that into stark relief. As I made obvious in a certain story I wrote recently (which I can’t seem to find…. ), I have never met anyone qualitatively or quantitatively smarter than me.

But the thing is, that’s purely intellectual horsepower. It makes me good at school, not life. I’d rather be good at making myself really happy.

I keep straying from the topic. It’s a hazard of the creative mind. We follow chains of connections, not straight lines.

I think I keep shying away from the topic because it’s so hard for me to grapple with. How do I tell if I am intellectualizing something that should be dealt with more emotionally?

Perhaps the cognitive key is to try to catch that feeling of icy cold preservation that comes with turning a feeling into an idea or into data. I definitely remember that feeling. It can feel quite wonderful. Instead of being upset by something, you instead become fascinated with it. And it creates the illusion of having solved a problem when all you did was put it on ice and study it without doing any of the (I swear to god, I just typed “intellectual” when I meant “emotional”, FREUD YOUR SLIP IS SHOWING) emotional work necessary to actually deal with things.

Hence the legerdemain. The intellectual intellect can make things disappear, but they’re not really gone. They’re waiting. And it can distract you with puzzles and games and other bright shiny things, but the emotional bills are still piling up. It can even convince you that you never need to deal with emotional issues, because you can just stay in the ice palace of your intellect, where nothing can ever reach you.

Not even sunshine.

So maybe that is what I will do. I will look for the ice. I am not sure what happens after I find it, but the solution to any problem begins at awareness. I don’t know what happens when you interrupted the brutal truth machine mid-task. I can’t say I have ever done it before, that I know of. I honestly don’t know what happens next.

Ideally, it would open the way to dealing with my emotions directly, and free me from all this ice and snow. That would an emancipation of epic proportions. I would finally experience the springtime.

But that is likely going to be a long and painful process. Transformation is a lovely (and oh so efficient) but I fear that some of us are simply too cautious, too fearful, and too excessively in control of their emotions to manage it.

Another thing we dealt with in class today was some studies that showed both that we are born either bold or timid, AND that parenting can move the monkeys more toward healthy responses.

In one study, done with monkeys, they took timid baby monkeys and gave them to bold, calm mothers. This had a great effect on the monkeys, who become bolder and more confident and better at making friends with other monkeys their age. But during times of great stress, the timid monkeys reverted to their timid ways, and freaked out.

Now, I am the shy son of a shy mother. So in that sense, I never stood a chance. My father has never been a stable or reliable force in my life, and that left mother.

Except, not really, because she wasn’t there for me when I was a kid. The bold young monkeys would explore freely and go quite far from their mothers, but still showed a need to know their mother was there for them if they needed them. They would periodically glance over at their mothers, or go back to Mama for a quick hug, but otherwise they were as free and bold and rambunctious as they could be.

The timid monkeys, on the other hand, clung to their mothers (literally) and show signs of great distress if separated from their mothers even for short times.

The determining factor was the attitude of the mother. If she was calm, the timid monkey was calm, and bold. Bold, in fact, as the ones born bold. But if the mother was fearful or unreliable, the timid baby was not only timid and afraid to explore, they had trouble getting along with the other monkeys as well.

I think, in those monkeys, we see the secret to that fundamental sense of safety I have been talking about.

Before I went to school, I had my awesome babysitter Betty, who was definitely not shy or timid. Result : I was a happy, charming, somewhat outgoing kid.

But then school happened, she went away, and I reverted to my timid-monkey ways. And that started a whole downward spiral of social rejection causing me to withdraw further into myself, which only lead to more social rejection….

Basically, I am one messed up monkey.

Once more, I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. Ish.