Daily Archives: October 9, 2015

The Return of the Ghost of the Me Blogging Again

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Oh right… I can use this thing to actually blog.

I am finally ahead of the game in terms of homework and exams. I had an exam today in Psych 1100. Sixty multiple choice questions, tooks me 40 minutes. That’s 40 seconds per question. Sounds about right.

I was the first to finish. Not the first time that has happened to me. I tend to do exams in a blaze of activity, all neurons firing. It’s what works for me, or at least, what has worked for me in the past.

As always, when I finish first, it either means I am absolutely brilliant or that I have no idea what the fuck I am doing. Usually, the answers is somewhere in between, but most of the time, it’s a lot closer to the brilliant end of the spectrum. When I do an exam, I am quite thoroughly mentally activated, and I have a lot of mental to activate.

I am sure I got some wrong, and there will be some where I can say “Geez, if I had only thought about if for a second… ” instead of blazing through the thing like wildfire, but I am confident that my grade will be good, if not necessarily great.

That’s just how I roll.

Of course, I could be wrong. I am prepared to find out that I have been wildly overconfident and really need to get my shit together and knuckle down. That would, in a way, be a relief. I have been looking for schoolwork that truly challenged me for a long ol time now, and it would be good to know I had found it and I had to truly up my game instead of coasting on native intelligence and a high degree of test brightness.

I just Googled “test brightness” and all I got was stuff about calibrating your monitor. Apparently it’s not a “thing”. I don’t know what else to call it. I’m really good at tests, whatever you want to call it.

The shape of the question implies the shape of the answer. And other mystic bullshit.

Of course, I am operating at a considerable handicap, namely that I don’t have the text yet. From that point of view, passing the test at all seems pretty impressive. And there is no doubt in my mind that I passed.

I realized today that I possibly could have told my professors about my whole problem with lack of ID and all the consequences thereof, and I might get some leniency. I don’t have to rely on my innate cleverness so much. I am sure the professors would understand that I am the victim of forces outside my control.

But I am just too damned proud to do it. I would rather scramble to keep up and take whatever lumps that entails than throw myself on the mercy of the court and beg for scraps. I guess to admit my problems to my teachers would mean admitting weakness to people whose approval means a lot to me (even though I sort of suck at getting it) and I would rather maintain the illusion that I a competent and capable, as opposed to the stumbling fool I tend to be.

People like me should really have handlers. People to keep us materially organized so we can be all dazzling and amazing in the world, and the fact that we are helpless hothouse flowers who are only good at blooming is kept relatively secret.

So for now, I just do my best to stay calm (not easy) and remember that some time soonish, this will all be over and I will be on the other side of it and this tension about identification will be something I laugh and shake my head about.

Otherwise, things have been medium groovy. I had my exam for Psych 1200 last Tuesday. Totally unprepared. Had no idea we had an exam that day. But I was all frontin like I had it all down. Guy next to me said “So, are you ready?” and I was all like “Sure, no problem. Got it cold. ”

So I suppose it would be extra embarrassing if I got a bad grade on that one. Luckily, I don’t think that way.

What intrigues me about that experience is how naturally I defended myself like that. I didn’t think about it, or stumble over myself, or create any sort of weird awkward tension. It was almost effortless.

And that’s happening more and more lately. I feel like I have lost some large piece of the filtering process between my emotions and reality has been removed, and I am super stoked about it.

I am stoked about it because it means I can be a more natural person now. I have reacted without thinking a bunch of times now, and it has worked out fine. I have proof that I don’t need to subject every impulse to a rationalist Inquisition. It means that sometimes, it is fine to just go with my gut, and leave the rational machinery for the big tasks.

It means I can be a lot more real.

I’m not out of the woods yet, and I doubt I ever will be. I always always be a very thinky kind of person, and that’s one of my strengths. Better one well considered wise move than a hundred random stabs. I will always be contemplative and thoughtful and I will never be a realtime field genius.

But being able to trust that I can say and do the right thing without thinking it to within and inch of its life would go a long, long way towards me being comfortable in my skin and relaxed about life, as opposed to living every waking moment in a state of paranoia, trying to anticipate everything because that’s the only way you can feel safe.

It feels like real, deep down, long lasting progress. A big chunk of ice has been removed from the clog caught in the throat of my soul, and I really hope this is just the beginning.

I might actually become sane.

Scary, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Vcon 2015 Con Report, part 2

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(Be glad it’s this. I was originally going to teach you people about brain structures as a form of studying.)

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Wow, did I sleep well. Turns out that, at least this one time, alcohol and sleeping pills made a wonderful combination. I got eight solid hours of peaceful, blank, dreamless[1] sleep and woke up feeling fine.

And normally, even with my CPAP and my sleeping pills, I am lucky to get six hours of mildly restless, dreamful sleep.

So while I would not recommend mixing your rum and grapefruit juice with quetiapine and trazodone, it worked for me. The only downside was that I slept so well that I completely missed the panel about Marvel movies at 1 pm.

Therefore, the first panel I made it to was at :

2 pm : Vcons Past. I went to this panel for a number of reasons, the foremost of which was, of course, genuine interest. I am an old person’s dreams in that I am always eager to listen to their stories. Formal history has never interested me deeply, but personal history fascinates me. So I was quite happy to listen to tales of yesteryear from Them What Was There. Another reason to go was to support my friend R. Graeme Cameron, who is a wonderful fellow and a spellbinding raconteur. And thirdly, I was already feeling guilty because I knew I would not be there for his always dryly hilarious Elron Awards because they were scheduled against the only force in the universe that could keep me away from them : The Turkey Readings.

I am sorry, Graeme, but the Turkeys are literally the most fun I have all year.

And speaking of which…

3 pm : The Turkey Readings. People read the worst books they can find. Volunteer weirdos (like me) act out the action. People pay to stop the reading. Others pay to keep it going. Money goes to the Canadian Unity Fan Fund, dedicated to sending West Coast fans to the East Coast and vice versa. When someone bids “stop” and nobody outbids them to “start”, you switch readers and the whole thing starts over.

Oh, and while the madness is busy ensuing, my dear friend and roomie Joe Devoy and the radiant and fabulous Felicity Walker are attempting to illustrate the stories being told, as told. At the end of the proceedings, the illustrations are auctioned, and this year, one of Felicity’s went for $25!

It’s the most fun thing ever.

Seriously. I laugh so much it counts as aerobic exercise. The whole room shakes with laughter. Bad fiction is a natural source of comedy, and getting people being all silly acting it out only amplifies the effects. The beauty of bad art as comedy is that bad art is so much more unpredictable than good art. Good art follows rules. And there are always a lot more ways to break a rule than there is to follow it.

In fact, bad art is a great way to learn the rules of effective storytelling because it will break rules you never even knew existed. Learning by counterexample is a powerful tool.

But mostly, it’s just funny as hell.

4:30 pm : The Elrons and FanEds. The Turkey Readings went till 4:30, so like I said, I missed the Elrons half of it. But I did get to see my dear friend and avatar of awesomeness Felicity Walker receive her FanEd award for activity in the world of fanzines (look it up), and I could not be more proud.

5 pm : As is the tradition at Vcon, the final panel was the Closing Ceremonies. As is my personal tradition, I didn’t go. My roomies did, though, so I just went back to the room and relaxed till it was over, then it was another trip out of the cozy confines of the con in search of food.

A lovely dinner was had with my usual cohorts and some local fans, then we wandered back to the convention for the quite horribly named but harmless Dead Dog Party, which is the party that marks the true end of the convention, where all us fen get together to drink, talk, and delay the onset of reality as long as we can.

This year, however, there was a planning SNAFU and the original base for this all-fen party was just someone’s room, right in the middle of a bunch of other rooms filled with people who had the wacky idea that they should be able to sleep at night. And parties have a minimum volume directly proportional to the number of attendants, so while we tried to be quiet in response to a noise complaint, it just wasn’t happening, even after the second complaint.

So we were booted out of that room, and had to find another. At this point, the majority of partygoers simply gave up and went to bed. But some kind and swift-thinking con staff were able to sneak us into a conference room that had one of my favorite things to see at a party, a big huge round table.

Thus began one epic and well populated game of Cards Against Humanity. At maximum, we had 14 people playing. The game is designed to manufacture hilarity, so despite the fact that it was materially the worst Dead Dog Party I have ever been to in my many years of Vcon-going, I had a wonderful time and didn’t end up going to bed till 4:30 am, all laughed out.

And thus ends another wonderful, magical, marvelous Vcon. I had a grand old time, as I always do, and I can’t wait till I get to do it all over again in 2016.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Yes, pedants, I know that there is no such thing as dreamless sleep unless you have a serious brain injury, in which case you will likely die of organic psychosis. But “sleep where I wake up not remembering any dreams nor do I have the sort of shadow-memory of having dreamed” is too much of a mouthful to type.↵