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.