That analogy works a lot better if your work is on actual paper.

Still feeling bored and depressed. That’s why I am doing my blogging so early. I need a dose of at least mildly purposeful action or I will just end up sleeping the time away.

I am getting really tired of video games. And without them, what the fuck do I do with my time?

At least I am reading again. I had a good run going of reading before bed instead of, or after, entertaining myself with my tablet, but then I lost track of the book and started playing video games again, which is maddeningly futile.

You can’t get to sleep by stimulating your mind. Or at the very least, I can’t.

So yesterday, I made the conscious choice to forget the book I had been reading, and start reading something else. By doing so, I cut the Gordian knot and escaped the gumption trap I had fallen into.

“Gumption trap” is a great phrase. I should use it more often. If I thought of more of my problems as traps, I might have a stronger will to escape them.

Because if there is one thing I am good at, it’s escape.

Hopefully, this sad mood I have been in will be dispersed once I have been to class today. Normally, on Tuesdays, I have class from 1 till 7, but once more Journalism 101, the first class, is canceled. This time, it’s because the prof has to go to his brother’s wedding in Hawaii.

I’m sure he misses us all terribly, though.

So today it’s Psych 1200 only, which starts at 4. Hopefully, we will be getting our exam results today. I mean, they made us do it on one of those irritating Scantron sheets (Be sure to fill in the circle completely with a Number 5 pencil) and you would assume that would lead to fast results.

I have never liked that kind of testing. Such cramped, fussy little things. When I was younger and more fearful, I was intensely paranoid about somehow doing the test “wrong” and failing because I didn’t fill in the circle right.

I mean, asking someone with my fine motor/vision issues to fill in those circles completely, but without going outside them, is basically the equivalent of asking a regular person to balance a teacup on their nose while jogging.

So I just concentrated on making sure the circle was full and didn’t worry about going slightly outside the circle. The most important thing is for there to be no pencil markings in any of the other circles, and I had that down pat.

Anyhoo, by all reason, our results should be back today, and so today I will get the results of my ad hoc experiment to see just how goddamned smart I am. Psych 1200 is the one where I had no idea it was exam day until I showed up, so I did absolutely no studying and had to rely entirely on what I actually remembered combined with my test brightness and logical deductive capacities. Which is pretty much how I sailed through school for most of my life.

So it might work. I might get a good mark regardless. I’ve done it plenty of other times in my life. Granted, this time I had the extra double plus challenge of not having the textbook, but what the hell. I did the best I could under the circumstances. The universe can ask no more of a person.

Regarding my sadness and boredom (my sad boredom? My bored sadess?), I think it will prove to be a good thing in the long run. This is another one of those evolutionary processes where I need to transform myself, and the kind of metamorphosis I need requires a lot of energy in order to escape the gravity well of my depression.

That energy can only come from things like discontent, boredom, or irritability. Once more, I have to let the energy build up until it finally becomes so intolerable that I have to do something about it, and it will be that explosion that gives birth to a newer, better version of myself, which has much less dragging it down.

Speaking hedonistically, I would prefer that my problems were solved via overwhelming joy and sunshine from a rich and powerful outside source, but that is not in the cards for me, so instead, it’s a long succession of cold, painful evolutions.

Maybe the joy and ecstasy route is closed to us cold rationalists whose minds are not open to the transcendental because we have honed our minds into precision machines bent on the truth at all costs, and thus cannot grasp purely internal realities with the intuitive acceptance of the mystic or the holy man.

Everything must pass our interior tests for validity or be disregarded as noise. We can analyze ourselves till the cows come home, but we can’t unlock the doors within us with the very rationalism that put the walls there in the first place.

I know that the brutal truth machine within me is not necessarily my friend. I know that its ruthless machinery brutalizes me as often as it helps me, and that its fine, fine scalpel cuts my soul as often as it cuts away the lies.

But it’s all I have. No, that’s not true. More accurate to say that I am addicted to its output and in order to maximize that output, and the feeling of power and insight it gives me, I give it full rein to go wherever it wants regardless of the damage done to me in the process.

I can’t say that’s the perfect way to run my railroad, but it’s gotten me where I am today : nowhere.

Oh well. Time to stop bleeding on the page for today. I am going to take a nap (assuming I am still sleepy when I am laying down… no certain thing, that) and then head off to school to discover my fate.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I voted tonight.

That’s a bigger deal than it sounds.

Very loyal fans of this blog will know that voting is not easy for me because of my social anxiety. To vote, I have to go to someplace I have never been full of people I don’t know, and when I get there, I have to prove who I am before I am allowed to play my part in the future of the nation.

Absolutely everything about that makes me anxious.

But luckily, I have Joe and Julian in my life. Julian was kind and persistent enough to gently prod me about going to vote, and I was very reluctant to do it before I got my ever-so-important photo ID in the mail. I had been planning (inasmuch as that is possible when gripped by terror) to vote on actual election day, which is a week from today on the 19th.

But Julian did his best to remove my excuses, including the question of identifying myself (turns out, photo ID is not needed. I could even have brought one of my prescription bottles… far out!), which he solved by looking up what ID was accepted online.

And the first time he asked today, I said no. The anxiety was in the driver’s seat, and to my social anxiety, showing up there and then being turned away for lack of identification would have been absolutely crushing. Easier to kick the ball down the field and leave my fate to the whims of ICBC and the provincial government.

Julian waited around an hour, and then poked his head in to say that he and Joe would be going to vote around 6 (it was just before 5 at the time), and that was the ramp I needed to get over myself and I said I would go along.

Knowing that I had a ride there and back, that I would have two people I know there, and that I had enough of the ID that they took, made it possible for me to commit to going. Also helping was that Julian said we would be going to eat later. This gave me something I knew I would enjoy to focus on when I started getting anxious. Just have to get through this, and then…

Our polling station was in a small (but very nice… they had a Fireside Room. I want one) church nearby, and there was quite a lineup, as I knew there would be. Apparently, there has been a rush on the advanced polling this weekend.

I am choosing to interpret that as good news for Canada and bad news for Harper. Canadians seem very eager to vote, and to my mind, people are way more eager to vote against than they are to vote for.

So, fingers crossed, this will mean victory for the Anybody But Harper contingent. And I really don’t care how that comes down. Ideally, we will see a repeat of the 1993 federal election, when the (then Progressive) Conservatives lost every single seat except for two held by politicians so beloved by their constituencies that the only thing that could have prevented their reelection was an assassination.

So yeah. Like that. Minus two. I want Harper’s name to be as reviled and poisonous as that of Brian Mulroney, and here’s the rub : compared to Harper, Mulroney was a wonderful prime minister.

At least Mulroney had the humility and respect for the people of Canada to make his systematic dismantling of everything good and Canadian seem like an accidental byproduct of some sort of blithe ignorance of how things work, instead of the front and central aim of absolutely everything he did as PM, like Harper.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Voting.

We got to the church and there was a line. It moved fairly well. There was an Asian lady with her extremely old and frail mother ahead of us in line, and at one point, she asked us to save her place in line because she had to take (or rather, FOLLOW) her mother to the bathroom. We were happy to do so.

After all, we’re Canadians. We’re civilized.

As we were waiting in line, someone from Elections Canada came down the line to check our… whatever it is you call the little postcard type thing they send you to tell you where to vote…. things. I had mine, so no prob. Then another came down the line to check out ID. Moment of truth, and I was really nervous.

Yeah, I know I’m crazy. Like, for real real, not for play play. I know it all too well.

Anyhow, everything was fine, of course. So technically, that meant I had already passed the identity hurdle and could relax while waiting in line. But of course, it’s not that easy.

To be honest, I don’t think I really relaxed until we were five minutes out the door. And even then, only partially. That’s the problem with depression : good things disappear almost before they happen, but the bad things linger on and on in the mind.

Because deep deep down, you don’t feel safe, and you are always on guard. And that’s no way to run a railroad.

After voting, we went to McDonald’s to get drive-thru. I couldn’t really afford it, but WTF. We were midway through ordering when the voice at the other end tells us that their CO2 system was broken so they only had iced tea.

Seriously, people? I can’t drink iced tea (sugar), but even if I could, I don’t like it. We were outta there and off to another McD’s in our area. That one had sodas that worked.

I need my Diet Coke, man.

So, now I have voted. I am so glad. By voting, not only did I do my duty as a Canadian, I headed off having yet another thing to feel stupid and lame and fragile and weak and horrible about.

Depression covers a lot of adjectives.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.